ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► I'm starting to think seasonal allergies are some kind of bullsh*t.

00:00:05 ◼   ► Like not that they're not real, but that I, so I have in the last few years gotten really

00:00:12 ◼   ► bad seasonal allergies.

00:00:14 ◼   ► And it seems like every single year it is not only worse, but that everybody else is

00:00:20 ◼   ► saying "Oh you know I read or heard blah blah blah, this is the worst year ever for

00:00:24 ◼   ► pollen or whatever whatever."

00:00:26 ◼   ► Yeah of course it is.

00:00:27 ◼   ► How is every year the worst year ever?

00:00:29 ◼   ► And this sounds like something is wrong.

00:00:32 ◼   ► How is every year the hottest year ever?

00:00:33 ◼   ► I don't know if they're linked together, but it could be that it makes for a greenhouse

00:00:38 ◼   ► effect, let's call it.

00:00:39 ◼   ► It might make for easier to have more growing things that produce more pollen.

00:00:43 ◼   ► I have no idea if that is even the case, but doesn't it sound plausible?

00:00:48 ◼   ► What I see is a problem that used to not exist as much, that now is exploding in existence

00:00:55 ◼   ► and it seems to affect tons of people.

00:00:58 ◼   ► And the best thing we can do is take medicines

00:01:03 ◼   ► that not only don't work, but that when they don't work,

00:01:06 ◼   ► the people who tell you to take them say,

00:01:09 ◼   ► oh, well, it didn't work this time

00:01:11 ◼   ► because you didn't start taking it a few weeks beforehand,

00:01:15 ◼   ► or, oh, you're building up a tolerance,

00:01:17 ◼   ► it'll start working eventually.

00:01:19 ◼   ► I mean, it's like, I feel like I'm spending

00:01:21 ◼   ► whatever it is, a dollar fifty a day

00:01:23 ◼   ► on these pills that do nothing every year,

00:01:26 ◼   ► it's worse and worse, I don't know.

00:01:30 ◼   ► So I mean, when I was a kid, I used to take allergy shots

00:01:32 ◼   ► 'cause I had bad allergies and that made them a lot better.

00:01:35 ◼   ► And I heard adults do allergy shots sometimes

00:01:38 ◼   ► for seasonal allergies.

00:01:40 ◼   ► Do any of you have, you in the chat,

00:01:42 ◼   ► does anybody have experience with that?

00:01:44 ◼   ► 'Cause I would gladly do allergy shots again

00:01:47 ◼   ► if it could fix this 'cause every year,

00:01:50 ◼   ► at least in the spring, sometimes also in the fall,

00:01:52 ◼   ► I'm just useless for like two weeks.

00:01:55 ◼   ► And the combination of like sick kids season

00:01:58 ◼   ► in the winter preceding this, it's just exhausting

00:02:00 ◼   ► and it makes it hard to do anything.

00:02:02 ◼   ► - You should try some, what is it, homeopathic,

00:02:04 ◼   ► homeopathic, however you pronounce it,

00:02:06 ◼   ► what are some of those remedies?

00:02:07 ◼   ► 'Cause I hear they work really well.

00:02:08 ◼   ► - Oh, I'm already taking them by not taking them.

00:02:11 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:02:12 ◼   ► I'm taking the maximum effective dose

00:02:14 ◼   ► by not taking them at all.

00:02:15 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:02:17 ◼   ► Right, like divide by zero,

00:02:18 ◼   ► something like that works out right.

00:02:19 ◼   ► (electronic beeping)

00:02:21 ◼   ► So let's do some follow up.

00:02:23 ◼   ► And it starts with, we got a lot of feedback

00:02:26 ◼   ► about how Walmart is energy efficient.

00:02:29 ◼   ► And I don't even recall having talked about that

00:02:32 ◼   ► in the prior episode.

00:02:33 ◼   ► I remember talking about energy efficiency, of course,

00:02:35 ◼   ► but I guess one of us made some sort of

00:02:37 ◼   ► flippant comment about it and have--

00:02:39 ◼   ► - Yeah, that was me.

00:02:40 ◼   ► I threw Walmart under the bus because they're

00:02:42 ◼   ► the standard bearer for a terrible,

00:02:45 ◼   ► giant American company, right?

00:02:47 ◼   ► And so I just assumed that they were also

00:02:50 ◼   ► the type of company that would pinch pennies

00:02:52 ◼   ► and not bother investing in green energy,

00:02:54 ◼   ► but that is not the case.

00:02:55 ◼   ► We will link to Walmart's website

00:02:58 ◼   ► where they will talk about all of their renewable plans.

00:03:00 ◼   ► They plan to be on 100% renewable energy by 2020,

00:03:04 ◼   ► so they're not quite where Apple is today,

00:03:06 ◼   ► but they have plans to get there.

00:03:08 ◼   ► They have a whole big page on their website

00:03:10 ◼   ► about sustainability.

00:03:11 ◼   ► I hesitate to say this because I'm sure

00:03:15 ◼   ► we'll just get more email from people telling me

00:03:17 ◼   ► that Walmart doesn't do anything bad ever.

00:03:19 ◼   ► Well, that's not true.

00:03:20 ◼   ► - I only wish that their sustainability

00:03:22 ◼   ► that they have on this page extended

00:03:23 ◼   ► to the sustainability of their workforce

00:03:25 ◼   ► as in paying them enough to be alive

00:03:27 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:03:28 ◼   ► and healthy and not relying on,

00:03:31 ◼   ► well, if they can't get pay and benefits through us,

00:03:33 ◼   ► the government will pick up the slack.

00:03:34 ◼   ► Anyway, I don't like Walmart, have you noticed?

00:03:37 ◼   ► But they are actually doing solar stuff,

00:03:39 ◼   ► so I was wrong on that.

00:03:40 ◼   ► So there you go, Walmart boosters.

00:03:43 ◼   ► They're out there.

00:03:44 ◼   ► - In Walmart's defense, which is probably a phrase

00:03:47 ◼   ► you will never hear me say again.

00:03:49 ◼   ► - This is nice.

00:03:50 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:03:51 ◼   ► - But in Walmart's defense,

00:03:53 ◼   ► if you look at other retailers like Amazon, for instance,

00:03:57 ◼   ► it's often not a lot better.

00:03:59 ◼   ► What's mostly at fault here is retail is a terrible

00:04:04 ◼   ► and extremely cutthroat business,

00:04:06 ◼   ► and government regulations on things like minimum wage

00:04:10 ◼   ► simply don't go far enough.

00:04:12 ◼   ► Okay, please do email us, next topic.

00:04:14 ◼   ► - Well, I wouldn't call that in Walmart's defense.

00:04:17 ◼   ► That would just be saying like Walmart does bad things and also other people do too.

00:04:21 ◼   ► And so they're also bad.

00:04:22 ◼   ► It doesn't make them any better to find other people who do the bad thing.

00:04:25 ◼   ► And we're not going to get into like, you know, like well if you know, like the minimum

00:04:28 ◼   ► wage is like well if my competitors can pay their employees this low and if we don't we're

00:04:34 ◼   ► going to go out of business.

00:04:35 ◼   ► Anyway, yes, there's lots of blame to go around but Walmart is far from blameless.

00:04:40 ◼   ► But they do put solar panels on the roof of things.

00:04:43 ◼   ► So they've got that going for them.

00:04:45 ◼   ► thing they do okay.

00:04:47 ◼   ► Whee!

00:04:48 ◼   ► Alright, so why don't you tell us about USB ports on the iPad Pro, because apparently

00:04:52 ◼   ► we're all confused about it.

00:04:54 ◼   ► We are?

00:04:55 ◼   ► No, not confused.

00:04:56 ◼   ► I was just thinking about it the other day.

00:04:57 ◼   ► It's not what you think.

00:04:58 ◼   ► It's not like, "Oh, the USB 2 speeds on the 9.7" iPad and stuff like that."

00:05:02 ◼   ► What I was thinking about is, you've got this relatively huge iPad Pro, the big one, and

00:05:08 ◼   ► even the regular size iPad has a lot of room on it.

00:05:11 ◼   ► And these days the only thing on them, now that they've removed the rotation lock and

00:05:16 ◼   ► everything is like power, volume, and of course the home button and the touch ID sensor, but

00:05:23 ◼   ► then this one tiny little lightning port on the side.

00:05:25 ◼   ► And I was like, "Well, what's the next step for the big iPad Pro?"

00:05:28 ◼   ► You've got keyboards that you can attach to them, it's got a smart connector on the side,

00:05:33 ◼   ► you know, it's got a stylus.

00:05:36 ◼   ► And I was mostly inspired by Marco talking last week about, "Oh, you could always hook

00:05:40 ◼   ► up USB things to iPads and iOS devices and they would just magically work if you could

00:05:44 ◼   ► somehow find a way to power them if they didn't get enough power from the port and stuff like

00:05:47 ◼   ► that, like the drivers are all in there.

00:05:51 ◼   ► So the big iPad Pro, why would you not have actual USB ports on it?

00:05:57 ◼   ► I mean I guess not more than one because you wouldn't want them to be more powerful than

00:05:59 ◼   ► a MacBook One, right?

00:06:00 ◼   ► But anyway, why wouldn't you, as opposed to having a camera adapter and all this other

00:06:07 ◼   ► stuff like, you know, or an SD card slot or whatever, but there's just so much freaking

00:06:11 ◼   ► room on the big iPad Pro. But as far as USB connectors, Apple has painted itself into

00:06:17 ◼   ► kind of a corner with the lightning thing because the practical reason why you wouldn't

00:06:22 ◼   ► put USB connectors on the iPad is if you did put them there, they'd be USB type C, and

00:06:26 ◼   ► USB type C looks a hell of a lot like lightning, and I can just imagine people jamming their

00:06:30 ◼   ► lightning into the USB C ports or vice versa, and that's like a nightmare. The usability,

00:06:34 ◼   ► I mean, how could you distinguish between those two ports?

00:06:36 ◼   ► They are different sizes, physically speaking,

00:06:39 ◼   ► and probably the big one can't fit into the small one,

00:06:41 ◼   ► but I don't think that's the reason.

00:06:43 ◼   ► Well, right, but I mean,

00:06:45 ◼   ► I think it would be a natural evolution

00:06:47 ◼   ► of especially the very big iPad Pro

00:06:49 ◼   ► to have actual USB ports on eventually, right?

00:06:52 ◼   ► But I don't see how that can happen

00:06:55 ◼   ► when lightning looks so much like USB-C.

00:06:57 ◼   ► So I wonder how Apple will square that.

00:07:00 ◼   ► And if the answer is, oh, we're never gonna have

00:07:01 ◼   ► more than a lightning port on that,

00:07:03 ◼   ► I'm not entirely sure that's the best long-term answer

00:07:06 ◼   ► if they really want especially the big iPad Pro

00:07:09 ◼   ► to become a more and more viable laptop replacement.

00:07:13 ◼   ► - Ultimately, there are so many reasons

00:07:15 ◼   ► why you can conceivably think of why Apple

00:07:19 ◼   ► would not be putting USB ports on iPads

00:07:22 ◼   ► and iOS devices in general.

00:07:24 ◼   ► - But why wouldn't you put it on the big one long-term?

00:07:27 ◼   ► Like I understand obviously why you're not gonna put it

00:07:28 ◼   ► on like most of the iOS line,

00:07:30 ◼   ► but when you get up into something that's so big

00:07:33 ◼   ► that it's so obviously not intended to be

00:07:35 ◼   ► just a slip it into your bag type of thing,

00:07:37 ◼   ► but it's like it's the size of a laptop.

00:07:39 ◼   ► Why does that not get one, I guess,

00:07:42 ◼   ► Thunderbolt 3 port or whatever?

00:07:43 ◼   ► Because there's so much you can do.

00:07:45 ◼   ► Like there's so many doors that opens

00:07:47 ◼   ► in terms of how usable is it on your desk

00:07:49 ◼   ► as opposed to when you're walking around with it,

00:07:51 ◼   ► that it's almost a shame to be constrained

00:07:52 ◼   ► by lightning forever.

00:07:53 ◼   ► - I mean, it's possible they will at some point.

00:07:56 ◼   ► You know, we never say never with Apple,

00:07:59 ◼   ► and especially with a product line that is kind of

00:08:03 ◼   ► on the way down, it's sales-wise.

00:08:06 ◼   ► Apple has done a lot of things with the recent iPads

00:08:09 ◼   ► that we thought they'd never do in an effort to broaden it

00:08:13 ◼   ► or help it find its feet or help increase sales

00:08:16 ◼   ► in some way or another.

00:08:18 ◼   ► So I think they very well might do something like that

00:08:20 ◼   ► in the future.

00:08:21 ◼   ► I think there's lots of reasons why they haven't done it

00:08:22 ◼   ► so far and I think they can very easily get past

00:08:25 ◼   ► the physical challenges of how do you fit a port

00:08:30 ◼   ► and then how do you avoid confusion with the other port.

00:08:33 ◼   ► I think they can get around that with either by punting

00:08:36 ◼   ► and not solving the problem and just putting

00:08:38 ◼   ► a USB-C port on there, which is not that unlikely.

00:08:42 ◼   ► Or just ship a dongle or something.

00:08:45 ◼   ► Or make a new standard of USB micro C

00:08:48 ◼   ► and declare it an industry standard

00:08:51 ◼   ► even though nothing else besides Apple devices

00:08:52 ◼   ► will have it for three years.

00:08:53 ◼   ► And then that's, they could solve that problem.

00:08:56 ◼   ► That is not the reason they're not doing it.

00:08:59 ◼   ► And if they wanted to do it,

00:09:00 ◼   ► they would get around that problem.

00:09:02 ◼   ► - Yeah, I would like to see how they would get around it,

00:09:05 ◼   ► because USB type C seems like,

00:09:07 ◼   ► I mean, supposedly Apple had a lot of influence

00:09:09 ◼   ► in that connector, it looks a lot like Lightning.

00:09:11 ◼   ► It's, from all accounts, a pretty good connector

00:09:14 ◼   ► as far as those things go.

00:09:16 ◼   ► Having to come up with a new one

00:09:17 ◼   ► just because the existing one that hopefully by that point

00:09:20 ◼   ► everybody in the industry actually uses,

00:09:22 ◼   ► and it really is an industry standard,

00:09:23 ◼   ► because Apple didn't make it up,

00:09:24 ◼   ► having to come up with one more weird connector,

00:09:27 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:09:28 ◼   ► It seems like a shame to me.

00:09:30 ◼   ► It seems like a shame in the same way

00:09:31 ◼   ► that it has always been a shame,

00:09:33 ◼   ► and it continues to be a shame,

00:09:34 ◼   ► that Microsoft chose the same modifier key as Unix,

00:09:37 ◼   ► meaning that you wanna do Unix-y stuff on Windows.

00:09:40 ◼   ► It's a battle between the Unix-y environment

00:09:43 ◼   ► and the Windows environment of like, you know,

00:09:44 ◼   ► Control + C, does that mean, you know,

00:09:46 ◼   ► send the interrupt signal or copy text?

00:09:49 ◼   ► And it, you know, it depends on where you are.

00:09:51 ◼   ► Whereas Apple, through mostly accidents of history, happened to not have that problem

00:09:55 ◼   ► because the Mac operating system uses the command key and to a much, much lesser extent

00:10:00 ◼   ► the control key.

00:10:01 ◼   ► So the control key is almost entirely available to the Unix environment.

00:10:04 ◼   ► So when they did the chocolate and peanut butter combination that is or was Mac OS X

00:10:08 ◼   ► and now is OS X, it was beautiful.

00:10:10 ◼   ► And you didn't have to worry about that conflict.

00:10:12 ◼   ► And I feel like Apple is on the Windows control key for the OS side of the equation with its

00:10:17 ◼   ► its lightning ports, basically making it a little bit extra bit of a pain in the butt.

00:10:22 ◼   ► You know, now they have a problem to solve, whereas these devices that are just USB-C

00:10:27 ◼   ► from top to bottom won't have that problem to solve.

00:10:30 ◼   ► Their only problem will be like, "How many of these USB-C ports do we put on our cool

00:10:33 ◼   ► new laptop replacement tablet thing?"

00:10:36 ◼   ► I forget if the Surface has USB-C ports on it, but anyway, if they wanted to it seems

00:10:41 ◼   ► like a thing they could do much more easily than Apple.

00:10:43 ◼   ► And it's one of those problems where it's like, "Well, couldn't Windows have changed

00:10:46 ◼   ► but they added the Windows key, they could have changed their modifier, but it's just

00:10:49 ◼   ► it has so much inertia and it would annoy so many people that Windows continues to lurch

00:10:53 ◼   ► along with the control key being the modifier for everything.

00:10:56 ◼   ► Well don't worry, Windows will never have any kind of Unix support.

00:10:59 ◼   ► Yeah, did you see that Ubuntu thing?

00:11:02 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:11:05 ◼   ► I don't think, I mean, that's, Unix is never going to change, you're not going to take

00:11:08 ◼   ► the control key away from them.

00:11:10 ◼   ► In the grand scheme of things, it's a small issue, but it's one of those things that makes

00:11:13 ◼   ► me happy about my combination of Mac and Unix every time I deal with it. And looking at

00:11:17 ◼   ► the iPad and that lightning port and the USB-C port shape, it makes me furrow my brow a bit.

00:11:24 ◼   ► [Laughter]

00:11:25 ◼   ► So, I mean, this is not on our topic list, which is why I'm going to derail us into

00:11:29 ◼   ► talking about it. Why do you think they haven't put a USB port on an iPad so far, and what

00:11:36 ◼   ► do you think they could do with it? I mean, I think the former is easy to explain. Like,

00:11:40 ◼   ► Why they haven't done it so far,

00:11:41 ◼   ► I think the big things are that it seemed like the past,

00:11:44 ◼   ► they wanted to move forward from that,

00:11:46 ◼   ► and didn't want to build in support for all these devices

00:11:48 ◼   ► and deal with all the technical

00:11:50 ◼   ► and software complexity of that.

00:11:51 ◼   ► And also, they kind of like things to be all enclosed.

00:11:55 ◼   ► For instance, one of the things that you would want

00:11:59 ◼   ► a USB port for would be additional storage,

00:12:01 ◼   ► and they don't want you to do that,

00:12:03 ◼   ► they want you to buy it from them.

00:12:05 ◼   ► So I think there's lots of reasons

00:12:06 ◼   ► why they haven't done it before.

00:12:08 ◼   ► What do you think could motivate them

00:12:10 ◼   ► to add USB-like ports for kind of general use

00:12:15 ◼   ► on the iPad Pro?

00:12:17 ◼   ► - I've seen people use the little camera connection kit

00:12:22 ◼   ► that has a USB port on it,

00:12:24 ◼   ► and the only time I think I've ever seen it

00:12:26 ◼   ► was you doing live broadcasts

00:12:29 ◼   ► when we're in San Francisco for WWDC.

00:12:33 ◼   ► I know that Jason Snell has played around with it,

00:12:36 ◼   ► as have others,

00:12:37 ◼   ► But I cannot think of anyone other than you, Marco,

00:12:41 ◼   ► that I've ever seen use the USB to Lightning

00:12:44 ◼   ► or in the past USB to dock connectors.

00:12:47 ◼   ► So I just don't feel like there's much of a market for it.

00:12:50 ◼   ► Like I can't think of anything

00:12:52 ◼   ► that I would wanna plug into my iPad

00:12:55 ◼   ► other than maybe the memory card from my camera

00:12:57 ◼   ► or the camera itself, hence the connection,

00:13:00 ◼   ► the dongle being called the camera connector.

00:13:03 ◼   ► I just, I don't see why one would want this.

00:13:06 ◼   ► - Well, it's a kind of, as with all these things,

00:13:08 ◼   ► it's in a race with the,

00:13:09 ◼   ► we talked about this many shows ago,

00:13:11 ◼   ► it's in a race with the wireless technologies, right?

00:13:13 ◼   ► So there's lots of wireless standards out there

00:13:17 ◼   ► for everything from wireless display, to wireless power,

00:13:21 ◼   ► to all, you know, obviously we have wireless networking

00:13:23 ◼   ► and that has become pervasive.

00:13:25 ◼   ► So it really kind of is a race between the eventual need

00:13:31 ◼   ► to do some of the things that USB does

00:13:33 ◼   ► on tablet type devices and how long it takes

00:13:38 ◼   ► for all those wireless standards to become,

00:13:40 ◼   ► to reach their wifi moment where they finally become

00:13:43 ◼   ► good enough for general use and they just spread everywhere

00:13:45 ◼   ► because no one loves wires.

00:13:47 ◼   ► Like if you could have--

00:13:48 ◼   ► - I love wires.

00:13:49 ◼   ► - Wireless display and wireless storage and wireless power.

00:13:53 ◼   ► So you just come up to your desk with your laptop

00:13:55 ◼   ► and put it down and your big screen in front of you

00:13:56 ◼   ► turns on, like of course who wouldn't want that, right?

00:13:58 ◼   ► I mean, especially with things like monitors

00:14:00 ◼   ► that you plug into the wall.

00:14:01 ◼   ► It's not like you have to recharge the batteries

00:14:03 ◼   ► your monitor. The monitor would still be plugged in, you just didn't have to deal with it.

00:14:06 ◼   ► Anyway, we're not there yet obviously with those. But so, setting that aside, the fact

00:14:09 ◼   ► that that could swamp all of this. The reason you eventually want something like USB on

00:14:14 ◼   ► the big iPad or whatever is, I mean it's the same reason they added a stylus, right? Or

00:14:18 ◼   ► they made the big version. They're extending the capabilities of the device, you know,

00:14:23 ◼   ► or multitasking with a split screen. They want people to be able to do things with these

00:14:27 ◼   ► devices that they couldn't do with the simpler ones. And it's because they're becoming more

00:14:32 ◼   ► powerful they're becoming you know that there was someone posted recently I

00:14:36 ◼   ► think it was a Jeff I would tweet something about like look at all of the

00:14:40 ◼   ► CPUs that have ever been in I think it was Microsoft surface or I forget what

00:14:45 ◼   ► it was some other you know slim sort of people something that people accept as a

00:14:50 ◼   ► laptop replacement look at how many of them are slower than the iPad Pro right

00:14:54 ◼   ► if if the top end of technology in terms of computing power is not growing

00:15:01 ◼   ► as fast as it used to, and we'll talk about Intel's

00:15:05 ◼   ► TikTok stuff later in the show.

00:15:07 ◼   ► Eventually, these things that are historically lesser

00:15:12 ◼   ► devices, laptops, and eventually tablets,

00:15:14 ◼   ► and eventually supposedly phones,

00:15:16 ◼   ► will slowly creep up and start closing the gap.

00:15:20 ◼   ► And you will be left with a situation where a big iPad Pro

00:15:23 ◼   ► can have all the power, I mean,

00:15:24 ◼   ► they just don't update the Mac Pro anymore.

00:15:26 ◼   ► Eventually a big iPad Pro will have all the power

00:15:28 ◼   ► of the current Mac Pro,

00:15:29 ◼   ► because I'll never frickin' update the machine again.

00:15:32 ◼   ► And if you have a small, you know, it's again,

00:15:35 ◼   ► if the price and size of compute starts dropping to zero,

00:15:39 ◼   ► then you will want to have a little thing like that

00:15:41 ◼   ► that you carry around with you in your bag

00:15:42 ◼   ► that you chuck on your desk and that when you do so,

00:15:46 ◼   ► you can connect to all the peripherals that you'd want

00:15:48 ◼   ► in a big desk environment.

00:15:49 ◼   ► You could have multiple monitors hooked up,

00:15:50 ◼   ► you can have larger storage,

00:15:51 ◼   ► you could have wired networking for faster transfers,

00:15:55 ◼   ► you could have all sorts of other peripherals.

00:15:57 ◼   ► And the question is, do you need to plug them in

00:15:58 ◼   ► or are they all wireless?

00:15:59 ◼   ► So at this point, with today's technology,

00:16:01 ◼   ► a lot of them you need to plug in.

00:16:03 ◼   ► So that's why I'm saying like a Thunderbolt 3 port,

00:16:04 ◼   ► like we keep saying USB, but you know,

00:16:06 ◼   ► you'd hook it up and you'd have two external monitors.

00:16:09 ◼   ► Maybe you hook it up and you have a big giant touchscreen

00:16:12 ◼   ► that's like 27 inches, that's, you know,

00:16:14 ◼   ► like laid out on your table instead of being in front of you

00:16:16 ◼   ► or whatever, so you could do more complicated stuff.

00:16:18 ◼   ► And it's like, why wouldn't I have a desktop computer

00:16:20 ◼   ► to that?

00:16:21 ◼   ► How can an iPad drive something,

00:16:22 ◼   ► drive peripherals that powerful?

00:16:24 ◼   ► Eventually it will be able to.

00:16:27 ◼   ► again, especially if the top end continues to grow more slowly than the bottom end.

00:16:32 ◼   ► So I feel like the functionality currently enabled by a Thunderbolt port or a USB 3 port

00:16:39 ◼   ► inevitably will come to tablet-class devices, assuming tablet-class devices still exist

00:16:44 ◼   ► if not like VR devices or whatever.

00:16:45 ◼   ► The only question is when that comes to pass, will we need to use a USB connector to do

00:16:50 ◼   ► it or will it all be wireless or will there be some other standard?

00:16:53 ◼   ► So here's an interesting thought experiment.

00:16:57 ◼   ► We've had wireless things in general, wireless protocols, wireless networking, wireless device

00:17:02 ◼   ► interconnection standards, things like Bluetooth, Wi-Fi. We've had these things now for a

00:17:07 ◼   ► long time in technology terms, over ten years where we've had these things. Not only have

00:17:12 ◼   ► they been possible, but they've been ubiquitous for over ten years and very widely supported

00:17:18 ◼   ► and really quite mature for what they are. And yet, if you look at the devices we use,

00:17:25 ◼   ► with the exception of things that are fully integrated like iPads, but you know if you

00:17:28 ◼   ► look at like a laptop or a desktop computer, things that do connect to other peripherals

00:17:33 ◼   ► or other pieces of hardware like monitors and stuff, almost all of that is still using

00:17:37 ◼   ► wires that was using wires 10 years ago. Like it seems like as the wireless things have

00:17:44 ◼   ► gotten better, so have the wired versions of the various connection protocols and everything,

00:17:50 ◼   ► and everyone's still using wires for lots of good reasons. Like I love wires because

00:17:54 ◼   ► they simply work better most of the time. They're usually more reliable, they're

00:17:59 ◼   ► often faster. They can go in places where wireless kind of can't like high interference

00:18:03 ◼   ► environments or certain restricted areas like planes or you know and so on, they need a

00:18:08 ◼   ► bunch of wireless stuff. They have advantages in things like power delivery and battery

00:18:11 ◼   ► usage and everything else. So wires are kind of, I think they're here to stay. Like everyone

00:18:17 ◼   ► always assumes that in the future everything will be wireless. As you said, interfacing

00:18:23 ◼   ► with your monitor, interfacing with the stuff on your desk.

00:18:26 ◼   ► But maybe that's not true,

00:18:27 ◼   ► maybe that's not a safe assumption.

00:18:29 ◼   ► Because I think we've had long enough now

00:18:31 ◼   ► with wireless interconnection things

00:18:33 ◼   ► that have been possible,

00:18:35 ◼   ► and yet we're still using wires for all these things

00:18:37 ◼   ► because they just work better.

00:18:38 ◼   ► - Yeah, but no one uses wires for networking anymore.

00:18:40 ◼   ► They take the ethernet ports right off the devices.

00:18:42 ◼   ► Like as soon as WiFi was good enough,

00:18:44 ◼   ► not good, because we always know it's flaky, it's slower,

00:18:46 ◼   ► like we all know the limitations of WiFi.

00:18:48 ◼   ► You get interference from your microwave oven

00:18:49 ◼   ► and you have interference from your portable phones

00:18:51 ◼   ► your thing and you can't get on the network and you know you keep dropping

00:18:54 ◼   ► like Wi-Fi has problems but as soon as it got good enough people like well

00:18:58 ◼   ► screw these things because no one wants to walk from place to place or run wires

00:19:02 ◼   ► through their house or plug things in or whatever I do all those things but some

00:19:06 ◼   ► things it's just not possible like you know having having the you know wireless

00:19:11 ◼   ► display technology so you don't you know all the sorts of all those sort of

00:19:14 ◼   ► laptop docks that you see in offices and the many different incarnations they

00:19:18 ◼   ► come in and then no I don't want a dock I just want one cable to plug in or

00:19:21 ◼   ► whatever it is it's not that bad to plug something in but if you told those

00:19:25 ◼   ► people in the same way that we told them hey every time you sit down your desk

00:19:28 ◼   ► you won't have to plug the ethernet cable in and out anymore it doesn't seem

00:19:30 ◼   ► like a big deal like who cares I plug in one cable it's fine it's really

00:19:33 ◼   ► convenient it's you know it works every time it's not a big deal but Wi-Fi just

00:19:38 ◼   ► wiped all that stuff off of the face of the earth there is no equivalent to Wi-Fi

00:19:41 ◼   ► I would say Bluetooth isn't even the equivalent to Wi-Fi because I think

00:19:44 ◼   ► Bluetooth is still not past the level of non-flakiness for anything except for devices that never

00:19:49 ◼   ► move. You know, keyboards and mice, I think people more or less accept Bluetooth, but

00:19:53 ◼   ► then there's the annoyance of the battery charging that wasn't there with wires, so

00:19:56 ◼   ► it has a downside. So I feel like Bluetooth is borderline, but no other wireless technology

00:20:00 ◼   ► for anything else like storage or monitors or anything like that is, you know, is remotely

00:20:07 ◼   ► up to the net win that Wi-Fi was. But it doesn't mean that they never will be. You know, you

00:20:14 ◼   ► just read any sci-fi book like technologically speaking there's no

00:20:17 ◼   ► reason you couldn't have really sophisticated high-speed ubiquitous

00:20:21 ◼   ► short-range high bandwidth Wi-Fi even the power delivery stuff so you're saying

00:20:25 ◼   ► on a very long time scale that long I mean do you know people who use wireless

00:20:31 ◼   ► charging for their phones it does that really exist I mean like yeah like those

00:20:35 ◼   ► stupid little pads yeah yeah I mean obviously you can buy them for Apple

00:20:39 ◼   ► devices too but most people who use them would imagine using for some kind of

00:20:42 ◼   ► Android device that is not a third party thing but it comes with the thing.

00:20:46 ◼   ► But I know people who choose to do that.

00:20:49 ◼   ► No one's forcing them to use that.

00:20:50 ◼   ► They find it convenient that when they come home they put all their devices on a big pad

00:20:54 ◼   ► or they put it in a little cradle.

00:20:56 ◼   ► And it's like, well if you're putting it in a cradle, if there was a little plug at the

00:20:58 ◼   ► bottom of the cradle, would it make a big difference if you plug it in?

00:21:02 ◼   ► They're choosing and these are not always the biggest technology.

00:21:05 ◼   ► It's just more convenient when I don't have to deal with the plug.

00:21:07 ◼   ► I just put it on this thing and it charges.

00:21:09 ◼   ► It's not great, it's slower, it's not good enough for everybody yet.

00:21:11 ◼   ► But the fact that anybody chooses to do it in its current sad unsupported state shows

00:21:16 ◼   ► that there is a desire for it.

00:21:17 ◼   ► So I feel like the convenience hooks of all those wireless things are impossible to resist

00:21:24 ◼   ► as soon as they pass the minimum sort of reliability threshold.

00:21:30 ◼   ► And Wi-Fi is the best example, and I think the only one that has passed it in Bluetooth

00:21:33 ◼   ► is on the border.

00:21:35 ◼   ► Everything else, it's like, "All right, well, keep revising the protocols, and a few early

00:21:39 ◼   ► your doctors will try it and then you know revise revise revise we'll know

00:21:42 ◼   ► when it crosses the threshold because Apple will have it all over the place

00:21:45 ◼   ► because Apple doesn't want any ports on any of his devices they don't even want

00:21:47 ◼   ► rotation lock switch for crying out loud that still drives me nuts there was no

00:21:51 ◼   ► room on the side of the device it couldn't be a millimeter bigger sorry

00:21:54 ◼   ► Casey we had that empty space for the four speakers they need every millimeter

00:21:58 ◼   ► of that empty space it's impossible to make the device different they should

00:22:01 ◼   ► just have a mute switch bump I mean if they'll have a camera bump to accommodate

00:22:04 ◼   ► that wide component they should have a mute switch bump on the other side that

00:22:07 ◼   ► Then it could be even.

00:22:08 ◼   ► The mute switch is a bump.

00:22:10 ◼   ► That's what makes it a switch.

00:22:11 ◼   ► It sticks out and you can slide it back and forth.

00:22:13 ◼   ► They'll make it a touch ID button.

00:22:14 ◼   ► You don't have to use your fingerprint to mute.

00:22:16 ◼   ► And it won't work if your hand's wet.

00:22:18 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:22:19 ◼   ► You know the wet hand trick though, right?

00:22:22 ◼   ► What?

00:22:23 ◼   ► No.

00:22:24 ◼   ► So the problem with touch ID sensors that people found as soon as they introduced is

00:22:28 ◼   ► they work fine, but then you go do the dishes and then you try to unlock your phone and

00:22:31 ◼   ► it doesn't work and you're annoyed.

00:22:33 ◼   ► And eventually your hand's dry and it works again.

00:22:35 ◼   ► All you gotta do is wet your hands a lot and then train it on your wet finger.

00:22:39 ◼   ► You can label it as, you know, wet right thumb.

00:22:42 ◼   ► And then you will train it on your dry right thumb and you'll train it on your wet right

00:22:46 ◼   ► thumb and both will work.

00:22:49 ◼   ► Life hack.

00:22:50 ◼   ► Well that was always my, so there was that court case or whatever where somebody at some

00:22:54 ◼   ► point ruled that the police can't ask you for your passcode but they can force you to

00:23:01 ◼   ► use your fingerprint to unlock your phone.

00:23:03 ◼   ► So my contingency plan, in case I ever get questioned by the police and they force me

00:23:07 ◼   ► to access my phone, would be to lick my finger for a second and then make Touch ID fail three

00:23:13 ◼   ► times, so then it would require the passcode and then I wouldn't have to let them in.

00:23:17 ◼   ► Just bring Casey with you and he'll spill water on your phone and they'll never be able

00:23:20 ◼   ► to do that.

00:23:21 ◼   ► You gotta do that before the waterproof iPhone 7 comes out.

00:23:23 ◼   ► Yeah, I think honestly it's already too late, because the 6S is already almost waterproof,

00:23:28 ◼   ► right?

00:23:29 ◼   ► Isn't it like fairly waterproof?

00:23:30 ◼   ► I think it's only waterproof on YouTube.

00:23:33 ◼   ► In the magic realm of YouTube, you can put it in a glass of water and it's fine if you

00:23:36 ◼   ► do it at home and it instantly dies.

00:23:38 ◼   ► I don't even know where to go from here.

00:23:39 ◼   ► Are we in follow-up?

00:23:40 ◼   ► Are we like three topics deep?

00:23:41 ◼   ► I don't even know what's happened to this show.

00:23:43 ◼   ► We've got one item of follow-up left.

00:23:44 ◼   ► Oh, God.

00:23:45 ◼   ► When you're in charge, Marco, everything takes a turn.

00:23:47 ◼   ► He's never in charge.

00:23:48 ◼   ► No, this is a life lesson.

00:23:50 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:23:51 ◼   ► I'm not in charge.

00:23:52 ◼   ► I just kind of took charge because that's how life works.

00:23:54 ◼   ► You need an agent of chaos, as they say.

00:23:56 ◼   ► Yeah, something like that.

00:23:58 ◼   ► No one ever grants you authority.

00:23:59 ◼   ► You have to take it.

00:24:00 ◼   ► - All right, well I'm taking authority in saying

00:24:01 ◼   ► let's get through this one damn last piece of follow-ups

00:24:04 ◼   ► so we can get into the real topics.

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00:26:20 ◼   ► - All right, Jon, your crowning moment has come.

00:26:23 ◼   ► Tell us about what's going on with your TV.

00:26:26 ◼   ► - Has it come?

00:26:27 ◼   ► So more than a year ago, because we revisited on the one year anniversary, more than a year

00:26:32 ◼   ► ago I banished my PlayStation 4 from my beautiful plasma television because mostly what I was

00:26:37 ◼   ► doing with my PlayStation 4 was playing Destiny, and Destiny had a heads-up display that's

00:26:41 ◼   ► on screen the entire time you're playing that is 100% opacity and doesn't move and doesn't

00:26:47 ◼   ► change that much, and it was burning in on my display.

00:26:50 ◼   ► And I revisited a year later to see if the retention had faded, and it had faded to be

00:26:54 ◼   ► almost entirely invisible to be replaced with the Cartoon Network logo which was also banished

00:26:59 ◼   ► from my television. Anyway, so when I banished my PS4, I got a gaming monitor, I brought

00:27:05 ◼   ► it into another room, and that's how I've been playing Destiny, still the main thing

00:27:09 ◼   ► I do with my PS4 since then, for more than a year now. Of course, when I pulled my PS4

00:27:14 ◼   ► from the TV, Destiny was new to me, it wasn't new, I got it around the time of the first

00:27:18 ◼   ► expansion first yeah I think the first expansion a little bit after and I you

00:27:24 ◼   ► know complained on the the bungee farms the bungees the maker of the game and I

00:27:27 ◼   ► say you know it would be nice if you had an option to make the HUD translucent

00:27:32 ◼   ► and or dim it or you know do some other thing that would help with burning and

00:27:35 ◼   ► there's a it was a big thread in their forms mostly consisted of people who

00:27:40 ◼   ► don't own plasma televisions telling everyone who does that they shouldn't

00:27:44 ◼   ► anymore because they're bad and that's why they should get LED televisions.

00:27:49 ◼   ► Helpful internet people.

00:27:50 ◼   ► It's just a bunch of kids.

00:27:52 ◼   ► They don't understand why anyone would want a plasma television.

00:27:54 ◼   ► The only thing they care about is like, "My LCD television," or they always call them

00:27:58 ◼   ► "LED television," is great.

00:27:59 ◼   ► And they get into fights with each other and it's like, "Kids, kids, calm down.

00:28:03 ◼   ► Stop fighting over what TV you have.

00:28:04 ◼   ► We need to concentrate on Bungie and say Bungie.

00:28:06 ◼   ► This seems like an easy feature for you to add.

00:28:09 ◼   ► Translucency seems like it's within your grasp, graphically speaking, on the PlayStation

00:28:13 ◼   ► or to make the HUD translucent or make it smaller or, you know, many games do this.

00:28:18 ◼   ► They give you options to tweak your HUD, not necessarily for Burn-In reasons, just for

00:28:23 ◼   ► customization reasons, but yeah, it helps with Burn-In as well.

00:28:26 ◼   ► Well, you know, there is a second option here that they could have done, you know, just

00:28:31 ◼   ► never let you stop playing Destiny.

00:28:33 ◼   ► Because then it doesn't matter if it's burned into your TV.

00:28:35 ◼   ► It's always showing anyway if you just always play Destiny.

00:28:37 ◼   ► If you never use your TV for anything else...

00:28:39 ◼   ► It still matters.

00:28:40 ◼   ► You would think it wouldn't matter, but it does.

00:28:42 ◼   ► And anyway, you got to stop sometime and destiny is not the only thing I did in my television anyway

00:28:46 ◼   ► So the gaming monitor I got is obviously

00:28:49 ◼   ► Does not look as good as my television and the black levels are atrocious

00:28:53 ◼   ► The response time is better

00:28:56 ◼   ► But anyway, so that's how I've been playing destiny for a year and the big thread in the bungee forums

00:29:00 ◼   ► Bungee like has not really said anything official about the topic of like other than acknowledging we have heard you about this request

00:29:09 ◼   ► And you know that they haven't said they didn't promise it very very Apple like in terms of

00:29:14 ◼   ► Vague acknowledgement that the issue has been received, but no promises that it will ever be addressed let alone. What time so

00:29:21 ◼   ► Imagine my surprise when here I am more than a year later

00:29:24 ◼   ► Bungie was previewing some of the content they're gonna have in the April update to destiny and

00:29:28 ◼   ► one of the first things they showed was the ability to

00:29:31 ◼   ► Turn off the HUD that was mostly the feature they were touting because people who you know do

00:29:37 ◼   ► Movies within the game or take screenshots, you know, you don't want to have the HUD there sort of, you know

00:29:42 ◼   ► Making it less cinematic and making it look more like a game

00:29:44 ◼   ► So you can drop the HUD for like nicer screenshots and movies and stuff

00:29:47 ◼   ► But there was also two other options of you know, full opacity high and low

00:29:52 ◼   ► Maybe there was a medium level didn't really get to see what those look like in the game

00:29:56 ◼   ► But they were there settings wise so there will be options to turn down the HUD

00:30:00 ◼   ► I don't know if the low setting is low enough to prevent image retention, but that's not my problem

00:30:06 ◼   ► My first problem is that I spent a year playing Destiny connected to a gaming monitor and I'm kind of used to it in terms of

00:30:13 ◼   ► If I was to go back on the television

00:30:15 ◼   ► I would feel like I'm really far away from the screen even though you know

00:30:18 ◼   ► You can do the math that my television screen is much bigger

00:30:21 ◼   ► But the distance wise I wouldn't be able to see as much detail

00:30:24 ◼   ► I'm used to being closer to the screen close enough to like see the pixels because it's not a retina display

00:30:29 ◼   ► It's just you know a 1080 HD display just like my television

00:30:33 ◼   ► but I'm sitting like two feet from it instead of eight feet away.

00:30:37 ◼   ► And the other thing is when I mentioned potentially bringing the PlayStation 4 back in, my wife

00:30:42 ◼   ► said that she was not for this idea, because that would just lead to more fighting between

00:30:46 ◼   ► my son who wants to play Star Wars Battlefront and my daughter who wants to watch television

00:30:50 ◼   ► shows.

00:30:51 ◼   ► So it's better when they can be in separate rooms, each doing the thing they want to do

00:30:54 ◼   ► without fighting over the big TV.

00:30:56 ◼   ► So it seems to me that despite my dreams coming true here, potentially the dimming might not

00:31:02 ◼   ► be sufficient to prevent Vernon and the other thing is, and the other two issues are I'm

00:31:06 ◼   ► kind of used to it sitting two feet from my monitor, I'm kind of used to playing that

00:31:10 ◼   ► way at this point, and for the harmony of the family it may be better to keep my PlayStation

00:31:17 ◼   ► 4 in here.

00:31:18 ◼   ► Now if they come up with a PlayStation 4.5 as the rumors are that a slightly more powerful

00:31:22 ◼   ► PlayStation 4 with that more power potentially being helpful to the PlayStation VR which

00:31:26 ◼   ► which I may eventually buy. I would buy a PlayStation 4.5 and connect it to the TV so

00:31:32 ◼   ► we have two PlayStations and my son and I could play Destiny at the same time finally,

00:31:36 ◼   ► and my wife would probably like that even less, but I would kind of have a quote-unquote

00:31:39 ◼   ► excuse. Well, it's not, I'm not just getting a second PlayStation, this is the better PlayStation,

00:31:43 ◼   ► and where else am I going to put it? If we don't have room for another gaming monitor,

00:31:46 ◼   ► it's got to be connected to the TV. So this is a complicated situation.

00:31:49 ◼   ► By the way, as somebody who bought a PS4 only a few months ago, that really annoys me, that

00:31:53 ◼   ► rumor.

00:31:54 ◼   ► Well it's only rumor now and the extra power probably wouldn't be a big deal because it

00:32:00 ◼   ► would probably just be for VR, which you'll probably buy anyway, honest. Aren't you going

00:32:04 ◼   ► to buy PlayStation VR? Tiff will make you buy it.

00:32:06 ◼   ► I would like to see it. I mean, I'm not sure I will buy it, but I think it's at least somewhat

00:32:10 ◼   ► likely, just because I don't plan to build a giant gaming PC to try out the Oculus. So

00:32:17 ◼   ► this is kind of like the alternative to that for more casual people like me. So I think

00:32:22 ◼   ► that's... I would like to see it.

00:32:24 ◼   ► Yeah, it's cheap enough that you're like, "You know what? Fine. I'm gonna give it a try.

00:32:27 ◼   ► This is giving it an honest shot." You know you're not gonna be like, "Oh, it would be better if I had a better PlayStation."

00:32:32 ◼   ► No, it'll be, you know, it'll be what it is.

00:32:34 ◼   ► The experience will be consistent and you can try it out and find out if it's terrible or not.

00:32:38 ◼   ► So that's that's been my plan as well.

00:32:40 ◼   ► But I would like a PlayStation 4.5. Anyway, the April update looks interesting. One-to-one infusion.

00:32:46 ◼   ► I knew I shouldn't have used that Harrowed Anglership Drifstan that I had, 320 drop.

00:32:51 ◼   ► that was just saving and saving it like just yesterday I was like you know what I

00:32:54 ◼   ► Should just infuse that into my 309 mighta. Why the hell not I know I'm gonna lose a lot of points

00:33:00 ◼   ► But pretty soon 330 335 stuff is gonna be dropping anyways. There's no point in saving the 320. Thank God

00:33:05 ◼   ► I saved it one to one infusion coming in April this ends the gibberish portion of the episode yeah Casey is John

00:33:11 ◼   ► Okay, I don't know you think should we call somebody a hand on heart. I'm not trying to be funny

00:33:16 ◼   ► I really thought that I had just spaced out and the conversation went a totally different direction

00:33:20 ◼   ► I was trying feverishly to catch up and figure out what the crap John was just saying and then oh, oh, he's just talking destiny again

00:33:27 ◼   ► Never mind

00:33:29 ◼   ► Next next we'll have Marco tell us about a watch terminology. I

00:33:33 ◼   ► Can't even I can't even all right. So is that are we good with follow-up any other follow-up gentlemen? We're all done

00:33:39 ◼   ► Excellent. All right, so I don't recall exactly when this happened

00:33:43 ◼   ► I think it was a little over a week ago

00:33:45 ◼   ► But last episode we were busy talking about the Apple events

00:33:47 ◼   ► again, didn't get a chance to talk about it.

00:33:50 ◼   ► Some things happened in the Node.js world last week, some

00:33:53 ◼   ► interesting things.

00:33:55 ◼   ► We have a link in the show notes to hainicodes.net, which

00:34:00 ◼   ► is sharing my experiences as a programmer in C#.net and

00:34:02 ◼   ► engineering manager.

00:34:04 ◼   ► And this person, whose name I don't know other than Haney,

00:34:08 ◼   ► anyway, they wrote a very quick article about-- or a

00:34:12 ◼   ► reasonably quick article-- about what happened on NPM.

00:34:15 ◼   ► And I'm going to take a stab as the summarizer in chief, and you guys can interrupt when

00:34:19 ◼   ► you're ready.

00:34:21 ◼   ► There was a person who had put up a package called "Kik," K-I-K, and the, what is it,

00:34:28 ◼   ► a chat app or something like that?

00:34:30 ◼   ► The people who run that got in touch with him and were upset that he had a package that,

00:34:35 ◼   ► I don't think in any way related to "Kik" the app, had a package that just had the same

00:34:40 ◼   ► name.

00:34:41 ◼   ► And so they told him he should take it down.

00:34:44 ◼   ► He said, no.

00:34:45 ◼   ► And then I guess they went to NPM, which is the package manager, node package manager

00:34:49 ◼   ► that you use with node, and they got NPM to take it down.

00:34:55 ◼   ► And he then, this gentleman, decided to rage quit NPM and remove all of his packages.

00:35:02 ◼   ► So far this is a kind of amusing but unremarkable story, except that one of the packages that

00:35:09 ◼   ► he removed was a package that was called left pad was it was like a 12 line string function

00:35:16 ◼   ► yes you are right it is called left pad it is a 12 line or 11 line function that just pads a string

00:35:22 ◼   ► on the left hand side and apparently a lot of very popular packages took this as a dependency so in

00:35:31 ◼   ► other words you know when you're writing code in in the modern times you usually have a package

00:35:36 ◼   ► package manager, something like CocoaPods or NuGet or NPM,

00:35:40 ◼   ► or what does Perl use, something ancient?

00:35:42 ◼   ► - Something ancient?

00:35:44 ◼   ► - Yeah, everything in Perl's ancient.

00:35:45 ◼   ► - Something with actual tests that run against the code

00:35:48 ◼   ► so you can tell it'll actually work.

00:35:49 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:35:51 ◼   ► - I couldn't resist, but that's CPAN, right,

00:35:53 ◼   ► or something like that?

00:35:54 ◼   ► - You got it.

00:35:54 ◼   ► - Okay, so most modern development platforms and Perl

00:35:59 ◼   ► have a package manager, and NPM is the one for this,

00:36:03 ◼   ► and when you have this package manager,

00:36:04 ◼   ► very easy to import somebody else's code. So apparently what all of these packages did,

00:36:08 ◼   ► including some very, very, very popular ones, was they imported this left pad package, and this

00:36:15 ◼   ► entire package was 11 lines of code. Well, when this package disappeared, that meant that anyone

00:36:19 ◼   ► who had already downloaded it was okay. But if you tried to, say, code on a new machine, or in

00:36:25 ◼   ► many cases redeploy, then this package was gone, and all of a sudden everything broke. And because

00:36:31 ◼   ► so many popular packages took this as a subdependency, if you will, like half of the Node ecosystem broke.

00:36:38 ◼   ► And this was really chapping a lot of people's butts, because a lot of the really smug developers,

00:36:47 ◼   ► most of them, pretty much all of whom were right, said, "Why would you take an 11-line dependency?

00:36:51 ◼   ► Why not just write those 11 lines yourself, or just put them somewhere in your project,

00:36:57 ◼   ► somewhere under your control?"

00:36:58 ◼   ► And there was a big kerfuffle about it.

00:37:00 ◼   ► And as someone who has written a Node app, which is my blog,

00:37:06 ◼   ► and I just recently re-ran Clock, which is Count Lines of

00:37:11 ◼   ► Code, on my blog, and I put up a short blog post about it,

00:37:14 ◼   ► which I'll put in the show notes, the entirety of my blog

00:37:17 ◼   ► engine, in terms of the things that I have written, is 850

00:37:21 ◼   ► lines of code.

00:37:22 ◼   ► Then I did a Count Lines of Code on my Node Packages

00:37:24 ◼   ► or node modules folder, and that was 180,000 lines of code.

00:37:29 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:37:30 ◼   ► So I'm not really one to throw stones on this issue,

00:37:33 ◼   ► but nevertheless, I don't think it's really useful

00:37:38 ◼   ► to poop all over package managers

00:37:42 ◼   ► and the idea of taking dependencies just carte blanche,

00:37:45 ◼   ► it's a bad idea.

00:37:46 ◼   ► I don't think that's necessarily true.

00:37:48 ◼   ► I do think, however, that taking an 11 line dependency

00:37:50 ◼   ► is a bit ridiculous.

00:37:52 ◼   ► So Marco, as chief curmudgeon when it comes to these sorts of things, what are your thoughts?

00:37:58 ◼   ► First of all, I think John might be even more curmudgeonly than me on this, but I'm at least

00:38:02 ◼   ► better known for avoiding dependencies like this. And the reason why I avoid dependencies

00:38:08 ◼   ► as much as I can is not because I've always been like this. It's because of experiences

00:38:14 ◼   ► that I had, mostly during the early days of Tumblr. Lots of things that we used in the

00:38:19 ◼   ► the early days broke. Lots of third party components, lots of application layer stuff,

00:38:25 ◼   ► you know infrastructure components that were not very widely used or were very young or

00:38:30 ◼   ► were not designed to be used at big scales. But most of the problems we had were third

00:38:36 ◼   ► party PHP modules, you know third party PHP code written by other people that we imported

00:38:41 ◼   ► so we wouldn't have to write our own functions for things like S3 or imagery sizing and stuff

00:38:45 ◼   ► like that. We had so many problems with this code, especially the freaking Zend framework.

00:38:52 ◼   ► I don't know if it's good now, but it sure wasn't then. We had so many problems with

00:38:57 ◼   ► almost every third party library that we used that we eventually just said, "You know what,

00:39:03 ◼   ► we're just going to not use any anymore." Because every time we would use one, literally,

00:39:09 ◼   ► not just sometimes, literally the majority of the time, six months later we would be

00:39:14 ◼   ► ripping it out and replacing it with either

00:39:16 ◼   ► another third party one that would break

00:39:18 ◼   ► six months after that, or finally we'd write our own

00:39:20 ◼   ► because they just were of low quality

00:39:23 ◼   ► and were not designed for a high needs environment

00:39:26 ◼   ► or not designed for edge cases or whatever else.

00:39:29 ◼   ► Because a lot of third party code out there,

00:39:32 ◼   ► there's this myth that open source stuff

00:39:35 ◼   ► will be really well tested and will kind of be

00:39:37 ◼   ► like battle hardened and you can rely on it

00:39:40 ◼   ► more than stuff you write yourself.

00:39:42 ◼   ► But that's only true sometimes,

00:39:43 ◼   ► It's only true for some things.

00:39:45 ◼   ► And that's, how true that is,

00:39:47 ◼   ► is kind of a function of how popular that code is.

00:39:50 ◼   ► So if you're using something that is in use by everybody,

00:39:54 ◼   ► from Facebook down to Casey's blog engine,

00:39:57 ◼   ► chances are that's been well tested

00:39:59 ◼   ► and that the bugs have been found

00:40:00 ◼   ► and the edge cases have been hit

00:40:01 ◼   ► and you're not gonna be the biggest person using it

00:40:03 ◼   ► and you're not gonna hit many problems.

00:40:05 ◼   ► But when you're just pulling in third party code

00:40:08 ◼   ► from a lot of things,

00:40:09 ◼   ► it's often hard to tell whether what you're pulling in

00:40:12 ◼   ► is of that level of quality or not.

00:40:14 ◼   ► And when you're in a young language

00:40:17 ◼   ► or a module for doing something

00:40:19 ◼   ► that most people don't need to do,

00:40:20 ◼   ► kind of like a niche module,

00:40:22 ◼   ► I don't know how to pronounce niche by the way,

00:40:23 ◼   ► I don't, it's niche, niche, forget it.

00:40:26 ◼   ► But every time I say that, I worry about that.

00:40:30 ◼   ► - I'm the same way, I'm right there with you.

00:40:31 ◼   ► - Good, okay, so we'll just agree

00:40:33 ◼   ► that we're pronouncing it badly.

00:40:35 ◼   ► Anyway, so the fewer people use the thing you're working on

00:40:40 ◼   ► and the fewer big people use it,

00:40:41 ◼   ► the less reliable it inherently is simply by being

00:40:45 ◼   ► open source or a third party or whatever.

00:40:47 ◼   ► So I just learned over time that I was better off

00:40:51 ◼   ► writing stuff myself and avoiding dependencies.

00:40:54 ◼   ► Even when they work well, they can cause issues.

00:40:57 ◼   ► Like when the version of something changes

00:40:58 ◼   ► and it breaks other things.

00:41:00 ◼   ► Package managers can solve problems like that

00:41:03 ◼   ► most of the time, but I've never seen a single one

00:41:05 ◼   ► that solved them all of the time in anything.

00:41:08 ◼   ► Linux, languages, any, I mean, like,

00:41:10 ◼   ► when you add dependencies like this willy-nilly,

00:41:13 ◼   ► you're really just adding work and risk.

00:41:16 ◼   ► And the idea that you won't be able to deploy your site

00:41:21 ◼   ► onto new servers because the original host

00:41:24 ◼   ► of this 11 line function took it down, that's crazy.

00:41:29 ◼   ► There are so many problems with that

00:41:30 ◼   ► that sound just crazy to me.

00:41:32 ◼   ► Why are you not in control of that?

00:41:34 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:41:35 ◼   ► As somebody who has run large scale services before,

00:41:38 ◼   ► Every dependency like that just to me is a huge liability.

00:41:42 ◼   ► And occasionally it is worth using third party code,

00:41:45 ◼   ► but I think it's a lot less often

00:41:48 ◼   ► than what people seem to be doing these days.

00:41:51 ◼   ► - Well, everybody builds on top of something.

00:41:53 ◼   ► I mean, it's not like you're saying,

00:41:54 ◼   ► well, I was using the compiler that came with my system,

00:41:56 ◼   ► but eventually I learned I had to write my own compiler.

00:41:58 ◼   ► You know, I was using the OS to ship with my servers,

00:42:01 ◼   ► but eventually I learned that it's wasteful

00:42:02 ◼   ► to try to rely on Linux,

00:42:04 ◼   ► 'cause you never know what the hell they're gonna do

00:42:05 ◼   ► and they can break your crap,

00:42:06 ◼   ► so it's better to write your own OS.

00:42:07 ◼   ► Like we all go on top of something.

00:42:09 ◼   ► It's all just a question of where you draw that line and why.

00:42:11 ◼   ► So there's sort of, for most of our lives,

00:42:13 ◼   ► been the idea that like, you're not gonna write

00:42:16 ◼   ► your own OS and your own compiler,

00:42:18 ◼   ► and maybe you're not even gonna write your own web server,

00:42:20 ◼   ► but if you're writing web applications at a certain point

00:42:23 ◼   ► around the web server code boundary,

00:42:24 ◼   ► then it's like now it's kind of more up for grabs.

00:42:26 ◼   ► Do you use an application framework?

00:42:28 ◼   ► Or do you write your own framework?

00:42:30 ◼   ► It was the type of thing where you can

00:42:32 ◼   ► write your own web app framework.

00:42:33 ◼   ► Like it's not, you know, that's how all the ones

00:42:35 ◼   ► that we have got here.

00:42:35 ◼   ► Like it doesn't take a 700 man team to do it.

00:42:38 ◼   ► One person can do it.

00:42:39 ◼   ► - Yep, I did.

00:42:40 ◼   ► - If you use one of the popular third party ones, chances,

00:42:45 ◼   ► and you happen to be in a Marco's unfortunate/fortunate

00:42:48 ◼   ► situation of you end up being, maybe perhaps unexpectedly,

00:42:53 ◼   ► one of the biggest users of everything that you do

00:42:55 ◼   ► because you are tremendous all of a sudden,

00:42:57 ◼   ► the compounding growth or whatever.

00:42:59 ◼   ► - And let me point out too, Tumblr was not that tremendous

00:43:03 ◼   ► when we started hitting these problems.

00:43:04 ◼   ► we probably had maybe 100,000 users

00:43:07 ◼   ► when all this stuff started breaking.

00:43:08 ◼   ► It wasn't that big of a service.

00:43:09 ◼   ► Like relative to what you consider

00:43:11 ◼   ► like a scaled or scalable web service, it was nothing.

00:43:14 ◼   ► - Well, I mean, sometimes when people start going to,

00:43:18 ◼   ► Facebook is a great example.

00:43:19 ◼   ► They were using a similar technology stack

00:43:22 ◼   ► and their solution was throw people and money

00:43:25 ◼   ► at the problem to the point where they were compiling

00:43:27 ◼   ► PHP into C++ and crazy stuff like that.

00:43:29 ◼   ► That's another possible approach, you know?

00:43:32 ◼   ► I don't know if they decided to write everything

00:43:34 ◼   ► themselves, they got down and said, "We're going to rewrite the language ourselves,"

00:43:37 ◼   ► and what is that, hip-hop their replacement thing or whatever?

00:43:40 ◼   ► But those are, those I feel like are extremes. I think for the most part, most companies

00:43:45 ◼   ► that are doing web development, I don't know if I'm going to say for the most part, maybe

00:43:50 ◼   ► it's 50/50, are using in-house web frameworks. In the modern era though, there are so many

00:43:55 ◼   ► popular web frameworks that work for so many needs that it's accepted that you're going

00:44:00 ◼   ► to build on top of them. I think where there are two places where this silly JavaScript

00:44:04 ◼   ► only three places that silly JavaScript stuff fell down.

00:44:07 ◼   ► One is an area that I'm familiar with,

00:44:10 ◼   ► because JavaScript is a crap language that

00:44:13 ◼   ► is missing really important things that people want, right?

00:44:16 ◼   ► And Perl started out as a crap language that

00:44:19 ◼   ► was missing many important things that people wanted.

00:44:21 ◼   ► And still, today is missing some things that people wanted.

00:44:24 ◼   ► Which means that to sort of round out your language-- Ruby

00:44:28 ◼   ► has a little bit of degree too, because they consider it

00:44:30 ◼   ► an asset-- to sort of round out your language

00:44:32 ◼   ► habitable, you know, to make it comfortable, there's a minimum amount of

00:44:37 ◼   ► sort of furniture you need to buy for the house before you can move in and

00:44:39 ◼   ► it's not part of the language. It's, you know, done in libraries, right? So

00:44:44 ◼   ► JavaScript is definitely in that situation which is why there's all these

00:44:47 ◼   ► things that like, you know, CoffeeScript and TypeScript and other things that are

00:44:51 ◼   ► like try to make JavaScript feel nicer. Those aren't libraries but the same idea

00:44:54 ◼   ► that that no one wants to just use JavaScript by itself because even basic

00:44:58 ◼   ► things like, say, left padding a string, are not in the language or the standard library,

00:45:03 ◼   ► where standard library is defined as what you can run in a browser, right? So someone's

00:45:07 ◼   ► got to write the stupid 11-line function, right?

00:45:09 ◼   ► Not in PHP, they don't.

00:45:10 ◼   ► Or, you know, I know, like the isArray packages are talking about, like the common test that

00:45:14 ◼   ► people want to do that's not in the language, that it's easy to write, but it's also easy

00:45:17 ◼   ► to get wrong, and it's just kind of like a basic thing, right?

00:45:20 ◼   ► Yeah, you don't have to do that in PHP either.

00:45:22 ◼   ► Yeah, JavaScript, nor Perl, by the way. JavaScript is in that position, and so that's why these

00:45:27 ◼   ► things exist. The second problem is the JavaScript community not sort of having

00:45:33 ◼   ► their act together enough to realize, "All right, so we have this language that has

00:45:36 ◼   ► these gaps." The best way to fill them is not with 10 billion individual

00:45:41 ◼   ► dependencies, each of which does one of those functions. Like, as a community, they

00:45:44 ◼   ► should have, you know, sort of come together and settled on some much larger

00:45:50 ◼   ► libraries they're like, "And round out the JavaScript language for me, lib 1.0."

00:45:54 ◼   ► right? And maybe there's seven competing ones of those, but that is much better

00:45:58 ◼   ► than, "I'm gonna do left pad, I'm gonna do sane regular expression matching, you

00:46:02 ◼   ► know, I'm gonna do fake inheritance in the prototype based language," and you

00:46:06 ◼   ► know, like everyone's sort of just doing the little tiny thing and having a

00:46:10 ◼   ► million of those combined. And I think the third failure for all the people who

00:46:14 ◼   ► got hit by this bug is people who grew up in an environment where the

00:46:19 ◼   ► expectation is that you can run your deploy and part of the deployment or

00:46:26 ◼   ► updating a syncing or whatever automated procedure they have that they're all

00:46:30 ◼   ► happy with they're not thinking about the fact that it is connecting to third

00:46:34 ◼   ► party servers to do that right if you're just slightly older if you're like you

00:46:38 ◼   ► know maybe 10 or 20 years older than the people who are running to these problems

00:46:43 ◼   ► you would have grown up in a culture like I did where you know you're

00:46:47 ◼   ► building on top of Perl, there are gaps in Perl that you're going to need to the libraries,

00:46:51 ◼   ► there's web frameworks, maybe you're writing your own, certainly you're building on top

00:46:54 ◼   ► of some real basics like DBI and LWP or whatever the hell, you know, the sort of core foundational

00:46:59 ◼   ► things that most people who use Perl want to do. But if you're in a big important company,

00:47:04 ◼   ► you don't go out to CPAN to get these packages, right? You have your own internal CPAN mirror

00:47:10 ◼   ► at your company, checked into version control, so you know exactly what the hell you're getting,

00:47:14 ◼   ► nothing anybody can do on the internet,

00:47:15 ◼   ► it's gonna change what you deploy.

00:47:17 ◼   ► Like, the only, nothing is gonna break your stuff

00:47:20 ◼   ► based on what's on the internet.

00:47:21 ◼   ► And you maintain that mirror,

00:47:22 ◼   ► and you sync upstream and downstream,

00:47:24 ◼   ► and you control your own destiny.

00:47:27 ◼   ► It's tons of third-party software.

00:47:28 ◼   ► Like a CPAN mirror, especially back in the old days,

00:47:30 ◼   ► was pretty darn big, and it's like,

00:47:31 ◼   ► why do we have to have our own CPAN mirror?

00:47:34 ◼   ► Because you don't wanna rely on stuff on the internet,

00:47:37 ◼   ► right, I mean, for security reasons alone.

00:47:39 ◼   ► Like, so that the idea that pulling something

00:47:41 ◼   ► from a repository would break people's production systems,

00:47:44 ◼   ► those production systems were prebroken,

00:47:46 ◼   ► not by the fact they were,

00:47:47 ◼   ► just by the fact that they were relying on third party code,

00:47:49 ◼   ► not just by the fact that the third party dependencies

00:47:52 ◼   ► were broken down into microscopic individual functions

00:47:54 ◼   ► with ridiculous names,

00:47:56 ◼   ► but because they weren't masters of their own destiny.

00:47:59 ◼   ► No matter what you choose to do in terms of the dependencies

00:48:01 ◼   ► and you can decide based on what Marco was talking about,

00:48:03 ◼   ► you know, is it reliable?

00:48:05 ◼   ► Is it suitable for my purpose?

00:48:06 ◼   ► Am I better off doing it myself?

00:48:07 ◼   ► Is it a core competency?

00:48:08 ◼   ► But like all these sorts of decisions,

00:48:10 ◼   ► Eventually you're gonna do some things

00:48:12 ◼   ► with third-party code, whether it's your OS

00:48:14 ◼   ► or your compiler or whatever,

00:48:15 ◼   ► but especially if it's package management,

00:48:17 ◼   ► you have to have that stuff in-house.

00:48:18 ◼   ► And these days, it is nothing to have a complete mirror

00:48:21 ◼   ► of some public repository in your, you know,

00:48:25 ◼   ► or just the individual packages you want,

00:48:27 ◼   ► check them into your version control.

00:48:28 ◼   ► You don't need the whole freaking repository.

00:48:30 ◼   ► The repository doesn't need to be involved

00:48:32 ◼   ► in your build and deployment process.

00:48:33 ◼   ► Just get the code that you need,

00:48:34 ◼   ► and then that code will never change out from under you.

00:48:36 ◼   ► If it is suitable for your purpose,

00:48:37 ◼   ► it will continue to be suitable

00:48:39 ◼   ► until you decide that it's not.

00:48:40 ◼   ► So anyway, in summary, whippersnappers.

00:48:45 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:48:47 ◼   ► - Wow.

00:48:49 ◼   ► I don't even know where to go from here.

00:48:52 ◼   ► All I will say is that it's interesting

00:48:55 ◼   ► that you bring up deployment

00:48:58 ◼   ► because one of the things that I was thinking about

00:49:00 ◼   ► when this was all going down was that

00:49:04 ◼   ► when I deploy camel to Heroku,

00:49:07 ◼   ► What I'm deploying is just my code, including my list of dependencies.

00:49:13 ◼   ► And just like you said, John, Heroku is then going out to npm and fetching all of these

00:49:19 ◼   ► packages on my behalf.

00:49:20 ◼   ► So this very well could have bitten me if myself or one of the packages I depend on

00:49:28 ◼   ► was dependent on the one that got pulled.

00:49:30 ◼   ► So this is exactly something that I could have run into because of the way I choose

00:49:36 ◼   ► to host my site, and I choose to host it on Heroku for a variety of reasons, but mostly,

00:49:40 ◼   ► like you said about core competencies, I don't have the time, interest, or desire to be a

00:49:45 ◼   ► Linux server admin, and so I choose, for better or worse, to have a platform as a service.

00:49:52 ◼   ► And that's what I like.

00:49:53 ◼   ► And I...

00:49:54 ◼   ► Worse.

00:49:55 ◼   ► Fine.

00:49:56 ◼   ► But that's what I like, and that's what works for me.

00:49:58 ◼   ► That's how I've chosen to do it.

00:49:59 ◼   ► And yes, there are ways around this, even with Heroku, but my point is, even an innocent

00:50:05 ◼   ► bystander like myself. I am potentially guilty of doing the same thing.

00:50:11 ◼   ► That's weird to me that like, you know, it doesn't really matter practically speaking

00:50:15 ◼   ► that you're pulling from the internet as you deploy. I don't understand why that needs

00:50:20 ◼   ► to be a dynamic part of the process. I feel like that should be pulled down, like the

00:50:26 ◼   ► same way you pull something from CocoaPods and now it's part of your application. Every

00:50:29 ◼   ► time you compile it doesn't re-download it from CocoaPods and silently update it to a

00:50:33 ◼   ► to a different version or get it like, or just,

00:50:35 ◼   ► you never actually have it.

00:50:36 ◼   ► And like, I know it's like more dynamic and just like,

00:50:39 ◼   ► oh, we're all this interconnected web

00:50:41 ◼   ► and network connections never go down

00:50:42 ◼   ► and I can trust what's on the other side of the network.

00:50:44 ◼   ► But I don't understand how you can trust it, honestly.

00:50:47 ◼   ► I mean, I don't even, you know,

00:50:49 ◼   ► maybe this is another weird C-PAN thing,

00:50:51 ◼   ► but like what kind of security is there?

00:50:52 ◼   ► If you're dynamically pulling every time you deploy,

00:50:54 ◼   ► you're just trusting, you don't even know what the hell

00:50:57 ◼   ► NPM repositories Heroku is using

00:50:59 ◼   ► and how they might be poisoned with what,

00:51:01 ◼   ► like, I mean, it doesn't matter for a personal site.

00:51:02 ◼   ► This is not a specific issue.

00:51:04 ◼   ► It's just the culture of—it's the same culture that gives you websites that end in

00:51:08 ◼   ► dot io that implore you to run cURL and pipe it through Bash.

00:51:13 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

00:51:14 ◼   ► It's that kind of culture.

00:51:15 ◼   ► It's kind of like a return to the really old days when I was first starting Unix.

00:51:22 ◼   ► Like I've told this story before at BU.

00:51:24 ◼   ► All TTYs were world-readable.

00:51:26 ◼   ► That's how naïve they were.

00:51:27 ◼   ► Like, it was Telnet.

00:51:28 ◼   ► There was no SSH.

00:51:29 ◼   ► Your passwords were flying in plain text every time you telnetted or FTP'd anywhere.

00:51:32 ◼   ► All TTYs were world-rideable.

00:51:33 ◼   ► It was like the free love sixties, right?

00:51:37 ◼   ► And that era came to an end.

00:51:38 ◼   ► But then, you know, fast forward 20 or 30 years and people are pulling from an unknown

00:51:43 ◼   ► website and piping to their shell.

00:51:46 ◼   ► Sometimes they'd have sudo in there.

00:51:47 ◼   ► It would be like someone just put in the chat room.

00:51:49 ◼   ► Sometimes they'd be like, "Seriously?

00:51:50 ◼   ► I'm going to pull from a website and pipe to sudo sh?"

00:51:53 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:51:56 ◼   ► It's a utopian world that has never actually really existed and cannot be recreated by

00:52:03 ◼   ► wishing it were true.

00:52:04 ◼   ► Oh my god.

00:52:07 ◼   ► I didn't realize that websites that end in .io are inherently bad.

00:52:12 ◼   ► This is news to me.

00:52:13 ◼   ► It's the whippersnappers.

00:52:14 ◼   ► It is the whippersnappers.

00:52:16 ◼   ► You've seen the websites I'm talking about, right?

00:52:18 ◼   ► Some cool new technology and they have a website that ends in .io and their installation procedure

00:52:23 ◼   ► wants you to just run a curl command and pipe it into a shell.

00:52:26 ◼   ► They're like, "No thanks.

00:52:28 ◼   ► No thank you.

00:52:29 ◼   ► I will not do that."

00:52:30 ◼   ► I mean, is it really any better when they had shell archives that you download, like

00:52:34 ◼   ► shaar files, and you just run those blindly?

00:52:36 ◼   ► Maybe it wasn't that much better, but I feel like you're crossing a line when the network

00:52:41 ◼   ► is involved and you're just blindly trusting bits going over a wire that you're just allowing

00:52:45 ◼   ► to execute on your machine that you just pulled off a website.

00:52:47 ◼   ► And it's like, is it the same as downloading unknown binaries?

00:52:53 ◼   ► is Turing complete, I understand how it's all equivalent and they're not really that

00:52:55 ◼   ► different and it's like, oh kids these days, right? But there is a difference. There's

00:52:59 ◼   ► a reason we've moved to signed binaries and all sorts of cryptographic things to assure

00:53:04 ◼   ► us that at the very least the application comes from the person we think it comes from

00:53:09 ◼   ► and hasn't been altered. There's a reason that has rolled out on phone platforms and

00:53:13 ◼   ► to a lesser extent desktop platforms and game consoles and everything like that. And the

00:53:17 ◼   ► modern practice of executing arbitrary code pulled from websites in your shell flies in

00:53:24 ◼   ► the face of that progress.

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00:55:43 ◼   ► Just today, the Safari Technology Preview was released, and we'll put the official blog

00:55:48 ◼   ► post in the show notes, but basically the gist is, this is a separate app that you download

00:55:55 ◼   ► via the web, and then is updated, I guess, fortnightly via the Mac App Store, and it's

00:56:01 ◼   ► It's sort of kind of a more stable version of the Safari Nightly, if I understand things

00:56:06 ◼   ► right, except that it has one important ability which I don't believe the Safari Nightly's

00:56:13 ◼   ► have, or the WebKit Nightly's have, which is it can talk to iCloud.

00:56:18 ◼   ► And so if you're like me and rely on Safari and rely on bookmark sync and things like

00:56:22 ◼   ► that, you can use the Safari technology preview.

00:56:25 ◼   ► The reason this is a segue from what we were just talking about, though, is that I tried

00:56:28 ◼   ► this on my work computer.

00:56:29 ◼   ► I haven't put it on my personal one yet, and I immediately went to install the 1Password extension. When I did so, I

00:56:36 ◼   ► attempted to enter a password for whatever it was I was looking at at the time, and the 1Password extension said, "Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.

00:56:43 ◼   ► This isn't signed the way we expect.

00:56:46 ◼   ► Thus, this is dangerous.

00:56:49 ◼   ► Thus, we don't want you to do this." And that comes back to what you were saying a minute ago, John, about

00:56:53 ◼   ► cryptographically signing things, making sure that what you're looking at is what you expect, etc.

00:56:59 ◼   ► I just thought that was interesting and good on 1Password for telling me these things, although

00:57:04 ◼   ► I couldn't figure out a way to override it, which is a little bit of a bummer.

00:57:07 ◼   ► But it still worked really well outside of the 1Password issue.

00:57:13 ◼   ► The technology preview worked well, everything seemed fine to me.

00:57:16 ◼   ► I haven't had the chance to kick the tires too much yet, but so far so good.

00:57:20 ◼   ► I've really liked it.

00:57:21 ◼   ► Have you guys played with this at all?

00:57:23 ◼   ► I only have one question.

00:57:25 ◼   ► Did all of your plugin icons all kind of shift over

00:57:29 ◼   ► to the right side as you were using it,

00:57:31 ◼   ► or did they stay where you put them

00:57:32 ◼   ► on the left side of the address bar?

00:57:34 ◼   ► - Oh, that frickin' address bar,

00:57:35 ◼   ► even in non-preview Safari, even just in regular Safari,

00:57:40 ◼   ► frequently the icons in the toolbar of Safari

00:57:43 ◼   ► decide they don't like where they are

00:57:44 ◼   ► and would like a new home, and then I put them back.

00:57:47 ◼   ► - They all just, they end up just all,

00:57:49 ◼   ► 'cause I think what happens is if they get updated,

00:57:52 ◼   ► I think they lose their spot and they always get added on to the right side.

00:57:57 ◼   ► So I like a balanced bar.

00:57:58 ◼   ► So I have four of these buttons that go in the address bar from extensions.

00:58:02 ◼   ► I like to put two on the left, two on the right.

00:58:04 ◼   ► And they always end up just having all four on the right within a few weeks.

00:58:08 ◼   ► Yeah, it's not good about remembering where you put things.

00:58:11 ◼   ► In the grand tradition of the modern Apple, they will let you rearrange things sometimes,

00:58:15 ◼   ► but they will not respect your rearrangement.

00:58:17 ◼   ► The only place I can say that isn't true is to the credit of iOS, Springboard is usually

00:58:23 ◼   ► pretty good about not moving your crap.

00:58:25 ◼   ► Not 100%, because every once in a while something will bump out of place, like if you do an

00:58:30 ◼   ► OS update and it adds an unmovable, undelatable Apple app and it'll bump your things around

00:58:34 ◼   ► or whatever, but it's pretty good.

00:58:35 ◼   ► But anyway, Safari Toolbars, yes.

00:58:38 ◼   ► I have experienced that.

00:58:39 ◼   ► And like I said, I experienced that not in the beta, not in the nightly, but just in

00:58:42 ◼   ► the regular stable one, not even during updates.

00:58:44 ◼   ► And I usually blame weird iCloud syncing.

00:58:47 ◼   ► It loses track of things and it's trying to notice that I added an icon somewhere six

00:58:51 ◼   ► years ago on a Mac that's no longer in service, but there's some state on some server somewhere

00:58:55 ◼   ► inside Apple that wakes up once every three months and spews a bunch of XML or property

00:59:01 ◼   ► lists towards my various Macs and perturbs the icons.

00:59:04 ◼   ► How am I supposed to pin cute dogs to Pinterest if I can't find the Pinterest button in Safari?

00:59:08 ◼   ► That's a problem.

00:59:11 ◼   ► Find them to key shortcuts.

00:59:12 ◼   ► But the most important feature of Safari Technology Preview, still unmentioned.

00:59:17 ◼   ► What is the most important feature?

00:59:18 ◼   ► Oh, the "Copy the Clipboard" thing so you can get rid of Flash?

00:59:22 ◼   ► No, it's got a purple icon!

00:59:24 ◼   ► Come on!

00:59:25 ◼   ► This is the whole reason anyone would ever—why would I want to use this?

00:59:29 ◼   ► Well, it's purple!

00:59:31 ◼   ► Purple is better than blue, and definitely better than Nightly, which is gray.

00:59:35 ◼   ► Yeah, no, actually, that's—the purple icon is actually, you know, I do like it, I do

00:59:41 ◼   ► like it better and it does look neat and it's the reason you might want to try it but it

00:59:44 ◼   ► highlights the one disappointing thing for me about it.

00:59:46 ◼   ► I would have preferred the Chrome system where you can just sort of tell Chrome go on the

00:59:52 ◼   ► Beta channel or whatever.

00:59:54 ◼   ► You only have one installation of Chrome and you just say, "But Chrome update yourself

00:59:58 ◼   ► from the Beta channel instead of the regular channel."

01:00:02 ◼   ► And the reason is Safari is still my default browser and I realized that I'm pretty much

01:00:05 ◼   ► never going to use the Safari technology preview unless I sort of disable or make inert the

01:00:12 ◼   ► standard one so that the preview can sort of take over as my default browser.

01:00:17 ◼   ► But I don't really want to do that either.

01:00:19 ◼   ► Like I would prefer to just have one Safari and switch it back and forth from should I

01:00:23 ◼   ► be pulling updates from the beta thing or not.

01:00:25 ◼   ► But this is certainly better than it was before because I never really ran the nightlies for

01:00:29 ◼   ► the reasons that Casey covered.

01:00:30 ◼   ► You know, it wasn't signed by Apple so you couldn't have the iCloud connection and everything.

01:00:34 ◼   ► So this is a step up,

01:00:36 ◼   ► but I don't really wanna run two copies of Safari

01:00:39 ◼   ► and I don't wanna have to zip up the old one.

01:00:41 ◼   ► And I'm not entirely confident that even if I tell the OS

01:00:44 ◼   ► to my default browser is this one

01:00:46 ◼   ► that the other one isn't gonna launch on its own.

01:00:48 ◼   ► Maybe I should give it a chance.

01:00:49 ◼   ► Maybe we should try using the verbal one for a while

01:00:50 ◼   ► and see if the blue one comes back to life zombie like

01:00:53 ◼   ► unless I zip it.

01:00:54 ◼   ► But anyway, lots of good new tech in like Casey mentioned

01:01:00 ◼   ► in the new one, a bunch of shadow DOM stuff,

01:01:02 ◼   ► EcmaScript 6, which is a slightly less crappy version of JavaScript.

01:01:07 ◼   ► So much hate.

01:01:08 ◼   ► Yeah, the copy and paste.

01:01:11 ◼   ► Not paste, sorry.

01:01:12 ◼   ► The cut and copy commands, which is great.

01:01:14 ◼   ► And I love that they highlight, you know, this is the only reason anyone still has legit

01:01:18 ◼   ► reason to run Flash because it's the only way to get stuff onto the clipboard.

01:01:21 ◼   ► We do it at work because sometimes you just want to have a link that you click that copies

01:01:24 ◼   ► something into the clipboard.

01:01:26 ◼   ► And having to run Flash for that has always felt gross.

01:01:28 ◼   ► So another browser supporting it natively is good.

01:01:31 ◼   ► But anyway, purple icon, thumbs up.

01:01:34 ◼   ► - Another interesting thing here,

01:01:35 ◼   ► I'm gonna read you the entire cut and copy portion

01:01:38 ◼   ► because it's very short.

01:01:39 ◼   ► Programmatic cut and copy to the clipboard.

01:01:41 ◼   ► It's now possible to programmatically copy and cut text

01:01:43 ◼   ► in response to a user gesture.

01:01:46 ◼   ► With blah and blah code,

01:01:48 ◼   ► having this ability may eliminate some websites

01:01:50 ◼   ► last need for the Flash plugin.

01:01:51 ◼   ► So yes, I love the dig on Flash,

01:01:54 ◼   ► but when I tweeted about this earlier,

01:01:56 ◼   ► a handful of people were like,

01:01:57 ◼   ► "Oh God, people are just gonna start pasting things in on me

01:02:00 ◼   ► or they're just gonna start copying what's in my clipboard,

01:02:03 ◼   ► what is this gonna mean for one password?

01:02:04 ◼   ► And everyone was, a few people were getting very upset.

01:02:08 ◼   ► And I think it's important to note,

01:02:10 ◼   ► one, that this is read only, or excuse me, write only.

01:02:15 ◼   ► Two, it's in response to a user gesture.

01:02:17 ◼   ► And three, I'm very curious to hear what that gesture is.

01:02:20 ◼   ► Is it that it can only be on like a click handler

01:02:22 ◼   ► or something like that?

01:02:23 ◼   ► Is it something more explicit?

01:02:25 ◼   ► I'm not sure.

01:02:26 ◼   ► But nevertheless, I think this is a really good thing.

01:02:29 ◼   ► - And it's already support.

01:02:30 ◼   ► I think Chrome already supports it like other modern browsers have ways to get things onto the clipboard without flash, right?

01:02:36 ◼   ► So it's not Safari's not the first one to implement this feature

01:02:38 ◼   ► And yeah, the security it's useless for even in response to a gesture like everything can be used to exploit eventually

01:02:44 ◼   ► You know with some sort of buffer overflow or whatever, but they can't pull the websites cannot get it

01:02:49 ◼   ► What's in your clipboard? All they can do is take their crap and put it there which could still be annoying like those stupid things

01:02:54 ◼   ► You know when you try to copy and paste text and they put the little attribution line next to it

01:02:58 ◼   ► Like we've all seen that one that it can still be annoying to put stuff into your clipboard

01:03:02 ◼   ► But annoying websites are always going to be annoying no matter what and so if the website does that you just won't go back to

01:03:08 ◼   ► It or we'll just deal with the annoyance

01:03:09 ◼   ► But they can't you know if you copy sensitive information and go to a website

01:03:13 ◼   ► This feature does not allow the website to get it that information in any way yep. No. This is this is a good thing and

01:03:19 ◼   ► it's another example of a

01:03:22 ◼   ► slightly

01:03:24 ◼   ► More transparent Apple which which I approve of I'm really I'm really pleased with the way

01:03:30 ◼   ► 2015 2016 have been with Apple being more transparent with Swift with this. This is all good stuff, and they should be commended for it

01:03:38 ◼   ► Yeah, remember we talked about Safari is the new IE kind of stuff like not this is a direct reaction to that but this

01:03:44 ◼   ► Specifically addresses a lot of the actual issues raised in that like oh

01:03:50 ◼   ► "Oh, why isn't Apple doing more on Shadow DOM?" or whatever.

01:03:53 ◼   ► The idea that they just had the Knightlys and it was an opaque development process and

01:03:58 ◼   ► you had to wait for the next version of the OS to come out to get the thing.

01:04:01 ◼   ► Now this is an incremental step towards, even if you're not a developer and you're just

01:04:07 ◼   ► a regular user and you want to get features earlier, here's a more convenient way to do

01:04:11 ◼   ► it.

01:04:12 ◼   ► Even more convenient than the Knightlys that we've been building for you for a year.

01:04:14 ◼   ► And here's us talking about on our blog, this is not the first blog post, this is the Webkit

01:04:19 ◼   ► blog has been updated frequently to talk about the new features they're planning on adding

01:04:23 ◼   ► and just been much more open about stuff that we previously would have had to wait for WWDC

01:04:28 ◼   ► to sort of read the tea leaves of the WebKit work.

01:04:31 ◼   ► Because you couldn't even see all the WebKit work because Apple would do stuff internally

01:04:35 ◼   ► and they wouldn't commit to the public repository until they were ready to release.

01:04:39 ◼   ► And they're just being much more open about that process, including talking about future

01:04:43 ◼   ► products and say, "We're adding this, that, and that, and they're going to be coming into

01:04:46 ◼   ► future release, which is, you know, like they've been doing with Swift, is unheard of from

01:04:49 ◼   ► the old Apple, sort of talking about future features for products. Granted, obscure techie

01:04:55 ◼   ► nerd type products, right, you know, that only web developers or GUI application developers

01:05:00 ◼   ► really care about, but still, it, you know, trusting that people are going to understand,

01:05:05 ◼   ► "Oh, well, you promised this feature," whatever, like, if you see the whole development process

01:05:08 ◼   ► going out in the open, you'll understand when things get booted out, when, "Oh, this didn't

01:05:12 ◼   ► make it in time for Swift 3.

01:05:13 ◼   ► Like, when inevitably some proposal doesn't make it in time for Swift 3, even though they

01:05:17 ◼   ► talked about wanting to put it in there, no one will be mad because anyone involved in

01:05:21 ◼   ► the process would have seen every step of the way why that thing didn't make it into

01:05:25 ◼   ► the process.

01:05:26 ◼   ► What else were you doing during that time?

01:05:28 ◼   ► When everyone can see the process, it's so much more understandable.

01:05:30 ◼   ► It's like, "Oh, well, that didn't make it into Swift 3.

01:05:34 ◼   ► We're kicking it down the road."

01:05:36 ◼   ► It doesn't seem like some sinister plan to withhold technology goodies from you.

01:05:39 ◼   ► It just seems like the fallout of software development,

01:05:43 ◼   ► which has all sorts of unexpected things.

01:05:45 ◼   ► And when you've seen all those things happen

01:05:46 ◼   ► in front of you, who can be,

01:05:48 ◼   ► I mean, I'm sure someone will still find a way to be mad,

01:05:50 ◼   ► but very few sane people will be mad about it.

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01:07:08 ◼   ► So Intel has ended TikTok and I don't really know what to say about this other

01:07:16 ◼   ► than I think it's pretty expected.

01:07:18 ◼   ► So John, what are your thoughts?

01:07:20 ◼   ► I'm just kind of sad that I finally nailed down which one was the tick and which one

01:07:25 ◼   ► was the tock and then go and change the process.

01:07:27 ◼   ► All the hard work I put in, I studied and studied.

01:07:29 ◼   ► So which one is the tick and which one is the tock?

01:07:32 ◼   ► Shrink is the tick.

01:07:33 ◼   ► Okay.

01:07:34 ◼   ► But it's not that it matters anymore now. They have much more sensible name, so they had to come up with another another

01:07:39 ◼   ► You know I don't know catchphrase or whatever to marketing term for their new strategy funk

01:07:45 ◼   ► So instead of tick tock and sort of tick tock thunk they came up with it's not great tick tock was much better

01:07:51 ◼   ► So that team did a better job in this team and come up with the acronym

01:07:55 ◼   ► But this was PAO and that stands for process architecture and optimization and so which one is the shrink?

01:08:02 ◼   ► It's the one that's called process like it's much easier now

01:08:05 ◼   ► They made that part of it easier, but PAO does not roll off the tongue like tik-tok does

01:08:09 ◼   ► So it's basically you know process is the tick

01:08:13 ◼   ► architecture is the talk that's when they produce a new micro architecture a new chip that has a you know a

01:08:19 ◼   ► Different number of execution units and different branch prediction and different cache size

01:08:22 ◼   ► I don't know you know like it's a new architecture, and then they're adding a new third phase called optimization

01:08:27 ◼   ► Which as far as I'm aware?

01:08:28 ◼   ► I'm looking at older article or we'll link in the show notes from and tech as far as I'm aware. They haven't really

01:08:33 ◼   ► Nailed down what's gonna happen in the optimization phase beyond saying well

01:08:38 ◼   ► It's not gonna be a shrink and it's not gonna be a new architecture. It's gonna be this third time when we do other

01:08:44 ◼   ► Things what can they do an optimization?

01:08:46 ◼   ► They can make the integrated GPU better. They could you know

01:08:50 ◼   ► Maybe make it use less power through more clever

01:08:54 ◼   ► you know, power management or throttling or thermals or, you know, I don't know what they're gonna do the optimization phase

01:09:01 ◼   ► we'll find out but it's going to be a formal a

01:09:03 ◼   ► formal part of the process and as many people in the chat room are snarkily trying to imply like TikTok

01:09:09 ◼   ► may have been the the strategy in name for the past year or two

01:09:13 ◼   ► but

01:09:14 ◼   ► the sort of the length of the tick and the length of the tocks have been stretching out in weird ways and

01:09:19 ◼   ► really this three-phase architecture is just more of an acknowledgement of

01:09:23 ◼   ► what was sort of happening already that the time scales are stretched out more and

01:09:27 ◼   ► that Intel wants to recognize that and set expectations to say we are gonna do a new process and then we're gonna do a new

01:09:34 ◼   ► architecture and then we're going to sort of

01:09:36 ◼   ► work on the two of them together for a little while longer to give the next process a longer time to

01:09:41 ◼   ► Hopefully arrive on our new three-phase

01:09:45 ◼   ► Schedule so we're all sort of still staring

01:09:50 ◼   ► at sort of the oncoming train of the the end of Moore's law

01:09:54 ◼   ► The real end is very far out in the distance theoretically speaking

01:09:59 ◼   ► But practically speaking there need to be it's getting harder and harder to make things smaller and smaller

01:10:03 ◼   ► with lithography techniques

01:10:06 ◼   ► And the research and the money required to go down to the next smaller size is like what you know

01:10:11 ◼   ► The real next breakthrough has to be like do we have to continue to use a lithography, you know sort of shining

01:10:17 ◼   ► Not so much light or you know shining forms of electromagnetic

01:10:20 ◼   ► Magnetic radiation onto a thing to cause the areas exposed to react differently than the non exposed areas

01:10:28 ◼   ► That's what we've been doing for our entire lives to make

01:10:31 ◼   ► Integrated circuits. I don't know what's next assembling

01:10:35 ◼   ► Transistors out of individual atoms or weird technologies that you know in the you know sort of the R&D realm

01:10:42 ◼   ► You can definitely make things smaller that way, but you can't make them at scale

01:10:45 ◼   ► And so there's this sort of general research gap.

01:10:48 ◼   ► But anyway, Intel plows bravely forward.

01:10:51 ◼   ► And the last show we talked a lot about Intel missing their dates and holding up Apple's

01:10:55 ◼   ► things or whatever, but the bottom line is they're still ahead of all their competition

01:10:58 ◼   ► in terms of their process, how far along they are at different process sizes.

01:11:03 ◼   ► And that continues to be an advantage for them.

01:11:07 ◼   ► And maybe they'll be the ones to make the next step before everybody else because they're

01:11:10 ◼   ► putting in the time and energy and they're already ahead of everybody else.

01:11:13 ◼   ► So you can't really be picking on Intel too much because they are sort of at the bleeding

01:11:18 ◼   ► edge of this, but if there is a wall out in the future, Intel may just get to it first

01:11:23 ◼   ► and then everyone catches up with them and then Intel's advantage is gone.

01:11:27 ◼   ► So stay tuned for the ATP episode in 15 years when we revisit that topic.

01:11:32 ◼   ► Oh goodness.

01:11:35 ◼   ► I can only hope.

01:11:37 ◼   ► All right, so speaking of Intel kind of falling on its face and speaking of really crummy

01:11:42 ◼   ► and loose segues, the Oculus founder said that the Oculus Rift, which was shipped in

01:11:50 ◼   ► the last day or two, right? Anyway, the the Rift will come to the Mac only if Apple quote

01:11:56 ◼   ► "ever releases a good computer" quote. Maybe that's all Intel's fault. So what's going

01:12:03 ◼   ► on here? Why is, what, in what, by what metric is Apple not releasing a good computer?

01:12:07 ◼   ► I mean I hit on this a little bit last week. I mean the main thing is that the Oculus requires

01:12:15 ◼   ► a pretty intense graphics card and over time, you know, more pedestrian ones will probably

01:12:20 ◼   ► be able to drive it just fine, but right now it's so cutting edge and it has such high

01:12:23 ◼   ► graphical needs that it requires a really, really high powered graphics card and there's

01:12:28 ◼   ► only a handful in the PC world that are good enough to do it and Apple ships none of those

01:12:33 ◼   ► in any of their computers. The only computer that could even come close would maybe be

01:12:37 ◼   ► the Mac Pro, but the current Mac Pro is two and a half years old or so and has fairly

01:12:44 ◼   ► outdated GPUs as a result of being so old. I think we covered this a little bit last

01:12:49 ◼   ► week, so I don't want to go too far into it now, but I think the short version is that

01:12:52 ◼   ► there's a few problems here, most of which Apple doesn't appear to care about. You

01:12:57 ◼   ► know, as I'm sure John will discuss in a second, I don't think Apple cares that much

01:13:00 ◼   ► about games on the Mac, but you know Apple has so far for a long time now tied their

01:13:07 ◼   ► updates to Intel's updates. And as we discussed Intel's cycles have been getting longer between

01:13:12 ◼   ► major updates to their CPU's that has also stretched out Mac update cycles and Apple's

01:13:18 ◼   ► habit as it was last week of skipping some processor generations that Intel gives them

01:13:24 ◼   ► for their lower volume products like the Mac Mini and the Mac Pro and you know even some

01:13:29 ◼   ► of the laptops these days.

01:13:31 ◼   ► Their Apple strategy for skipping some of the things

01:13:33 ◼   ► that they could use, kind of like holding off

01:13:36 ◼   ► till better ones come later,

01:13:38 ◼   ► that's also working against them,

01:13:39 ◼   ► because again, as the Intel generations have gotten longer,

01:13:43 ◼   ► we now have a situation that we have today

01:13:46 ◼   ► with most of the laptops, where we're sitting around

01:13:49 ◼   ► waiting for the Skylake revision from Intel

01:13:51 ◼   ► to come out in quantity so that Apple can ship

01:13:54 ◼   ► the new MacBook Pros, and meanwhile,

01:13:56 ◼   ► the ones you buy today have something like

01:13:57 ◼   ► three year old CPU in them.

01:13:59 ◼   ► So something here has to change.

01:14:01 ◼   ► Either, well, I hope something has to change.

01:14:04 ◼   ► We'll see if it actually does or not,

01:14:05 ◼   ► based on Apple's actions.

01:14:06 ◼   ► But obviously Intel can't deliver

01:14:09 ◼   ► new generations of chips any faster.

01:14:12 ◼   ► We're seeing that.

01:14:13 ◼   ► We're seeing that they are slowing down

01:14:14 ◼   ► in their rate of being able to deliver these things

01:14:16 ◼   ► 'cause just everything's getting harder.

01:14:18 ◼   ► So Apple needs to either be okay not getting these markets

01:14:22 ◼   ► and be okay selling three year old hardware in Macs,

01:14:27 ◼   ► brand new today on a regular basis.

01:14:30 ◼   ► Or Apple has to stop skipping Intel generations,

01:14:33 ◼   ► which would generally cut their product cycle time in half

01:14:36 ◼   ► because they tend to skip every other generation

01:14:38 ◼   ► on some of these products like the Mac Pro.

01:14:40 ◼   ► Or Apple can start issuing updates to products

01:14:44 ◼   ► even when there is no new CPU to use from Intel.

01:14:48 ◼   ► Which they have occasionally done,

01:14:50 ◼   ► but it's not a routine thing for them.

01:14:53 ◼   ► Any of those things could solve this problem.

01:14:56 ◼   ► Also, then you have the issue of like,

01:14:57 ◼   ► even if they kept their products more up to date,

01:15:00 ◼   ► what products does Apple sell that could accommodate

01:15:04 ◼   ► the size and thermals of a high power GPU?

01:15:08 ◼   ► And it's basically like one and a half.

01:15:10 ◼   ► It's like the Mac Pro for sure,

01:15:12 ◼   ► and then maybe the big iMac,

01:15:14 ◼   ► depending on the cooling requirements and everything.

01:15:16 ◼   ► You basically have two Macs that Apple could plausibly put

01:15:19 ◼   ► really high power GPUs in,

01:15:21 ◼   ► and both of those are probably pretty low volume

01:15:25 ◼   ► products for them, especially the Mac Pro.

01:15:27 ◼   ► So it just seems like Apple doesn't really care

01:15:31 ◼   ► to address this market, which I think is unfortunate

01:15:34 ◼   ► because I wish Apple had a little bit more hunger

01:15:38 ◼   ► in attracting people from PCs than they seem to,

01:15:42 ◼   ► but with the exception of the whole iPad stuff,

01:15:45 ◼   ► but that's a whole different thing.

01:15:46 ◼   ► But I do wish they would solve this more often

01:15:48 ◼   ► because I think it would make Macs better also.

01:15:50 ◼   ► And if Apple ever has VR ambitions,

01:15:52 ◼   ► this will hurt them as well.

01:15:54 ◼   ► But for now, this is the situation we're in,

01:15:57 ◼   ► and we'll see if any of those factors change.

01:15:59 ◼   ► - Apple's attitude towards these things

01:16:02 ◼   ► has been frustrating.

01:16:03 ◼   ► Like a couple years ago, I wrote something on my blog

01:16:06 ◼   ► asking for the cheese grater

01:16:08 ◼   ► that hadn't been updated in forever,

01:16:09 ◼   ► back when the show just started.

01:16:10 ◼   ► That was one of the reasons their icons

01:16:12 ◼   ► was the old cheese grater

01:16:13 ◼   ► with the sarcastic new label on it

01:16:15 ◼   ► because they introduced a new Mac Pro that was barely new.

01:16:17 ◼   ► And it's like, are you ever gonna update this?

01:16:19 ◼   ► What's the deal?

01:16:20 ◼   ► And I was asking for them to,

01:16:23 ◼   ► Is there anyone left at Apple who really cares about high performance computers?

01:16:26 ◼   ► No they're not going to make a lot of money for you, no they're not going to be high volume,

01:16:29 ◼   ► you know it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things, but if you are computer enthusiasts,

01:16:36 ◼   ► isn't there someone there who like really likes fast great computers, just like the

01:16:40 ◼   ► example I use for Halo cars in the car industry where lots of car companies make a car, there's

01:16:44 ◼   ► probably going to be a money loser for them, just because car companies are filled with

01:16:48 ◼   ► people who love cars, and people who love cars tend to love fast cars and beautiful

01:16:51 ◼   ► cars and so they make these cars that are just, you know, you might look at them as

01:16:55 ◼   ► a boondoggle like you spend all this money on R&D, it's got all these custom parts, no

01:17:00 ◼   ► one's even going to use this thing and it's weird and finicky or whatever but you make

01:17:03 ◼   ► it because you love cars, right?

01:17:05 ◼   ► And they did that.

01:17:06 ◼   ► The tube Mac Pro, I mean you may not agree with their vision but you can't say that they

01:17:10 ◼   ► just kind of punted it and just like, "Oh, here's another tower computer."

01:17:13 ◼   ► They had the vision of this crazy tube-shaped computer like that this was their vision of

01:17:17 ◼   ► of high performance computing,

01:17:19 ◼   ► and it had these at the time,

01:17:20 ◼   ► fairly powerful video cards with 12 gigs of VRAM,

01:17:23 ◼   ► which was unprecedented shipping stock on a Mac,

01:17:25 ◼   ► and it was interesting and innovative on all fronts.

01:17:29 ◼   ► Was it a good supercar?

01:17:31 ◼   ► Was it a good halo car?

01:17:32 ◼   ► Maybe not or whatever.

01:17:33 ◼   ► But then you can't go, and then just let that sit there.

01:17:37 ◼   ► Like, man, you just lose interest, right?

01:17:40 ◼   ► 'Cause that sort of like on again, off again thing

01:17:43 ◼   ► where it's like, we love high performance.

01:17:45 ◼   ► Here's an amazingly expandable Mac

01:17:46 ◼   ► looks like a cheese grater and it's easy to open up and you can swap the RAM and we'll

01:17:50 ◼   ► update it frequently and you can put in different video cards and it has slots and look how

01:17:55 ◼   ► easy it is to take in and out the drives and the first one can only do two drives and now

01:17:58 ◼   ► this one can do four and it's even easier to get the drives in and out and they made

01:18:02 ◼   ► a water-cooled one.

01:18:03 ◼   ► It seemed like they were on that bandwagon for a pretty long time and then they lost

01:18:06 ◼   ► interest.

01:18:07 ◼   ► And then they came back and were interested and then they said immediately lost interest

01:18:09 ◼   ► again.

01:18:10 ◼   ► And that's not a way to attract people who have similar sensibilities.

01:18:15 ◼   ► "Hey, are you one of the people who's like a gear head

01:18:18 ◼   ► "who loves supercars and high performance cars?

01:18:20 ◼   ► "Do you like big high performance computers?"

01:18:23 ◼   ► In some respects, as an end in and of themselves,

01:18:26 ◼   ► you don't even need this, but you just think it's cool,

01:18:28 ◼   ► the same reason people buy fast cars

01:18:30 ◼   ► that they can never drive

01:18:31 ◼   ► at the full speed that they're gonna drive.

01:18:32 ◼   ► It's like, if you're that type of,

01:18:34 ◼   ► does Apple care about the customer?

01:18:36 ◼   ► Sometimes they do,

01:18:37 ◼   ► because there are people inside Apple who are like that,

01:18:39 ◼   ► but then all of a sudden they don't again,

01:18:41 ◼   ► and it becomes hard to trust the company.

01:18:42 ◼   ► And so many people,

01:18:43 ◼   ► so many things I've been reading lately about pros,

01:18:47 ◼   ► maybe these people who actually have legit need

01:18:49 ◼   ► like professional graphics people or professional 3D people,

01:18:51 ◼   ► professional video people or whatever,

01:18:53 ◼   ► saying that sometimes Apple, it pays attention to them,

01:18:57 ◼   ► but then they don't and they're kind of tired

01:18:59 ◼   ► of the rocky relationship and they're going to somewhere

01:19:03 ◼   ► that has more consistently supported them

01:19:05 ◼   ► and they're switching to PCs or whatever.

01:19:06 ◼   ► Gamers have long since made that decision

01:19:08 ◼   ► and say Apple has never really cared about gamers

01:19:10 ◼   ► and only incidentally when they shipped machines

01:19:12 ◼   ► where it was easy to swap video cards,

01:19:14 ◼   ► could you buy a PC video card, flash it for your Mac,

01:19:17 ◼   ► shove it in there, and then boom, you've got a Mac

01:19:20 ◼   ► that is actually a really good gaming PC as well.

01:19:22 ◼   ► That's part of Palmer Lucky's complaint here.

01:19:25 ◼   ► The quote I put in the notes about this is,

01:19:27 ◼   ► "You can buy a $6,000 Mac Pro

01:19:29 ◼   ► with top of the line AMD Fire Pro D700

01:19:32 ◼   ► and it still doesn't match our recommended specs."

01:19:34 ◼   ► Like it doesn't even meet, like here's sort of like the,

01:19:37 ◼   ► "Here's what we think you should have for the Rift.

01:19:39 ◼   ► A $6,000 Mac Pro doesn't meet it."

01:19:41 ◼   ► Like maybe, you know, when that $6,000 Mac Pro

01:19:45 ◼   ► was introduced, it would have been a reasonable thing.

01:19:48 ◼   ► Like if Oculus had come out then,

01:19:49 ◼   ► their minimum spec may have been lower,

01:19:50 ◼   ► like, you know, lower resolution or whatever,

01:19:53 ◼   ► lower target frame rate, whatever the things are.

01:19:54 ◼   ► But nowadays it's the same computer.

01:19:56 ◼   ► It's still $6,000 and it's still got the D700 in it.

01:19:59 ◼   ► And the world has just moved on by leaps and bounds.

01:20:02 ◼   ► Even when it was introduced, in this case,

01:20:03 ◼   ► the D700 was not a gaming-focused card.

01:20:05 ◼   ► So even when it was introduced,

01:20:06 ◼   ► there were gaming cards that were way faster, right?

01:20:09 ◼   ► But now it's just ridiculous.

01:20:10 ◼   ► But the price hasn't gone down, right?

01:20:11 ◼   ► The whole Apple thing of like,

01:20:12 ◼   ► we will continue to sell the same computer

01:20:14 ◼   ► for the same price for three years

01:20:16 ◼   ► while the rest of the world moves on.

01:20:18 ◼   ► Which you can get away with in some markets,

01:20:20 ◼   ► but if you're gonna do anything

01:20:21 ◼   ► in sort of the high-end, pro, super powerful, or whatever,

01:20:26 ◼   ► I just wish the Mac Pro,

01:20:27 ◼   ► whether it pays attention to gaming at all,

01:20:28 ◼   ► I just wish the Mac Pro would be the best,

01:20:31 ◼   ► fastest computer in the world at something

01:20:33 ◼   ► for any sustained period of time.

01:20:34 ◼   ► 'Cause I feel like that is entirely possible.

01:20:36 ◼   ► Fine, make it the best computer for running

01:20:37 ◼   ► weird painting 12 megapixel textures in real time onto models things they demoed at WWDC

01:20:44 ◼   ► for Pixar and everything.

01:20:46 ◼   ► Make it the best computer in the world for that, for more than 15 minutes.

01:20:50 ◼   ► It doesn't even have to be games, but I think it should be something.

01:20:54 ◼   ► It's sad that they've been neglected like that, and it's sad that in this case Apple

01:20:58 ◼   ► is completely missing out as far as we can see on the outside on the entirety of VR,

01:21:03 ◼   ► which who knows, I really hope Apple has all sorts of VR projects internally and they decided

01:21:07 ◼   ► that it's not ready or not interesting, or the form it's taking on PCs, they're not interested

01:21:11 ◼   ► or whatever.

01:21:13 ◼   ► But they're not allowing people who buy even their highest-end computers to participate

01:21:19 ◼   ► in it even speculatively.

01:21:21 ◼   ► So it's kind of depressing.

01:21:24 ◼   ► And the final point is, with the whole Palmer, he's slamming the Macs.

01:21:27 ◼   ► I think he's slamming them with reason, but it doesn't mean that you need an amazingly

01:21:32 ◼   ► powerful graphics card to do "VR."

01:21:35 ◼   ► You need it for the Oculus Rift, which is a particular VR product, but as we talked

01:21:39 ◼   ► about earlier, if you have a PlayStation 4, you can get PlayStation VR for a couple hundred

01:21:43 ◼   ► bucks extra, it's not going to be as good as the Rift.

01:21:45 ◼   ► It's not going to be as powerful, but it will run on your PlayStation 4, which is nowhere

01:21:49 ◼   ► near as powerful as the recommended system for the Oculus Rift.

01:21:52 ◼   ► So VR does not equal the Oculus Rift.

01:21:55 ◼   ► They're two different things.

01:21:56 ◼   ► This is a specific product, and VR is a concept, hell, they have ones that you can use on your

01:21:59 ◼   ► cell phone.

01:22:00 ◼   ► Now, obviously the Rift is probably going to be the highest end one or whatever, but

01:22:05 ◼   ► You don't have to entirely miss out on VR because you don't have a fancy high-end gaming

01:22:09 ◼   ► PC.

01:22:10 ◼   ► If you're interested in it, as at least Marco and I both are, we'll try it out on a couple

01:22:16 ◼   ► hundred bucks thing we buy on our PlayStation, and it'll probably be weird, and it's the

01:22:21 ◼   ► very first consumer release of this technology, so inevitably, ten years from now, we'll look

01:22:25 ◼   ► back on this VR and think either it's ridiculous that we even considered VR to be a thing,

01:22:29 ◼   ► or look back at it and look at how incredibly primitive it is compared to what comes after

01:22:33 ◼   ► it.

01:22:34 ◼   ► We'll link to that piece in Polygon of basically saying, "Your Mac is fine for VR, just not

01:22:39 ◼   ► for the Rift."

01:22:40 ◼   ► Which, again, it's high-end versus capability.

01:22:43 ◼   ► Like, I want some Mac somewhere to be the best computer in the world for some demanding

01:22:49 ◼   ► computational function, because I'm into fast computers.

01:22:51 ◼   ► That's why.

01:22:52 ◼   ► Like, I don't feel like I need any way to justify it like that, and I wish there were

01:22:54 ◼   ► more people in Apple that had the same attitude.

01:22:57 ◼   ► Yeah, and it isn't just about gaming or VR.

01:23:00 ◼   ► You know, even if VR doesn't take off,

01:23:03 ◼   ► or even if you can disregard gamers

01:23:06 ◼   ► as a market Apple cares about,

01:23:08 ◼   ► lots of Apple software,

01:23:10 ◼   ► or software that Apple customers would have run,

01:23:12 ◼   ► can make use of the extra resources

01:23:15 ◼   ► of a well-equipped Mac Pro.

01:23:17 ◼   ► You know, the Mac Pro is the only computer

01:23:19 ◼   ► in the Mac lineup that can have more than four cores.

01:23:22 ◼   ► And as discussed previously, much to John Chagrin,

01:23:26 ◼   ► I run a utility in my menu bar called iStat Menus.

01:23:29 ◼   ► - Me too.

01:23:30 ◼   ► uses up all those cores.

01:23:31 ◼   ► - It shows me when my cores are in use and by what.

01:23:36 ◼   ► And I've noticed, you know, like over the last few years,

01:23:40 ◼   ► you know, even though making software multi-threaded

01:23:43 ◼   ► is difficult and not everything can effectively

01:23:46 ◼   ► take advantage of multiple cores,

01:23:48 ◼   ► I have noticed in recent years that a lot more

01:23:51 ◼   ► of the things that I do are taking advantage

01:23:53 ◼   ► of multiple cores.

01:23:55 ◼   ► And there's lots of, and even stuff that a lot of people

01:23:58 ◼   ► use like Apple's Photos app for instance or any kind of heavy photo workflow, Lightroom,

01:24:05 ◼   ► Photos app, Aperture, if you do any kind of video stuff of course that will use it too.

01:24:11 ◼   ► Lots of software that a lot of people use can take advantage of any amount of cores

01:24:17 ◼   ► you give it within reason. So you can, right now the iMacs and the 15 inch MacBook Pros

01:24:23 ◼   ► have four cores, I would love to have an eight or 12 core Mac Pro, that would be amazing.

01:24:29 ◼   ► But right now they're just, they're not that competitive because there's no reason to buy

01:24:35 ◼   ► one right now with the prices and the age of them and everything. But like, there's

01:24:40 ◼   ► so much software now, so many common needs that lots of Apple customers do have that

01:24:48 ◼   ► could take advantage of this. You don't have to just be a video editor or a high end gamer

01:24:52 ◼   ► to want a Mac Pro. You know, and I can complain at length about the trade-offs made by the

01:24:59 ◼   ► new tube Mac Pro compared to the old cheese grater. It is overall a good product if it

01:25:04 ◼   ► was updated on a regular basis, but you know, the old cheese grater I think was a better

01:25:08 ◼   ► one honestly in many ways. But I at least want something, some sign that somebody at

01:25:15 ◼   ► Apple both A) cares about the Mac, which is, I know a lot of the executives do care about

01:25:23 ◼   ► the Mac, but sometimes it's hard to see the actions of that on the outside, and B)

01:25:29 ◼   ► that somebody high up at Apple cares about high-end pro use of the Mac. And that is the

01:25:35 ◼   ► part that's been seemingly fading in recent years, and I worry about that. You know, it's

01:25:40 ◼   ► thing to exit the software game, to discontinue Aperture. Final Cut I think they're still

01:25:45 ◼   ► okay on. I don't know much about the video world, but I think they are maintaining that

01:25:48 ◼   ► okay. Logic, they're maintaining okay. Even if Apple starts slacking off on the software

01:25:55 ◼   ► side of addressing the pro market, it worries me greatly when they start ignoring the hardware

01:26:01 ◼   ► side because like the software side, we have good alternatives. If Aperture went away,

01:26:07 ◼   ► we have Lightroom, you know, and we have the new Photos app.

01:26:10 ◼   ► If Final Cut goes away, there's like Avid

01:26:12 ◼   ► and other things people use.

01:26:14 ◼   ► You know, if Logic goes away, there's other audio editors.

01:26:16 ◼   ► But if there's no more high-end Mac hardware,

01:26:21 ◼   ► you have to abandon the entire Mac platform

01:26:24 ◼   ► to have an alternative to that,

01:26:26 ◼   ► which is a really high bar and it's a really big ask

01:26:29 ◼   ► and a lot of people like me don't want to do it.

01:26:31 ◼   ► I don't want to abandon the Mac.

01:26:33 ◼   ► I don't want to build a Hackintosh

01:26:34 ◼   ► or switch to Linux or Windows.

01:26:36 ◼   ► I wanna keep using Mac OS.

01:26:38 ◼   ► And Mac OS was designed incredibly well

01:26:41 ◼   ► and incredibly well-architected to take advantage

01:26:43 ◼   ► of incredibly high-end hardware

01:26:45 ◼   ► that Apple just doesn't really sell anymore.

01:26:47 ◼   ► And that's kinda sad.

01:26:49 ◼   ► - Well, the OpenGL stack is not great,

01:26:52 ◼   ► but aside from that, yeah.

01:26:54 ◼   ► - I think you make a decent point, Marco,

01:26:56 ◼   ► but I also don't think we should be throwing

01:26:58 ◼   ► in the towel quite yet.

01:26:59 ◼   ► I mean, I would agree that they don't update things

01:27:02 ◼   ► like the Mac Pro as frequently as anyone in the world

01:27:05 ◼   ► me would want. I'm perfectly happy with them not updating it but every 10 years so I don't have to

01:27:10 ◼   ► go through another one of those months of this show when that's all we talked about. But, you

01:27:18 ◼   ► know, in all seriousness, I don't think that we should be too disgruntled or sad that we haven't

01:27:26 ◼   ► seen one in admittedly a fair bit of time because presumably this will get fixed and it will get

01:27:31 ◼   ► fixed soon enough. And I don't blame you for being grumbly about the pace with which they're

01:27:37 ◼   ► refreshing the Mac Pro, but it's got to be coming. I mean, it has to be, and presumably

01:27:42 ◼   ► soon.

01:27:43 ◼   ► I hope so.

01:27:44 ◼   ► That sounds like exactly what we were saying when the cheese grater was over, like, "Well,

01:27:48 ◼   ► but they've got updated eventually." And then eventually we enter the second phase, which

01:27:51 ◼   ► is like, "Maybe they're never going to update again. Maybe they're just going to stop selling

01:27:54 ◼   ► Mac Pros." Like, that was the headspace we were in around about the time that the tube

01:27:59 ◼   ► because we were seriously considering, well, you know, Apple really has a consumer focus lately,

01:28:03 ◼   ► and they're all about the iPhone and the iPad, and, you know, do they really need the Mac Pro

01:28:09 ◼   ► in their lineup? Not really. Maybe they feel like they can get away, like maybe they just won't make

01:28:13 ◼   ► any more Mac Pros, and then they came up with the tube. And like I said, you can argue about whether

01:28:17 ◼   ► the tube is the correct vision for high performance computing, but you can't say they skimped,

01:28:21 ◼   ► you can't say they just gave you a watered down iMac in a tube shape. Like that thing was

01:28:25 ◼   ► a Mac Pro through and through with their vision of you know a whole bunch of ports on the back of the thing and

01:28:30 ◼   ► Circular and two huge video card not one huge GPU

01:28:33 ◼   ► But two huge GPUs and one of them you know and and their technology for using them for compute as also using to drive the graphics

01:28:40 ◼   ► And the enclosure and like it's not the same vision as the cheese grater

01:28:43 ◼   ► But it is a high-performance vision and it was exciting to see that you know that was I think that was actually the Schiller can

01:28:49 ◼   ► Innovate my ass thing right like yep

01:28:51 ◼   ► Can't innovate anymore my ass

01:28:53 ◼   ► (audience laughing)

01:28:57 ◼   ► That was legit.

01:28:58 ◼   ► You know, you could be crowing about that.

01:28:59 ◼   ► And again, like you could just disagree

01:29:01 ◼   ► about the vision of the product,

01:29:02 ◼   ► but you can't say that they were skimping

01:29:04 ◼   ► and were afraid and were just kind of like

01:29:07 ◼   ► dipping their toe into high performance computers.

01:29:09 ◼   ► They wanted to make the future of high performance computers

01:29:13 ◼   ► but it's just, it was just been so painful

01:29:15 ◼   ► to see that thing land and then just nothing for so long,

01:29:19 ◼   ► especially since the one that landed, you know,

01:29:21 ◼   ► as we discussed much on the show,

01:29:24 ◼   ► what Marco and I wanted was,

01:29:27 ◼   ► what was I calling it back then,

01:29:28 ◼   ► the quad 27 inch display, right?

01:29:31 ◼   ► And we knew this thing couldn't drive it, right?

01:29:33 ◼   ► And it was like, well, but this is the first one,

01:29:35 ◼   ► you know, it can't drive it.

01:29:36 ◼   ► Maybe it could drive it.

01:29:37 ◼   ► No, it can't quite drive it or whatever,

01:29:38 ◼   ► but you know, it's not the one that we want,

01:29:41 ◼   ► but okay, maybe the tech's not ready for it,

01:29:43 ◼   ► but surely the next one will do it.

01:29:44 ◼   ► We didn't think the next one

01:29:44 ◼   ► was gonna come three years later, you know?

01:29:46 ◼   ► We thought, yeah.

01:29:47 ◼   ► And in the meantime, we both got 5K iMacs.

01:29:49 ◼   ► So, my wife did anyway.

01:29:52 ◼   ► So we've got our display, but it's not in the Mac Pro,

01:29:54 ◼   ► and the current Mac Pro still can't drive it,

01:29:56 ◼   ► and we assume the next one will be able to drive it,

01:29:58 ◼   ► but we don't know when that one's coming, and--

01:30:00 ◼   ► - Even that's a question mark, honestly.

01:30:02 ◼   ► Like whether the next Mac Pro will be able

01:30:04 ◼   ► to drive a 5K display is honestly still a question mark.

01:30:08 ◼   ► But to me, like I've complained in the past

01:30:10 ◼   ► about the drive-by software updates,

01:30:12 ◼   ► that like lower priority things seem to get

01:30:15 ◼   ► like these drive-by updates, where like,

01:30:16 ◼   ► they'll get attention for like an hour,

01:30:18 ◼   ► you'll have one engineer working on something

01:30:19 ◼   ► for like a week and then never allowed to touch it again,

01:30:21 ◼   ► and that's how you get something like the

01:30:23 ◼   ► El Capitan Disk Utility.

01:30:24 ◼   ► It seems like the Mac Pro, from what we know so far,

01:30:28 ◼   ► and maybe Apple's about to prove us all wrong on this,

01:30:30 ◼   ► I hope they are, but from what we know so far,

01:30:32 ◼   ► it seems like the Mac Pro update to the tube

01:30:35 ◼   ► was a drive-by hardware update,

01:30:37 ◼   ► where they were ignoring it seemingly for a long time,

01:30:41 ◼   ► and then they had this great update that,

01:30:44 ◼   ► Again, I can complain a lot about what they did to it

01:30:48 ◼   ► because I think they made it a lot more narrow

01:30:53 ◼   ► and a lot more expensive than what it was before.

01:30:57 ◼   ► They really narrowed the appeal

01:30:59 ◼   ► and they eliminated a lot of totally valid use cases.

01:31:01 ◼   ► But they did innovate, as Phil Schiller's ass said,

01:31:05 ◼   ► they did innovate. (laughing)

01:31:07 ◼   ► But they innovated and then they just kinda

01:31:10 ◼   ► dropped the ball after that.

01:31:12 ◼   ► There are new CPUs for that.

01:31:14 ◼   ► they could have used in the meantime

01:31:15 ◼   ► and they skipped a generation.

01:31:17 ◼   ► - They could have upgraded the GPUs.

01:31:18 ◼   ► - Yeah, they could have upgraded just the GPUs.

01:31:20 ◼   ► If they're so focused on this machine,

01:31:23 ◼   ► having these two workstation GPUs

01:31:26 ◼   ► that somebody like me who would wanna buy the machine

01:31:29 ◼   ► doesn't need it all, I would gladly buy it

01:31:30 ◼   ► with one consumer GPU because I'm buying it

01:31:34 ◼   ► for the CPU power and the RAM's healing and everything else,

01:31:37 ◼   ► not the GPU reasons.

01:31:39 ◼   ► If they're going to refocus the entire machine

01:31:43 ◼   ► on this high-end dual GPU use,

01:31:45 ◼   ► then follow through on that.

01:31:47 ◼   ► And they didn't follow through.

01:31:48 ◼   ► The GPUs are sitting there stale forever.

01:31:50 ◼   ► I've heard from people who try to use OpenCL for things

01:31:54 ◼   ► that it's really kind of been,

01:31:56 ◼   ► had the ball dropped on it as well,

01:31:58 ◼   ► that it just seems like they came in

01:32:01 ◼   ► and they did this huge redesign and refocus

01:32:04 ◼   ► of the product that we weren't really asking for

01:32:06 ◼   ► and then didn't follow through even on that.

01:32:08 ◼   ► So that's why I'm so sad for this product

01:32:11 ◼   ► because I love the Mac Pro.

01:32:13 ◼   ► I love, especially what it used to be,

01:32:15 ◼   ► I love having this extremely flexible expandable tower

01:32:19 ◼   ► that had two CPU sockets, tons of RAM slots,

01:32:22 ◼   ► you could put a whole bunch of drives in it.

01:32:24 ◼   ► And granted, you can modernize it in other ways.

01:32:26 ◼   ► Like, you know, these days,

01:32:27 ◼   ► you don't maybe need as many drives anymore

01:32:29 ◼   ► 'cause now we're in the era of SSDs

01:32:31 ◼   ► and the drives have gotten so big,

01:32:33 ◼   ► you don't need as many anymore.

01:32:34 ◼   ► So like, you can see them removing some of these things.

01:32:38 ◼   ► I do still greatly miss dual socket configurations

01:32:42 ◼   ► and I do greatly miss configurations

01:32:44 ◼   ► that don't have two graphics cards

01:32:46 ◼   ► because I don't need them.

01:32:47 ◼   ► But I hope they write this at some point soon.

01:32:52 ◼   ► I don't know if they will or not,

01:32:55 ◼   ► but I really hope they do.

01:32:56 ◼   ► And I'm still maintaining some optimism

01:32:58 ◼   ► 'cause if they don't, the iMac 5K is a great product.

01:33:02 ◼   ► I'm using mine, I'm almost always very happy with it.

01:33:06 ◼   ► I would like a lot more CPU power,

01:33:08 ◼   ► so if they make a compelling Mac Pro

01:33:11 ◼   ► that I can get eight cores in reasonably,

01:33:13 ◼   ► I would love that.

01:33:14 ◼   ► But if the Mac Pro withers away in irrelevance

01:33:18 ◼   ► the way it has been over the last few years,

01:33:21 ◼   ► and if it's never good again,

01:33:24 ◼   ► I still have the iMac, and that's fine,

01:33:27 ◼   ► but boy, I wish I could have the Mac Pro back.

01:33:30 ◼   ► - Just because of CPU speed?

01:33:32 ◼   ► - Mostly because of CPU speed.

01:33:34 ◼   ► - And fan quietness.

01:33:35 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, exactly.

01:33:36 ◼   ► Things like being totally silent at any load level

01:33:39 ◼   ► is just kind of more graceful and nice.

01:33:42 ◼   ► Having the Xeon class components and the ECC RAM

01:33:45 ◼   ► and everything makes, I feel like it makes things

01:33:47 ◼   ► slightly more reliable, having more internal ports,

01:33:50 ◼   ► stuff like that, you know, like more USB ports built in

01:33:53 ◼   ► rather than having to use flaky hubs, stuff like that.

01:33:56 ◼   ► Like I love all those things about the Mac Pro.

01:33:58 ◼   ► In many ways I miss it.

01:34:00 ◼   ► And again, if we never get it back the way me or John

01:34:03 ◼   ► on it, we'll deal, we'll be okay, but it does seem like a waste that there's all

01:34:08 ◼   ► these amazing CPUs out there at the high-end world. Like in the next generation, the Broad

01:34:13 ◼   ► Bell Xeons, there's a 5 GHz part with 4 cores. If you can have a dual socket configuration,

01:34:20 ◼   ► have two of those, 8 cores at 5 GHz, that would be incredible. That would be the best

01:34:27 ◼   ► single-threaded and multi-threaded Mac. But they're not going to offer that because the

01:34:31 ◼   ► the current Mac Pro design is only one socket.

01:34:33 ◼   ► And the CPUs they use can do two,

01:34:36 ◼   ► they just don't offer that machine.

01:34:38 ◼   ► And it's just like, there's so much more they could offer.

01:34:41 ◼   ► There are so many great processors in the Xeon line

01:34:43 ◼   ► they could offer, and there are so many use cases

01:34:46 ◼   ► the old Mac Pro solved that the new one doesn't.

01:34:49 ◼   ► And all those things make me sad.

01:34:51 ◼   ► But I'm still hoping for a Mac Pro update soon.

01:34:54 ◼   ► We'll see what happens, I guess.

01:34:57 ◼   ► - Have faith, it'll happen.

01:34:59 ◼   ► - Hope so.

01:35:00 ◼   ► Alright, thanks to our three sponsors this week, Casper, Warby Parker, and Audible.com,

01:35:06 ◼   ► and we will see you next week.

01:35:07 ◼   ► Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin, 'cause it was accidental, oh it

01:35:18 ◼   ► was accidental.

01:35:19 ◼   ► John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, 'cause it was accidental,

01:35:27 ◼   ► It was accidental.

01:35:28 ◼   ► It was accidental.

01:35:29 ◼   ► Accidental.

01:35:30 ◼   ► And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.

01:35:31 ◼   ► And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.

01:35:45 ◼   ► So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, N-T-Marco-Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-Z-I-N-E-S.

01:35:56 ◼   ► ♪ Accidental ♪

01:35:58 ◼   ► ♪ Accidental ♪

01:36:00 ◼   ► ♪ They didn't mean to ♪

01:36:02 ◼   ► ♪ Accidental ♪

01:36:04 ◼   ► ♪ Accidental ♪

01:36:05 ◼   ► ♪ Tech podcast ♪

01:36:07 ◼   ► ♪ So long ♪

01:36:09 ◼   ► - So you added a family member.

01:36:12 ◼   ► - I did, yes, it has wheels though.

01:36:15 ◼   ► You subtracted one too.

01:36:18 ◼   ► - Yes, may the M5 rest in peace.

01:36:23 ◼   ► I'll miss that car.

01:36:25 ◼   ► You know, I'll tell you what,

01:36:26 ◼   ► when I was preparing to drop it off

01:36:29 ◼   ► and when I did drop it off,

01:36:30 ◼   ► I was almost in tears.

01:36:33 ◼   ► Like, I really, this is the only time

01:36:37 ◼   ► that I've ever given up a car that I owned

01:36:39 ◼   ► where I was really sad to see it go.

01:36:41 ◼   ► Every other time that I've either stopped having a car

01:36:46 ◼   ► or upgraded to a different car,

01:36:49 ◼   ► every other time I've been kind of ambivalent

01:36:52 ◼   ► toward my old one for some reason, you know,

01:36:55 ◼   ► either before I was leasing,

01:36:56 ◼   ► either it'd be like,

01:36:57 ◼   ► 'cause it was costing me a lot of money,

01:36:58 ◼   ► 'cause it was breaking down constantly,

01:36:59 ◼   ► and that's why I was getting a different car,

01:37:01 ◼   ► or like with my previous 3 Series lease,

01:37:06 ◼   ► I knew I was upgrading to the M5,

01:37:08 ◼   ► so going from a 3 Series to an M5 was a huge jump,

01:37:11 ◼   ► and I was like, "Oh man, I'm so excited.

01:37:12 ◼   ► "This 3 Series, yeah, it'll be fine.

01:37:14 ◼   ► "I'm going to the M5.

01:37:15 ◼   ► "Forget the 3 Series."

01:37:17 ◼   ► This time, the M5, it's so good,

01:37:21 ◼   ► And it's so different from where I was going

01:37:25 ◼   ► that I was almost regretting it.

01:37:27 ◼   ► I was almost second guessing my move.

01:37:29 ◼   ► Like when I was turning, I'm like, man,

01:37:30 ◼   ► am I gonna really regret this?

01:37:32 ◼   ► 'Cause where I'm going is different.

01:37:35 ◼   ► It's not all better.

01:37:36 ◼   ► It's better in some ways, worse than others.

01:37:39 ◼   ► And that M5 just is such a good car

01:37:42 ◼   ► that I was really very sad to leave it.

01:37:47 ◼   ► - Yeah, I'm sad that you left it behind me.

01:37:49 ◼   ► I don't blame you.

01:37:49 ◼   ► It's not like you did anything wrong,

01:37:51 ◼   ► but I'm sad about it because I feel like I bonded

01:37:54 ◼   ► with that car.

01:37:55 ◼   ► I mean, it's the only car I've ever driven.

01:37:57 ◼   ► It's the only car I've ever driven in two countries.

01:37:59 ◼   ► It's the only car that's ever shuffled me around Germany.

01:38:02 ◼   ► It's the only car I've ever been in

01:38:04 ◼   ► or driven the Nurburgring on in, whatever.

01:38:07 ◼   ► We as a group of four spent a lot of good times in that car

01:38:12 ◼   ► and you guys as a group of two and three

01:38:14 ◼   ► spent a lot of good times in that car.

01:38:16 ◼   ► It's sad, but that's okay

01:38:18 ◼   ► because you have bought yourself a Tesla.

01:38:20 ◼   ► - Well, I leased myself a Tesla.

01:38:23 ◼   ► They still own it.

01:38:25 ◼   ► - Well, that was the problem.

01:38:26 ◼   ► You leased the M5 too.

01:38:27 ◼   ► It was never really yours.

01:38:28 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly.

01:38:29 ◼   ► - I know you felt like it was yours,

01:38:30 ◼   ► but you were just leasing it.

01:38:31 ◼   ► So you were never willing to commit to the M5.

01:38:34 ◼   ► You're always like, for three years,

01:38:36 ◼   ► I'll give you a trial period M5.

01:38:37 ◼   ► Maybe I'll like you, maybe I won't,

01:38:39 ◼   ► but you're probably going back.

01:38:41 ◼   ► - Believe me, you don't want to own an M car

01:38:44 ◼   ► older than three years.

01:38:45 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:38:46 ◼   ► - I mean, it depends.

01:38:47 ◼   ► The thing I'll miss most about the M cars is what we just talked about about the Mac Pro.

01:38:52 ◼   ► I mean, maybe it's partly where I live, but Tesla's like the Toyota Camry of where I live.

01:38:56 ◼   ► They're all over the place, but I rarely see an M5.

01:39:00 ◼   ► I think there's two in the whole extended neighborhood area, but there's a Tesla on every other driveway.

01:39:06 ◼   ► So the Tesla just seems less special because it's less rare.

01:39:10 ◼   ► It's also less of a Mac Pro in terms of, "We make lots of good cars, and they're plenty fast,

01:39:17 ◼   ► But can we take one of our cars and make it you know as good and as fast as we possibly can and I don't

01:39:23 ◼   ► Even care what kind of car does he even there's a big giant four-door sedan we can make that go fast, too

01:39:27 ◼   ► Let's let's work our magic like it's the you know it's the

01:39:31 ◼   ► Almost pointlessly exotic high-end right and the Tesla especially since you didn't get the pointless exotic high-end Tesla

01:39:39 ◼   ► But even if you had it's still more

01:39:41 ◼   ► It's got other goals because it is a whole new platform a whole new technology

01:39:46 ◼   ► And it is necessarily more prosaic. We are not at the at the stage yet where there can even be an electric car

01:39:52 ◼   ► That is a regular street car that is as focused on

01:39:55 ◼   ► ridiculously excessive performance applied to another car as

01:39:59 ◼   ► The most ridiculous AMG Mercedes or the m5 or any sort of supercar type of thing so I feel like you are

01:40:07 ◼   ► taking a

01:40:09 ◼   ► Step up in practicality and a step down in

01:40:12 ◼   ► ridiculous

01:40:14 ◼   ► automotive excess

01:40:15 ◼   ► - Hey!

01:40:16 ◼   ► - Okay, well first of all, I think I disagree