ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► So how's it going so far?

00:00:02 ◼   ► - Going well.

00:00:03 ◼   ► The prediction that you two had for night one at home,

00:00:09 ◼   ► would you like to guess if it went as you expected

00:00:13 ◼   ► or not at all as you expected?

00:00:15 ◼   ► - I already heard an analog, right?

00:00:16 ◼   ► You'd already told the world.

00:00:18 ◼   ► - Did I already tell the world?

00:00:19 ◼   ► Did that already come? - Yeah.

00:00:20 ◼   ► - That didn't come out yet, did it?

00:00:21 ◼   ► - That's out? - No.

00:00:22 ◼   ► - I listened live.

00:00:23 ◼   ► - Oh, okay. - Oh, that doesn't count.

00:00:24 ◼   ► You're cheating.

00:00:25 ◼   ► - Yeah, you absolutely cheated.

00:00:26 ◼   ► Okay, so Marco, did it go as you expected,

00:00:28 ◼   ► which is to say it went not swimmingly,

00:00:31 ◼   ► or did Declan surprise everyone

00:00:34 ◼   ► and it went pretty much flawlessly?

00:00:37 ◼   ► - First night home from the hospital,

00:00:39 ◼   ► I'm saying it did not go flawlessly.

00:00:42 ◼   ► - Oh, it was a disaster.

00:00:43 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's-- - It was a disaster.

00:00:45 ◼   ► - It's simply unrealistic to expect otherwise.

00:00:46 ◼   ► I mean, it's not really his fault.

00:00:48 ◼   ► You know, zero year olds are pretty rough.

00:00:50 ◼   ► - If it goes perfectly, you'd be worried

00:00:52 ◼   ► that there's something wrong with the baby

00:00:53 ◼   ► and you'd be bringing them back to the hospital.

00:00:55 ◼   ► - That's true. - Get them inspected.

00:00:56 ◼   ► - 'Cause you'd be like, "This not failing to thrive

00:00:58 ◼   ► He's just too sleepy all the time, yeah.

00:01:00 ◼   ► - Now, it's actually funny you say that

00:01:01 ◼   ► 'cause we did mention the pediatrician Monday

00:01:04 ◼   ► that he was really sleepy and we were letting him go

00:01:07 ◼   ► something like four-ish hours overnight

00:01:09 ◼   ► 'cause he really didn't wake up to feed

00:01:11 ◼   ► and the pediatrician was like, "Uh-uh, no, not yet.

00:01:14 ◼   ► "That ain't your thing yet.

00:01:15 ◼   ► "You gotta wake that baby up."

00:01:16 ◼   ► And so that's what we've been doing.

00:01:17 ◼   ► And it's been, I mean, all in all,

00:01:20 ◼   ► it's actually, he's been really good.

00:01:22 ◼   ► The first night was a disaster

00:01:23 ◼   ► because we hadn't yet come to the conclusion

00:01:26 ◼   ► that divide and conquer is the answer.

00:01:27 ◼   ► And so, you know, here it is, I'm trying to be supportive

00:01:29 ◼   ► of Erin who is the only one who can actually feed Declan.

00:01:33 ◼   ► And I'm waking up and just kind of staring at her

00:01:35 ◼   ► while she's feeding him, not,

00:01:37 ◼   ► and there's no point in me being up,

00:01:38 ◼   ► but I'd wanna be supportive.

00:01:40 ◼   ► And it took us until basically the end of that night

00:01:42 ◼   ► where I think I said to her, "Listen, he's pissed off.

00:01:46 ◼   ► You haven't slept in forever.

00:01:47 ◼   ► You're the one who actually needs sleep right now.

00:01:49 ◼   ► You go to bed, I'll just entertain him for a couple hours."

00:01:53 ◼   ► And that's when kind of we had the epiphany

00:01:55 ◼   ► that divide and conquer is really the way to do it.

00:01:58 ◼   ► - Yeah, there is a purpose to you staying up

00:02:01 ◼   ► at the same time, and that's like to offer moral support

00:02:05 ◼   ► if your wife is the type of person who would resent you

00:02:09 ◼   ► if you were sleeping peacefully in the other room

00:02:10 ◼   ► while she was sleeping.

00:02:12 ◼   ► But eventually, yes, you will both get over that

00:02:15 ◼   ► because you will realize if either one of us

00:02:17 ◼   ► ever wants to sleep, we have to get over the notion

00:02:19 ◼   ► that all suffering must be shared.

00:02:20 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

00:02:22 ◼   ► - Which one of us said Adam Sandberg?

00:02:24 ◼   ► Was that me or John?

00:02:25 ◼   ► I did and then you confirmed it. We were trying to remember the name of some movie.

00:02:29 ◼   ► I'm like, "Oh, that's the thing with Adam Sandberg." And you said, "Yep."

00:02:32 ◼   ► But it's not—

00:02:33 ◼   ► I don't know—yeah, I don't know why I let that slide, because I knew it was Andy Sandberg, but apparently we had a brain fire.

00:02:37 ◼   ► Yeah, so did I. I knew it was Andy Sandberg, too. It just, you know, came out wrong.

00:02:39 ◼   ► Anyway, in case you were wondering, the man's name is Andy Sandberg.

00:02:43 ◼   ► So everybody was wrong except me.

00:02:45 ◼   ► You didn't say anything.

00:02:46 ◼   ► Right.

00:02:47 ◼   ► It didn't make you right, but you were—you are correct in saying you are not wrong.

00:02:50 ◼   ► You should have—you should have corrected me in real time, so you wouldn't have had this follow-up.

00:02:54 ◼   ► you could have done a real-time follow-up.

00:02:55 ◼   ► - You assume I know who that is

00:02:56 ◼   ► or what you were talking about.

00:02:57 ◼   ► - You know who Andy Samberg is, come on.

00:03:00 ◼   ► - You overestimate me.

00:03:01 ◼   ► No, you don't. (laughing)

00:03:02 ◼   ► - If you saw him, you'd be like, "Oh yeah, it's that guy."

00:03:04 ◼   ► Maybe you don't know the name.

00:03:05 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's maybe also unlikely.

00:03:08 ◼   ► - I think you would.

00:03:09 ◼   ► I mean, if you've ever seen a recent "Saturday Night Live,"

00:03:13 ◼   ► not now recent, but within the last five, 10 years recent,

00:03:17 ◼   ► if you've seen "Brooklyn Nine-Nine,"

00:03:19 ◼   ► and he's been in a bunch of movies too,

00:03:20 ◼   ► although they're escaping me off the top of my head.

00:03:22 ◼   ► So far I'm at zero for two.

00:03:24 ◼   ► - How about Lazy Sunday, which was a--

00:03:28 ◼   ► - Never heard of it.

00:03:29 ◼   ► - The original reference that you made was on a boat.

00:03:31 ◼   ► He's seen the on a boat thing.

00:03:32 ◼   ► I'm on a boat.

00:03:33 ◼   ► - The first time I saw that was when I recorded it

00:03:35 ◼   ► to insert into the show last week.

00:03:37 ◼   ► - Wow.

00:03:38 ◼   ► - I heard about it,

00:03:39 ◼   ► so I knew roughly what you were talking about,

00:03:42 ◼   ► but I didn't know anything else about,

00:03:45 ◼   ► like I had never heard the whole thing.

00:03:47 ◼   ► Same thing with (beep) in a box,

00:03:48 ◼   ► like when that came out, same people, right?

00:03:50 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:03:51 ◼   ► - Like two weeks earlier or something.

00:03:52 ◼   ► Yeah, that was like the entire world was obsessed with that and I didn't hear it for like six months

00:03:56 ◼   ► It was really funny. Uh, so Adam I kind of did it again. Andy Samberg is part of a trio called lonely Island

00:04:03 ◼   ► They're the ones who did the I'm on I'm on a boat song and they came out with an album

00:04:08 ◼   ► I don't know two three months ago

00:04:10 ◼   ► Maybe a little more than that and I read a review of it

00:04:13 ◼   ► Which is weird because I never read album reviews

00:04:15 ◼   ► but I read a review of it on like Rolling Stone or Pitchfork or something hipster and

00:04:20 ◼   ► The point that they made about the album was you know, it's supposed to be satirical rap

00:04:24 ◼   ► And so it's sort of kind of weird alish. Although weird al is deliberately goofy

00:04:30 ◼   ► Whereas they're more satirical in my personal estimation

00:04:33 ◼   ► well

00:04:34 ◼   ► anyway

00:04:34 ◼   ► They said that the problem with the Lonely Island album is that the music is

00:04:39 ◼   ► Good enough and the writing is good enough that it's not really that satirical after all and that and so they totally kind of

00:04:46 ◼   ► escape or missed the point of the entire album which was to be satirical and silly so that they accidentally made an album that was

00:04:52 ◼   ► Just good enough to not be taken as a joke, which was their intention exactly, right?

00:04:56 ◼   ► Yeah, no, it's weird. Should I be a little bit embarrassed that first of all, I had never heard t-pain before

00:05:02 ◼   ► but while watching the on the boat video I was

00:05:04 ◼   ► Like the only music I was actually enjoying was when t-pain was saying because it was actually singing and not just yelling

00:05:09 ◼   ► I'm so not a rap guy clearly. I mean, well the comedy behind that though is that he was autotuned to death

00:05:16 ◼   ► Like that was T-Pain's thing was, or at least as far as I knew, was he was like the first person to

00:05:21 ◼   ► really embrace auto-tune. Well, that's not fair. The first person that everyone realized really embraced auto-tune.

00:05:28 ◼   ► I think you could argue that many artists such as maybe Britney Spears had embraced auto-tune a long time before him.

00:05:33 ◼   ► But, but yeah, that's kind of his shtick and, and yeah.

00:05:36 ◼   ► Either way, he was definitely the most musical part of that,

00:05:39 ◼   ► which I was trying to get some kind of musical enjoyment out of it because I'm like, well,

00:05:44 ◼   ► If I'm gonna listen to something called music, I might as well attempt to extract some some enjoyment out of it

00:05:50 ◼   ► And that was the only source of any any promise in that whole thing. You didn't like the lyrics at all. I

00:05:56 ◼   ► Think one verse was kind of funny maybe but like the whole I was sitting there like this is still going

00:06:01 ◼   ► Like I couldn't believe how long that like they I figured that it was like a 45 second SNL skit

00:06:07 ◼   ► Not that they had made an entire, you know, three or four minute or whatever song out of it

00:06:11 ◼   ► No, it's it's it's the real deal. I think it should have stayed as a 30 seconds good

00:06:15 ◼   ► You should there's there's a couple of other

00:06:18 ◼   ► Couple other videos that they've done that are pretty good. They're a semicolon video

00:06:23 ◼   ► I thought was pretty awesome and it's all about using semicolons properly which which I thought was enjoyable

00:06:28 ◼   ► Sounds incredible you've seen that one right Marco. No, that's a good one. Put it in the show notes force Marco to watch it

00:06:35 ◼   ► I have seen nothing you have you have to understand any any question that begins with you know, surely you've seen blank

00:06:41 ◼   ► No, you do all day. I start sending you more links

00:06:44 ◼   ► Seriously, you assume going to actually watch them make TIFF press your little hand on the mouse button

00:06:49 ◼   ► Yeah, but I'll have to like manually switch into Chrome to make flash work to play it yeah not worth it

00:06:56 ◼   ► Well, I pause my music open my chrome ghetto. It's just not worth it. Well, what do you mean pause your music?

00:07:02 ◼   ► You're listening to fish. That's not music pause your noise

00:07:05 ◼   ► Open your open your flash ghetto

00:07:09 ◼   ► Etc. Anyway, what else is going on? What is what did walrus CP tell us John? That's Colin Peck run

00:07:16 ◼   ► Road tweeted to say that

00:07:19 ◼   ► Last show I was talking about they were using bundles for upgrades a concept. We discussed long ago and and last week's show

00:07:25 ◼   ► We posted I hope the link is in the show

00:07:28 ◼   ► It's of a screenshot of this actually happening in the store

00:07:31 ◼   ► And I mentioned the scenario where it could actually be more expensive

00:07:35 ◼   ► to get a second app as part of an upgrade bundle than it would be if you just bought the second app on its own and

00:07:40 ◼   ► Colin wrote in to say that apparently

00:07:42 ◼   ► You the store now forbids you from purchasing a bundle if it would be cheaper for you to buy

00:07:47 ◼   ► the the other apps like individually so I

00:07:51 ◼   ► Guess that's one workaround to this problem with bundle pricing

00:07:56 ◼   ► But it still seems pretty weird to me and complicated like people

00:07:59 ◼   ► I don't know what the message looks like because I didn't test it

00:08:01 ◼   ► I didn't have a scenario where I owned half of a bundle and I could try it out, but

00:08:04 ◼   ► but what does it say to you to let you understand

00:08:07 ◼   ► why you can't buy this bundle

00:08:08 ◼   ► and what you should do instead?

00:08:10 ◼   ► I don't know, it's very confusing.

00:08:11 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's very weird.

00:08:13 ◼   ► Additionally, somebody had asked us for you to explain

00:08:17 ◼   ► how you're handling trim support

00:08:19 ◼   ► with your new found baby SSD.

00:08:23 ◼   ► Can you recap what trim is

00:08:24 ◼   ► and then talk about what you're doing about it?

00:08:26 ◼   ► - Yeah, this was a common question

00:08:28 ◼   ► when I mentioned that I've got an SSD

00:08:30 ◼   ► because people who have, and it's a third party SSD

00:08:33 ◼   ► and I'm sticking it into a Mac,

00:08:34 ◼   ► that never had, didn't ship with an SSD.

00:08:36 ◼   ► And everyone wants to know about TRIM support.

00:08:39 ◼   ► What am I doing with TRIM support?

00:08:40 ◼   ► And that's a bunch of wrinkles related to Yosemite.

00:08:43 ◼   ► So TRIM, I don't even know what it stands for,

00:08:45 ◼   ► but TRIM is a command that gets sent to an SSD

00:08:49 ◼   ► that tells it that a bunch of blocks of data on it

00:08:53 ◼   ► are no longer being used.

00:08:55 ◼   ► So the SSD is free to sort of reclaim them for future use.

00:08:57 ◼   ► And this sounds weird.

00:08:58 ◼   ► It was like, why would you need this on an SSD?

00:09:00 ◼   ► Why don't you need this on a disk?

00:09:02 ◼   ► And it has to do with the way disks are addressed

00:09:05 ◼   ► by computers.

00:09:06 ◼   ► We're gonna use the Unix parlance.

00:09:07 ◼   ► It's like a block addressable device where it's just,

00:09:10 ◼   ► it's this device hanging out there and you,

00:09:12 ◼   ► instead of addressing it in bytes,

00:09:14 ◼   ► you can address it in blocks like, you know,

00:09:15 ◼   ► whatever, 4K or whatever.

00:09:17 ◼   ► Actually, that's, I don't wanna get into blocks.

00:09:19 ◼   ► Forget it, forget about the block thing.

00:09:21 ◼   ► - Just kidding.

00:09:22 ◼   ► - Just concentrate, yeah, concentrate on that as a,

00:09:24 ◼   ► well, you know, because there's file system blocks

00:09:26 ◼   ► and then there's the block address.

00:09:28 ◼   ► Anyway, yeah.

00:09:29 ◼   ► Yeah, now we're gonna get into file system.

00:09:30 ◼   ► So when you're addressing a disk,

00:09:33 ◼   ► you have to write a file system to it.

00:09:35 ◼   ► And the file system is the structures that you put on it

00:09:37 ◼   ► to keep track of where everything is.

00:09:39 ◼   ► So you have a little index over here on the disk

00:09:41 ◼   ► and you write it like a little tree or something.

00:09:43 ◼   ► And this is where I'm gonna look up where the files are.

00:09:46 ◼   ► And then there's a whole bunch of different techniques,

00:09:48 ◼   ► depending on the file system to find

00:09:49 ◼   ► where are the pieces of this file.

00:09:50 ◼   ► Are they big, long, continuous string?

00:09:52 ◼   ► Probably not.

00:09:53 ◼   ► Probably there's a bunch of pieces

00:09:54 ◼   ► and then a pointer to another bunch of pieces

00:09:56 ◼   ► and a pointer to another bunch of pieces.

00:09:57 ◼   ► And you've got blocks that direct you to other blocks

00:09:59 ◼   ► You've got a doubly indirect blocks and triply indirect

00:10:02 ◼   ► Well, I mean, this is all the realm of file system

00:10:04 ◼   ► The file systems job is to put a bunch of things on disks that are structured so we can find the data

00:10:08 ◼   ► And when you delete a file on most file systems

00:10:11 ◼   ► All you do is go to the little place where you would look up where all the stuff for the file is and you just erase

00:10:16 ◼   ► That entry it's like erasing an entry and like the index of a book, right?

00:10:21 ◼   ► It doesn't touch the actual data that belonged to the file the data that belonged to the file is still sitting there

00:10:26 ◼   ► All you did was erase like the bookkeeping information that the structures in the file system that would tell you where to find that stuff

00:10:31 ◼   ► And that's why you can undelete files if people remember undelete utilities back from the DOS days and everything like that

00:10:37 ◼   ► Because you know when you delete something it doesn't take as long as writing you don't you don't overwrite all the disks once you do

00:10:44 ◼   ► Some kind of secure delete that's fine for spinning disks

00:10:47 ◼   ► But for SSDs these are a little bit weird everything about memory chips is weird

00:10:50 ◼   ► And I don't know if this is true of all SSDs, which is a point we'll get to in a little bit but

00:10:55 ◼   ► uh for in the early days of SSDs and probably still is the case for most of them, the way the

00:11:01 ◼   ► memory is addressed in the little chips that make up the SSDs, you can't just grab one little sort

00:11:07 ◼   ► of block size piece and read and write it. When you want to write something you have to write it

00:11:13 ◼   ► in a large chunk even if you're just interested in one little piece of it. And furthermore you

00:11:19 ◼   ► can't write to a bunch of memory that already has stuff in it. So what you have to do is read

00:11:25 ◼   ► Read that entire gigantic chunk into some other memory, temporarily.

00:11:29 ◼   ► Erase that entire gigantic chunk, modify the little chunk you wanted to change in the copy

00:11:35 ◼   ► that you made in memory before you erased it, and then write the whole thing back.

00:11:38 ◼   ► Which seems incredibly inefficient, but that's the way SSDs work for a variety of reasons.

00:11:43 ◼   ► And that means that even if the space isn't used, like even if you erased the little entry

00:11:48 ◼   ► and said "Oh, that file's gone, I deleted it, I deleted that 5 gig movie," and it just

00:11:51 ◼   ► erases the little tiny lookup table of where those 5 gigs were, that 5 gig is data-driven,

00:11:55 ◼   ► is still in the chip so the next time you want to write something if it lands in one of those places

00:12:00 ◼   ► where that 5 gig file was it can't just go "oh I'm going to write that data there" it has to erase it

00:12:04 ◼   ► first you can't unlike a spinning disk where you can just write over any spot like writing is just

00:12:08 ◼   ► an operation where you say "I don't care where I'm writing" just start writing because it just you

00:12:11 ◼   ► know flips a little magnetic poles in the disk and you're all set you don't have to erase it before

00:12:15 ◼   ► you write but on SSD not only do you have to erase it before you write but you have to erase this big

00:12:19 ◼   ► gigantic block, modify the little bit in the copy that you got and then put the copy back on.

00:12:24 ◼   ► So the trim command is an optimization the operating system when it deletes a little file

00:12:29 ◼   ► It says okay. I'm going to delete this little entry from the file system

00:12:33 ◼   ► But also i'm going to send this command to the disk that says by the way

00:12:36 ◼   ► I deleted the entry for this for this file in the file system

00:12:38 ◼   ► So you should go and find all the blocks that belong to that thing or it'll tell you where those blocks are and say the

00:12:43 ◼   ► Mark, these is being freed. So it gives the ssd a chance

00:12:45 ◼   ► To erase those blocks so that when something needs to be written later

00:12:49 ◼   ► It doesn't find itself stumbling onto where you know

00:12:52 ◼   ► because here's the thing about the SSD, SSD has no idea about the file system

00:12:55 ◼   ► it is just a big addressable chunk of storage. The file system is all something that happens in the realm of the operating system

00:13:00 ◼   ► So the SSD has no idea what's a file, what's not a deleted file, it just obeys commands

00:13:05 ◼   ► It's just a stupid, you know, box for the most part

00:13:07 ◼   ► So that's why trim is useful because it lets the operating system tell the SSD

00:13:12 ◼   ► "I deleted a file" so all the blocks that belong to that file that were here, here, here, and here

00:13:17 ◼   ► They're not used anymore

00:13:19 ◼   ► So when you get a chance maybe in some idle time erase those because later when you need to write something

00:13:23 ◼   ► You can have some freshly erased spots

00:13:24 ◼   ► And this is by the way, one of the reasons that SSDs especially the early ones

00:13:27 ◼   ► would slow down when they got full because that would mean that the number of places that you can write like the places that are

00:13:32 ◼   ► Erased in an erase state would go down because you know, the SSD is almost full

00:13:37 ◼   ► So anytime I needed to write anything would have to read the entire chunk back

00:13:40 ◼   ► Erase the entire thing modify a little bit write it back. There wasn't any fresh sort of greenfield to put stuff in

00:13:46 ◼   ► So here's the here's the thing with trim Apple

00:13:48 ◼   ► I believe supports trim on most of its SSDs that it builds in most all I don't know what the situation is now

00:13:53 ◼   ► I think maybe all of them

00:13:55 ◼   ► But it doesn't support trim for third-party SSDs in general

00:14:00 ◼   ► So I bought a third-party SSD if you go to the system information application in Yosemite

00:14:06 ◼   ► You can you know select your little ATA bus or SATA bus or whatever your thing is on and it'll say trim support

00:14:13 ◼   ► Yes, or no and mine says no so people are asking hey

00:14:16 ◼   ► Did you use this thing called trim enablers all much as little system extension type things that will

00:14:20 ◼   ► Force the operating system to enable the trim command even if your SSD is not one supplied by Apple

00:14:25 ◼   ► That's what people have been doing in past versions of the US

00:14:29 ◼   ► But Yosemite will not load a kernel extension that has not been signed and to sign a kernel extension

00:14:35 ◼   ► You basically need to build it yourself

00:14:37 ◼   ► You need to sort of have the source code or something and compile it

00:14:39 ◼   ► But Apple does not release the source code to its what is it called?

00:14:42 ◼   ► AHCI advanced host something interface we should get that where is that in like that advanced host controller interface

00:14:49 ◼   ► Apple doesn't release the source code to those to that driver

00:14:53 ◼   ► For OS X so third parties can't make their own

00:14:57 ◼   ► Drivers and sign them and load them all they can do is these hacks they were doing before but Yosemite will basically refuse to load

00:15:04 ◼   ► kernel extension that isn't signed so the only way to get trim enabler to work in Yosemite is to turn off the thing that

00:15:10 ◼   ► Says I will only load signed kernel extensions

00:15:13 ◼   ► Which it's not a great thing to do because it is a good security feature in that

00:15:16 ◼   ► Like a virus or malware can't throw a kernel extension into your system like even if it gets like temporary root access because it tricks

00:15:23 ◼   ► You into entering your local password and it writes a kernel extension somewhere

00:15:26 ◼   ► And then you know you're rooted or whatever the system will not load a kernel extension

00:15:30 ◼   ► that isn't signed, and if they signed it,

00:15:32 ◼   ► presumably it's signed with an Apple developer ID,

00:15:34 ◼   ► Apple has some contact information,

00:15:35 ◼   ► like they could find the responsible parties.

00:15:37 ◼   ► Like if someone goes through the effort to make malware

00:15:40 ◼   ► with a signed kernel extension,

00:15:41 ◼   ► at least Apple would have some recourse

00:15:42 ◼   ► to find out who these people are,

00:15:43 ◼   ► because presumably that whatever

00:15:45 ◼   ► their authentication method is,

00:15:46 ◼   ► determining if you're a real person

00:15:47 ◼   ► and giving you a developer ID,

00:15:49 ◼   ► and they can also revoke your certificate

00:15:50 ◼   ► and validate that and do all sorts of other things

00:15:52 ◼   ► that we do with it.

00:15:53 ◼   ► So this is a very long-winded and possibly technically,

00:15:57 ◼   ► slightly technically inaccurate way

00:15:59 ◼   ► of getting to the question,

00:16:00 ◼   ► which was, am I doing this thing?

00:16:02 ◼   ► Am I using trim enabler?

00:16:04 ◼   ► And am I disabling kernel extension signing in Yosemite

00:16:09 ◼   ► or checking for kernel extension signatures in Yosemite?

00:16:11 ◼   ► And the answer is no.

00:16:13 ◼   ► And the reason I'm not doing it,

00:16:15 ◼   ► one is that I don't really like the idea

00:16:18 ◼   ► of bypassing the security feature in Yosemite,

00:16:20 ◼   ► even though it wasn't there in previous ones,

00:16:22 ◼   ► it just like, why would I do that unless I have a reason?

00:16:25 ◼   ► And that leads to the second reason,

00:16:26 ◼   ► which is until and unless I see performance problems

00:16:30 ◼   ► with my SSD and those performance problems are solved

00:16:33 ◼   ► by enabling trim, I'm not going to even consider doing this.

00:16:36 ◼   ► Like in other words, I'm gonna wait until there's a problem.

00:16:40 ◼   ► And if suddenly I feel like,

00:16:41 ◼   ► oh, this SSD used to be really fast,

00:16:42 ◼   ► but now it's getting slow.

00:16:43 ◼   ► And that leads to the final nuance in that SSDs

00:16:47 ◼   ► have on them like basically a little computer

00:16:49 ◼   ► that manages the storage,

00:16:50 ◼   ► it manages like the write leveling

00:16:51 ◼   ► and all sorts of other things

00:16:52 ◼   ► because you can only read and write flash

00:16:54 ◼   ► a certain number of times before it wears out.

00:16:55 ◼   ► And SSDs are over provisioned depending on

00:16:58 ◼   ► If they're like an enterprise SSD or consumer SSD,

00:17:00 ◼   ► they give you more storage than you think you have

00:17:02 ◼   ► because where leveling will use up sections.

00:17:04 ◼   ► And anyway, there's a complicated little computer in there

00:17:07 ◼   ► managing the chips.

00:17:08 ◼   ► And the complexity of what's going on inside an SSD

00:17:11 ◼   ► is increasingly divorced from the view of that SSD

00:17:15 ◼   ► from the operating system as just a simple box of bits

00:17:17 ◼   ► that you can address.

00:17:18 ◼   ► And so the assumptions about trim,

00:17:21 ◼   ► that you have to tell the thing to trim

00:17:23 ◼   ► because otherwise it's gonna be inefficient or whatever.

00:17:26 ◼   ► It's not that the SSD knows where the deleted files are,

00:17:28 ◼   ► but it's more like what's going on inside that SSD.

00:17:32 ◼   ► It's like the operating system can't know better

00:17:34 ◼   ► than the SSD when and how it needs to do its work.

00:17:37 ◼   ► Because in the grand scheme of things,

00:17:40 ◼   ► you're gonna have to erase the blocks

00:17:42 ◼   ► that belong to that five gigabyte pod

00:17:43 ◼   ► before you write to them anyway.

00:17:44 ◼   ► And maybe it's better to do it soon rather than later,

00:17:47 ◼   ► like send a trim command and tell the SSD to get rid of it

00:17:51 ◼   ► during like an idle period or whatever,

00:17:52 ◼   ► but the operating system can just send that as a suggestion.

00:17:55 ◼   ► for all it knows, the SSD reads the trim command

00:17:58 ◼   ► and files it away in a queue somewhere

00:17:59 ◼   ► and doesn't do it for a long time.

00:18:01 ◼   ► Or maybe it doesn't do it ever

00:18:02 ◼   ► because actually it turns out there was another IO operation

00:18:04 ◼   ► that addresses the same thing

00:18:05 ◼   ► and then validates the trim and whatever.

00:18:06 ◼   ► So I don't know the intricate details

00:18:09 ◼   ► that are what's going on inside SSDs these days,

00:18:11 ◼   ► but I do know that the storage management in SSDs

00:18:13 ◼   ► has been changing a lot.

00:18:14 ◼   ► So I'm not entirely sure whether trim is as necessary

00:18:19 ◼   ► as it used to be.

00:18:20 ◼   ► I think it probably still is useful

00:18:22 ◼   ► and most benchmarks bear out that if you don't enable trim,

00:18:24 ◼   ► you have serious problems,

00:18:25 ◼   ► especially when storage gets tight.

00:18:27 ◼   ► But anyway, what I'm doing is leaving Yosemite's

00:18:30 ◼   ► kernel extension signature checking the way it is.

00:18:34 ◼   ► And if I find that my SSD is getting slow,

00:18:36 ◼   ► I will follow the instructions,

00:18:38 ◼   ► which we will put in the show notes,

00:18:39 ◼   ► the very scary process of disabling

00:18:42 ◼   ► kernel extension signature checking and using trim enabler.

00:18:46 ◼   ► - So I've had on my work MacBook Pro,

00:18:50 ◼   ► I've had a third party SSD since I received the machine

00:18:53 ◼   ► in June of 2012, is that right?

00:18:58 ◼   ► Yes, June of 2012.

00:19:01 ◼   ► I did not knowingly do anything to enable

00:19:05 ◼   ► or disable trim support and the thing still screams.

00:19:09 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's way faster than a spinning disk, right?

00:19:11 ◼   ► Marco, have you ever enabled trim

00:19:13 ◼   ► on any of your various third-party SSDs?

00:19:16 ◼   ► - No, I always have just forgotten to do that.

00:19:18 ◼   ► I mean, one thing I always,

00:19:20 ◼   ► I mean this is now almost ancient history,

00:19:23 ◼   ► but when SSDs were first getting to consume our stuff

00:19:26 ◼   ► and they were getting popular,

00:19:28 ◼   ► the SandForce controllers came out and became a big splash

00:19:31 ◼   ► because, this was actually I think before Trim existed

00:19:36 ◼   ► as a command that you could send.

00:19:37 ◼   ► Basically, certain SSDs would do things kind of the dumb way

00:19:41 ◼   ► and would have to, they would fill up

00:19:44 ◼   ► and then they would have that,

00:19:45 ◼   ► have whatever it's called, like the write slowdown,

00:19:47 ◼   ► whatever that's, write degradation I think it's called.

00:19:50 ◼   ► - Write amplification where you just wanted

00:19:52 ◼   ► to write one little thing, but it turns out

00:19:54 ◼   ► what you have to do is erase a huge swath,

00:19:55 ◼   ► read a huge swath, modify, and then write a huge swath.

00:19:58 ◼   ► - Right, so it's like after the SSD was filled up once,

00:20:00 ◼   ► as you described earlier, like after it was ever filled up,

00:20:02 ◼   ► then all writes over time would then be slower

00:20:05 ◼   ► than that initial batch.

00:20:06 ◼   ► Anyway, so SandForce was a controller company.

00:20:10 ◼   ► They made those little computers on the SSDs

00:20:12 ◼   ► to figure out where to put things and how to write things.

00:20:14 ◼   ► And they figured out various techniques and optimizations

00:20:18 ◼   ► to basically avoid that problem and minimize that problem

00:20:21 ◼   ► without trim support,

00:20:22 ◼   ► just by like how they would spread the rights around

00:20:24 ◼   ► and how they would buffer them and things like that.

00:20:26 ◼   ► Various tricks, I don't know all the details.

00:20:29 ◼   ► So I would always just buy Sandforce controller SSDs

00:20:33 ◼   ► because I knew, first trim didn't even exist

00:20:36 ◼   ► and then when it was added,

00:20:39 ◼   ► Max didn't support it at all first.

00:20:41 ◼   ► And then when Apple did finally add support for it

00:20:44 ◼   ► in the OS, it would only work on these whitelists to disks,

00:20:46 ◼   ► which I didn't have any of them.

00:20:49 ◼   ► So for all of my third-party SSDs,

00:20:51 ◼   ► I just, I bought SSDs that didn't really need trim support

00:20:55 ◼   ► and just never bothered trying to hack my way

00:20:57 ◼   ► into enabling it.

00:20:58 ◼   ► - All right, why don't you tell us about something

00:21:00 ◼   ► that's pretty cool, though?

00:21:01 ◼   ► - Gladly.

00:21:02 ◼   ► We are sponsored this week, can you guess?

00:21:04 ◼   ► - Is it Squarespace?

00:21:06 ◼   ► - It is Squarespace.

00:21:07 ◼   ► Squarespace is the all-in-one platform

00:21:09 ◼   ► that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website, portfolio, and online

00:21:14 ◼   ► store. For a free trial and 10% off, visit squarespace.com and enter offer code ATP at

00:21:20 ◼   ► checkout. A better web starts with your website.

00:21:24 ◼   ► Squarespace is simple and easy. They have a beautiful design on both their site and

00:21:29 ◼   ► on the sites you create. They have all these gorgeous templates. And it's this really advanced

00:21:34 ◼   ► HTML interface where you can just drag stuff around. Everything's drag and drop. You can

00:21:39 ◼   ► adjust settings and colors and themes and positions and sizes and everything.

00:21:44 ◼   ► You can adjust everything to your heart's content and it's all live previews right

00:21:48 ◼   ► on your site.

00:21:49 ◼   ► It's all WYSIWYG.

00:21:50 ◼   ► It's really amazing.

00:21:51 ◼   ► What they've managed to cram into a web browser is stunning.

00:21:56 ◼   ► We use Squarespace honestly.

00:21:57 ◼   ► I mean we use it for our site for ATP.fm and you can see for yourself that is an almost

00:22:03 ◼   ► completely unmodified Squarespace template.

00:22:05 ◼   ► We wanted to hack a couple of little things,

00:22:08 ◼   ► and so they actually let you inject JavaScript

00:22:11 ◼   ► and HTML and CSS if you want to.

00:22:13 ◼   ► You can inject it directly into your template.

00:22:15 ◼   ► And so you can customize quite a bit through that

00:22:18 ◼   ► if you're a nerd like us,

00:22:19 ◼   ► which you probably are if you're listening to this.

00:22:21 ◼   ► So I really recommend them, they're great.

00:22:24 ◼   ► There are so many classifications of geeks like us

00:22:27 ◼   ► where we could make a website for everything that we do,

00:22:30 ◼   ► but it's often not the best use of our time,

00:22:33 ◼   ► and Squarespace gives you so much functionality,

00:22:36 ◼   ► way more than any of our little home brew systems

00:22:38 ◼   ► would ever have.

00:22:39 ◼   ► And it's just so easy.

00:22:40 ◼   ► You can just put up a website in no time at all

00:22:43 ◼   ► and then go back to focusing on your actual project

00:22:45 ◼   ► that you're making the website for,

00:22:46 ◼   ► avoiding that whole distraction.

00:22:48 ◼   ► So I very much recommend Squarespace.

00:22:51 ◼   ► They have 24/7 support if you need it

00:22:53 ◼   ► through live chat and email.

00:22:55 ◼   ► They have responsive designs, of course.

00:22:56 ◼   ► They have commerce.

00:22:57 ◼   ► You can put stores in your website.

00:22:58 ◼   ► They have so many features.

00:22:59 ◼   ► I can't even get to them all.

00:23:01 ◼   ► Plan started just $8 a month.

00:23:03 ◼   ► This includes a free domain if you sign up for a year.

00:23:06 ◼   ► You can start a free trial today

00:23:07 ◼   ► with no credit card required.

00:23:09 ◼   ► This is a real free trial.

00:23:10 ◼   ► You don't have to put in a credit card.

00:23:11 ◼   ► You just type in a name and go.

00:23:13 ◼   ► Start building your website.

00:23:14 ◼   ► See if you like it.

00:23:15 ◼   ► There's no commitment.

00:23:16 ◼   ► And then it's actually really great.

00:23:18 ◼   ► Even, they didn't tell me to say this,

00:23:20 ◼   ► but even after the trial ends,

00:23:21 ◼   ► they send you an email and they say,

00:23:23 ◼   ► "You need more time?

00:23:24 ◼   ► Just click here and we'll extend the trial for you."

00:23:26 ◼   ► I don't know how many times you can do that,

00:23:28 ◼   ► but they're very generous.

00:23:29 ◼   ► It's very, very easy to try out.

00:23:30 ◼   ► 'Cause they know, if you try it,

00:23:32 ◼   ► you're probably gonna like it.

00:23:34 ◼   ► Anyway, when you do decide to finally sign up

00:23:36 ◼   ► after putting it off for too long, hopefully not,

00:23:38 ◼   ► when you do decide to sign up for Squarespace,

00:23:41 ◼   ► make sure to go to squarespace.com

00:23:42 ◼   ► and use offer code ATP at checkout.

00:23:45 ◼   ► You'll get 10% off your first purchase

00:23:47 ◼   ► and you'll show your support for our show.

00:23:49 ◼   ► Thank you very much to Squarespace.

00:23:51 ◼   ► A better web starts with your website.

00:23:53 ◼   ► - Mr. Syracuse, could you tell us about the source list

00:23:58 ◼   ► and opacity in Yosemite, please?

00:24:00 ◼   ► This is old feedback from when we were complaining

00:24:02 ◼   ► about Yosemite's transparency stuff

00:24:05 ◼   ► and the sidebars and all that.

00:24:06 ◼   ► This is from Robert Cooper and he was sending a note,

00:24:09 ◼   ► maybe we even talked about this before, I don't know,

00:24:11 ◼   ► that you can choose for the source list to be opaque,

00:24:14 ◼   ► you know, programmatically if you're writing an application.

00:24:16 ◼   ► Did we talk about this already?

00:24:17 ◼   ► Sounds familiar.

00:24:18 ◼   ► - I don't think we did.

00:24:20 ◼   ► - Anyway, we're talking about it again.

00:24:21 ◼   ► I think he's a developer for Skype

00:24:23 ◼   ► because he says in one of his tweets,

00:24:24 ◼   ► "We've chosen to do that in Skype 7."

00:24:27 ◼   ► I haven't upgraded Skype 7, so I haven't seen it yet,

00:24:29 ◼   ► But what I think they're saying is that they chose to make the sidebar opaque in Skype 7

00:24:33 ◼   ► This I mean that you can programmatically do it. Yeah, of course. I mean you programmatically do anything right here

00:24:38 ◼   ► You know, you don't even have to use Apple sourceless

00:24:40 ◼   ► You could fake it if you wanted to but it's nice to see the easy option

00:24:43 ◼   ► But the important thing about the transparency in Yosemite is what the defaults are for

00:24:48 ◼   ► Applications that were compiled and built before Yosemite even shipped they can end up with like, you know, like Outlook 2011

00:24:55 ◼   ► they can ship with

00:24:58 ◼   ► They'll have translucent sidebars. They had no idea that we're ever gonna have a translucent sidebar that here

00:25:02 ◼   ► They are running on Yosemite with a transits a sidebar that they never planned on having

00:25:05 ◼   ► And those defaults show how dedicated Apple is

00:25:08 ◼   ► It's not like hey, we're gonna have this new feature

00:25:09 ◼   ► And if you want to use it just you know

00:25:11 ◼   ► Flip this little bit in this API when you make this call and you'll get a translucent sidebar

00:25:15 ◼   ► No, they opted everybody into it

00:25:17 ◼   ► Which is a bold move and you know

00:25:21 ◼   ► I don't particularly like it because I think the apps that never meant to have transparency the sidebars will look all weird

00:25:26 ◼   ► And even the ones that want to have it sometimes don't look great, but we've talked about that before

00:25:31 ◼   ► I've talked about it at length on this podcast and the talk show so reference those episodes you won't hear more whining about transparency in

00:25:38 ◼   ► Yosemite

00:25:39 ◼   ► Excellent. Do we want to finally clear out this GameCube controller follow-up that's been in our show notes for an eternity

00:25:47 ◼   ► Sure. This is from someone named rich

00:25:50 ◼   ► Long ago I was discussing the GameCube controller and the adapter that lets you use a GameCube controller with the Wii U

00:25:57 ◼   ► The adapter is so you can play Smash Brothers

00:25:59 ◼   ► And I was excited that the adapter would also let you play any other game that used the the pro controller for the Wii U

00:26:05 ◼   ► But that was not the case and I was sad about it

00:26:07 ◼   ► and I was mentioning this because I thought it was

00:26:09 ◼   ► pretty damning evidence against the pro controller the Wii U pro controller is the

00:26:14 ◼   ► Traditional looking controller with two analog sticks and buttons and triggers, you know, the typical looking controller

00:26:20 ◼   ► That Nintendo made for the Wii U specifically and yet when Smash Brothers came out

00:26:25 ◼   ► They offered this adapter for the GameCube controller

00:26:28 ◼   ► And I'm saying like if they if if the Wii U Pro controller was really any good

00:26:32 ◼   ► Nintendo would not have felt the need to make an adapter and rich was writing in to

00:26:36 ◼   ► Clarify

00:26:38 ◼   ► or to clarify that the GameCube controller was there just because Smash Brothers

00:26:43 ◼   ► Players are addicted to it and because it's wired instead of wireless if you're not using the wave bird

00:26:48 ◼   ► And I know this but it's worth it's worth pointing out why I still think

00:26:52 ◼   ► It's evidence that the Wii U pro controller has not is not fulfilling its job

00:26:57 ◼   ► Like if Nintendo is going to make a new traditional looking controller

00:27:00 ◼   ► They should make something that is satisfactory

00:27:03 ◼   ► to all but the hardest of hardcore Smash Brothers players and this

00:27:08 ◼   ► You know Apple is not going to make an adapter just for people who compete in Smash Brothers tournaments

00:27:15 ◼   ► It's just not enough of those people in the entire world

00:27:16 ◼   ► This adapter is for the wide range of people who play Smash Brothers and it's basically Nintendo admitting that even if you're not a professional

00:27:23 ◼   ► Smash Brothers player we understand that the pro Wii U pro controller is not is not it is not better than the GameCube controller

00:27:31 ◼   ► So here you go

00:27:31 ◼   ► We're actually gonna make a peripheral and

00:27:33 ◼   ► Advertise it and sell it to regular people and reissue the GameCube controller with a Smash Brothers logo on it again

00:27:38 ◼   ► This is not a product that is only for competitive Smash Brother players

00:27:42 ◼   ► They're gonna sell way more than them than just the people who compete in tournaments obviously for the people who compete in tournaments

00:27:48 ◼   ► Yes, this practice for them. They wanted wired. They need reaction times. They want to use the controller

00:27:52 ◼   ► They've used for a long time so and so forth

00:27:54 ◼   ► But I still feel like if Nintendo had made the Wii U Pro controller so that it was unequivocally

00:28:00 ◼   ► Unassailably better than the GameCube controller and was perceived as such by customers

00:28:06 ◼   ► It would not have felt the need to make a mass-market product like this

00:28:09 ◼   ► so you can use your GameCube controller Smash Brothers again, and I agree with them and I agree with popular opinion that the pro controller is

00:28:17 ◼   ► very well made

00:28:19 ◼   ► but I think the layout and the shape are not as good as the

00:28:22 ◼   ► GameCube controller except of course the d-pad which is X gurgle and everybody hates

00:28:27 ◼   ► But that's why the GameCube controller is not perfect is that the only reason?

00:28:31 ◼   ► That and the triggers are not great and of course the Z button that every hits

00:28:36 ◼   ► But you know the Z if they could that's part of the triggers that the Z button the triggers are passable

00:28:40 ◼   ► You can get by with them the triggers have something to recommend them, but they're not that great

00:28:45 ◼   ► But the main controls that you use in games thumb stick buttons

00:28:49 ◼   ► Like that's what you have your hand on your left thumb is on the thumb stick

00:28:52 ◼   ► Your right thumb is hitting a bunch of buttons

00:28:54 ◼   ► The GameCube controller is the current peak of controller design from Nintendo is traditional controller design as far as I'm concerned

00:29:02 ◼   ► Our second sponsor this week is Harry's. Go to harrys.com H-A-R-R-Y-S dot com and use the promo code ATP to save $5.

00:29:11 ◼   ► For many of us shaving is a pain. It sucks. It's uncomfortable.

00:29:14 ◼   ► It causes nicks, cuts, scrapes, and razor burn and razor blades today are outrageously expensive.

00:29:19 ◼   ► Harry's was started by two guys who wanted a better product without paying an arm and a leg.

00:29:24 ◼   ► Harry's makes their own blades from their own factory. It's an old blade factory in Germany that they actually bought

00:29:29 ◼   ► that's been around forever.

00:29:32 ◼   ► These are high quality, high performing German blades crafted by shaving experts, giving

00:29:36 ◼   ► you a better shave that respects your face and your wallet.

00:29:40 ◼   ► Harry's offers factory direct pricing at a fraction of the big brands.

00:29:43 ◼   ► Harry's blades are about half the price.

00:29:46 ◼   ► Plus you don't have to wait around for some weird drugstore employee to come unlock the

00:29:50 ◼   ► little shoplifting case so you can get them out.

00:29:53 ◼   ► It's so much easier, they can ship them directly to your door like any other modern purchase

00:29:57 ◼   ► in this decade.

00:29:58 ◼   ► The starter set at Harry's is an amazing deal.

00:30:01 ◼   ► For $15 you get a razor, moisturizing shave cream, and three razor blades.

00:30:06 ◼   ► When you need more blades they're just $2 each or less.

00:30:10 ◼   ► An 8 pack is $15, a 16 pack is $25.

00:30:13 ◼   ► These are amazing prices.

00:30:15 ◼   ► If you look like, you know, check out what you're paying for your Gillette Fusion or

00:30:18 ◼   ► whatever.

00:30:19 ◼   ► You know, I would say, so they sent me a kit, I used it, it was great.

00:30:23 ◼   ► I would say the quality of them is right up there with the Gillette Fusion blades, which

00:30:29 ◼   ► which were my normal usage blades.

00:30:32 ◼   ► Harry's is about half the price.

00:30:34 ◼   ► You get 12 blades for 20 bucks.

00:30:36 ◼   ► I mean, it's amazing, fantastic pricing.

00:30:38 ◼   ► And that lets you change the blade more often.

00:30:40 ◼   ► You can afford to change it more often,

00:30:41 ◼   ► which gives you even better shape

00:30:42 ◼   ► 'cause fresh blades are always better than old blades.

00:30:44 ◼   ► And the rest of the equipment I think is really nice.

00:30:47 ◼   ► The handle is really this nice metal, classy, heavy thing.

00:30:51 ◼   ► Really enjoyed the Harry stuff.

00:30:53 ◼   ► Apparently there's a month of Movember.

00:30:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, so I did it the last couple of years

00:30:58 ◼   ► and I don't know if I'm gonna be able to do it this year

00:31:01 ◼   ► because my life is so out of control at the moment, but--

00:31:03 ◼   ► - Well, all you have to do is not shave.

00:31:05 ◼   ► - Well, yeah.

00:31:07 ◼   ► So anyway, the idea is you shave everything

00:31:11 ◼   ► except your mustache for the entire month of November.

00:31:15 ◼   ► It's supposed to raise awareness and hopefully money

00:31:18 ◼   ► for men's health issues, just anything men's health related.

00:31:21 ◼   ► And if you're going to trim everything but your stash,

00:31:24 ◼   ► I would do it with a Harry's razor.

00:31:26 ◼   ► In fact, Harry's is the official razor partner of Movember.

00:31:30 ◼   ► Whether or not you grow your moh,

00:31:33 ◼   ► with Harry's you can get an amazing shave and do good

00:31:35 ◼   ► by supporting Movember's quest

00:31:37 ◼   ► to fund important health research.

00:31:39 ◼   ► With Harry's you get the convenience

00:31:40 ◼   ► and ease of ordering online, you get high quality blades,

00:31:42 ◼   ► you get a great handle in shaving cream,

00:31:44 ◼   ► and excellent customer service

00:31:45 ◼   ► at half the price of the big brands.

00:31:48 ◼   ► Get started with the starter set,

00:31:49 ◼   ► you get a handle, three blades, and cream

00:31:51 ◼   ► for just $15 shipped to your door.

00:31:53 ◼   ► Go to harrys.com, H-A-R-Y-S.com, and use promo code ATP to save $5 off your first purchase.

00:32:01 ◼   ► Thanks a lot to Harry's for sponsoring us and Movember.

00:32:04 ◼   ► All right.

00:32:07 ◼   ► So we are actually into main topics only 30, 35 minutes into the show.

00:32:12 ◼   ► This might be a record for us for the last couple months.

00:32:14 ◼   ► I'm very proud of us.

00:32:15 ◼   ► Well, let's talk about this Microsoft band of which I have not had time to read anything

00:32:19 ◼   ► about outside of listening to underscore David Smith's podcast about it or a podcast episode

00:32:25 ◼   ► about it, which we will put in the show notes. So one of you guys tell me what this is about.

00:32:32 ◼   ► Not everyone at once.

00:32:33 ◼   ► You haven't seen it, Marco?

00:32:34 ◼   ► Uh, no, I haven't actually. I only saw people talking about it, but I don't know anything

00:32:39 ◼   ► about it except that it looks like what appears to be a pretty decent wearable for an ecosystem

00:32:43 ◼   ► that nobody's going to use.

00:32:45 ◼   ► I've seen it and played with it for a couple of minutes. And so I can't really talk about

00:32:48 ◼   ► usage of it, although Underscore had a good post about his usage of it, like why he bought

00:32:53 ◼   ► one and what he thinks of it, and we'll link that up in the show notes if you want to get

00:32:55 ◼   ► sort of a hands-on experience of using it.

00:32:57 ◼   ► I've just sort of played with it and I was looking at it from a hardware perspective,

00:33:00 ◼   ► and there's this great sort of exploded view diagram at Microsoft.com/Microsoft-band if

00:33:09 ◼   ► you scroll to the very bottom of the page, this little animation that shows how it's

00:33:12 ◼   ► constructed.

00:33:13 ◼   ► And it's an interesting take on how to get all the hardware they want into a band-type

00:33:20 ◼   ► shape.

00:33:21 ◼   ► So this thing is aiming for...

00:33:23 ◼   ► It's kind of weird.

00:33:24 ◼   ► It's not going to be like a full-fledged little computer on your wrist to the same degree

00:33:29 ◼   ► as an Apple Watch is, in that they don't expect you to do much on the screen, much interacting

00:33:36 ◼   ► in 2D.

00:33:37 ◼   ► Like, the screen is very long and thin, so it's kind of a one-dimensional device where

00:33:40 ◼   ► you're swiping white right and left but there's not a lot of up and down there's

00:33:44 ◼   ► not even a lot of like hitting the top button or the bottom button there's a

00:33:47 ◼   ► lot of like little sidebars and swiping to the sides and showing a little half

00:33:51 ◼   ► of half of a little letter poking off the other side of the screen so you know

00:33:55 ◼   ► there's more over there so you know which direction you know typical Windows

00:33:57 ◼   ► Phone style metro UI type thing so in that respect it's not like the Apple

00:34:03 ◼   ► Watch where you've got this 2d thing and you could have different sets of buttons

00:34:07 ◼   ► and a dial and all those other things like that.

00:34:09 ◼   ► But unlike the Apple Watch, for example,

00:34:11 ◼   ► this does have a GPS built in,

00:34:13 ◼   ► so you can go for a jog with it

00:34:15 ◼   ► without having your phone with you to do the GPS part

00:34:17 ◼   ► of like tracking what your route was and everything.

00:34:20 ◼   ► - That is so smart.

00:34:21 ◼   ► - Yeah, especially since like, you know,

00:34:22 ◼   ► who's gonna have a Windows phone to join it up with.

00:34:25 ◼   ► It does have all the sensors

00:34:26 ◼   ► or a lot of the same sensors as the band,

00:34:28 ◼   ► but it does an interesting thing

00:34:30 ◼   ► where instead of the sensors for like your pulse

00:34:32 ◼   ► and everything like that,

00:34:33 ◼   ► being underneath the sort of chunky top part of the watch,

00:34:36 ◼   ► They've split that stuff up so the sensors are sort of like

00:34:39 ◼   ► inside your wrist, like where you'd take your pulse

00:34:41 ◼   ► and the screen is on the outside of your wrist

00:34:43 ◼   ► where you'd look at your watch,

00:34:44 ◼   ► which is an interesting way to keep it thin on top

00:34:47 ◼   ► because they don't have to have the sensors there.

00:34:49 ◼   ► But that means that the bottom of the watch,

00:34:50 ◼   ► sort of the part where it clasps together has a lump.

00:34:53 ◼   ► There's a lump at the bottom of the strap basically

00:34:55 ◼   ► and that's where the sensors are.

00:34:56 ◼   ► And then to find a place to smuggle,

00:34:58 ◼   ► I think, I can't tell from the exploded diagram,

00:35:00 ◼   ► but I assume this is where they're smuggling the batteries.

00:35:02 ◼   ► They put the batteries in the sides of the band.

00:35:04 ◼   ► They have little stiff regions on the sides of the band, left and right side of the band,

00:35:08 ◼   ► that are curved plastic that doesn't bend, and inside there I'm assuming are little battery

00:35:12 ◼   ► packs or something, because otherwise I don't know where they'd be putting the battery.

00:35:16 ◼   ► What that means is the shape of this watch, the shape of this band, is kind of like a

00:35:21 ◼   ► square.

00:35:22 ◼   ► There's a stiff rigid screen on the top, there's a stiff rigid sensor bundle on the bottom,

00:35:26 ◼   ► and on the left and right side there's these sort of curved but still rigid regions, and

00:35:31 ◼   ► between that there's a little bit of flexing and the clasp that adjusts has like a little

00:35:35 ◼   ► groove, about an inch long groove that you can sort of slide it along in the groove and

00:35:39 ◼   ► whatever point in the groove you want it to you just release the thing and these two little

00:35:42 ◼   ► claws grab underneath the groove.

00:35:44 ◼   ► So there is some size adjustability and I think they offer the actual band in three

00:35:47 ◼   ► sizes because this is not like the Apple Watch where it's like a little computer and then

00:35:52 ◼   ► a flexible band that you can adjust the length of, right?

00:35:56 ◼   ► This computer is essentially all around your wrist.

00:35:58 ◼   ► This is a very, much more like what I was thinking,

00:36:00 ◼   ► although not quite as elegant,

00:36:02 ◼   ► but what I was thinking of in terms of you could take

00:36:04 ◼   ► advantage of the band to let you have more room

00:36:06 ◼   ► to put hardware.

00:36:08 ◼   ► But Apple has made a very different choice here.

00:36:10 ◼   ► And I think the biggest dividing line between these products

00:36:12 ◼   ► is not like, oh, Microsoft band has GPS

00:36:14 ◼   ► or the Microsoft band has to work with all sorts

00:36:17 ◼   ► of other phones because it can't just work

00:36:18 ◼   ► with Windows phone because that's like Marco said,

00:36:20 ◼   ► an ecosystem that's no one is into.

00:36:22 ◼   ► I think the big difference is that Microsoft band

00:36:24 ◼   ► is so clearly not going for anything having to do

00:36:26 ◼   ► with fashion.

00:36:27 ◼   ► And Apple Watch is so clearly focused on fashion,

00:36:31 ◼   ► at least half of it's, you know,

00:36:32 ◼   ► the effort of that product is,

00:36:34 ◼   ► of course we're not gonna make it like

00:36:36 ◼   ► all one color and computer we're looking in to have lumps.

00:36:38 ◼   ► We're gonna make something that looks like jewelry,

00:36:40 ◼   ► and we're not gonna put anything in the band

00:36:42 ◼   ► because that's supposed to be decorative.

00:36:43 ◼   ► And in fact, the device should be decorative,

00:36:45 ◼   ► the band should be decorative,

00:36:46 ◼   ► the entire thing has to be decorative

00:36:47 ◼   ► because it's a fashion accessory.

00:36:49 ◼   ► Microsoft band is absolutely not a fashion accessory

00:36:52 ◼   ► in any way.

00:36:53 ◼   ► And in that way,

00:36:54 ◼   ► maybe perhaps it plays more to Microsoft strengths.

00:36:56 ◼   ► I guess they've never been known to be a particularly fashionable brand, but

00:37:00 ◼   ► Anyway, I think it's a really interesting

00:37:03 ◼   ► design and a really interesting choice for Microsoft

00:37:06 ◼   ► And I'm excited by the fact that this wasn't like a demo it like

00:37:09 ◼   ► You know CES or something that never actually ships or doesn't ship for a year

00:37:13 ◼   ► It's a product that no one knew about that they announced and said here it is you can go buy it

00:37:16 ◼   ► So I give this this product and the effort from Microsoft a big thumbs up in the same way that it kind of did for

00:37:22 ◼   ► like the whole Windows Metro thing,

00:37:24 ◼   ► so they're kind of, they're doing their own thing,

00:37:26 ◼   ► they're not trying to copy Apple, they're not being Samsung,

00:37:30 ◼   ► and their own thing is actually pretty cool,

00:37:32 ◼   ► and I hope this has more success in the market, let's say,

00:37:35 ◼   ► than the various devices like Windows Phone

00:37:38 ◼   ► and the OS with the Metro interface.

00:37:40 ◼   ► - If I was into fitness, which is pretty far from the truth,

00:37:45 ◼   ► then I would buy this, I think, no question.

00:37:48 ◼   ► Because I'm not into fitness,

00:37:50 ◼   ► I don't have much of a use for it,

00:37:53 ◼   ► but I kinda like some of the trade-offs they've made.

00:37:56 ◼   ► - Why do you say just because you're not into fitness

00:37:59 ◼   ► that this seems useless to you?

00:38:00 ◼   ► - Well, I'm not gonna use Windows Phone.

00:38:02 ◼   ► - I mean, it does have integration with iOS,

00:38:04 ◼   ► as I was saying, it doesn't like,

00:38:05 ◼   ► Reid underscores the thing about it,

00:38:06 ◼   ► like it's kind of a,

00:38:08 ◼   ► I'm assuming he's not using it with a Windows Phone,

00:38:09 ◼   ► but he's saying like he,

00:38:10 ◼   ► it's like a one-way communication,

00:38:12 ◼   ► it's not two-way because it's not

00:38:14 ◼   ► completely platform integrated,

00:38:16 ◼   ► but he's getting the experience

00:38:17 ◼   ► of being able to be notified on his wrist.

00:38:19 ◼   ► - Oh, it'll show blues with notifications?

00:38:21 ◼   ► - What he compared it to, he divided the fitness bands,

00:38:23 ◼   ► let me just summarize this post here,

00:38:24 ◼   ► it's probably longer than just reading it

00:38:25 ◼   ► all out on the air, but he divided them into like,

00:38:28 ◼   ► the ones that are just always with you

00:38:29 ◼   ► and track information like the Fitbits,

00:38:31 ◼   ► and those necessarily, you know,

00:38:32 ◼   ► they focus on just long battery life,

00:38:35 ◼   ► it's just a sensor attached to you,

00:38:36 ◼   ► but there's not much interaction with it, right?

00:38:38 ◼   ► You're not flaking around a screen.

00:38:39 ◼   ► And then there are the ones that have screens,

00:38:41 ◼   ► but those have been like, I have to be sleepy all the time,

00:38:44 ◼   ► I can't really do anything like the Pebble,

00:38:45 ◼   ► where it's like, wake me up when you wanna use me,

00:38:47 ◼   ► and use me through some limited interface,

00:38:49 ◼   ► because I take a lot of energy to do all this stuff

00:38:51 ◼   ► and then I'll go back to sleep.

00:38:53 ◼   ► So they have an E Ink screen or a very limited screen

00:38:55 ◼   ► or they're not awake a lot of time.

00:38:57 ◼   ► And this is in kind of the same category

00:39:00 ◼   ► as like a combination of the two.

00:39:01 ◼   ► All the fitness sensors are there.

00:39:03 ◼   ► I don't know what the battery life on this thing is

00:39:04 ◼   ► by the way, but all the fitness sensors are there

00:39:06 ◼   ► and it can do the persistence fitness things.

00:39:07 ◼   ► But it's also like this other devices

00:39:09 ◼   ► where you can use it as a little computer.

00:39:10 ◼   ► And I think it does communicate with your iOS device

00:39:12 ◼   ► at least at one direction

00:39:13 ◼   ► to show you notifications and stuff.

00:39:14 ◼   ► And what Underscore said is basically

00:39:16 ◼   ► this convinced him that he will really like the Apple Watch

00:39:18 ◼   ► because the Apple Watch will be two-way communication,

00:39:21 ◼   ► and I guess you won't care that the Apple Watch

00:39:23 ◼   ► doesn't have GPS because that's not, again,

00:39:24 ◼   ► it was not into a fitness type thing.

00:39:27 ◼   ► The Apple Watch will count your steps

00:39:28 ◼   ► if that's all you care about.

00:39:29 ◼   ► If you wanna map your route,

00:39:30 ◼   ► then you don't have to run with your iPhone.

00:39:32 ◼   ► But I totally think the lack of GPS in the Apple Watch

00:39:35 ◼   ► is like three generations away from being a moot point

00:39:38 ◼   ► because they'll add it in as soon as they can afford

00:39:39 ◼   ► to do it with battery power.

00:39:41 ◼   ► - I think that's optimistic, but yeah.

00:39:43 ◼   ► - The reason I'm picking on you, Marco,

00:39:44 ◼   ► is because I think this is basically a pebble,

00:39:47 ◼   ► but better done and with the GPS.

00:39:50 ◼   ► And I don't view it building on what Underscore

00:39:53 ◼   ► and John were just saying,

00:39:54 ◼   ► I don't view it as just a Fitbit with the GPS.

00:39:57 ◼   ► I view it more as a Pebble with the GPS.

00:40:00 ◼   ► And my understanding of what I heard

00:40:02 ◼   ► on Developing Perspective was it uses the same sort of APIs

00:40:06 ◼   ► that for example, that iDrive uses in your car

00:40:10 ◼   ► so that you can read your text messages

00:40:12 ◼   ► on the iDrive screen if you set it up appropriately.

00:40:14 ◼   ► So just like John was saying, it's all one way,

00:40:16 ◼   ► All it's doing is saying, hey, you just got a text message

00:40:19 ◼   ► and here's the text message.

00:40:20 ◼   ► And there's not much you can do to respond to it

00:40:23 ◼   ► on the band, I almost called it a watch.

00:40:26 ◼   ► But nevertheless, at least you can see something there.

00:40:28 ◼   ► - Yeah, maybe I'll give it a try.

00:40:29 ◼   ► Because I am also curious just to see

00:40:33 ◼   ► what is the actual real life utility of such a device.

00:40:36 ◼   ► But that being said, I mean,

00:40:37 ◼   ► we're gonna be getting WatchKit this month, supposedly.

00:40:41 ◼   ► So I think this might just be for iOS developers

00:40:45 ◼   ► and iOS fans, this might just be a temporary distraction

00:40:49 ◼   ► for the next five months until we have a watch from Apple.

00:40:51 ◼   ► - Well, Underscore being his typical super industrious self

00:40:55 ◼   ► is like, he's gotta get this so he knows what the utility is

00:40:58 ◼   ► so he can create his fleet of watch out

00:41:01 ◼   ► and understand how this man possibly,

00:41:02 ◼   ► like there may be more than one of him.

00:41:04 ◼   ► Have you guys checked to see if like--

00:41:05 ◼   ► - I don't know how he does as much as he does.

00:41:07 ◼   ► - Is he always the same guy when you,

00:41:09 ◼   ► because he could be like one of seven identical,

00:41:12 ◼   ► Anyway, he could be a clone, that's what I'm saying.

00:41:14 ◼   ► But this gives him a chance to see

00:41:18 ◼   ► what kind of applications would be good on this device.

00:41:20 ◼   ► And he's sort of using it so that when the Apple Watch

00:41:22 ◼   ► comes along, he will know, he will have a top 10 list

00:41:25 ◼   ► of the applications he's gonna make

00:41:26 ◼   ► while Casey still thinks about getting his FastX for iOS.

00:41:30 ◼   ► - Why are you so mean to me?

00:41:31 ◼   ► - I'm just saying, if you're gonna feel shame

00:41:33 ◼   ► about not updating FastX,

00:41:34 ◼   ► don't feel shame that Overcast beat you out.

00:41:35 ◼   ► Feel shame that during the time

00:41:36 ◼   ► Overcast was being developed,

00:41:38 ◼   ► Underscore probably made seven apps.

00:41:39 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:41:40 ◼   ► - Yeah, he makes everyone else look bad.

00:41:42 ◼   ► - Yup.

00:41:43 ◼   ► Oh man, that's really funny.

00:41:45 ◼   ► And you're right.

00:41:46 ◼   ► I mean, if I had just a pool of money

00:41:48 ◼   ► just sitting there for me to waste away on silly devices,

00:41:52 ◼   ► I would absolutely buy one of these just to try it out.

00:41:56 ◼   ► And it definitely looks, well, I shouldn't say looks cool.

00:41:58 ◼   ► Its feature set seems very neat to me.

00:42:03 ◼   ► Like you were saying, Jon,

00:42:04 ◼   ► it's not aesthetically the most pleasing thing in the world,

00:42:06 ◼   ► but it certainly doesn't look bad either.

00:42:08 ◼   ► And I'm curious to see what comes of it,

00:42:10 ◼   ► but only time will tell.

00:42:13 ◼   ► You know, it's too bad that because it's Microsoft,

00:42:16 ◼   ► everyone just kind of fluffs it off immediately.

00:42:19 ◼   ► Because as a friend of the show, Ben Thompson,

00:42:22 ◼   ► was saying in the chat a minute ago,

00:42:24 ◼   ► you know, this ain't the old Microsoft.

00:42:25 ◼   ► This is kind of a new Microsoft that's really trying.

00:42:28 ◼   ► And John, you were talking about this earlier,

00:42:29 ◼   ► really trying to do something different and unique.

00:42:31 ◼   ► And a lot of times I think they hit the nail

00:42:35 ◼   ► really closer to the head than anyone gives them credit for.

00:42:38 ◼   ► And so it's kind of a bummer to me

00:42:40 ◼   ► that nobody's really given them any credit

00:42:44 ◼   ► from what I can tell.

00:42:45 ◼   ► - Well, that's not really the problem.

00:42:46 ◼   ► The problem isn't credit, the problem is action.

00:42:49 ◼   ► So it's the same thing that happened with WebOS.

00:42:53 ◼   ► Same thing happened with Windows Phone.

00:42:54 ◼   ► - Well, WebOS ran out of money,

00:42:56 ◼   ► that's not Microsoft's problem.

00:42:57 ◼   ► - Well, well, but the reason why,

00:42:59 ◼   ► so the same thing happened where the geeks like us

00:43:02 ◼   ► and maybe the tech press, you know, these things come out

00:43:05 ◼   ► and everyone's like, "Oh, you know what?

00:43:06 ◼   ► "This is really interesting."

00:43:08 ◼   ► Everyone says, "Oh, it's interesting."

00:43:10 ◼   ► This is really progressive,

00:43:11 ◼   ► or some word that means like, "This is cool,

00:43:15 ◼   ► "but then the conclusion is, but I don't want it."

00:43:18 ◼   ► Or, "This is great, I love this,

00:43:21 ◼   ► "but I'm not gonna buy this instead of an iPhone."

00:43:24 ◼   ► And so I think this is gonna have the same kind of problem,

00:43:26 ◼   ► which is, so you have this device from Microsoft

00:43:31 ◼   ► right before this probably big hit device from Apple, right?

00:43:36 ◼   ► So you have this device from Microsoft

00:43:38 ◼   ► that we're all looking at now and saying,

00:43:41 ◼   ► this is really interesting.

00:43:43 ◼   ► This might be really interesting.

00:43:45 ◼   ► They're doing a good job.

00:43:47 ◼   ► But how many people who say this

00:43:50 ◼   ► are gonna be using one of these in a year

00:43:51 ◼   ► instead of an Apple Watch?

00:43:53 ◼   ► - Well, they have the same problem as Apple of old did

00:43:55 ◼   ► where at a certain point it becomes like,

00:43:58 ◼   ► no matter what Apple did, it was always like,

00:44:01 ◼   ► yeah, but that's just Apple.

00:44:03 ◼   ► So like, who cares?

00:44:05 ◼   ► like it's exactly the same thing.

00:44:07 ◼   ► Like it's interesting or whatever, but you know,

00:44:09 ◼   ► come on real computers use Windows.

00:44:10 ◼   ► Like it's a sideshow, you're not interested.

00:44:12 ◼   ► And once you kind of get out of that position,

00:44:14 ◼   ► once people start thinking of you as not,

00:44:18 ◼   ► not part of the mainstream, not part of like the real thing,

00:44:21 ◼   ► then it's really difficult to ever,

00:44:25 ◼   ► to ever jump back up into the previous position

00:44:28 ◼   ► where to get people to like,

00:44:29 ◼   ► say I'm actually going to buy that

00:44:30 ◼   ► because it starts to feel like I'm not gonna buy a Mac.

00:44:33 ◼   ► I'm a PC guy, Macs don't run the programs that I want.

00:44:36 ◼   ► I'm not familiar with how they work.

00:44:37 ◼   ► It's just everything builds on top of everything

00:44:39 ◼   ► and it becomes insurmountable.

00:44:40 ◼   ► And the only way Apple could dig itself out of it

00:44:42 ◼   ► was with these spectacular flashy products.

00:44:45 ◼   ► Initially flashing ways that really weren't that substantial

00:44:48 ◼   ► like using fashion again.

00:44:49 ◼   ► Why do people care about the iMac?

00:44:50 ◼   ► It was just a computer.

00:44:51 ◼   ► Like it was an okay computer.

00:44:52 ◼   ► It wasn't a bad computer,

00:44:53 ◼   ► but the guts of the iMac were not all that impressive.

00:44:57 ◼   ► It was because it was teal and translucent and cool looking.

00:44:59 ◼   ► Like that's why the iMac made it.

00:45:00 ◼   ► And the iPod was them making a product

00:45:03 ◼   ► that had already existed but doing it so much better

00:45:05 ◼   ► than the other ones.

00:45:06 ◼   ► Like, and so is this so much better than the Apple watch?

00:45:08 ◼   ► No, it's not.

00:45:09 ◼   ► So it's not going to do that for them,

00:45:10 ◼   ► but they must feel like,

00:45:12 ◼   ► Microsoft must feel like Apple did where it's like,

00:45:14 ◼   ► we're making good stuff.

00:45:15 ◼   ► Like it's not bad, it's good.

00:45:17 ◼   ► Arguably sometimes it's the best or it's close.

00:45:20 ◼   ► And yet why is our reward not proportional

00:45:22 ◼   ► to the quality of the product we're making?

00:45:24 ◼   ► If we're making something that's like 80%

00:45:25 ◼   ► as good as something, like, and we get no market share,

00:45:28 ◼   ► it just seems like it's not fair.

00:45:31 ◼   ► And so I feel for them, but on the other hand,

00:45:34 ◼   ► I have a little bit of a glee about the fact

00:45:38 ◼   ► that they're in the position that Apple,

00:45:40 ◼   ► I'm trying not to hold a grudge.

00:45:41 ◼   ► Like in some respects I'm rooting for them,

00:45:42 ◼   ► but then when I think about rooting for them,

00:45:44 ◼   ► I'm like, you know what, if they got control,

00:45:47 ◼   ► they would just start making products I don't like again,

00:45:49 ◼   ► and it would make me sad.

00:45:50 ◼   ► - You said like, oh, if we make a product

00:45:52 ◼   ► that's 80% as good, then it should have to market share.

00:45:53 ◼   ► And the problem is like something like this,

00:45:56 ◼   ► I think most people are going to have

00:45:57 ◼   ► one wrist wearable at most.

00:45:59 ◼   ► Most people are only gonna have zero,

00:46:01 ◼   ► but I think that the most somebody will have

00:46:03 ◼   ► is likely to be one.

00:46:05 ◼   ► And so the question is,

00:46:06 ◼   ► not only is this good enough to buy,

00:46:09 ◼   ► but is this good enough to buy instead of the Apple Watch?

00:46:13 ◼   ► And that's the problem.

00:46:14 ◼   ► Most people don't carry two cell phones.

00:46:16 ◼   ► Most people carry ones, at least that they buy themselves,

00:46:19 ◼   ► most people carry one cell phone.

00:46:20 ◼   ► - Most of them are not a PC,

00:46:22 ◼   ► but a PC was like a $2,000 investment,

00:46:24 ◼   ► you didn't replace it every two years.

00:46:26 ◼   ► These type of devices are small enough

00:46:27 ◼   ► and there's enough advancement in the field.

00:46:30 ◼   ► be like for a lot of people would try the iPhone or try Android because you're like

00:46:34 ◼   ► well my two-year contract stuff like this isn't subsidized or anything but it just feels

00:46:37 ◼   ► like it's it's not as big of a commitment but it does get back to what you said earlier

00:46:41 ◼   ► about the ecosystem where you might feel like what am I what am I buying into here do I

00:46:45 ◼   ► have faith that this is going to be a supported product line for the future or is this going

00:46:49 ◼   ► to be like a one-off or you know what was that courier project that they had with like

00:46:53 ◼   ► remember that it was like a tablet that opened up like a book and they canned that before

00:46:56 ◼   ► even got out the door. So it seems like Microsoft may not, maybe kind of a hostile environment to

00:47:02 ◼   ► innovation at this point, or the Kin, what was that other one they made? The uh, yeah,

00:47:05 ◼   ► like the social smartphone platform that they made like two of, it was from the Sidekick guys,

00:47:09 ◼   ► and they released that and then canned it. Like, Microsoft needs to work on their, not so much

00:47:14 ◼   ► execution, because a lot of times the products are like, have something to recommend them,

00:47:17 ◼   ► but just like, the decision about when to release it, when to announce it, and whether this is going

00:47:23 ◼   ► to be a thing you follow through with. And if it's not going to be a thing you follow through with,

00:47:25 ◼   ► Like don't don't release the kin line on the hopes like hey, who knows maybe this will take off

00:47:30 ◼   ► But we probably don't think it will because it's actually kind of a crappy product and we really did a kind of a half-assed launch

00:47:34 ◼   ► And then when it doesn't catch on you're like, you know what a week later

00:47:37 ◼   ► Let's just cam the whole thing or a courier which you show to people people get excited about and then just say well

00:47:42 ◼   ► You know what? Let's just get rid of that

00:47:43 ◼   ► You know like I know a couple people are excited but we don't really like it and don't show it like all the things that

00:47:48 ◼   ► Apple tries out internally and gets rid of we never hear about those. That's what you have to do it

00:47:52 ◼   ► You really they really have to pick what they're going to do

00:47:55 ◼   ► do it really well put the company behind it and

00:47:59 ◼   ► not do these things that either look technically interesting and you're sad that they go away or

00:48:05 ◼   ► Kind of tumble out the door half-heartedly and that are canceled like when was the kin canceled like it was like two months

00:48:11 ◼   ► It was very soon

00:48:13 ◼   ► MTW in chat room says they didn't show courier that it just leaked

00:48:16 ◼   ► Oh, that's also I mean it's part of the same problem whether you show it or whether it leaks like we if we need to not

00:48:21 ◼   ► know about it. We need to not have pictures of it. We need to not, you know, for all of

00:48:24 ◼   ► the various like TV products and tablet products and all the watch prototypes that Apple made,

00:48:30 ◼   ► like we got the first thing we got to see out of Apple that was like a watch type thing

00:48:33 ◼   ► was the watch that they said they were going to make. We didn't, and we haven't seen all

00:48:36 ◼   ► whatever crazy TV stuff that they've tried and not released that we just assume was going

00:48:40 ◼   ► on in there. Apple's much better about deciding which products are good enough to go out the

00:48:46 ◼   ► door and once a product does go out the door, giving it a fair shot and putting the full

00:48:50 ◼   ► way to the company behind it.

00:48:52 ◼   ► And so we'll see if Band gets that from Microsoft.

00:48:55 ◼   ► Really quick aside, does, well, I don't know if either of you guys have seen much of this,

00:48:59 ◼   ► but watching the NFL these days is just a series of face palms because everywhere you

00:49:08 ◼   ► see these bright blue Microsoft Surface tablet-y things.

00:49:12 ◼   ► And it's so obvious that it's like, product placement is one thing and I know it's a thing.

00:49:19 ◼   ► It happens everywhere.

00:49:20 ◼   ► Hell, Apple does it constantly.

00:49:23 ◼   ► But I don't know, maybe I am biased, but it just seems to me that it's done in a much

00:49:27 ◼   ► more subtle way.

00:49:28 ◼   ► Like I'm thinking of house, for example, you would see Macs all over the place, but it

00:49:32 ◼   ► was subtle.

00:49:33 ◼   ► Whereas with the NFL, it's like, here's the bright blue surface and there's a row of bright

00:49:39 ◼   ► blue surfaces on the commentators desks.

00:49:42 ◼   ► And here it is on the sidelines and on the Microsoft surface, they're reviewing the play

00:49:46 ◼   ► right now.

00:49:47 ◼   ► Oh, it's so tacky to me.

00:49:49 ◼   ► - Yeah, similar problem in the most recent season

00:49:51 ◼   ► on Netflix of Parks and Recreation,

00:49:53 ◼   ► where like it was, which is not a very good season actually.

00:49:55 ◼   ► But anyway, they got some kind of big Microsoft sponsorship.

00:49:59 ◼   ► And so in previous seasons,

00:50:00 ◼   ► everybody had iPhones and stuff.

00:50:03 ◼   ► This season, every computing device you see

00:50:06 ◼   ► is a Microsoft device.

00:50:07 ◼   ► So every character is carrying a Windows phone

00:50:09 ◼   ► and using it proudly, like holding it up constantly.

00:50:12 ◼   ► And every computer that you see on the desk

00:50:15 ◼   ► is a Surface or at least running Windows 8

00:50:17 ◼   ► and it's always showing the Windows 8 home screen

00:50:19 ◼   ► prominently and you have all these screens

00:50:23 ◼   ► and Microsoft in your face and it's like,

00:50:25 ◼   ► good product placement should be both

00:50:29 ◼   ► unnoticeable and plausible.

00:50:31 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, exactly.

00:50:33 ◼   ► - And what you're saying with the NFL,

00:50:34 ◼   ► it's like that also, it violates both these things.

00:50:36 ◼   ► You shouldn't notice that they're beating you

00:50:38 ◼   ► over the head with this one particular type of product.

00:50:41 ◼   ► It should just seem like, oh, I just kinda see people

00:50:43 ◼   ► subconsciously and it seems like everyone's using Apple products or

00:50:46 ◼   ► Microsoft products and the cool people are or something like that's what it's

00:50:49 ◼   ► supposed to do and you're not supposed to notice a wow they're really beating

00:50:54 ◼   ► me over the head with this one kind of product and B this is so unrealistic

00:50:58 ◼   ► because in reality I know for a fact that these things are not good enough or

00:51:03 ◼   ► popular enough that all these people would naturally have them yep and the

00:51:07 ◼   ► chat room is going berserk and we would be I was trying I want to take credit

00:51:11 ◼   ► I didn't for once I didn't get something from the chat room. I saw the story today and it was it was hilarious

00:51:16 ◼   ► This is on CNN and the same type deal

00:51:19 ◼   ► They have some kind of product placement deal with Microsoft services and you can tell it's a surface from the back because it sort of has

00:51:24 ◼   ► That you know iconic kickstand that they have, you know, the back of the surface looks like where little thing folds out

00:51:29 ◼   ► So it looks like a little easel, right?

00:51:31 ◼   ► And so what you see is just series of easels sitting in front of all the different commentators

00:51:36 ◼   ► But when they have camera shots from the side what you can see is a lot of the commentators

00:51:40 ◼   ► Have an iPad that they're sort of using behind the surface as like a shield, you know

00:51:46 ◼   ► So you can't see that they're using the iPad either either the iPad is resting against the surface

00:51:49 ◼   ► Like it actually literally is an easel or they just have an iPad in their hands and that's not good for Microsoft

00:51:54 ◼   ► It's not good at all

00:51:55 ◼   ► It's so bad. I don't know. It's just

00:51:58 ◼   ► Yeah, granted. I make my living off of Microsoft technologies

00:52:02 ◼   ► And so there's there's always going to be a special soft spot in my heart for Microsoft

00:52:07 ◼   ► But so much of what Microsoft does is so cheesy and silly and this is some of it and it makes

00:52:16 ◼   ► me sad.

00:52:17 ◼   ► >> Fashion is not their strong suit.

00:52:19 ◼   ► As Steve Jobs said, taste is not their strong suit.

00:52:22 ◼   ► >> Yep.

00:52:23 ◼   ► Oh well, what else is awesome these days, Marco?

00:52:25 ◼   ► >> Lynda.com is an easy and affordable way to help you learn with high quality, easy

00:52:29 ◼   ► to follow video tutorials.

00:52:31 ◼   ► Instantly stream thousands of courses created by experts on software, web development, graphic

00:52:36 ◼   ► design and more.

00:52:37 ◼   ► go to lynda.com, L-Y-N-D-A.com/ATP to see for yourself.

00:52:42 ◼   ► They offer courses for all experience levels,

00:52:45 ◼   ► beginner or advanced and everything in between.

00:52:48 ◼   ► These courses are produced at the highest quality.

00:52:50 ◼   ► This is not like little YouTube videos

00:52:52 ◼   ► that are really inconsistent.

00:52:53 ◼   ► This is real high quality courses

00:52:55 ◼   ► produced by professionals in their field.

00:52:57 ◼   ► And they have all these great animations

00:52:59 ◼   ► and graphs and examples and everything.

00:53:01 ◼   ► They're really high quality production here.

00:53:03 ◼   ► You can play straight through, start to finish,

00:53:04 ◼   ► or you can just jump in and find a quick answer.

00:53:07 ◼   ► They have tools like searchable transcripts,

00:53:09 ◼   ► you can kind of see what's being talked about,

00:53:10 ◼   ► you can click around, jump to various points, playlists,

00:53:14 ◼   ► even certificates of course completion

00:53:16 ◼   ► that you can publish to your LinkedIn profile

00:53:18 ◼   ► if you have such a thing.

00:53:19 ◼   ► You can even learn while you're on the go

00:53:21 ◼   ► with the lynda.com apps for iPhone, iPad, and Android.

00:53:24 ◼   ► They also offer a premium plan.

00:53:27 ◼   ► If you're a premium member, you can download those courses

00:53:29 ◼   ► to those iPad apps offline.

00:53:31 ◼   ► They have all sorts of courses you might love

00:53:33 ◼   ► and benefit from, things like development,

00:53:35 ◼   ► if you wanna learn how to program,

00:53:37 ◼   ► web development, app development,

00:53:39 ◼   ► they have things like things on Swift and iOS and web

00:53:42 ◼   ► and Android and all this stuff.

00:53:44 ◼   ► They also will teach you just how to use apps,

00:53:46 ◼   ► how to use productivity apps like Microsoft Office stuff,

00:53:49 ◼   ► creative pro apps like Adobe Creative Suite,

00:53:52 ◼   ► Logic, Final Cut, all this stuff.

00:53:53 ◼   ► Even business skills like negotiation and management,

00:53:58 ◼   ► they have videos on all this stuff, it's really incredible.

00:54:00 ◼   ► They have over 100,000 video tutorials on lynda.com.

00:54:04 ◼   ► I really can't say enough good things about them.

00:54:06 ◼   ► I've watched a number of their things

00:54:08 ◼   ► and they're all very, very high quality.

00:54:10 ◼   ► I'm always very impressed by them.

00:54:11 ◼   ► lynda.com is so useful that 30% of colleges

00:54:14 ◼   ► and universities and most of the Ivy League schools

00:54:16 ◼   ► offer lynda.com subscriptions to their students

00:54:18 ◼   ► and faculty members.

00:54:20 ◼   ► lynda.com is offering a seven day free trial.

00:54:22 ◼   ► You can access all the courses for free for seven days.

00:54:25 ◼   ► If you visit lynda.com/atp, once again,

00:54:29 ◼   ► that's a seven day free trial, access to all courses.

00:54:32 ◼   ► L-Y-N-D-A dot com slash ATP.

00:54:35 ◼   ► Thanks a lot to lynda.com for sponsoring once again.

00:54:38 ◼   ► - So let's talk about iWork 2013.

00:54:41 ◼   ► - Wait, what?

00:54:42 ◼   ► We're talking about this?

00:54:43 ◼   ► - Yeah, well, okay.

00:54:43 ◼   ► What else are we talking about?

00:54:44 ◼   ► - What, did news happen?

00:54:46 ◼   ► - No, I think this is a topic,

00:54:48 ◼   ► I mean, it's not news news,

00:54:49 ◼   ► but it's one of those things that people complain about

00:54:52 ◼   ► and I keep seeing it and the complaints don't go away.

00:54:54 ◼   ► And the more I think about it,

00:54:55 ◼   ► the more it reveals to me something that Apple,

00:54:58 ◼   ► like something that Apple is doing

00:55:00 ◼   ► It just doesn't make sense and coincidentally for the people who are upset about us bashing

00:55:05 ◼   ► Microsoft into something that Microsoft does much better than Apple.

00:55:08 ◼   ► And I don't really understand why Apple is doing what it's doing.

00:55:13 ◼   ► So have you, do either one of you have the new version of iWork?

00:55:17 ◼   ► Yep.

00:55:18 ◼   ► Yep.

00:55:19 ◼   ► I don't think I have it on the Mac.

00:55:20 ◼   ► I think I probably have it on iOS.

00:55:21 ◼   ► Isn't it like free on iOS or it comes free with your devices or something like that?

00:55:24 ◼   ► I think it's free everywhere now.

00:55:25 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:55:26 ◼   ► It's not about the specific programs which have their problems, right?

00:55:31 ◼   ► And the file formats are weird, but it's about how they're handling backward compatibility.

00:55:36 ◼   ► And I grabbed this quote from an InfoWorld article, I'm assuming it's reasonably accurate,

00:55:40 ◼   ► but if it's not, the gist of it is right, if not the details.

00:55:44 ◼   ► And so the details as listed here is basically if you get the new version of iWork, you can't

00:55:48 ◼   ► open files created with any version of iWork earlier than iWork 09.

00:55:53 ◼   ► If you try to do that, iWork detects that you're trying to open a document from something

00:55:58 ◼   ► earlier than iWork 09 and says, "Oh, you should find a copy of iWork 09 and open the file

00:56:03 ◼   ► with that instead."

00:56:05 ◼   ► And so this is sort of leaving behind your own file format from not that long ago, like

00:56:11 ◼   ► less than a decade certainly, probably less than five years ago, whatever it is, those

00:56:17 ◼   ► documents can't be opened by the new version.

00:56:21 ◼   ► And a lot of the time when Apple sort of races forward, leaving behind legacy things, whether

00:56:25 ◼   ► it's ditching everything except for USB on the original iMac or dropping support for

00:56:31 ◼   ► an API or some hardware thing or whatever, there's a reason.

00:56:36 ◼   ► It helps them to make...

00:56:39 ◼   ► It helps them get ahead of their competition, because they're not encumbered by legacy stuff,

00:56:43 ◼   ► and so they can go and make the new shiny thing without worrying about dragging along

00:56:47 ◼   ► this baggage of backward compatibility because the baggage just gets bigger and bigger, especially

00:56:53 ◼   ► if you have a successful product in your past. Eventually all your time is spent trying to

00:56:56 ◼   ► like support the past instead of worrying about the future so you can never make anything

00:57:00 ◼   ► great. But I don't see how that philosophy can be or should be applied to file formats

00:57:06 ◼   ► because it's not as if we're asking that these old file formats be supported forever in their

00:57:11 ◼   ► current form. All I think most reasonable people are asking is if I create a bunch of

00:57:15 ◼   ► of documents with iWork over the years,

00:57:17 ◼   ► and I get the latest version of iWork,

00:57:19 ◼   ► I just wanna be able to open them.

00:57:21 ◼   ► And I don't care that much that if I open them,

00:57:22 ◼   ► it converts them to the new format.

00:57:24 ◼   ► As long as if it does the conversion, it's not lossy,

00:57:27 ◼   ► like this looked fine in the old version of iWork,

00:57:29 ◼   ► but when I converted it to the new version,

00:57:30 ◼   ► all my fonts were screwed up

00:57:31 ◼   ► and everything looked broken or whatever.

00:57:34 ◼   ► You just, for file format compatibility,

00:57:37 ◼   ► making new file formats, for example,

00:57:39 ◼   ► one of the reasons that speculated

00:57:40 ◼   ► they made these new file formats

00:57:41 ◼   ► that are like zip archives and stuff,

00:57:43 ◼   ► is for better compatibility with iOS

00:57:45 ◼   ► because they want it to unify the code base,

00:57:47 ◼   ► it's fine, that's a perfectly valid reason

00:57:48 ◼   ► to change your file format and to rev the program.

00:57:50 ◼   ► And maybe you can argue if it's a good reason

00:57:53 ◼   ► to dumb down the feature set

00:57:54 ◼   ► to a common set of functionality

00:57:55 ◼   ► that can work on iOS on the web and on the Mac.

00:57:58 ◼   ► But anyway, whatever, they're gonna do that, that's fine.

00:58:01 ◼   ► But by not reading the old file formats,

00:58:03 ◼   ► it shows a lack of respect for the work

00:58:06 ◼   ► that people have done with previous versions

00:58:07 ◼   ► of this program, especially since probably

00:58:09 ◼   ► the pre-iWork 09 versions are gonna stop working

00:58:11 ◼   ► on modern Macs pretty soon,

00:58:12 ◼   ► that's the thing that Apple does which I think that does have a reason but you

00:58:15 ◼   ► have to support the old file formats because if you don't what you're

00:58:18 ◼   ► signaling to people and Apple signals this to people in iARC and also in

00:58:23 ◼   ► pretty much everything that's ever done on the web do not trust us with your

00:58:27 ◼   ► data make a bunch of picture galleries in like you know .Mac oh well those are

00:58:32 ◼   ► gonna be gone when we switch over to the mobile me galleries make a bunch of

00:58:35 ◼   ► mobile me websites with iWeb oh iWeb is not supported anymore I hope you didn't

00:58:39 ◼   ► Hope you didn't write too much in your little blog that you made

00:58:41 ◼   ► We're converting over to this thing

00:58:43 ◼   ► And by the way, there's no way to get that content back out and make a bunch of documents with iwork

00:58:47 ◼   ► Well five years are gonna pass and you can't open them up

00:58:49 ◼   ► I hope you save a version of iwork or a nine which by the way won't run on the computer that you buy three years

00:58:53 ◼   ► from now

00:58:54 ◼   ► It's telling everybody do not trust Apple with your data because we will abandon it. We will race ahead

00:59:00 ◼   ► We will leave behind like I feel so bad for people who like we put a lot of work into iwork websites

00:59:05 ◼   ► It that tool what it did was basically give you a native Mac

00:59:09 ◼   ► Application at lake let people who know nothing about the web make web pages and it put them up on little hosting that was part

00:59:14 ◼   ► Of your service that you bought it was not a very good program

00:59:16 ◼   ► the results were not very nice with the bottom line is people dragged in little pictures and type lots of words and

00:59:21 ◼   ► Made a series of posts and Apple is just like well, sorry, that's going away

00:59:25 ◼   ► Hope you have some way to pull that down and back it up or something

00:59:27 ◼   ► I remember that year that I was going around to people in my family and and

00:59:32 ◼   ► trying to find a way to like pull down the file and and modify the links so they still work locally so they can just

00:59:37 ◼   ► Have a local copy because people invested time in that and Apple has no respect for the time that people spent on that and with file

00:59:43 ◼   ► Formats Apple has no respect for the work that people put in making word processing documents

00:59:46 ◼   ► so the lesson they're teaching everybody is

00:59:48 ◼   ► Don't use our programs or our web services if you care about

00:59:52 ◼   ► Being able to open this thing or view this thing in five or ten years

00:59:55 ◼   ► and I

00:59:57 ◼   ► Think Apple's probably with I work and what is done with the web properties?

01:00:01 ◼   ► Probably the worst of the big companies like, you know

01:00:05 ◼   ► Apple Microsoft Amazon or whatever in breaking compatibility with no way forward with no sort of like

01:00:10 ◼   ► Import or export option or anything like that?

01:00:12 ◼   ► I don't know. I'm angry about it. I don't even use I work and by the way, I don't work for

01:00:17 ◼   ► For this and many other reasons. I mean part of the problem, you know, you're definitely right. I agree with everything you just said

01:00:25 ◼   ► Part of the problem is is bigger than than just this was a bad decision in I work

01:00:29 ◼   ► I mean part of that one of the biggest parts of the problem is that I work doesn't get a lot of attention from Apple

01:00:34 ◼   ► There's a reason like there was literally no new update from

01:00:38 ◼   ► 2009 until 2013 and the 2013 versions were not written during that whole time

01:00:45 ◼   ► They were written like at the last minute and rushed out the door

01:00:48 ◼   ► It seems like they spend a lot of time trying to do the sync up between there's an iOS version

01:00:53 ◼   ► There's a web version as the Mac version and try to make them all work on the same thing and all work together

01:00:57 ◼   ► Like that seems like what they put the effort in. It's probably not you're right a multi-year effort like that

01:01:01 ◼   ► But who knows? I don't know what their schedules are like internally, but

01:01:04 ◼   ► The result was a program that didn't satisfy people because that that synchronization between all the platforms

01:01:10 ◼   ► Sort of dumbed down the applications to the common subset of functionality that will work across all of them and people are angry about that

01:01:16 ◼   ► and the execution wasn't great, but

01:01:20 ◼   ► Yeah, go on. I just I don't I don't think it's because they didn't put enough effort into it because it seems like they did

01:01:26 ◼   ► Put a lot of resources into it. They just they just put them towards the wrong things

01:01:29 ◼   ► Well, I mean the I work file formats have always been kind of a disaster

01:01:33 ◼   ► So like the first versions of I work before oh nine

01:01:35 ◼   ► They saved everything as a as a Mac bundle which for those of you who don't know a bundle or a package whatever

01:01:43 ◼   ► It's called a package is just a directory with this

01:01:45 ◼   ► How is it like a special flag set to make it into a package? How does that work?

01:01:49 ◼   ► Now the Finder is the thing that interprets the bundle that is set now. That's classic my quest

01:01:55 ◼   ► I believe it's the Finder that interprets them as something other than a directory because if you look at them anyplace else other than

01:02:01 ◼   ► The Finder it looks like exactly what it is a directory with a bunch of files in it, right?

01:02:05 ◼   ► So the first versions of I work their file format was these

01:02:09 ◼   ► These fake files which are actually directories full of other files and that causes a lot of problems whenever that file has to leave the Mac

01:02:18 ◼   ► Biggest thing is email attachments.

01:02:21 ◼   ► Secondarily, you also can't put them in upload forms

01:02:25 ◼   ► on websites, in the file input type,

01:02:28 ◼   ► because those expect single files

01:02:29 ◼   ► and these are actually directories.

01:02:31 ◼   ► And you can imagine that was pretty annoying

01:02:33 ◼   ► when you couldn't really email these things around

01:02:36 ◼   ► very easily through most email servers or email programs,

01:02:38 ◼   ► and certainly not through Windows at all,

01:02:41 ◼   ► if it had to bounce through Windows.

01:02:42 ◼   ► You couldn't email these files around

01:02:43 ◼   ► from this Office suite of applications.

01:02:46 ◼   ► that was a pretty stupid move really.

01:02:48 ◼   ► And so then in the later version,

01:02:51 ◼   ► I think in the '09 version, they moved to,

01:02:54 ◼   ► I believe it was just like a zip file.

01:02:57 ◼   ► It was basically like, it was either an SQL file

01:02:59 ◼   ► or a zip file that was just all that data shoved

01:03:02 ◼   ► into this container, which is a much better way to do it.

01:03:04 ◼   ► And then with the new versions, I think they,

01:03:06 ◼   ► didn't they move back?

01:03:08 ◼   ► I think with the new versions, there were some kind of,

01:03:11 ◼   ► we'll have to look this up and write this up and link to it.

01:03:13 ◼   ► There were some kind of move,

01:03:15 ◼   ► It was a move, like a step backwards

01:03:18 ◼   ► because the justification was this is gonna be easier

01:03:22 ◼   ► to sync between iOS and iCloud documents

01:03:24 ◼   ► and Mac and everything because of the structure

01:03:27 ◼   ► they've picked.

01:03:27 ◼   ► Regardless, the file formats have always kind of been

01:03:31 ◼   ► a disaster, they've always changed dramatically

01:03:34 ◼   ► and many times have had very weird decisions

01:03:36 ◼   ► and again, it just seems like,

01:03:40 ◼   ► it seems like they just, the iWork team

01:03:42 ◼   ► is not getting the resources it needs

01:03:44 ◼   ► or it is not a high enough priority

01:03:47 ◼   ► for iWork to ever be truly great.

01:03:49 ◼   ► And I use iWork, I don't use Microsoft Office

01:03:51 ◼   ► because I hardly ever need Office programs,

01:03:53 ◼   ► so it's not worth me buying Office.

01:03:55 ◼   ► I just use iWork stuff and get away with it just fine.

01:03:58 ◼   ► And I've used iWork as my only Office suite for,

01:04:02 ◼   ► I don't know, at least six or seven years now.

01:04:04 ◼   ► So it's, I use this not every day,

01:04:09 ◼   ► but I use it regularly,

01:04:10 ◼   ► and I know these programs pretty well now.

01:04:13 ◼   ► And they're always like 75% of the way there.

01:04:18 ◼   ► They could be so good, but it just seems like

01:04:22 ◼   ► they don't get attention from Apple.

01:04:24 ◼   ► And I think what you're saying is true.

01:04:26 ◼   ► It's very fair what you're saying,

01:04:28 ◼   ► especially about things like the MobileMe photo galleries

01:04:31 ◼   ► and stuff like that, like all the photo stuff,

01:04:33 ◼   ► that is very valid.

01:04:35 ◼   ► I think with iWork, I think it's mostly just an issue

01:04:41 ◼   ► of these apps getting NOLA from Apple.

01:04:43 ◼   ► And secondarily them not caring about drop-in compatibility.

01:04:47 ◼   ► But it wouldn't surprise me at all

01:04:49 ◼   ► if they were going to write in support

01:04:51 ◼   ► for the new apps to rebuild formats

01:04:54 ◼   ► and it just got cut because they didn't have enough time

01:04:56 ◼   ► because they didn't give this project

01:04:57 ◼   ► enough resources from the beginning.

01:04:59 ◼   ► - Oh, they have that thing where they put out a version

01:05:01 ◼   ► that dropped a huge number of features

01:05:03 ◼   ► and then kind of backfilled apologetically as time allowed.

01:05:06 ◼   ► - Right, yeah, that's the 2013 version,

01:05:09 ◼   ► which is still, I think, worse than the previous ones.

01:05:13 ◼   ► - And like, I don't use a lot of these things regularly,

01:05:14 ◼   ► but I follow people who do.

01:05:15 ◼   ► And it's like, even Keynote,

01:05:17 ◼   ► which used to be like the one,

01:05:18 ◼   ► the best program in that suite is like,

01:05:20 ◼   ► everyone loves Keynote,

01:05:21 ◼   ► is like been getting worse over time, not better.

01:05:23 ◼   ► And that's something that Microsoft has always done so well.

01:05:25 ◼   ► One, support backwards compatibility support

01:05:28 ◼   ► for their file formats, like forever, basically.

01:05:31 ◼   ► Like they are the masters of that.

01:05:32 ◼   ► And you don't have to go to that extreme,

01:05:33 ◼   ► but you should be good at it at least.

01:05:35 ◼   ► And it's not like Microsoft didn't change their formats.

01:05:37 ◼   ► They went to, you know, a zip file full of XML stuff.

01:05:40 ◼   ► And, you know, they Docx and XLSX and all that stuff.

01:05:43 ◼   ► Like they advanced, but when they advanced,

01:05:47 ◼   ► they tried to be compatible

01:05:49 ◼   ► because like that's their big selling point.

01:05:50 ◼   ► If you make documents in Microsoft Office,

01:05:52 ◼   ► Microsoft Office will up to them.

01:05:53 ◼   ► I remember when like Office 97 came out

01:05:55 ◼   ► and like there was a split in format between 97 and 95

01:05:58 ◼   ► and people were freaking out or whatever.

01:05:59 ◼   ► I don't remember the exact details of the year.

01:06:01 ◼   ► So I'm sorry if I got it wrong, but that, you know,

01:06:05 ◼   ► They condition their user base to accept

01:06:08 ◼   ► that the format will change and feel safe

01:06:10 ◼   ► that it's not like the documents

01:06:12 ◼   ► are gonna become unreadable.

01:06:13 ◼   ► And Apple is doing the opposite.

01:06:15 ◼   ► They're conditioning all the users to fear these applications

01:06:18 ◼   ► and not trust any important data to it.

01:06:20 ◼   ► And the other thing Microsoft has done

01:06:22 ◼   ► with a few bumps in the road, like, you know,

01:06:24 ◼   ► Word 6 for the Mac and all that terrible stuff,

01:06:26 ◼   ► they tend to make their programs better with time.

01:06:30 ◼   ► The programs get faster, documents open faster.

01:06:32 ◼   ► They have more features.

01:06:33 ◼   ► They wouldn't like, if one version of a program

01:06:35 ◼   ► had really interesting typography controls,

01:06:39 ◼   ► the next version of the program

01:06:40 ◼   ► would not drop all those features

01:06:41 ◼   ► because like they're not possible in iOS

01:06:43 ◼   ► or can't be done on the web or something.

01:06:44 ◼   ► Like they would never do that.

01:06:45 ◼   ► There's no major regression in functionality

01:06:49 ◼   ► without some good reason.

01:06:50 ◼   ► Like, oh, we're deprecating the access database.

01:06:52 ◼   ► So forget about that whole integration.

01:06:54 ◼   ► Like, you know, but just like,

01:06:56 ◼   ► hey, this thing adds a new ability

01:06:59 ◼   ► to tweak the kerning on text.

01:07:02 ◼   ► And the next version says,

01:07:02 ◼   ► yeah, you know all that kerning stuff, forget it.

01:07:04 ◼   ► We pulled it out, it's gone.

01:07:05 ◼   ► And if you open a document that had a custom kerning,

01:07:07 ◼   ► we're just gonna show it a different way.

01:07:09 ◼   ► Like that's not progress.

01:07:10 ◼   ► It's over time, the reason we all love software

01:07:13 ◼   ► is it gets better, faster, stronger.

01:07:15 ◼   ► You know, it does not sort of stumble along.

01:07:19 ◼   ► Occasionally features that you used

01:07:20 ◼   ► and relied on disappear with no explanation.

01:07:23 ◼   ► File formats get abandoned.

01:07:24 ◼   ► The application changes its looks

01:07:27 ◼   ► in ways that seem like lateral moves.

01:07:29 ◼   ► Items move around the interface for no discernible reason.

01:07:33 ◼   ► that is a web version you don't care about.

01:07:35 ◼   ► Are there any like rabid iWork fans

01:07:37 ◼   ► with the possible exception of Keynote,

01:07:39 ◼   ► which I think did have rabid fans and may still have them?

01:07:41 ◼   ► The rest of iWork is just like, meh.

01:07:43 ◼   ► - You know, what's funny is,

01:07:47 ◼   ► especially listening to what Markowitz said

01:07:49 ◼   ► about how iWork is 80% of the way there,

01:07:52 ◼   ► I feel like so many of the things you just said about iWork,

01:07:55 ◼   ► you could make a reasonable substitution of say iCloud

01:08:00 ◼   ► or any number of other Apple software products.

01:08:04 ◼   ► Heck, even iOS 8, a lot of people,

01:08:06 ◼   ► I mean, I think iOS 8 is fine, but.

01:08:09 ◼   ► - No, I think it's not fair for iOS 8 and iCloud.

01:08:11 ◼   ► iOS 8 is not worse than iOS 7,

01:08:16 ◼   ► and it adds a bunch of things that you felt like

01:08:20 ◼   ► you would be happy if you had them.

01:08:21 ◼   ► Like iOS 7 didn't have extensions, which is a big thing.

01:08:23 ◼   ► - Sure, sure, no, no, I'm on a different point.

01:08:26 ◼   ► My point was when Marco was saying,

01:08:28 ◼   ► Oh, it's so close, but it's not quite there.

01:08:31 ◼   ► And iCloud has gotten better,

01:08:32 ◼   ► but it seems like you could say that about a lot of things.

01:08:36 ◼   ► Like so great example is in iOS 8,

01:08:38 ◼   ► the ordering of the extensions and the share sheets,

01:08:42 ◼   ► or I think that's what it is,

01:08:43 ◼   ► wherever the one password icon lives,

01:08:45 ◼   ► how you could at least put one,

01:08:47 ◼   ► you could have a one password extension,

01:08:49 ◼   ► yet when you tried to reorder

01:08:51 ◼   ► what the order of those extensions were,

01:08:54 ◼   ► the order got reset constantly.

01:08:57 ◼   ► Now I believe that's been fixed in the latest beta,

01:08:59 ◼   ► but that's a great example of, oh, you were so close,

01:09:02 ◼   ► but then there's this one really annoying thing

01:09:04 ◼   ► that you didn't quite get right.

01:09:05 ◼   ► - I think that's much closer than iWork.

01:09:07 ◼   ► Even iCloud, which has had it stumbled,

01:09:09 ◼   ► on the long term, you have to say,

01:09:12 ◼   ► iCloud Drive versus basically everything else

01:09:14 ◼   ► they've ever done with documents.

01:09:15 ◼   ► iCloud Drive is better than that.

01:09:16 ◼   ► CloudKit versus everything else they've done

01:09:18 ◼   ► in the same realm, CloudKit is better.

01:09:20 ◼   ► Maybe it's not there,

01:09:21 ◼   ► but you just wanna see forward progress.

01:09:23 ◼   ► When you have a long running program like iWork

01:09:25 ◼   ► or long-running suite like iWork,

01:09:27 ◼   ► that is around for a long time,

01:09:30 ◼   ► is not updated on sort of on a regular basis,

01:09:33 ◼   ► such that you just often wonder like, is the product dead?

01:09:36 ◼   ► Are they just not gonna do it anymore?

01:09:37 ◼   ► Like iLife was the same way,

01:09:38 ◼   ► where they were doing iLife with years in the name,

01:09:40 ◼   ► and then all of a sudden a year would come and go

01:09:41 ◼   ► and there'd be no new iLife,

01:09:43 ◼   ► and you're like, so is iLife still a thing?

01:09:46 ◼   ► And then they release a point update

01:09:47 ◼   ► to keep the old version working.

01:09:48 ◼   ► You're like, well, there's someone,

01:09:49 ◼   ► it's gotta be someone over there working on it

01:09:50 ◼   ► because they're doing some work

01:09:52 ◼   ► to make sure it works with the new OS,

01:09:53 ◼   ► like versus Microsoft Office back in its heyday especially,

01:09:57 ◼   ► was like regular updates,

01:09:58 ◼   ► you know they're gonna keep trying to make it better,

01:10:00 ◼   ► maybe you'll disagree with something they've done

01:10:03 ◼   ► or some weird interface

01:10:04 ◼   ► or they implemented new crazy menus in Office

01:10:07 ◼   ► because Microsoft has organized like a crazy,

01:10:12 ◼   ► I don't know what the right word is, Tower of Babel

01:10:13 ◼   ► and one hand doesn't know what the other hand is doing.

01:10:16 ◼   ► But anyway, they always look like they were developing it

01:10:19 ◼   ► and so many things with Apple

01:10:21 ◼   ► are sort of like speculative abandonware,

01:10:24 ◼   ► just like Marco was doing.

01:10:25 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:10:26 ◼   ► Is anyone working on this?

01:10:28 ◼   ► Probably, like I guess, but maybe not.

01:10:33 ◼   ► And I mean, the Mac Pro is speculative abandonware hardware

01:10:37 ◼   ► for the longest time, but in software,

01:10:38 ◼   ► there seems like a lot of that.

01:10:39 ◼   ► And it has to be said at some point that like,

01:10:42 ◼   ► maybe it has something to do with the fact

01:10:44 ◼   ► that Apple feels like it shouldn't or can't

01:10:48 ◼   ► sell the software anymore, that everything has to be free,

01:10:50 ◼   ► that even the stuff that used to be $400 has to be $79 now.

01:10:54 ◼   ► You know, like if iWork could be priced at something

01:10:58 ◼   ► other than, you guys were saying it's free,

01:11:00 ◼   ► I haven't even looked at it,

01:11:01 ◼   ► but like priced at some price that is closer to sustainable,

01:11:06 ◼   ► maybe it wouldn't really fund all this development,

01:11:08 ◼   ► but just something.

01:11:09 ◼   ► But if they feel like they just have to give it away

01:11:10 ◼   ► for free as a perk to try to make their hardware

01:11:12 ◼   ► more valuable, I don't see how a bunch of mediocre,

01:11:15 ◼   ► mediocre to crappy programs

01:11:17 ◼   ► make their hardware more valuable.

01:11:19 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

01:11:20 ◼   ► You're not adding value. No one is going oh, and if you get an iOS it used to be like remember

01:11:24 ◼   ► How you used to be like that with I life it was like if you want to get I life you have to get

01:11:27 ◼   ► A Mac that was practically a system seller to use game console parlance, right?

01:11:31 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, people would play with GarageBand in the store and be like, oh my god

01:11:34 ◼   ► If I got a Mac I could make music right design. Do they have I like for Windows?

01:11:38 ◼   ► No, you have to have a Mac like it was a system seller

01:11:40 ◼   ► It was like all these things that you know

01:11:42 ◼   ► I know I have a computer and people tell me I can use it to make movies to make music to burn CDs

01:11:47 ◼   ► But I know I personally can't use it to do those things because it's way too complicated

01:11:50 ◼   ► I wouldn't know where to begin and I life was like hey

01:11:52 ◼   ► We will make you successful at doing these things that you know are possible with a computer

01:11:57 ◼   ► But you still feel are beyond your ability and I work is not a system seller

01:12:00 ◼   ► Nobody is buying Macs or iPads or doing anything involving Apple to say oh no goody now. I get to use I work

01:12:07 ◼   ► I can never do word processing before

01:12:09 ◼   ► It's not it's not a system seller

01:12:12 ◼   ► Yeah, and I think you're I mean, I don't think it's a pricing issue at all

01:12:16 ◼   ► I don't think they ever sold high enough volumes of iWork to make the price of it matter much to their bottom line at all

01:12:22 ◼   ► But it is very important to push the usefulness of their platforms

01:12:28 ◼   ► And you know not only from like an independence perspective like it's an insurance policy

01:12:33 ◼   ► against Microsoft ever stopping making Office for Macs first of all and it's also to serve

01:12:39 ◼   ► their iOS interest to say

01:12:42 ◼   ► Look at how useful, especially the iPad,

01:12:45 ◼   ► which really needs some help right now,

01:12:46 ◼   ► look at how useful the iPad can be for work.

01:12:49 ◼   ► And IBM can go and sell it for them,

01:12:51 ◼   ► they can sell and they can say,

01:12:52 ◼   ► "Look, it runs all these Office apps."

01:12:54 ◼   ► 'Cause if Microsoft Office, well, for a while,

01:12:56 ◼   ► Microsoft Office didn't exist on the iPad,

01:12:59 ◼   ► now it does, but who knows if it always will

01:13:02 ◼   ► and how good it will always be,

01:13:03 ◼   ► now Apple can go around and say,

01:13:05 ◼   ► "Look, you can get for this one low price of this iPad

01:13:11 ◼   ► that might be three years old, A5,

01:13:13 ◼   ► for this one price you can get this iPad

01:13:16 ◼   ► and all this free software on it that's awesome

01:13:19 ◼   ► and you should really buy this iPad because of it

01:13:21 ◼   ► and you'll be able to get all this work done.

01:13:23 ◼   ► And the problem is that, so that's like,

01:13:26 ◼   ► again, the strategy tax, that's, well not really,

01:13:28 ◼   ► that's their goal is to make their hardware sell more units

01:13:32 ◼   ► 'cause that's where they make most of their money

01:13:33 ◼   ► but if the software is mediocre or absent,

01:13:38 ◼   ► it makes it very hard to do that.

01:13:40 ◼   ► The weird thing is that with iOS 8 now

01:13:42 ◼   ► They've essentially given Microsoft all the tools needed to do the thing that previously would say well only Apple does like only apples are gonna

01:13:50 ◼   ► Ever bother to make it an office type suite of programs that work on the web on iOS on the Mac with the same file

01:13:56 ◼   ► Format all sharing between all synchronized, but now with the advent of iCloud Drive Yosemite iOS 8

01:14:01 ◼   ► Extensions to like Microsoft. There's no reason Microsoft can't

01:14:05 ◼   ► unify its office suite across all of its platforms using one drive or whatever their services and having that integrated into iOS and having that

01:14:12 ◼   ► available on Macs and you know like

01:14:14 ◼   ► Not only Apple can do this now and I wonder if Apple would be like relieved if someone else picked up the mantle of

01:14:21 ◼   ► because that's what Apple wants to sell is like

01:14:23 ◼   ► We have a way for you to do word processing and it doesn't matter where you do it

01:14:27 ◼   ► If you do it on your Mac, if you do it on a website if you do it on your iOS device

01:14:31 ◼   ► It's all the same documents. It's all the same program

01:14:33 ◼   ► It you know it looks and works kind of roughly the same everywhere with a native interface and each one of those things

01:14:39 ◼   ► with a feature set that's the same across all of them so on and so forth like that's what they're selling but

01:14:44 ◼   ► If you do it with a bunch of mediocre applications these the sort of unification they're going for like I don't think that is

01:14:52 ◼   ► As attractive if they say oh well especially what you know an establishment like we're like I know how to do that in Word

01:14:58 ◼   ► I know how to make pivot tables in Excel. I don't know anything about numbers

01:15:01 ◼   ► I don't know what this pages thing is and it's weird and it's kind of buggy and I use the old version now

01:15:06 ◼   ► I can't open those documents anymore and you know, like that's why office is still popular because

01:15:10 ◼   ► Microsoft for all its weirdness and all its troubles

01:15:13 ◼   ► Still has held to the contract of office like as a standard, you know

01:15:17 ◼   ► That like if you make your documents in this you'll be able to open them. We'll do a good job with compatibility

01:15:22 ◼   ► We'll try to make them look the same

01:15:24 ◼   ► I mean again, there's been stumbles with that too with like if you open it on the windows version of office

01:15:29 ◼   ► looks different than on the Mac version, this font differences, there's that whole thing

01:15:32 ◼   ► about the Mac's epoch being, what is it, January 1904 or something like that, which is different

01:15:37 ◼   ► than the Windows epoch, so all your dates and your PowerPoints would be offset, and

01:15:40 ◼   ► like, there are always problems.

01:15:42 ◼   ► But Apple is not even, it's not even a contender, like they're, they're defeating themselves,

01:15:48 ◼   ► like it's, you know, stop hitting yourself, Apple, like they're punching themselves in

01:15:51 ◼   ► the face with "I work".

01:15:52 ◼   ► They're just not, not a contender in this race.

01:15:56 ◼   ► And to play devil's advocate for a second here, all of the characteristics that make

01:16:00 ◼   ► Microsoft so good and reliable at being an office software supplier also make them very

01:16:06 ◼   ► boring and unable to compete in a lot of consumer space.

01:16:09 ◼   ► Because all those values, you need the opposite characteristics to make a lot of great products

01:16:15 ◼   ► in the spaces that we care more about these days.

01:16:17 ◼   ► But that being said, a lot of Apple's problems are just botched execution or bad decisions.

01:16:25 ◼   ► the people in the chat were pointing out earlier,

01:16:26 ◼   ► like you can make a lot of these same arguments

01:16:28 ◼   ► about Final Cut Pro X when that came out.

01:16:31 ◼   ► That like it was Apple clearly like moving the ball forward

01:16:36 ◼   ► way too aggressively and cutting way too much out

01:16:39 ◼   ► and starting over and angering every user

01:16:42 ◼   ► of this software basically.

01:16:45 ◼   ► - I think Final Cut Pro X is more defensible

01:16:47 ◼   ► because they were moving forward.

01:16:50 ◼   ► They felt like, I think they miscalculated their power maybe.

01:16:54 ◼   ► Like they thought that they could make this great leap

01:16:57 ◼   ► and that they would leave some people behind

01:16:59 ◼   ► but that this future destination is better.

01:17:01 ◼   ► And that in the end it would work out.

01:17:03 ◼   ► They could bring their market,

01:17:06 ◼   ► they could bring everybody ahead with them.

01:17:07 ◼   ► There would be stragglers, people would grumble about it,

01:17:09 ◼   ► kind of like OS X where it was kind of a mess

01:17:11 ◼   ► in the beginning, people grumbled,

01:17:13 ◼   ► but in the end the greatness of it

01:17:14 ◼   ► like compelled everyone to move along.

01:17:17 ◼   ► And plus it got this other audience of people

01:17:18 ◼   ► who were never interested in the Mac.

01:17:19 ◼   ► 'Cause hey, this has Unix underneath it

01:17:20 ◼   ► and it has a nice GUI.

01:17:21 ◼   ► Like that strategy worked with them for OS X.

01:17:24 ◼   ► They did essentially the same thing with Final Cut Pro.

01:17:27 ◼   ► It was also combined with like the crazy price drop thing.

01:17:29 ◼   ► Like forget about iWork being like, you know,

01:17:31 ◼   ► that was never sustaining itself

01:17:32 ◼   ► 'cause not enough things were sold.

01:17:34 ◼   ► I think the Pro apps were much closer

01:17:36 ◼   ► to sustaining themselves as, you know,

01:17:38 ◼   ► marketable products in their own right.

01:17:40 ◼   ► But even those got the ax and say like,

01:17:42 ◼   ► no, you can't be $300 anymore.

01:17:44 ◼   ► You gotta be 79 bucks.

01:17:45 ◼   ► I was like, this is the max we'll charge.

01:17:46 ◼   ► And so now you know they're not sustainable

01:17:48 ◼   ► and then they get less updates

01:17:49 ◼   ► and the Final Cut Pro 10 thing didn't work out

01:17:51 ◼   ► the way they wanted it to.

01:17:52 ◼   ► And it's just been a series of miscalculations.

01:17:55 ◼   ► And the pro apps are not things

01:17:57 ◼   ► that are trying to help them sell hardware, right?

01:18:00 ◼   ► It's not that there's just too small of a market.

01:18:02 ◼   ► They were for Apple is for a while

01:18:04 ◼   ► in the business of selling software to pros.

01:18:07 ◼   ► And they seem to have sort of,

01:18:10 ◼   ► in the same way that lost interest

01:18:11 ◼   ► selling the X serve and X serve rate and everything,

01:18:13 ◼   ► seem to have lost interest in pro software

01:18:15 ◼   ► canceling programs, they cancel Shake or something like that.

01:18:18 ◼   ► And Final Cut Pro X.

01:18:21 ◼   ► I still thought Pro X was a good idea.

01:18:24 ◼   ► It just didn't quite work out as well for them

01:18:26 ◼   ► as you know, OS X did.

01:18:27 ◼   ► - Well, exactly.

01:18:28 ◼   ► And that's, you know, this is the problem.

01:18:30 ◼   ► The Apple hardware is like firing on all cylinders.

01:18:33 ◼   ► The hardware these days is great.

01:18:35 ◼   ► Last few years, you can see like,

01:18:37 ◼   ► almost every hardware product Apple has made

01:18:39 ◼   ► in the last three to five years has just been awesome.

01:18:43 ◼   ► Like there's been very few exceptions to that.

01:18:45 ◼   ► And yet, on the software side, they're just crumbling

01:18:49 ◼   ► on so many different fronts so frequently.

01:18:52 ◼   ► I really worry about them,

01:18:53 ◼   ► 'cause it used to be that they moved much more slowly

01:18:56 ◼   ► and were much smaller,

01:18:57 ◼   ► but they had a solid reputation of reliability

01:19:01 ◼   ► and ease of use and stability.

01:19:04 ◼   ► And all of this was,

01:19:06 ◼   ► that's what carried their brand for so long.

01:19:08 ◼   ► That's why people would buy Apple products

01:19:11 ◼   ► because it would quote, "Just work."

01:19:13 ◼   ► Because they would be better.

01:19:16 ◼   ► They would be more stable.

01:19:17 ◼   ► They would be more intuitive.

01:19:18 ◼   ► everything would work better than in the PC world.

01:19:22 ◼   ► And in the last few years, this has crumbled so far

01:19:26 ◼   ► that I don't necessarily think,

01:19:28 ◼   ► I mean, unless PCs have gotten really bad, I don't know,

01:19:30 ◼   ► I haven't used them in a while,

01:19:31 ◼   ► but I think the Apple platform no longer has

01:19:35 ◼   ► that high ground nearly as much as it used to

01:19:38 ◼   ► if it still has it at all.

01:19:40 ◼   ► - Maybe not in the application space, in the OS space.

01:19:43 ◼   ► Like, I mean, I know a lot of people complain

01:19:44 ◼   ► about you, somebody, but like I said in my review,

01:19:47 ◼   ► Truth like I upgrade all my machines sooner and sooner like I just I just upgrade everything and it's just been

01:19:53 ◼   ► remarkably

01:19:55 ◼   ► problem-free

01:19:57 ◼   ► IOS 8 not so much which is weird because that's their like more important platform. I always say it was super buggy for me

01:20:03 ◼   ► I still occasionally can't copy a URL and paste it into another application. I have no idea why I'm on 8.1 now

01:20:10 ◼   ► Drives me insane and no I don't have one password installed and no I don't have any custom keywords installed

01:20:15 ◼   ► It's mysterious, but I think they're their OS, you know OS 10 at least

01:20:20 ◼   ► Those guys are doing a good job

01:20:22 ◼   ► I mean you can still argue about whether they want to yearly releases and stuff

01:20:25 ◼   ► But then if you look at their application software, that's not part of the OS any application software

01:20:31 ◼   ► That's not part of the s like I think this came up on one of our podcasts in the past

01:20:34 ◼   ► It was like name an Apple application that like they're like would win an ADA

01:20:38 ◼   ► That that is it is an example an Apple to Apple design award for people who don't know

01:20:42 ◼   ► There is a shining example of what it's like to be an awesome Mac application name one

01:20:47 ◼   ► That's not bundled with the OS and that used to be pretty easy to do like the whole iLite suite was pretty amazing

01:20:53 ◼   ► It's like, you know, they're the original version of iPhone that would win an ADA. This is an amazing application

01:20:58 ◼   ► Now I don't think anyone would say that about iPhone

01:21:01 ◼   ► No one would say about anything in the iWork suite. Like I don't think Apple is

01:21:05 ◼   ► Leading in software by saying if you were awesome. These are the kind of Mac apps you would make

01:21:11 ◼   ► All right. Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week Squarespace, Harry's and Lynda.com and we will see you next week

01:21:19 ◼   ► Now the show is over they didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental

01:21:28 ◼   ► It was accidental

01:21:31 ◼   ► John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental

01:21:40 ◼   ► It was accidental

01:21:42 ◼   ► And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm

01:21:47 ◼   ► And if you're into Twitter

01:21:50 ◼   ► You can follow them at

01:21:53 ◼   ► C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:21:57 ◼   ► So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:22:01 ◼   ► Auntie Marco Arment

01:22:04 ◼   ► S-I-R-A-C

01:22:06 ◼   ► USA, Syracuse

01:22:09 ◼   ► ♪ It's accidental ♪

01:22:11 ◼   ► ♪ Accidental ♪

01:22:12 ◼   ► ♪ They didn't mean to ♪

01:22:15 ◼   ► ♪ Accidental ♪

01:22:16 ◼   ► ♪ Accidental ♪

01:22:17 ◼   ► ♪ Tech podcast ♪

01:22:19 ◼   ► ♪ So long ♪

01:22:22 ◼   ► (man snoring)

01:22:24 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:22:25 ◼   ► Oh, you're gonna snore some more now Casey.

01:22:26 ◼   ► I didn't wanna put this in the controller part

01:22:28 ◼   ► 'cause I thought we'd spend enough time.

01:22:29 ◼   ► But every time I talk about controller stuff,

01:22:31 ◼   ► the Wii U Pro Controller people keep coming out and saying,

01:22:34 ◼   ► "What's wrong with the Wii U Pro Controller?

01:22:36 ◼   ► Why do you keep saying bad things

01:22:37 ◼   ► about the Wii U Pro Controller?"

01:22:38 ◼   ► And I how many times have I talked about what I don't like about it like you two have heard it before right?

01:22:42 ◼   ► Mmm. I'm sure I have but I don't remember which now I'm giving you giving you the excuse to tell me more

01:22:48 ◼   ► Remember because I say it and immediately I put links in the chat room so people can look at them

01:22:53 ◼   ► The Wii U Pro controller and the game you control it

01:22:56 ◼   ► I guess the Wii U Pro controller if you looked at it in your hand you're like oh like like any Nintendo peripheral they make

01:23:02 ◼   ► solid hardware in that like

01:23:04 ◼   ► I'm not gonna say it's indestructible, but it's pretty darn tough like it feels like a solid thing you can abuse it

01:23:11 ◼   ► It does not fall apart in general Nintendo is really good at making solid hardware

01:23:16 ◼   ► So this feels like a solid product, but the problems with our the same

01:23:19 ◼   ► I mean if you listen to my hypercritical

01:23:21 ◼   ► I know we talked about this is I'd like we linked the hypercritical episodes a couple times to hypercritical episodes where I talked about

01:23:26 ◼   ► video game controllers

01:23:29 ◼   ► the main problem with the Wii U pro controller is that the

01:23:34 ◼   ► The right thumb stick is the place where the button should be sort of the primary control location. Oh, yes. Yes

01:23:40 ◼   ► You have talked about this

01:23:41 ◼   ► Yeah

01:23:41 ◼   ► And so they're just in reverse now if you if you use two stick shooters

01:23:44 ◼   ► Maybe but even then I I like the octagonal surrounds for the sticks and they have round surrounds

01:23:49 ◼   ► I don't like having uniform buttons that are all the same size laid out in a diamond pattern

01:23:53 ◼   ► Because not every button is equally important and games most have a main button in a secondary button tertiary buttons

01:23:59 ◼   ► And it doesn't feel as comfortable so like it's in almost every way the controller can can be inferior to the GameCube controller

01:24:07 ◼   ► it is except the d-pad which is much better and the triggers are probably better - and

01:24:10 ◼   ► The build quality is maybe a little bit

01:24:13 ◼   ► It looks a little bit higher end because of the glossy finish on top or whatever and of course

01:24:17 ◼   ► It's wireless and USB chargeable and all that modern technology type stuff, but

01:24:20 ◼   ► No, that's why I don't like the Wii U Pro controller. That's why nobody likes the Wii U Pro controller

01:24:24 ◼   ► That's right. Nobody in the entire universe what I'm saying is there's not a single person in the world

01:24:28 ◼   ► Oh, yeah likes the Wii U Pro controller. Even its designer doesn't like it. That's right

01:24:32 ◼   ► And the mother of the designer doesn't like it. Email John, please email John. I said every time I say that I don't like it

01:24:38 ◼   ► It's like wait a second. Are you saying that nobody likes that controller? I like it. I had the pony

01:24:42 ◼   ► You know that you got that reference case? No. Nope. That's okay. I

01:24:46 ◼   ► Got a I got a silver game cue controller. I forgot if I told you that I saw that

01:24:50 ◼   ► I think you tweeted a picture of it mint in box. Well, it's in box

01:24:54 ◼   ► anyway the box is not mint but anyway point is hasn't been opened hmm how much

01:24:59 ◼   ► does that cost you not too much 200 bucks no I'm not paid $200 for it speaking of

01:25:06 ◼   ► things that cost $200 I ordered my phone what hey alright of course there's a

01:25:11 ◼   ► wait you know which what'd you get what'd you get the gold one yeah I got the

01:25:17 ◼   ► phone that everyone gets 64 black yep space gray please yeah right yeah are

01:25:23 ◼   ► - Are you gonna do a case?

01:25:25 ◼   ► - I already kept the case is already here.

01:25:26 ◼   ► The phone is not, but they can't see.

01:25:28 ◼   ► I got the black leather case.

01:25:30 ◼   ► - You have exactly my phone then,

01:25:31 ◼   ► or will have exactly my phone.

01:25:33 ◼   ► - And mine.

01:25:34 ◼   ► - I considered getting a red one,

01:25:35 ◼   ► but I just, I don't know, I couldn't do it.

01:25:37 ◼   ► - The case, the colored cases do not wear gracefully.

01:25:41 ◼   ► - I definitely love the case.

01:25:43 ◼   ► Like I definitely think you're making the right move

01:25:46 ◼   ► getting a case and I question whether you're making

01:25:48 ◼   ► the right move getting a six, but oh well.

01:25:50 ◼   ► - What, instead of a six plus?

01:25:52 ◼   ► - Instead of a five S.

01:25:53 ◼   ► - Oh no, come on.

01:25:55 ◼   ► You think I'm gonna finally buy an iPhone

01:25:58 ◼   ► after like six years,

01:25:59 ◼   ► then I'm gonna buy a generation old one?

01:26:01 ◼   ► Not gonna happen.

01:26:02 ◼   ► I had one for a week, I know what I'm getting into.

01:26:04 ◼   ► It's not like I'm gonna be surprised.

01:26:05 ◼   ► - All right, that's fair.

01:26:07 ◼   ► - So Marco, if you were to buy a new phone tomorrow,

01:26:10 ◼   ► the 6S is out and you can get it in four

01:26:14 ◼   ► or four point whatever inches, seven?

01:26:16 ◼   ► - Seven, yeah.

01:26:17 ◼   ► - What are you buying?

01:26:19 ◼   ► - That would, so does the smaller one

01:26:21 ◼   ► have the same camera as the bigger one?

01:26:23 ◼   ► - Sure, it's identical in every way,

01:26:25 ◼   ► except that it's physically smaller.

01:26:28 ◼   ► - Battery life?

01:26:30 ◼   ► - We'll call it equivalent,

01:26:32 ◼   ► because the screen is so much smaller.

01:26:34 ◼   ► - I think I go smaller.

01:26:36 ◼   ► - The thing of it is is that I still

01:26:39 ◼   ► just drastically prefer the feel in the hand of the 5S,

01:26:43 ◼   ► but golly, I am getting used to the new screen

01:26:46 ◼   ► and I am liking it.

01:26:48 ◼   ► - Oh, I like it when I'm using it,

01:26:50 ◼   ► unless I'm using it one-handed,

01:26:51 ◼   ► like while walking around doing something.

01:26:53 ◼   ► And unfortunately, that's a pretty major role of a phone

01:26:55 ◼   ► for most people.

01:26:57 ◼   ► So I just really, it's like getting a 17 inch MacBook Air

01:27:01 ◼   ► or MacBook Pro.

01:27:02 ◼   ► It's like, it seems like a good idea

01:27:05 ◼   ► if you park it at a desk most of the time

01:27:07 ◼   ► and don't bring it with you most of the time.

01:27:08 ◼   ► But if you're carrying it with you back and forth to work

01:27:11 ◼   ► in a backpack every single day,

01:27:13 ◼   ► you might regret that decision.

01:27:14 ◼   ► That might not be the best choice for you.

01:27:17 ◼   ► With a phone, it's like you have to consider

01:27:18 ◼   ► how it's actually used.

01:27:19 ◼   ► And yes, a bigger screen is nicer while it's being used.

01:27:23 ◼   ► Like in two-handed, you know, it's stationary.

01:27:26 ◼   ► It is indeed nicer.

01:27:28 ◼   ► But is it worth the trade-off in portability

01:27:31 ◼   ► in the sense that it makes it harder to use while portable

01:27:34 ◼   ► for a lot of people?

01:27:35 ◼   ► And obviously that's an individual decision.

01:27:39 ◼   ► For people who are going back to the 5S

01:27:41 ◼   ► or who are still using the 5S and not upgrading,

01:27:44 ◼   ► I totally get that decision.

01:27:45 ◼   ► I totally respect that decision.

01:27:46 ◼   ► And I've almost made that decision.

01:27:48 ◼   ► I think I will ultimately stick with the 6,

01:27:50 ◼   ► but I've come very close to going back to the 5S

01:27:54 ◼   ► because every time I pick it up,

01:27:56 ◼   ► I think not only does it look way better,

01:27:57 ◼   ► but it just feels so much better to use.

01:28:00 ◼   ► And yes, it does look tiny,

01:28:01 ◼   ► but everything I do is a million times faster,

01:28:04 ◼   ► my grip is more secure, I can reach everything,

01:28:07 ◼   ► it's less frustrating,

01:28:08 ◼   ► 'cause the fact is, as I've said earlier,

01:28:10 ◼   ► iOS and iOS apps are still largely designed

01:28:15 ◼   ► with the assumption that you can always reach

01:28:16 ◼   ► all four corners.

01:28:17 ◼   ► So many important buttons are up on the upper corners

01:28:20 ◼   ► that are hard to reach on the 6.

01:28:21 ◼   ► And that, maybe over time that changes.

01:28:25 ◼   ► But we're not there yet, both in the OS and all the apps.

01:28:28 ◼   ► And it's gonna be a while.

01:28:30 ◼   ► So I think in the future this might be easier

01:28:32 ◼   ► to use a larger phone because like the software

01:28:34 ◼   ► will be more finger local in a lot of ways.

01:28:38 ◼   ► Like it will assume that you're only holding

01:28:41 ◼   ► the bottom two thirds of the phone.

01:28:43 ◼   ► But until that point, and that point is not here yet,

01:28:46 ◼   ► And again, when the watch comes,

01:28:50 ◼   ► and when your phone is less often needed

01:28:53 ◼   ► to be used one-handed,

01:28:55 ◼   ► if you can do certain things on the watch

01:28:56 ◼   ► that you'd previously take your phone

01:28:59 ◼   ► out of your pocket to do while walking somewhere,

01:29:01 ◼   ► while doing something, then again, that will also help.

01:29:04 ◼   ► But we're not there yet either.

01:29:06 ◼   ► So I think for this year, it makes sense

01:29:08 ◼   ► for a lot of people who are sensitive to this

01:29:11 ◼   ► to not upgrade it to the 6.

01:29:12 ◼   ► And then maybe next year, we'll see what happens.

01:29:14 ◼   ► As the environment around it changes,

01:29:16 ◼   ► as we get the watch,

01:29:17 ◼   ► as we get different software considerations,

01:29:20 ◼   ► we'll see what happens.

01:29:21 ◼   ► But as of today, I think it's a tough call.

01:29:24 ◼   ► - Well, consider the rumored mix of 6 and 6 Plus.

01:29:28 ◼   ► I don't know if this is rumored or announced,

01:29:29 ◼   ► but I've seen numbers thrown around

01:29:31 ◼   ► that make the mix of 6 and 6 Plus look way closer to 50/50

01:29:35 ◼   ► than I ever thought it would be.

01:29:37 ◼   ► Do you know any sources of authoritative numbers

01:29:39 ◼   ► or have heard similar rumors?

01:29:41 ◼   ► - I haven't seen anybody with any credibility.

01:29:43 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't forget where I saw it.

01:29:45 ◼   ► I mean, I'm assuming I saw it from like maybe a Simco

01:29:48 ◼   ► or maybe some related thing.

01:29:49 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:29:49 ◼   ► I don't know if they'll ever tell us the mix,

01:29:51 ◼   ► but what I can pretty confidently say

01:29:56 ◼   ► is that I think we would have heard a story

01:29:57 ◼   ► if it turned out that the 5S was like selling massively.

01:30:01 ◼   ► You know, like the people weren't getting the 6

01:30:03 ◼   ► that all the hardcore people were buying 5S's

01:30:05 ◼   ► and it was just a crazy, I mean,

01:30:07 ◼   ► and the thing against the 5S now is not so much

01:30:10 ◼   ► just that it's older and slower,

01:30:12 ◼   ► but also no Apple Pay, right?

01:30:14 ◼   ► No NFC.

01:30:15 ◼   ► And so if Apple does continue to make a smaller line,

01:30:18 ◼   ► which is still up for grabs,

01:30:19 ◼   ► what they do, if they gave it feature parity,

01:30:22 ◼   ► then it would be like the iPads were last year,

01:30:25 ◼   ► just pick the size.

01:30:25 ◼   ► And if you had three sizes to pick from,

01:30:27 ◼   ► they would have really covered

01:30:28 ◼   ► pretty much every base you can imagine.

01:30:31 ◼   ► - Well, and the Apple Pay, again,

01:30:32 ◼   ► that's another thing where you have to look and say,

01:30:34 ◼   ► well, Apple Pay just launched,

01:30:37 ◼   ► it is still not supported widely yet.

01:30:40 ◼   ► And in a year from now, then a lot of American places

01:30:44 ◼   ► will have replaced their terminals

01:30:45 ◼   ► with the new touchless terminals and everything,

01:30:47 ◼   ► so you'll have more of that.

01:30:48 ◼   ► I feel like over time,

01:30:51 ◼   ► the usefulness of the larger phones will grow,

01:30:54 ◼   ► but today it's more of a tough call.

01:30:56 ◼   ► That also being said,

01:30:57 ◼   ► all of this is not to say they won't sell well

01:31:01 ◼   ► or that they aren't selling well.

01:31:02 ◼   ► It's just like the TV in the store bright picture problem.

01:31:06 ◼   ► People are going to buy these things in large numbers,

01:31:09 ◼   ► regardless of whether they're actually easy,

01:31:11 ◼   ► easy or better to use than the smaller ones.

01:31:14 ◼   ► - Well, don't you think this is pent up demand

01:31:15 ◼   ► for people who knew they wanted a bigger phone?

01:31:18 ◼   ► - Oh yeah.

01:31:18 ◼   ► - You know, like they knew,

01:31:19 ◼   ► like it wasn't like they were speculating,

01:31:21 ◼   ► they're like, I think I might like a bigger phone.