00:00:08 ◼ ► From Relay FM, this is Upgrade, Episode 240. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by
00:00:14 ◼ ► FreshBooks, ExpressVPN, and Moo. I am Jason Snell. Myke Hurley is on assignment, and so,
00:00:20 ◼ ► in order to replace Myke Hurley, I have gone to the, uh, one of my go-to guest hosts. It is
00:00:30 ◼ ► you know him from the Accidental Tech podcast and Hypercritical and Reconcilable Differences
00:00:35 ◼ ► and many other places and OS X Reviews. It's John Syracuse, so hello. You always forget Robot or
00:00:40 ◼ ► Not, and you know me from Robot or Not. You know him from Robot or Not, which is an excellent
00:00:44 ◼ ► podcast which is totally not like this podcast at all, because it's, uh, but it is different. It's
00:00:49 ◼ ► you and me. You know, I forget about Robot or Not because we record that in, like, a batch and then
00:00:53 ◼ ► release them. Um, I have to remind you we just like Netflix. You gotta do some bacon research
00:00:58 ◼ ► before our next session. We make all the shows and release them in a batch. Yeah, actually,
00:01:03 ◼ ► we don't. We don't. We don't. We don't. No, we could. We could release them in a binge,
00:01:07 ◼ ► and then, like, every year you get 20 episodes. That seems like a bet. I don't love the binge
00:01:13 ◼ ► thing on Netflix, but that would certainly be bad for podcasts, I think. Well, I don't approve it.
00:01:18 ◼ ► Anyway, nobody wants to hear about this. They want to hear about the Snell Talk question,
00:01:21 ◼ ► which I warned people that you were going to be on the show, and I asked that they could send
00:01:25 ◼ ► questions to them. You mean you told them so they would be excited? Um, yes, that's what I meant by
00:01:30 ◼ ► warning. It was a positive. It was the most positive kind of warning. The positive warning
00:01:34 ◼ ► of, uh, "Greetings! Congratulations and felicitations! John Siracusa will be on upgrade!"
00:01:41 ◼ ► And listener Fuzan wrote in to say, "Is there a particular shape of pasta that is most pleasing
00:01:48 ◼ ► to me?" And I wanted to ask, before we turn the spotlight on me for #SnellTalk, I wanted to
00:01:54 ◼ ► do some #SyracusaTalk. Do you have a particular shape of pasta that you find most pleasing?
00:01:59 ◼ ► I could swear we did this question on the Just Mentioned Roboto Not Podcast, but I'll trust you
00:02:04 ◼ ► if you tell me if we haven't. Oh, I remember nothing of that podcast. Yeah, me neither. I
00:02:10 ◼ ► was thinking, "How many answered this before?" I mean, we've done pasta questions, but I'm not
00:02:13 ◼ ► sure if I've asked you specifically for, like, a favorite shape. This could be, yeah, pasta-shaped
00:02:17 ◼ ► déjà vu or something. My answer is, as it always is when I get asked this question, is it's like
00:02:23 ◼ ► trying to choose your favorite child. There's no favorite. There are lots of ones that I like,
00:02:27 ◼ ► and I'm in the mood for a particular one. It's like music. Like, you might have a favorite band,
00:02:31 ◼ ► but it's very hard to come up with a favorite song. Like, it depends on what you're in the
00:02:33 ◼ ► mood for at the time. So I have strong opinions about what pasta shape I wanted, what particular
00:02:40 ◼ ► time, and I have opinions on which pasta shapes go best with which kinds of dishes, for sure,
00:02:45 ◼ ► but none of them are my favorite. They're all situational. All right. All right, do you have,
00:02:50 ◼ ► like, can you give me an example of a situational preference? Sure. So you've got a really kind of
00:02:56 ◼ ► heavy sauce. Maybe it's like a sauce with, like, ground up meat in it or something. You want
00:03:00 ◼ ► something that's going to stand up to that, like a rigatoni. Big beefy tube that can stand up to
00:03:05 ◼ ► a very heavy sauce. You wouldn't put that in, like, angel hair because it would just overwhelm it.
00:03:09 ◼ ► Similarly, if you have a kind of light sauce, maybe just olive oil and garlic or something like
00:03:13 ◼ ► that, and you want a lighter pasta, I wouldn't do, like, a really thick spaghetti or any kind
00:03:18 ◼ ► of big tube pasta. I'd go with regular spaghetti on that or even thin spaghetti on that. So it's
00:03:22 ◼ ► kind of like wine pairing, but really you want the pasta, the robustness of the pasta shape to match
00:03:28 ◼ ► the sauce or whatever other thing you're putting on it. The right tool for the right job. Yeah,
00:03:32 ◼ ► and I have favorites. Like, my staples are probably ziti rigatoni, irregular spaghetti,
00:03:40 ◼ ► thin spaghetti, I mean, gemelli, penne. Those are usually at all times. Right now I have every
00:03:48 ◼ ► single one of those in my cabinet. There are probably some other esoteric ones that are in
00:03:51 ◼ ► there for special dishes, but those are the staples. So we haven't done a pasta episode
00:03:56 ◼ ► of "Robot or Not," but we did a gnocchi episode. So, you know, maybe we covered that as part of the
00:04:02 ◼ ► greater pasta existentialism of the gnocchi episode of "Robot or Not." I don't know. Maybe.
00:04:07 ◼ ► Yeah, and the pasta shape's like, I have lots of recipes for pasta, as you might imagine,
00:04:13 ◼ ► and the recipes are shape-specific. So in any particular recipe, you can't substitute one shape
00:04:18 ◼ ► for another. It would be like substituting a different meat for another meat. It becomes
00:04:23 ◼ ► an entirely different dish. You know, I hate it when people say that they've got macaroni
00:04:27 ◼ ► and cheese and then you get it and it's not macaroni. Like, just say that. Just say that
00:04:31 ◼ ► it's not macaroni, but don't tell me it's macaroni. Macaroni is a kind of pasta. If you
00:04:35 ◼ ► give me macaroni and cheese and then it's some other pasta and cheese, it's not macaroni and
00:04:39 ◼ ► cheese at that point. But I'm having spaghetti and meatballs and it's not spaghetti. It's like,
00:04:46 ◼ ► for reasons that I'm about to explain, my family had a dish that was with—I forget what it was.
00:05:08 ◼ ► And this is not what Fu Zhan asked, but I hate penne. And I said to Lauren, I was like,
00:05:14 ◼ ► "Oh, that's not my favorite." She's like, "Really?" It's like not something she knew about me because
00:05:18 ◼ ► apparently I've swallowed my dislike for penne over the years. But it all came out, John. It all
00:05:22 ◼ ► was under stress. It all came out. What don't you like about it? I don't know. I don't like
00:05:26 ◼ ► how it goes on the fork and I don't like the tube part because I just feel like that's a...
00:05:31 ◼ ► Do you like any tube pasta? I don't think I do like any tube pasta, honestly. I don't like...
00:05:37 ◼ ► Not even ziti and a baked ziti? Yeah, well, okay, yes. All right. Like ziti or cannelloni
00:05:45 ◼ ► Okay. Well, then maybe I don't like it. I'll take a big tube pasta. Anyway, what I'm saying is that
00:05:51 ◼ ► jamelli, the little twisty pasta, is my favorite. I don't love the superfine spaghetti or angel hair.
00:05:57 ◼ ► I always like the thicker, more robust spaghetti. And jamelli is nice because it's the little...
00:06:02 ◼ ► It's the twisty guy, so it's a little bit thicker, but it's still... It's all on the outside. I don't
00:06:08 ◼ ► really want... I don't really like the pasta so much where there's also a little cave that
00:06:18 ◼ ► I do. Are you surprised? Really? I suppose not. As long as you're not eating honey wheat pasta,
00:06:23 ◼ ► I'm sure it's okay. Yeah, that's true. I'm not. I save that for other things. So speaking of pasta,
00:06:27 ◼ ► I will mention here some personal news that I'm going through now. The reason that I got
00:06:32 ◼ ► served a special sort of pasta is that I have been delightfully diagnosed as being gluten sensitive,
00:06:42 ◼ ► and I have to go on a gluten-free diet, which means I am now rethinking all aspects of my life
00:06:50 ◼ ► up to this point. I put a link in our show notes to the Kubler-Ross model of the stages of grief,
00:06:56 ◼ ► because last week I went through all of them. I have reached acceptance now where I've bought
00:07:00 ◼ ► a few gluten-free cookbooks, and I'm trying to figure out how to make gluten-free pizza dough
00:07:05 ◼ ► and things like that. Oh my goodness. Because, yeah, it's really bad, Jon. It's really bad.
00:07:10 ◼ ► As a part of this process, they're like, "Now, before we stick an instrument down... We sedate
00:07:17 ◼ ► you and stick an instrument down your throat into your stomach and then through into your
00:07:20 ◼ ► small intestine to see if you have the signs of celiac, of gluten insensitivity. We need you to
00:07:28 ◼ ► be sure and eat a wheat product like a piece of toast, wheat toast, whole wheat toast every day."
00:07:33 ◼ ► And I just laughed. I was like, "Guys, it's not going to be a problem. I eat so much wheat,
00:07:39 ◼ ► it is not even going to be... There is no effort required here." I had a piece of toast in the car
00:07:43 ◼ ► right over here. Yeah, I mean, seriously. I got a piece of bread in my pocket right now. I could
00:07:48 ◼ ► just eat right now. It's not going to be a problem. But anyway, so... And I realize we're touching the
00:07:53 ◼ ► third rail by even mentioning people's diets because you guys have gone on that third rail
00:07:58 ◼ ► the last couple of weeks on ATP with all of Marco's stories of 100% plant-based diets and
00:08:04 ◼ ► keto diets and things like that. So, yes, I'm not looking for any advice. I'm not looking for
00:08:11 ◼ ► any favorite recipes. Later on in this process, I might put out a request for that. But right now,
00:08:18 ◼ ► I'm just kind of processing and trying to figure out what products are available in my local store
00:08:22 ◼ ► so that I can continue to eat things that are, in some cases, a sad simulacrum of the actual thing
00:08:31 ◼ ► that I want to eat. Rice pasta, in my opinion, is not worth having. Just don't even try it.
00:08:35 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, if I can get some pasta that is decent, then so be it. But
00:08:40 ◼ ► I'm willing to forgo... There's some stuff that I'm willing to forgo, other stuff not... I think
00:08:45 ◼ ► right now the goal is, can we come up with ways for me to eat dinner with my family without me
00:08:49 ◼ ► having a completely different dinner than everybody else in the family? And that would be like,
00:08:53 ◼ ► can I make some... Yeah, an alternate pizza dough, an alternate pasta that I could mix in there.
00:08:58 ◼ ► But I'm generally with you, speaking of the ATP stuff, in that I appreciate you being the voice
00:09:04 ◼ ► of moderation there, saying perhaps instead of going on the all-plant diet or the all-meat-and-butter-fat
00:09:10 ◼ ► diet that you kind of have a balance and eat your vegetables and do some exercise and otherwise just
00:09:16 ◼ ► kind of do things in moderation. I think one of the things that's always bothered me, and I've
00:09:20 ◼ ► seen people in my own family do this with diets, is you end up going whole on into something where
00:09:27 ◼ ► it's like, "Nope, it's just going to be this one thing, and I'm not going to eat everything else."
00:09:30 ◼ ► And I don't know, that never seems to be a good idea, and it never seems to work out well. I agree.
00:09:37 ◼ ► He says as he cuts all gluten from his diet. Yeah, well, that's doctor's orders. I'm not doing that
00:09:42 ◼ ► because... What do doctors know? It's like a Star Trek, they're just going to give you a salad.
00:09:47 ◼ ► What do doctors know? Yeah, salad and some little foam cubes. Those are future croutons,
00:09:53 ◼ ► the foam cubes. So let's move on. Thank you to Fu Zhan for the Snell Talk question. Let's move on
00:09:58 ◼ ► to Upstream, where we talk about media things, that little area that Myke and I have carved out
00:10:15 ◼ ► customers. And I want to get a TiVo update from you, and I wanted to give you my TiVo update.
00:10:22 ◼ ► So my TiVo update is, still using it, very glad I have my TiVo. I feel like it has become the
00:10:32 ◼ ► secondary input now, because there's so much that we watch that is on streaming. And I don't use the
00:10:38 ◼ ► TiVo interface for streaming, because those apps are not very good, and they're super slow.
00:10:42 ◼ ► And they did a sale not too long ago, where they were selling their 4K model, which doesn't actually
00:10:50 ◼ ► do 4K like cable, but it does 4K video streaming. And I thought about switching to it, but then I
00:10:57 ◼ ► thought about how they've got those awful kind of cheap web interfaces for their streaming apps,
00:11:05 ◼ ► and I just decided I would really rather just save TiVo as my TV channel's device, and everything else
00:11:11 ◼ ► I'm just going to watch on Apple TV. But I'm starting to get the feeling like I can actually
00:11:15 ◼ ► see it coming now, where I'm going to eventually abandon the TiVo and go to an over-the-top
00:11:20 ◼ ► service with a Cloud DVR instead, and just have it be on one box. But I'm not there yet, because
00:11:25 ◼ ► my TiVo works great, and I think in the end I wouldn't be saving any money by switching to an
00:11:32 ◼ ► over-the-top service. I'm going to be spending probably more money if I do something like that.
00:11:35 ◼ ► So we've got three TiVos running right now. I've got my good TiVo, which was the last best flat
00:11:41 ◼ ► one. You know, the TiVo that was rectilinear. That's the Romeo, right? That's what I've got
00:11:46 ◼ ► before they bent the TiVo mold, and they can only make bent TiVos now. Yep, the fanciest Romeo with
00:11:52 ◼ ► the most disk space. Me too. That's what I have. And I love it, and it continues to do what it
00:11:57 ◼ ► does, but I have been using it less just because so much of my stuff comes from the UMTeen streaming
00:12:01 ◼ ► services. And it manifests mostly in how much free space is there on my TiVo. It used to be
00:12:08 ◼ ► perpetually full, and now the free space is going up over time, so I think it's like at 70% now.
00:12:14 ◼ ► And when I watch something, there are so many streaming services that I watch stuff on. It's
00:12:19 ◼ ► like, it's time to watch something. And in general, I don't keep track of where I'm watching them.
00:12:23 ◼ ► I have one thing that keeps track of all the shows that I'm watching, but once I figure out the show
00:12:28 ◼ ► that I'm watching, I have to remember where it is. Is that one on Hulu? Is that one on Netflix? Is
00:12:32 ◼ ► that one on Amazon Prime? And the fourth or fifth choice is that one on TiVo, which means that it's
00:12:38 ◼ ► not on any of the services. It's on some premium channel like HBO or Showtime, or it's on network
00:12:43 ◼ ► television or whatever. And also, it's a currently running show or an AMC or something.
00:12:49 ◼ ► Like Walking Dead or whatever. There are shows that were on television that I could have caught
00:12:54 ◼ ► on my TiVo, but I didn't, and now they're on Hulu, for example, or some other service, right? So it's
00:12:59 ◼ ► very confusing where they are, but the bottom line is my watching is fairly evenly spread around all
00:13:05 ◼ ► my services, which means that TiVo, which used to be the vast majority of my shows, is now one-fifth,
00:13:09 ◼ ► just like every other service is one-fifth or whatever. And I'm fine with that. The interesting
00:13:15 ◼ ► thing is I spend a lot of time these days, like I'm going to watch a show right before I go to bed
00:13:21 ◼ ► or finish a show before I go to bed that I started earlier. There are shows that I don't care that
00:13:26 ◼ ► much about, like The Magicians or something. Like I'm into it, but I'll watch it, but it's not
00:13:29 ◼ ► appointment viewing, right? So very often I'll have the end of a Magicians episode to watch,
00:13:35 ◼ ► and I will watch it on my iPad in my bed from my TiVo. The TiVo recorded it because it's a show
00:13:42 ◼ ► that's running right now, and I'm caught up, so when the episodes go, it will be on my TiVo,
00:13:46 ◼ ► and I'll watch it in the TiVo app, which is strange because it's like, I'm using my TiVo,
00:13:50 ◼ ► but even when I'm using my TiVo, I'm not using my TiVo. Like I'm not using the TiVo remote in front
00:13:54 ◼ ► of the television, even though I'm in the same house and I'm just in a different room. Anyway,
00:13:59 ◼ ► so that's the state of my TiVo. I have three of them. So I've got that good one. I've got a bent
00:14:03 ◼ ► one, the fanciest bent one that they had, and the bent ones are terrible, and they have fans that
00:14:07 ◼ ► make noise, and they use laptop hard drives, and I don't like them, and they're stupid that they're
00:14:10 ◼ ► bent. And then underneath that, I have the whatever the fanciest TiVo you could get before the
00:14:16 ◼ ► Romeos was. I think it's like the TiVo Premier HD Pro whatever blah blah blah. Also a flat box,
00:14:23 ◼ ► it was better looking than the Romeo 2, but slow as balls. It's just very slow. The Romeos were a
00:14:29 ◼ ► huge improvement in speed. That's in the bedroom. That used to be, like, it was like the bedroom TiVo.
00:14:35 ◼ ► The bedroom always got like the hand-me-down TiVo, right? When I got the bent one, I got it because
00:14:40 ◼ ► the hand-me-down bedroom TiVo was just so slow, and we knew what the faster ones felt like, but
00:14:46 ◼ ► by the time I decided to get a replacement for the slow one, the only ones you could get were the bent
00:14:50 ◼ ► ones. So I got one of the bent ones and put it upstairs, and because of my TiVo remote situation,
00:14:56 ◼ ► I didn't have enough spare remotes, and they took away the one-two switch in the remotes. Do you
00:15:01 ◼ ► remember that? The little switch in the remotes that toggle between one and two? So you could
00:15:06 ◼ ► have two TiVos and switch it like through some Confluence events I ended up without the right
00:15:10 ◼ ► combination of remotes in my house to be able to have one remote for the bent TiVo and one remote
00:15:14 ◼ ► for the flat one, and instead I had one remote that both TiVos responded to, so I had to put a
00:15:20 ◼ ► big piece of tinfoil in front of the IR receiver on the non-bent TiVo, which is fine because the
00:15:28 ◼ ► non-bent TiVo wasn't even hooked up to the television anymore. The bent one was hooked up
00:15:32 ◼ ► to it, and if you wanted to watch something, the idea was that we would copy all the shows off of
00:15:36 ◼ ► the non-bent TiVo onto the bent one, and then we would just retire the non-bent one. And if you've
00:15:41 ◼ ► ever done that, transferred shows from one TiVo to another, you know it takes an eternity for some
00:15:44 ◼ ► unknown reason. So we were trying to do that, and then eventually we hit roadblocks where certain
00:15:48 ◼ ► shows you weren't allowed to copy them off TiVo because copyright, some garbage, whatever,
00:15:52 ◼ ► and so both of them just stayed there permanently. And so if you wanted to watch something off the
00:15:56 ◼ ► non-bent one, you would go to the bent TiVo, and there you could see the non-bent one on the
00:16:00 ◼ ► network, and you'd watch the shows remotely from that, and it was stupid. So that's to explain why
00:16:05 ◼ ► there were two TiVos, one of which had tinfoil in front of it hooked up to the bedroom television
00:16:08 ◼ ► for the past two years or whatever. But recently my bent one, the hard drive, died in it,
00:16:13 ◼ ► you know, basically confirming my suspicions that laptop hard drives are garbage, and it was much
00:16:22 ◼ ► before the series 2? Just before the series 2? I don't remember. I bought the original,
00:16:29 ◼ ► I bought the series 1, the original one. That was my first TiVo. I don't know if I had the,
00:16:36 ◼ ► which was much nicer looking. So yeah, I've had TiVos for years and years. And this is my first
00:16:41 ◼ ► hard drive to die, and it was one of the stupid bent ones in the bent box laptop thing. Luckily,
00:16:47 ◼ ► I wisely got the extended warranty because I didn't trust the stupid thing, so I got it replaced
00:16:52 ◼ ► under warranty, and they couldn't even replace it with the model because they don't make this
00:16:56 ◼ ► anymore. Mine was like a TiVo Bolt Plus, but since then the top line bent one has been rebranded TiVo
00:17:03 ◼ ► Vox, so that's what I have now. I have a TiVo Vox, but it doesn't matter because I didn't get the Vox
00:17:07 ◼ ► remote, so I can't talk to it. It's just, it's, anyway, I've got that now, and it came with the
00:17:14 ◼ ► new UI, which I thus far avoided. The new UI is garbage. Oh yeah, it's, yeah, they did a whole new
00:17:20 ◼ ► interface update that you could opt into if you've got an older box, and I actually asked on the
00:17:26 ◼ ► occasion of its one year anniversary, I asked Dave Zatz, who does ZatzNotFunny, and he's a,
00:17:32 ◼ ► you know, DVR guy and a TiVo guy, if it was any better than a year before when it was released,
00:17:39 ◼ ► and he said, "Oh no, it's terrible. I regret it every day. Don't update to it." So I have just
00:17:44 ◼ ► remained on the old TiVo interface, which quite frankly is like why I have a TiVo is because I
00:17:50 ◼ ► like that interface, and they've got this new interface that seems to prioritize all sorts of
00:17:54 ◼ ► ways of watching television that I do not participate in, so I have no interest in doing it.
00:18:00 ◼ ► Can you roll yours back? Can you like wipe the drive and revert? I don't think so. I don't think
00:18:05 ◼ ► I would do that. I mean, I warned my wife when I sent it away. I said, "You know there's a chance
00:18:09 ◼ ► that when they send this, it's going to have the new UI, and the new UI I heard is terrible." And
00:18:13 ◼ ► she's like, "We were all ready for it." And sure enough, it came, and we're just going to deal with
00:18:16 ◼ ► it, but she had a question. She's like, "Why would," after trying to use it for a couple of days,
00:18:20 ◼ ► she's like, "Why would they do this? Why would they, why would they make it like this?" Because
00:18:23 ◼ ► she wants to know. And it made me think about it more than just thinking about how garbage is.
00:18:27 ◼ ► And the best explanation I can come up with is the new UI has more places to show pictures of things,
00:18:35 ◼ ► and there's many reasons why that could be a decision they would make. One is it's more places
00:18:41 ◼ ► to sell promotional thing. I don't know if TiVo does this, but potentially, "Hey, do you want your
00:18:46 ◼ ► show advertised on TiVo? Pay us a little bit extra money. We'll make sure your show shows up in the
00:18:50 ◼ ► banner," or whatever. Two, it's for people who can't read. I don't know. People do like pictures.
00:18:56 ◼ ► They like pictures to be in the background. They like pictures to be in the photo. They like to
00:19:04 ◼ ► want this, because what we want to see is some way of organizing our shows and going through them,
00:19:09 ◼ ► and to be able to tell things about them. Setting aside the UI for a second, the main thing you want
00:19:15 ◼ ► to do is like, "The Magicians" is a show I record. How many episodes of "The Magicians" are on my TiVo?
00:19:21 ◼ ► Which ones have I watched or not watched? Which one's the newest one? Which one's the oldest one?
00:19:25 ◼ ► Like, you give me information about them. Show me the titles. Maybe show me the season and episode
00:19:29 ◼ ► number. Maybe show me the first words of a description. Like, I kind of think of the Gmail
00:19:39 ◼ ► and it shows you the subject line and the first few words of the message. It's very information
00:19:43 ◼ ► dense for a single line item. Very compact, right? Especially if you go to the actual compact mode.
00:19:48 ◼ ► TiVo's interface used to be like that. You could organize things and sort them in different ways,
00:19:51 ◼ ► but it was basically a list view. And they'd put as much information as they could on each
00:19:56 ◼ ► list view item. And because of the way they were sorted, and because of various graphical
00:19:59 ◼ ► elements like the little colored dots or the little tiny progress bar, you could see which
00:20:04 ◼ ► ones are old, which ones are new, which ones you had watched already, which ones were you halfway
00:20:08 ◼ ► through, maybe what the titles were, maybe the date they were recorded. Lots of information.
00:20:14 ◼ ► And however many could fit on the screen, and you could scroll to see more. The new interface is
00:20:19 ◼ ► like, how much information can be removed? So you go to the Magicians now, and it shows the same
00:20:24 ◼ ► stupid thumbnail, which gives you no information because it's a generic thing of just like "Elliot
00:20:33 ◼ ► episodes, no text associated with any of them. So you're like, "What episode is this? What order
00:20:39 ◼ ► are they in?" And it scrolls horizontally instead of vertically. I was like, "Do I have to go into
00:20:45 ◼ ► the episode for it to tell me the title or the date or the season or the episode number?"
00:20:50 ◼ ► It's almost useless. It makes no sense to me at all. Show me all the episodes of the Magicians
00:20:56 ◼ ► that I have so I can pick the one that I want to watch. And they try to highlight something where
00:21:01 ◼ ► you can just start playing immediately, but I'm like, "Is that the one that I want to play?
00:21:04 ◼ ► Or is that the newest? Or is that the oldest?" And whenever I try to guess, it seems it is sorted
00:21:08 ◼ ► it the opposite way. And this is setting aside the whole change to the UI. The old model,
00:21:13 ◼ ► as rudimentary as it was, made sense with a four-way, with a five-way thing, four directions
00:21:18 ◼ ► and a select. It was go to the right to go into it, go to the left to go to the left to go out of
00:21:23 ◼ ► it, and press the select button to select the item you have selected, and up and down arrows to go up
00:21:28 ◼ ► and down. It was north, south, east, west. It made perfect sense. You could do the entire UI. It was
00:21:34 ◼ ► like the old iOS, where it's like you hit an item and you go to the right and you hit the back button
00:21:38 ◼ ► and you go to the left, only it was even simpler than that because there was no back button.
00:21:41 ◼ ► Then they got rid of that model. Now you enter a menu, and the only way to get out of it is to hit
00:21:44 ◼ ► the actual dedicated back button. The left button usually does nothing. I'm very angry about the new
00:21:51 ◼ ► UI. I can tell. I don't know what I'm going to do when I have no choice but to get that UI. I just
00:21:56 ◼ ► hope they get a clue and restore list view everywhere, at least. Well, I just feel like
00:22:05 ◼ ► that moment is coming where I'm going to finally give up on TiVo, but it hasn't happened yet.
00:22:09 ◼ ► Yeah, I'm getting close. I don't even have any 4K TVs in the house, so the 4K revolution is going
00:22:16 ◼ ► Yeah. I want to ask you about some news because I think you might have an opinion about this.
00:22:30 ◼ ► recorded this that they are going to series with eight episodes of an adaptation of Lisey's Story,
00:22:42 ◼ ► and Stephen King is not only producing but writing all eight episodes of this TV series. Now you are
00:22:49 ◼ ► a huge Stephen King fan. What do you think about this deal? I'm a very big Stephen King fan. I read
00:22:56 ◼ ► everything he wrote up until several years ago when I just fell off the reading bandwagon almost
00:23:01 ◼ ► entirely. So I looked at this and I'm like, "Is this one of the ones that came out after I stopped
00:23:10 ◼ ► Nope, I totally read this. I read this when it came out, and I remember it pretty well.
00:23:16 ◼ ► And of all the things for Apple to adapt, I would not have picked this because it's very weird and
00:23:20 ◼ ► not particularly family-friendly at all. But I have good feelings about the book. That said,
00:23:28 ◼ ► Stephen King adaptations for movies and televisions just seem to be a problem that we as a species
00:23:37 ◼ ► cannot yet crack. There are good ones in there, here and there, but the batting average is really
00:23:44 ◼ ► low. And having Stephen King be a writer for it I don't think helps. I'm not sure he knows how to
00:23:50 ◼ ► write television. I don't think he knows what good television is. I don't agree with his taste in
00:23:56 ◼ ► television. I love his books and I love his writing and it's all great. But when it comes
00:24:01 ◼ ► to movies and television, I mean, a book no further than his general hatred for the Stanley
00:24:06 ◼ ► Kubrick movie, which is barely an adaptation of his book, but unquestionably a good and effective
00:24:11 ◼ ► movie. But Stephen King hates it and it doesn't make any friggin' sense. So that said, because I
00:24:18 ◼ ► like this book and now remember it, and because I like Stephen King, I will undoubtedly watch this,
00:24:24 ◼ ► but my hopes are very low. Did you like Castle Rock? I did, surprisingly. I mean, it's uneven
00:24:32 ◼ ► and it's barely based on anything having to do with Stephen King, lots of references and the
00:24:37 ◼ ► setting picture, whatever, but it's kind of like, well, it's not the same as Black Mirror, but Black
00:24:42 ◼ ► Mirror, a show I generally dislike, I still feel good about just because that one good episode.
00:24:46 ◼ ► How can one good episode make up for like five seasons of shows that I mostly didn't like? It
00:24:50 ◼ ► just does. I feel like the one good episode, it's worth all the time I invested to get that one good
00:24:55 ◼ ► episode, and we've talked about that before. Similarly, Castle Rock, which I watched all of,
00:25:01 ◼ ► I feel like was worth my time because of that one good episode. I think it was episode seven
00:25:06 ◼ ► or something, which I thought was batting way above, like it was punching way above its weight.
00:25:10 ◼ ► The rest of the show was like, "Nah, hmm, okay, Stephen King, it's kind of weird, yeah, I get it,
00:25:14 ◼ ► where are you going, whatever, kind of silly, blah, blah, blah," and then this amazing episode,
00:25:18 ◼ ► and then back to its old self. Yeah, I'm not sure I've seen any evidence that Stephen King is
00:25:23 ◼ ► actually good at writing screenplays. Yeah, or television shows, or again, if I follow him on
00:25:28 ◼ ► Twitter and he says which shows he likes, I'm not sure he has his taste in shows matches mine. Like
00:25:33 ◼ ► shows he likes, I don't like. Yeah, so interesting idea, but I just kind of found it hard to believe
00:25:41 ◼ ► that you and I were going to be talking about Upstream, and this was announced. Even with his
00:25:46 ◼ ► novels, I think he benefits greatly from the editors he works with, which is not to say that
00:25:52 ◼ ► he's a bad writer or anything, but I feel like I remember that from on writing. That's one of
00:25:56 ◼ ► the things that stuck with me about that book is when he shows his drafts and the editing process,
00:26:01 ◼ ► whether it's him editing it or his actual editor at his publisher helping edit, it really elevates
00:26:06 ◼ ► the raw material that he puts out. So if he has good editorial help and good directorial help,
00:26:15 ◼ ► I think he can do an okay job. But my main fear is that the things he thinks are most important
00:26:22 ◼ ► about the novel are not the things that I liked best about the novel, and so he will be sure to
00:26:26 ◼ ► put in the things that he thinks are important from the novel, and they'll be in there and he'll
00:26:31 ◼ ► be super satisfied that if I gave this to anyone else, they would never put this stuff in, but
00:26:34 ◼ ► it's the most important thing in the novel, and I will disagree with that opinion and it'll end
00:26:38 ◼ ► up being weird. Anyway, I'll definitely watch it. Sure, so that's an Apple deal. JJ Abrams apparently
00:26:44 ◼ ► is finishing out his deal with Warner, which is going to produce this show, and is apparently being
00:26:53 ◼ ► sort of wooed for another big producer deal, because those are all the rage, a big name
00:26:58 ◼ ► producer. And JJ Abrams, I have to say, has been incredibly productive as a producer. I guess that's
00:27:03 ◼ ► their job is to be productive. But if you think about not just the stuff that he's written,
00:27:07 ◼ ► but the stuff that he's produced and that his production company has made, there are all sorts
00:27:12 ◼ ► of them, including things that you would never even identify as being a product of JJ Abrams at
00:27:18 ◼ ► all. I think Westworld is technically a JJ Abrams production. And so he's got a deal that's lapsing
00:27:26 ◼ ► with Warner, and there's a question about Warner and JJ Abrams, are they going to make another deal
00:27:31 ◼ ► to have him stay at Warner now that they've got their new owners? And I see it intimated
00:27:38 ◼ ► here and there about Apple potentially making a move for him, and that kind of fascinates me
00:27:45 ◼ ► only because not only do I think that JJ Abrams actually might be a good fit for Apple, I'm not
00:27:51 ◼ ► sure Apple wants to pay him what he's going to ask, but maybe they've got cash laying around,
00:27:57 ◼ ► they could do it. But also I know that JJ Abrams has a basically lifelong love of Apple. He's a
00:28:03 ◼ ► Mac user from back in the olden days. The opening credit sequence of his TV show Alias was made by
00:28:10 ◼ ► JJ Abrams on his Mac. JJ Abrams goes back a long way with Apple. And I wonder sometimes if we are
00:28:16 ◼ ► a few months out from some big super deal for TV between JJ Abrams and Apple, it wouldn't shock me
00:28:24 ◼ ► if that happened. As long as it wasn't an exclusive, I think he would go for it because I
00:28:27 ◼ ► think that he always wants to be able to make movies that will be released in cinemas, as they
00:28:35 ◼ ► say. Yeah, well, I think the TV deal and the movies are different potentially, right? Where
00:28:40 ◼ ► he's making movies over here and then he's doing his TV where Apple's got a first look or something
00:28:44 ◼ ► like that. But I don't know, JJ Abrams is the one name, if you would ask me, who's the one player in
00:28:51 ◼ ► Hollywood who's the most likely to be a good fit with Apple? He would be who I would say just
00:28:58 ◼ ► because I know his history with Apple. And it'll be interesting to see what he does. But anyway,
00:29:05 ◼ ► this is the third JJ Abrams produced show to be bought by Apple. Yeah, I'm sure you've talked
00:29:10 ◼ ► about this on your other podcast, Focus on this Topic, but I hate the idea of JJ Abrams or anyone
00:29:16 ◼ ► else being a good fit with Apple for making shows because I really don't like the idea of Apple
00:29:24 ◼ ► involving itself in the creative process. I know obviously they're putting up the money, of course,
00:29:28 ◼ ► they're going to be involved. I understand the realities of it, but I just don't have faith in
00:29:32 ◼ ► their taste when it comes to this. And the idea of Apple giving notes to JJ Abrams puts my teeth on
00:29:37 ◼ ► edge. I just don't want to think about it because I like almost everything that he does and I feel
00:29:41 ◼ ► like Apple has no notes to give him. Presumably it would be Zach Van Amburg and Jamie Ehrlich who
00:29:47 ◼ ► would give him notes if anybody. And presumably if they back up half a billion dollars into
00:29:51 ◼ ► JJ Abrams' front yard, then maybe he'll be okay with the occasional note or they will show so much
00:29:58 ◼ ► confidence in him that they won't be so worried about it. He spoke at WWDC, I feel like he's got
00:30:05 ◼ ► an existing relationship with Apple that serves, they have a connection there that maybe leads
00:30:14 ◼ ► somewhere else. I don't know. Yeah, and he's slightly more young in Hipton-Steven-Spielberg.
00:30:21 ◼ ► Sorry, Steve. There was literally in that sizzle reel they did for Apple TV+, there was that shot
00:30:28 ◼ ► of somebody in a World War II fighter plane and I thought, "Well, that's Amazing Stories." And it
00:30:37 ◼ ► All right, we have more, but first I will take a break and tell you about our first sponsor. It's
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00:32:02 ◼ ► FM. All right, Jon, 2019. When we last spoke on this podcast, it was late 2018. It is now 2019.
00:32:11 ◼ ► And I have, I want to talk about the Mac this year because it feels to me like 2019 is going to be
00:32:18 ◼ ► one of those years that we point to and say this was a momentous year for the Mac, both on the
00:32:25 ◼ ► hardware and the software side. I want to talk to you about that. But I want to start with Mac OS
00:32:32 ◼ ► because I think that's probably, I had to pick one and that's the one I chose. Like, I'm thinking
00:32:36 ◼ ► about WWDC and how, you know, how potentially the announcements there for the Mac are going to be
00:32:44 ◼ ► much bigger and have much greater ramifications than maybe a lot of people understand. Like,
00:32:49 ◼ ► this idea that they've already laid out there, that they laid out last summer, that a whole bunch
00:32:55 ◼ ► of iOS apps presumably are going to be coming over and running on the Mac this fall. Like,
00:33:00 ◼ ► I'm not sure people understand just how different that's going to be and how potentially weird that's
00:33:06 ◼ ► going to be. It's certainly not going to be what we're used to on the Mac. How do you think this
00:33:13 ◼ ► is going to go both in June and in September? Do you think it's going to be a huge change or do
00:33:19 ◼ ► you think it's going to be maybe less big than it has the potential? Because I keep thinking it's
00:33:26 ◼ ► going to be an enormous thing and people are going to not quite realize just how it's going to change
00:33:30 ◼ ► the whole texture of the Mac to have these iOS apps running on the Mac. Yeah, it's kind of,
00:33:35 ◼ ► it's one of those changes that I think people who are either developers or are plugged in at a more
00:33:40 ◼ ► technical level feel and see more strongly than users. So it's hard for me to say how it's going
00:33:46 ◼ ► to impact just your average Apple consumer in 2019. But like, was it back in June of 2018,
00:33:52 ◼ ► just around WDC? Our episode of ATP that we recorded about it was titled Extinction Level
00:33:59 ◼ ► Event, which was my estimation of what it means to introduce iOS applications that are written with
00:34:07 ◼ ► iOS APIs onto the Mac. Because it is not a strong ecosystem and UIKit is an incredibly powerful,
00:34:14 ◼ ► invasive species. And even though 2018 came and went, if you're a consumer, you're like,
00:34:18 ◼ ► "I got this weird news app that I never launched and like a stocks app, but I just ignore it."
00:34:22 ◼ ► It doesn't seem like a big deal, but June of 2018, we're like, "This is it." If they are serious
00:34:27 ◼ ► about this and they follow through on it and they don't do something fairly radical to ensure the
00:34:36 ◼ ► continued survival and primacy of AppKit on the Mac, say goodbye. UIKit is going to arrive and
00:34:43 ◼ ► eventually wipe out everything on the Mac for lots of reasons that we discussed last summer.
00:34:51 ◼ ► So this summer, we're getting closer to the general public realizing this is to your point,
00:34:55 ◼ ► they're going to give us whatever the real marzipan story is. Last year, it was just like,
00:34:58 ◼ ► "This is a tech experiment we're doing and we're going to ship it and we'll have more for you on
00:35:02 ◼ ► this in the future, blah, blah, blah. But for now, here's some apps." This year, WWC, they're going
00:35:07 ◼ ► to presumably say, "Remember that experiment? Here's the APIs that you developers can write
00:35:12 ◼ ► to and here's how you can import your iOS apps." They're going to have a name, they're going to have
00:35:16 ◼ ► a story, there's going to be a whole big thing to it. They could still choose to say, "And we've
00:35:22 ◼ ► merged into AppKit," or "AppKit is still the primary API and this is just reporting." There's
00:35:26 ◼ ► lots of things that Apple could still do to steer the ship in a different direction. But all signs
00:35:31 ◼ ► point to them saying, "Here's this great new way to make Mac applications." We still support and
00:35:36 ◼ ► love AppKit, yada, yada, but there are so many iOS developers who are suddenly going to be able to
00:35:43 ◼ ► take their existing apps and bring them to the Mac or write new apps with UIKit that are multi-platform
00:35:48 ◼ ► and they have the whole multi-platform story of how you can write a single application,
00:35:50 ◼ ► have it run on all the platforms and be able to merge the stores and it is a big change.
00:35:55 ◼ ► There's lots of times the big change is, "Oh, the big change from Carbon to Cocoa." But if you were
00:36:01 ◼ ► a Mac user, maybe you didn't notice that that much. Maybe you noticed a little bit, maybe the app
00:36:05 ◼ ► seemed a little different, maybe you heard TechNerds talking about it, but in general, it was like,
00:36:18 ◼ ► And they will also notice the app that they had on their phone, suddenly they have it on the Mac
00:36:24 ◼ ► and it looks and runs kind of the same. And I think it will generally be seen as a positive
00:36:29 ◼ ► change to almost everybody except perhaps old school Mac users who will eventually get used to
00:36:34 ◼ ► it because we get used to everything eventually. Yes, I loved it when you pointed out to Casey and
00:36:38 ◼ ► Marco that people who are upset that Apple seems to be changing have not been around long enough
00:36:55 ◼ ► generally you get over it. But I do agree, I was thinking, and Myke and I talked about this a little
00:37:00 ◼ ► bit, when we do the upgrade is every year, like struggling to come up with like best new Mac app
00:37:07 ◼ ► some years. And honestly, I would say that it's very rare that there's a new Mac app that is not
00:37:14 ◼ ► either a Mac equivalent of an iOS app, because you're not going to write a new Mac app and not
00:37:20 ◼ ► write an iOS app in most cases, or it's an app that takes advantage of very specific aspects
00:37:27 ◼ ► of the Mac, things you can do on the Mac that you can't do on iOS. And when I think of my favorite
00:37:32 ◼ ► Mac apps over the last few years, they're one of those or they're the other. And in the first case,
00:37:37 ◼ ► I think it's actually great for those developers, right? Because maybe not the ones who put all the
00:37:42 ◼ ► work in to make it work on the Mac, but for the next generation of those developers, because they
00:37:47 ◼ ► can come to the Mac without all that extra work. And for the other set, I don't think anything's
00:37:51 ◼ ► going to happen to them, because as long as they have access to the things that you can't do on
00:37:55 ◼ ► iOS, then they'll have a they'll have a role. But that's kind of I mean, there's not a lot like most
00:38:02 ◼ ► of the apps that I use on my Mac every day have been around for a very long time. And the few that
00:38:08 ◼ ► have that I that aren't like that are either electron apps like Slack, or they're, you know,
00:38:15 ◼ ► these unique kind of apps like Audio Hijack, or you know, some of the other rogue Amoeba stuff,
00:38:19 ◼ ► which does things with audio that iOS just doesn't let you do. So on that front, I think it's,
00:38:26 ◼ ► I think it's kind of okay. I do get a little concerned that we're going to either end up with
00:38:32 ◼ ► well, I'm not concerned if they redefine what Mac apps are supposed to look like to make it seem
00:38:39 ◼ ► to fit more with iOS, that'll be frustrating as a user to have a kind of like a redesign that makes
00:38:45 ◼ ► everything look more iOS, but I think I would rather have that than what we sort of have with
00:38:50 ◼ ► those four marzipan apps today in Mojave, which is apps behave a certain way, unless they don't,
00:38:57 ◼ ► which is not that's inconsistent and super weird, but it's kind of hard. I can't imagine. I mean,
00:39:05 ◼ ► marzipan may be, it's going to be better than what we have in Mojave for no doubt, but I kind of have
00:39:12 ◼ ► a hard time envisioning it coming all the way across to saying, oh, these apps are just
00:39:18 ◼ ► indistinguishable, like carbon and cocoa apps, indistinguishable from one another. They're almost
00:39:22 ◼ ► it's impossible to tell where it came from. I think it's far more likely that it'll be very clear
00:39:28 ◼ ► that these apps originated on iOS, and therefore the only solution for consistency in the interface
00:39:34 ◼ ► if Apple seeks that is to redefine a bunch of things about how traditional Mac apps are
00:39:47 ◼ ► I mean, back in the carbon cocoa transition, it was fairly obvious for people skilled in the art,
00:39:52 ◼ ► as they say, which one was especially in the beginning, because just the basic behaviors
00:39:57 ◼ ► of like text fields and controls were different enough that you could just tell, but they
00:40:01 ◼ ► eventually the way they fixed that was not saying, and the cocoa way will be the new way. In general,
00:40:07 ◼ ► they made sure that as carbon faded and cocoa became dominant, that all of the quote unquote
00:40:13 ◼ ► Mac like behaviors that we had come to expect from the carbon controls were ported to the cocoa
00:40:17 ◼ ► controls, right? And there was a little bit of a hybrid and a melding, but they didn't just say,
00:40:22 ◼ ► well, forget about that old behavior that you used to like cocoa controls don't work like that. They
00:40:26 ◼ ► worked so hard for many years trying to ensure parity, basically to bring cocoa up to the carbon
00:40:32 ◼ ► standards in terms of Mac likeness and to bring carbon up to the standards of cocoa in terms of
00:40:37 ◼ ► functionality and integration with all Unix world and all that other stuff. And I have some faith
00:40:42 ◼ ► that they're going to do something similar with the marzipan apps and that in the beginning,
00:40:45 ◼ ► it will be easy to tell because even just the most basic controls and navigation won't look or work
00:40:49 ◼ ► right. But eventually, like all the different places in the UI that don't have selectable
00:40:53 ◼ ► text or don't support copy and paste or don't support context menus that they will eventually
00:40:58 ◼ ► provide a way to implement those and implement them themselves in their own applications.
00:41:02 ◼ ► That's my hope anyway, not that I'm saying they're going to make them all just feel like cocoa apps,
00:41:06 ◼ ► like surely it will be a hybrid. And I can imagine them saying this is our opportunity to bring touch
00:41:10 ◼ ► to the Mac. So don't do any changes to the controls that make them less friendly to touch. So
00:41:13 ◼ ► everything's going to be bigger and waste more of our screen space, which won't matter because we'll
00:41:17 ◼ ► have giant 31.6 inch displays on our Mac pros. So everything will be awesome. But anyway, I
00:41:28 ◼ ► the Mac in the sense that it is a truck in Steve Jobs' parlance. Because otherwise, what's the
00:41:36 ◼ ► hell's the point of having the Mac? If it's just a larger screen with a mouse and keyboard or an iOS
00:41:40 ◼ ► app, there's no point. In the beginning, it's going to look and feel a lot like that just due
00:41:43 ◼ ► to time constraints and the development of the API. And honestly, I think a lot of us will be
00:41:47 ◼ ► happy just to get the iOS port of messages and finally have feature parity. That will feel like
00:41:52 ◼ ► a huge upgrade, even though the new messages app will not quote unquote be Mac like the existing
00:41:58 ◼ ► messages app isn't particularly Mac like. Same thing with like photos and all that. You know,
00:42:03 ◼ ► when they did like, it was like a lion or something when they started iOSifying all of the
00:42:07 ◼ ► Mac apps, either by using what is that the UX kit or whatever, by using like their sort of lookalike
00:42:14 ◼ ► workalike framework for the Mac that APIs were a lot like UIKit, but it wasn't really UIKit.
00:42:21 ◼ ► And changing the UI's of the application, so they look more like their iOS counterparts,
00:42:27 ◼ ► The actual legit straight ahead marzipan versions of those will be upgrades both aesthetically and
00:42:34 ◼ ► also probably functionally. And they'll probably also be even more Mac like than the existing one.
00:42:39 ◼ ► So there'll be that little honeymoon period where finally Apple gets to bring us all of its old
00:42:42 ◼ ► applications and can disband the Mac teams and combine them with the UI kit teams and do all
00:42:47 ◼ ► that stuff. And then there'll be the uncomfortable period where we'll be able to tell the difference
00:42:50 ◼ ► and we'll have these, you know, quote unquote real Mac apps sitting alongside the marzipan ones.
00:42:54 ◼ ► But then I hope eventually as the extinction level event progresses and appkit fades into the dustbin
00:43:00 ◼ ► of history, that the marzipan apps that we're left with will have adopted all of the utility
00:43:07 ◼ ► of the applications they replaced. Not necessarily all the individual features and ways of doing
00:43:11 ◼ ► things, but all the utility. That's my hope anyway. So our friend Steve Tran Smith tweeted
00:43:18 ◼ ► last week that he is very confident based on evidence he doesn't wish to make public at this
00:43:24 ◼ ► point that Apple is planning new likely UI kit music podcasts, perhaps even books apps for Mac
00:43:30 ◼ ► OS to join the new TV app. I expect the four to be the next wave of marzipan apps, grain of salt,
00:43:35 ◼ ► etc. And yes, this means the much discussed and long awaited breakup of iTunes finally, he says,
00:43:42 ◼ ► and I, you know, I'll be there to, to dance a jig on the grave of iTunes too. And I use it every
00:43:50 ◼ ► day to play music. But I do think about that moment when these apps will come over to the Mac and I
00:43:57 ◼ ► think, yeah, but they're not super functional. Like if I had to switch from iTunes to music to
00:44:04 ◼ ► play all my music every day on my Mac, the music app as it's currently iterated on iPhone and iPad,
00:44:12 ◼ ► I don't love it. Like browsing music in it is not great partially, I think because it's designed for
00:44:17 ◼ ► a smaller screen. And I would actually argue, I don't know if you've spent much time in the music
00:44:20 ◼ ► app on the iPad, but that, that feels very much like an app that the iPad layout itself is an
00:44:27 ◼ ► afterthought right down to the fact that it's got that now playing screen that just kind of comes up
00:44:31 ◼ ► on the side. Cause you know, whatever, I guess we could do that. It makes it look like the iPhone.
00:44:41 ◼ ► getting rid of iTunes, trying to do everything and be everything and replacing with a TV app
00:44:50 ◼ ► then I start to think, but what if it's just the iOS app? And I get a little concerned that those
00:44:55 ◼ ► iOS apps maybe not right. Maybe they're going to get pushed forward and this is going to be
00:45:00 ◼ ► the impetus to make those iOS apps have more features and more feature parody with the Mac,
00:45:05 ◼ ► cause they don't want them to be as much of a regression, but I'm a little concerned that what
00:45:09 ◼ ► it'll really be is just those kind of limited functionality iOS apps dropped on the Mac.
00:45:14 ◼ ► - You realize what's going to happen, don't you? This is something you might not want to think
00:45:17 ◼ ► about, but I think it's in all of our futures. iTunes will be the new QuickTime Player 7.
00:45:27 ◼ ► sync over a wire or get access to the application storage space or any of those like things that,
00:45:34 ◼ ► or maybe even like sideload MP3s onto your hard drive, you'll just have to go to the utilities
00:45:42 ◼ ► folder. Because my guess is that the music app, if it comes on the Mac, is going to be literally
00:45:48 ◼ ► an Apple music app. - But I think it'll be QuickTime Player 7 in another sense in that it
00:45:52 ◼ ► will be the application that we all wax nostalgic about and say, boy, they replaced QuickTime Player
00:45:57 ◼ ► 7 with this crappy new QuickTime Player. And every day when I want to get anything done, I have to go
00:46:02 ◼ ► back to the real QuickTime Player, QuickTime Player 7. - This will be the best thing to happen
00:46:06 ◼ ► to iTunes's reputation in years. - Exactly. It'll suddenly be our favorite application. I can't
00:46:11 ◼ ► believe they replaced it with that crappy music application. You can't do anything. And it's like
00:46:14 ◼ ► one screen, you have no options. I can't sort stuff. I can't edit my metadata. I can't do
00:46:18 ◼ ► anything with it. And so if I ever were going to go and get anything done with my music, I have to
00:46:23 ◼ ► launch iTunes Player 7. Oh, sorry. iTunes Classic or whatever they ended up calling it. I mean,
00:46:30 ◼ ► yeah, we spent all this time hating iTunes and then it suddenly becomes our most favorite
00:46:33 ◼ ► application in the entire world simply because the new ones have limited functionality.
00:46:36 ◼ ► And now on the flip side of that, this thing that gives me some optimism is part of the reason
00:46:42 ◼ ► that QuickTime Player 10 or X or whatever you want to pronounce it never got all the functionality
00:46:49 ◼ ► of QuickTime Player 7. Setting aside all the framework stuff of the actual deprecation of
00:46:53 ◼ ► QuickTime and the advent of AV Foundation and all that other stuff is that that application in
00:46:59 ◼ ► several other ones also arrived just as Apple basically stopped doing any serious development
00:47:05 ◼ ► of Mac applications basically. It's not that they couldn't have continued to improve insert
00:47:12 ◼ ► name of bundled Apple Mac OS application here. They just didn't. In general, the applications
00:47:18 ◼ ► stayed mostly the same. There weren't big teams advancing them. Even flagship things like Photos,
00:47:24 ◼ ► once they had iOS-ified it, spent a long time not getting a lot of new features. And when it did,
00:47:31 ◼ ► they didn't really rethink much of anything. I think about the horrendous interface to shared
00:47:36 ◼ ► photo streams and photos, that tiny little popover with that horrible autocomplete field,
00:47:42 ◼ ► you know, that whole thing. And an inability to tell when any action has taken place and trying
00:47:46 ◼ ► to edit things that turn into those little blue cells in a very limited space on a giant 27-inch
00:47:51 ◼ ► iMac screen and how many years that has been like, "Yep, that's good enough. It's fine."
00:47:55 ◼ ► Like one tiny little toolbar button hidden way up in the corner, huge expanses of wasted space.
00:48:03 ◼ ► And compare that to the development lifetime of iPhoto, which started very simple and was
00:48:08 ◼ ► worked on year after year and got more and more features and more and more advanced and better
00:48:11 ◼ ► and better over the years. It's just night and day. So you could say QuickTime Player 10 was
00:48:18 ◼ ► terrible because, you know, just the QuickTime Player 7 was better. Or you can just say that
00:48:23 ◼ ► was the time that Apple put their foot off the gas. And now with the advent of Marzipan,
00:48:28 ◼ ► when they replace iTunes with the music app or whatever, yeah, initially it'll be crappy and not
00:48:32 ◼ ► have a lot of features. But maybe the second year, the music app on the Mac will get a bunch of new
00:48:37 ◼ ► features because now they have all the wood behind one arrow and that team is able to execute and
00:48:47 ◼ ► half a person working on it for a year, right? Instead it's like five people working on it for
00:48:51 ◼ ► a year and maybe they can make progress. Like that's my hope that they will come back to
00:48:56 ◼ ► developing applications for the Mac because now they no longer have the excuse that there's like
00:49:00 ◼ ► five people in the company left who know AppKit and they put a half person in this app and a half
00:49:05 ◼ ► person on that app and all that other stuff. So initially, yeah, it's going to be bad and the
00:49:17 ◼ ► can you imagine, like you mentioned how bad the music app is in the iPad and how it feels like
00:49:21 ◼ ► the expansion is an afterthought. Can you imagine that on a 5K iMac, the music application and you
00:49:26 ◼ ► zoom it to full screen? It's just as... I do. That is exactly the nightmare that I am having
00:49:32 ◼ ► is what you just described. I mean, you don't need all the functionality of iTunes, but like you need
00:49:37 ◼ ► a different paradigm. That screen is way bigger. The input devices are way different and it's just,
00:49:42 ◼ ► it's the wrong fit, right? And unlike the TV application where there's no Mac equivalent now,
00:49:48 ◼ ► and we just can't do anything, like we've got to watch it all on iTunes, but like, oh, at least
00:49:51 ◼ ► there's a TV app. We do have a music player application and for all its warts, you can listen
00:49:56 ◼ ► to music in different ways with it. And the new application will be like, yeah, it's like a big
00:50:01 ◼ ► phone that fills your Mac screen. And I'm just going to give that app the middle finger. One
00:50:05 ◼ ► of the reasons the QuickTime Player 10 is what it is, is because Apple decided that it was
00:50:11 ◼ ► philosophically like not going to invest a lot of effort into little utility apps when functionality
00:50:17 ◼ ► existed elsewhere, which is, I felt like that was kind of an older school version of Apple where it
00:50:23 ◼ ► was, you know, Preview is a good example of an app like that. And QuickTime Player 7 was like that.
00:50:28 ◼ ► And there are other examples too, but like with QuickTime Player 10, they were really saying,
00:50:34 ◼ ► you know, look, if you want to trim little videos out of bigger videos and then save them out,
00:50:40 ◼ ► you should just use iMovie. Like it's right there, but we're not going to, you know, we're not going
00:50:44 ◼ ► to make that a particularly easy thing to do in this app. This app is much less functional. And
00:50:50 ◼ ► it's the same Apple that, you know, again, they have Preview and TextEdit and things like that,
00:50:55 ◼ ► but I think modern Apple with a whole other platform to build on iOS looked at it and was
00:51:00 ◼ ► like, now we really just needed to be a media player, some basic functionality. That's all
00:51:04 ◼ ► it needs to be. Just use iMovie otherwise. -I think it was, uh, mentioned the framework
00:51:10 ◼ ► difference. That really does make a difference because the old QuickTime Player before it was 7,
00:51:14 ◼ ► but whatever, the QuickTime Player pre-10, was there to show off QuickTime. Everything the
00:51:20 ◼ ► QuickTime could do, it was just a gateway to the functionality inherent in the QuickTime Framework.
00:51:24 ◼ ► -It was a front end for the QuickTime Framework, whereas QuickTime Player 10 was an app that they
00:51:29 ◼ ► built because they knew that eventually, in fact, this fall is the eventually, the whole QuickTime
00:51:35 ◼ ► Framework was going to be deprecated because it's 32-bit and they didn't want to work on it anymore.
00:51:44 ◼ ► you know, encoding, decoding, and playback and not a general purpose editing thing in container
00:51:49 ◼ ► format. Like QuickTime was much more extensive, right? So not only do they want an app that could
00:51:54 ◼ ► show it all off, but making an app that shows it off, like in the app itself, not that it was
00:51:59 ◼ ► trivial, but you were basically just exposing existing framework functionality. The QuickTime
00:52:03 ◼ ► Player didn't contain that functionality, the framework contained it. But we were long since
00:52:12 ◼ ► basically be like writing iMovie. Like it's not sitting there waiting for you in the framework
00:52:16 ◼ ► because it's not a front end for QuickTime because QuickTime, you know, is no longer going to be a
00:52:20 ◼ ► thing. So I kind of feel for QuickTime Player 10. That's also one of the reasons that no one really
00:52:24 ◼ ► replaced it with something because it's like, okay, well, are you just going to write QuickTime
00:52:29 ◼ ► Player 7 again? Because we've already got that. And if you're not, are you going to write your
00:52:32 ◼ ► own video editor? Because that's pretty hard. QuickTime, I'm kind of sad about QuickTime because
00:52:38 ◼ ► it was and is a great technology that desperately needed to be modernized, but the world modernized
00:52:43 ◼ ► itself around it and it got left behind. And so now it's like, it's not just the 32-bit 64-bit,
00:52:49 ◼ ► but it's everything. The container formats, the codecs, QuickTime was a pioneer that just didn't
00:52:54 ◼ ► keep up. And so all the existing video editing applications and the various frameworks are
00:53:00 ◼ ► written for a different world and there's no equivalent to QuickTime. It's sad. But for the
00:53:07 ◼ ► other applications like preview and text edit, I'm always impressed by their functionality,
00:53:10 ◼ ► especially preview. Like preview doesn't seem like it can do a lot, but like, you know, if you copy
00:53:16 ◼ ► an image to the clipboard and you're like, can I put this image into preview and crop it? But it's
00:53:24 ◼ ► in the clipboard. How do I get an image in the clipboard into preview? So you make, you're like,
00:53:27 ◼ ► maybe I'll just make a new document because you're a Mac user, you hit command N and there's your
00:53:31 ◼ ► clipboard in the document. Exactly sized to whatever was in your clipboard. And you're like,
00:53:35 ◼ ► oh, it just did it for me there. And then you just crop it and you save it and you can convert it.
00:53:40 ◼ ► Like QuickTime preview does expose all the functionality inherent in the ability to read
00:53:51 ◼ ► it does a surprising amount and same thing with text edit with all the different text editing
00:53:54 ◼ ► features and the ability to attempt to open word documents. I'm generally impressed with most of
00:54:00 ◼ ► the built in applications right up to the point where Apple stopped developing them, which was at
00:54:03 ◼ ► this point, like several years ago. Well, let's take a break. And then I have some more Mac stuff
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00:56:06 ◼ ► upgrade and all of relay FM. So john last week, BB edit came back in the Mac App Store, which is
00:56:12 ◼ ► great. It was foretold last June, another one of these things last June, they Apple said that panic
00:56:16 ◼ ► and bare bones were going to come back to the Mac App Store. Transmit came back last fall. And BB
00:56:22 ◼ ► edit came back last week. Interesting combination of factors, right? Some policy decisions with the
00:56:28 ◼ ► Mac App Store, some new functionality in Mojave that lets apps ask for permission to do things
00:56:35 ◼ ► that in the past they couldn't ask permission to do, which were were restrictions that led apps to
00:56:41 ◼ ► say, Well, if we can't do this, we're just not going to be in the store, like read the entire
00:56:44 ◼ ► disk is a good example of that. But also, I think it's interesting that when these apps came back,
00:56:50 ◼ ► they came back in basically a special edition, it's the subscription model edition, which is if
00:56:55 ◼ ► you want to just buy an app and get that app, and you can use it forever, but you're gonna have to
00:56:59 ◼ ► pay an upgrade fee for the next major version, you do that on the transmit or bare bones websites.
00:57:04 ◼ ► If you want to get them in the Mac App Store, you sign up for a subscription, which is annual,
00:57:10 ◼ ► and gives you access to whatever the latest version is whenever they release it. And and that's how
00:57:16 ◼ ► they've managed to figure out how do we deal with not having upgrade pricing in the Mac App Store.
00:57:22 ◼ ► So I think that's interesting on its own. It also has gotten me to start thinking of what the Mac
00:57:27 ◼ ► App Store is going to look like in the aftermath of Marzipan as this new OS comes out this fall,
00:57:32 ◼ ► whether we're going to see a flood or not of iOS apps. You have any thoughts about the the BB Edit
00:57:39 ◼ ► thing though, first, like, I'm not going to buy a Mac App Store subscription to BB Edit because I'm
00:57:44 ◼ ► happy to just have it in the one that I get from barebones.com. But it is a sign of Apple
00:57:51 ◼ ► as we said last June, directly addressing some of the issues with Mac App Store through this
00:57:55 ◼ ► combination of adding an App Store editorial and fixing some of their policies and changing some of
00:58:00 ◼ ► the things in the operating system. And it's it's better than it was. I feel like there's still
00:58:06 ◼ ► inherently a mismatch. It's like a bad fit between the Mac App Store and popular, powerful Mac
00:58:14 ◼ ► applications that existed before the Mac App Store. And it's to Apple's credit that they've
00:58:18 ◼ ► been trying to bridge that gap, trying to woo these developers back. But mostly they've done so
00:58:25 ◼ ► in a non-systematic way. Like, I still think the mismatch is there. Even though these things are
00:58:31 ◼ ► back, they're back because of the herculean efforts of Apple to woo these developers and the efforts
00:58:37 ◼ ► of these developers to do what's required. Like, it's a cooperation between these developers and
00:58:42 ◼ ► Apple's to figure out a way to get this to work. But in the end, when they've all figured it out
00:58:46 ◼ ► and they're back on the store, we are now not in a situation where if you make a powerful Mac
00:58:52 ◼ ► application, that it's a no-brainer to go on the Mac App Store. Not only is it not a no-brainer,
00:58:58 ◼ ► it doesn't seem like a benefit and it seems like you're questioning whether you might want to do
00:59:03 ◼ ► it at all, which is not where the Mac App Store wants to be. You want it to be a place where
00:59:09 ◼ ► developers say, "I want my app on there because that's where I'm going to make all my money
00:59:13 ◼ ► because that's the best for my application. I can make the best application there and I can make the
00:59:17 ◼ ► most money there." And that is just not true of the Mac App Store for powerful applications,
00:59:21 ◼ ► traditional Mac applications, right? Even though they've done all this work to bridge this gap and
00:59:26 ◼ ► to get these high-profile applications, I don't feel like they have fundamentally changed the
00:59:30 ◼ ► nature of the Mac App Store. It is not attractive to that type of application developer, and the
00:59:36 ◼ ► users have learned that if you're a user who wants that kind of application, buy it direct.
00:59:46 ◼ ► Steve Trout and Smith, to mention him again, or I think it was him, maybe it was Guy Rambo,
00:59:58 ◼ ► Right? There's a mismatch there, and no amount of schmoozing or getting flagship applications
01:00:06 ◼ ► onto there or working hard with individual developers is going to change that. And that's
01:00:10 ◼ ► not a scalable system anyway. Is Apple going to work like that over the course of a year with
01:00:15 ◼ ► every single developer who wants to make an application that just wants to do things that
01:00:18 ◼ ► Mac applications used to do? No. Direct Mac applications with notarizing, which will be
01:00:29 ◼ ► If you make that type of application, you spend a lot of time thinking, "So I have to go in the Mac
01:00:36 ◼ ► App Store. Will I actually make enough sales for it to be worth what I know will be the huge hassle?
01:00:41 ◼ ► Is it worth potentially having the Mac App Store version behave differently and have a different
01:00:46 ◼ ► set of support concerns than the other ones? Are there some features I can only do in the direct
01:00:50 ◼ ► sale version?" These questions still exist and highlight the fact that there is a mismatch
01:01:01 ◼ ► I think some of those temporary exceptions are Apple wanting—I mean, obviously there was a PR
01:01:07 ◼ ► move, that's why they announced it at the keynote, to say, "We're making changes to the Mac App
01:01:11 ◼ ► Store." When I talked to the people involved in this announcement in June, what they basically
01:01:16 ◼ ► said is, "Yeah, a lot of the stuff's not there, and it's not going to be there in the fall."
01:01:19 ◼ ► And clearly Apple's solution was, "Well, we're going to give you temporary permission now."
01:01:24 ◼ ► But those temporary exceptions have been there. Like, temporary exception has existed since the
01:01:28 ◼ ► dawn of the Mac App Store. That has always been their tool to get apps in there, but they didn't
01:01:33 ◼ ► rename them. They have added some, but I think you're right. I think those are the challenges.
01:01:38 ◼ ► How far down the path do they go? Is there a whole other set of different permissions that Mac apps
01:01:43 ◼ ► can get maybe this fall or not? They did enough to get Bare Bones and Panic and Office 365 and
01:01:51 ◼ ► Creative Cloud. And even them, barely. I think there are still potential, if not functional,
01:01:59 ◼ ► then sort of semantic differences between the Mac App Store version of BBI and the direct one,
01:02:04 ◼ ► because there have to be different code paths. Yeah, and transmit for sure. Transmit, there are
01:02:08 ◼ ► some differences where there are some features that are—I think Panic has said that they will do them
01:02:14 ◼ ► at some point, which is very strongly like, they can't do them until Apple opens that up for them
01:02:20 ◼ ► to do this feature that's in the regular version that's just not in the Mac App Store. And if you
01:02:24 ◼ ► think about it from their perspective, Panic or BBI, if they're making their application,
01:02:28 ◼ ► those features that were in there that they can't do in the Mac App Store? They made them because
01:02:33 ◼ ► they think they're good features that people want to use. And the fact that they can't put them in
01:02:37 ◼ ► the Mac App Store means that they are working so hard to get as much of the functionality of the
01:02:42 ◼ ► app they made into the Mac App Store. It's like, why am I working so hard to wedge this into this
01:02:47 ◼ ► funnel when I have the perfectly good working applications that I can sell to people right now,
01:02:52 ◼ ► and I have my own store, and I'm a big enough company, and I have an existing customer base?
01:02:55 ◼ ► The upside is maybe potentially you can get a big boost in sales, but maybe not because most people
01:03:00 ◼ ► like these applications have been in the Mac App Store, so part of it is just your relationship
01:03:04 ◼ ► with Apple or the good will and the PR and being featured by Apple. And again, not a scalable
01:03:10 ◼ ► system and doesn't change the fundamental nature of the Mac App Store. So is the future of the Mac
01:03:19 ◼ ► So yeah, so that's the flip side of this. If you're coming from iOS, you're coming from an
01:03:24 ◼ ► environment that's even more constrained than the Mac, and so no big deal, right? And especially if
01:03:28 ◼ ► they combine the app stores or have a way to have an application that works across all the platforms,
01:03:33 ◼ ► like if, as we were discussing, the introduction of UIKit and the iOS APIs on MacOS as an extinction
01:03:39 ◼ ► level event for all "native" Mac APIs to eventually be replaced by iOS ones and Mac developers to
01:03:46 ◼ ► eventually replace by iOS developers, this all works itself out long term. Because yeah, the
01:03:49 ◼ ► old, funny guys will be there with their weird applications and need all these special permissions,
01:03:53 ◼ ► but that's probably not where the growth is. There's not like there's hundreds of those
01:03:57 ◼ ► clamoring to make new applications every year, like you said. Like, what is the best new Mac
01:04:00 ◼ ► app this year? Sometimes it's hard to tell. There are tons of iOS apps, there are tons of iOS
01:04:04 ◼ ► developers, and they fit right into the App Store because they're used to this level of abuse/
01:04:08 ◼ ► whatever. They've got Stockholm syndrome or whatever, and they have accepted that this is
01:04:13 ◼ ► the channel where all the sales come from because it is literally the channel where all the sales
01:04:16 ◼ ► come from on the phone, and they don't know about the direct model or whatever. So long term, I
01:04:22 ◼ ► think this problem will mostly work itself out. It may come up again because eventually you'll be in
01:04:28 ◼ ► a situation, unless Apple's the only one who's going to make applications, like pro-level
01:04:31 ◼ ► applications, like the Apple attitude, Austin, seems to be that the only application that needs
01:04:37 ◼ ► any kind of special permissions is Xcode and everything else can fit into the App Store model.
01:04:41 ◼ ► But even if you just look at something like Logic or Photoshop or Lightroom or any of these
01:04:47 ◼ ► pro-level applications, it still would have to jump through some hoops to work in the Mac App
01:04:54 ◼ ► Store, and Apple would still have to help them jump through those hoops. That's not a healthy
01:05:07 ◼ ► the heights of functionality that the best Mac apps have. There are a few of them out there. We
01:05:11 ◼ ► can name some graphic design applications on iOS or some other apps that are super impressive and
01:05:14 ◼ ► some ones that are up and coming, like what, Fair Write or whatever is that, the only running
01:05:18 ◼ ► application they use. But the highs on the Mac are very high. Trying to get those developers to
01:05:25 ◼ ► add that kind of functionality to a Mac app written with iOS APIs will be a big rung in the
01:05:38 ◼ ► And I think it can happen. I think the path ahead for Apple and the Mac is fairly clear,
01:05:43 ◼ ► but it's going to be a difficult road. And success is not guaranteed because we have proof that
01:05:48 ◼ ► people make tons and tons of iOS applications of middling complexity that are appropriate for
01:05:54 ◼ ► phones and iPads. But we don't yet have proof that there will be Mac applications with the complexity
01:06:00 ◼ ► of a Logic or Pro Tools or a Photoshop or all those other things. We can't just keep relying on
01:06:05 ◼ ► these same old developers like Panic and BB Edit and Adobe and Microsoft. Eventually we need more
01:06:11 ◼ ► new blood. I'm trying to think of all the great new iOS applications. We've got Affinity as a new
01:06:19 ◼ ► name. Sure. Pixelmator, what are some other ones? There are some very powerful iOS applications that
01:06:26 ◼ ► I can imagine them either already make a kick-butt Mac application or they certainly could make one.
01:06:31 ◼ ► So have some faith in the future, but I want to see an existence proof that amazing new complex
01:06:38 ◼ ► feature-filled applications written in UIKit can appear on the Mac and fill those gaps.
01:06:44 ◼ ► My gut feeling too is that the priority with Marzipan is not to allow people to use Marzipan
01:06:51 ◼ ► to then break out of the box of iOS and add more functionality on the Mac. So I would put money
01:06:58 ◼ ► that for a very long time, if ever, if you want to have access to the system at a level that is
01:07:05 ◼ ► way beyond what iOS apps can do, your answer is to write Mac apps, like to write them the old way.
01:07:13 ◼ ► Because it would seem to be that would be one of the last boxes that Apple would feel like they
01:07:17 ◼ ► needed to check in terms of letting people build apps using that framework, using that code base,
01:07:25 ◼ ► and then being able to write a whole disk backup app with it. So it feels like the iOS apps that
01:07:35 ◼ ► come over with Marzipan or are conceived as being iOS and Mac from the get-go using Marzipan are not
01:07:43 ◼ ► going to be pushing into areas that some Mac apps live in because, you know, Apple won't let you.
01:07:50 ◼ ► Like I imagine it'll be much more locked down. The security model will be the iOS security model,
01:08:01 ◼ ► - It'll be a tricky part. We'll be getting them to play nice with the Mac system environment.
01:08:07 ◼ ► So you mentioned Rogue Amoeba and all those applications that manipulate the various sound
01:08:10 ◼ ► things at sort of a system level that in no way would fit in any kind of app store, right?
01:08:18 ◼ ► Rogue Amoeba's apps see those applications and how they see the changes that the Rogue Amoeba
01:08:23 ◼ ► apps are making to the system. If Rogue Amoeba tries to change the inputs of a Marzipan app,
01:08:28 ◼ ► will it correctly, will the pipes connect in the right way, right? Will they see those changes?
01:08:45 ◼ ► out from underneath those apps, that they respond to those changes in the expected ways.
01:08:49 ◼ ► That's a great example of one of those details that if they don't nail it on the first try and
01:08:54 ◼ ► it seems like there's a big disconnect, second and third and fourth visions of Marzipan,
01:08:59 ◼ ► if this is indeed the path forward, will include connecting those dots. And eventually, I think,
01:09:04 ◼ ► the Rogue Amoeba apps will work with them right before Apple totally crushes the Rogue Amoeba's
01:09:11 ◼ ► - Yeah. Now, Steve Trout and Smith did try and succeed to get AppleScript sort of working in a
01:09:18 ◼ ► holiday thing. - And get services to show up in an AppleScript or in a Marzipan app. And so,
01:09:28 ◼ ► I bring those up just to say, I think you make a great point, which is, it's not just how these
01:09:34 ◼ ► apps work and look and feel on the Mac. It's also going to be, are they apps? Do they interact or
01:09:42 ◼ ► are they dark matter, right? Are they in their own little world where it's like, well, they exist,
01:09:48 ◼ ► but Mac apps look and they're like, doesn't look like anything to me. It's just Marzipan. And that's
01:09:54 ◼ ► not great. Just like how in Mojave, if certain frameworks die, all of the Marzipan apps quit,
01:10:07 ◼ ► - Or they just have a common parent process. I mean, it's the same thing if you kill login
01:10:12 ◼ ► window on your Mac today, everything disappears because it's the parent process of your entire
01:10:16 ◼ ► login site. - It feels very classic to me in a way though, right? Which is like, oh, no,
01:10:20 ◼ ► it looks like an app, but it's not really an app quite. It's not quite. And that goes over
01:10:26 ◼ ► lots of stuff, including, yes, can I grab audio from that? What if I adjust the inputs? It also
01:10:32 ◼ ► does mean things like automation. Is it scriptable? A base Mac app, I can tell it to launch using
01:10:38 ◼ ► AppleScript and I can use UI scripting to do things in Keyboard Maestro or something like that.
01:10:44 ◼ ► That may all be completely broken, but that will make those apps less good citizens on the Mac.
01:10:51 ◼ ► And in the long run, I suspect that something more like shortcuts will be the approved user
01:10:58 ◼ ► automation system on the Mac too. But we do have a lot of things that define what a Mac app does
01:11:09 ◼ ► this class of apps, that's less good for the platform. So that's part of, that's why they
01:11:16 ◼ ► announced it and gave themselves a year before they actually had to ship anything for developers
01:11:20 ◼ ► because it's really hard. - Some of that stuff that's broken, they'll never fix because that's
01:11:24 ◼ ► not the way forward. - I think AppleScript is a great example. I could imagine them saying like,
01:11:29 ◼ ► yeah, it's not really supported. Apple events, Apple, it's not. - Or even stuff like the services
01:11:33 ◼ ► menu, which is sort of next step, right? That could probably be made to work, but if that's not
01:11:42 ◼ ► this is no point. And on the other hand, Apple has been laying the groundwork for this for years
01:11:45 ◼ ► with things like share extensions, which were conceived and implemented as a cross-platform
01:11:50 ◼ ► thing long before Marzipan existed. They're different, like share extensions on the Mac
01:11:54 ◼ ► are different than they are on iOS, but they're similar enough that you could see how by making
01:11:59 ◼ ► both Mac applications and iOS applications have this share extension model, despite the code
01:12:05 ◼ ► and API differences, it is one of the rare cases of a new system level thing that Apple actually
01:12:13 ◼ ► made across platforms that is just waiting for all those tubes to be hooked up behind the scenes.
01:12:18 ◼ ► Like, oh, there you go. Remember all the share extensions you've been writing? Now there's a
01:12:21 ◼ ► unified way to write them and they work across all platforms and it's a paradigm that works.
01:12:25 ◼ ► But there's so many places where that doesn't exist, mostly because there's system level
01:12:29 ◼ ► functionality on the Mac that has absolutely no equivalent in iOS. And it should, like the answer
01:12:33 ◼ ► to this is not, well, don't worry about that because it's not an iOS. The answer to that is
01:12:36 ◼ ► add stuff like that to iOS. Give file system access to iOS, let it see external storage,
01:12:42 ◼ ► let you control the system sound routing. Like we've all, you know, we all know the iOS complaints.
01:12:47 ◼ ► That's the solution. And if the solution on the Mac is we're going to do all those things,
01:12:51 ◼ ► but what we're going to do is we're going to implement them on iOS and then bring those
01:12:54 ◼ ► implementations to the Mac and all the existing Mac implementations will just fade away. That's
01:12:59 ◼ ► one path to the future. And arguably is a reasonable one because a lot of these systems
01:13:04 ◼ ► as implemented on the Mac are very old and very creaky and you know, things like services,
01:13:08 ◼ ► people who use them and love them, they're great, but they are not, they are not a well-loved piece
01:13:15 ◼ ► of software from the perspective of how often new features get added or even how well they're
01:13:23 ◼ ► surfaced in the UI. You don't know if services exist. You can use Mac for years and just never
01:13:27 ◼ ► see them. Yeah. Apple actually did some things to services in Mojave, which is super weird, but
01:13:32 ◼ ► it would not be a big leap for them to find a way to bridge the gap in terms of saying, well,
01:13:38 ◼ ► we've got a new solution that is basically like services, but it's using the share functionality
01:13:43 ◼ ► that would be addressed in the same way. It wouldn't surprise me if that's the direction
01:13:47 ◼ ► they go, but as an iPad user, I have to say the flip side of all of this really is that I hope
01:13:51 ◼ ► that part of the process means that the iPad apps get better and more powerful because if you're
01:13:56 ◼ ► going to do some extra work to add functionality to them, especially so that they work on larger
01:14:00 ◼ ► screens and they work on the Mac, maybe that means that the iPad can pick that stuff up too and that
01:14:04 ◼ ► the iPad apps will be more functional. I'd take that. I'd love that. That's kind of a side effect
01:14:09 ◼ ► of the app-centric nature of what was originally iPhone OS, like that the entire phone was the app,
01:14:16 ◼ ► even when it wasn't springboard, it was the app. That conception of iOS, that it's all about the
01:14:23 ◼ ► apps. We need more powerful apps for the iPad. I can't wait to see what the new apps can do.
01:14:28 ◼ ► What we need on the iPad and have needed for years is a more powerful iOS. That's all we
01:14:34 ◼ ► usually talk about on the Mac. What new features does this OS have? Oh yeah, and by the way,
01:14:39 ◼ ► there are apps that run on it. It's so inverted on the iOS. We so rarely think about what the OS can
01:14:45 ◼ ► do, what features have they added to the OS, because the OS is like whatever, it's just a way
01:14:49 ◼ ► to run apps. And yeah, we all know under the covers there are APIs that are important and so on and so
01:14:53 ◼ ► forth, but the apps take such a prime place that there is no thing of like, "Oh, the OS added
01:15:00 ◼ ► system-wide text-to-speech everywhere. The OS added the ability to mount network shares using
01:15:06 ◼ ► this new protocol. The OS added a way to control sound inputs and outputs and create new..." Like,
01:15:11 ◼ ► the OS added a new context menu and a new..." We don't think about what the OS can do for us in
01:15:16 ◼ ► iOS because it hasn't been doing enough. Whereas on the Mac, all those things we just talked about
01:15:24 ◼ ► that stew, in that environment. A new way to manage Windows, the dock itself, like all these
01:15:28 ◼ ► things that we consider part of the OS. On iOS, we get crumbs, we get table scraps, and we don't...
01:15:36 ◼ ► We tend not to think about it, except for maybe iPad users asking for better multitasking, but
01:15:40 ◼ ► we need to ask for and should expect so much more out of the OS itself in iOS instead of just being
01:15:47 ◼ ► like a status bar and a springboard for us. And like maybe a way to split the screen up a couple
01:15:51 ◼ ► different ways. We need more. Yeah. Now, that's my... Whenever I come back to the storage stuff,
01:15:58 ◼ ► that's one of my things. Or the sound stuff. Those are two of the things that really get me.
01:16:06 ◼ ► I know, right? So we'll see what happens there. You want to talk hardware a little bit? Because
01:16:10 ◼ ► I do think it'll be a big year for the Mac in terms of hardware. Lots of possibilities. You're
01:16:15 ◼ ► going to get... Well, I say your Mac Pro, but we'll see. You're going to get a Mac Pro. You can judge
01:16:26 ◼ ► I don't know if I believe that. They just mean the monitor is built in. That's all they mean.
01:16:33 ◼ ► It's fine. It could just be that that's literally all that they mean. Or they could mean some aspect
01:16:38 ◼ ► of the production, which is that they have stuff that they can drop in, but it's not a user thing.
01:16:42 ◼ ► Oh, God. It's the worst kind of just obsessing over... They give us so little. They give us
01:16:47 ◼ ► one adjective, and we spend two years talking about that one adjective. What's this mean?
01:16:56 ◼ ► without giving any spoilers, that happened on Star Trek Discovery a couple of weeks ago,
01:17:01 ◼ ► where a character said something, phrased in a certain way, that they created this entire
01:17:06 ◼ ► conspiracy theory about how that phrasing was similar to phrasing of another character in
01:17:11 ◼ ► another Star Trek series. And so it was all connected, man. I'm caught up on Discovery,
01:17:16 ◼ ► I think, but I don't even know what you're talking about. Probably because I haven't seen
01:17:18 ◼ ► the other Star Trek series. Well, also because it's really dumb. I just rewatched that episode
01:17:22 ◼ ► yesterday, and I'm like, "That whole thing came from this one line reading of one character? Come
01:17:26 ◼ ► on." But yes, we are reduced to that, which is, "What does it mean? It might be modular." And it's
01:17:32 ◼ ► like from a third source who saw it one time or heard people talking about it briefly and
01:17:38 ◼ ► heard the word modular and doesn't know what it means. It's hard to tell. There will be one
01:17:44 ◼ ► this year, they said. I imagine we'll see it at WWDC, at least as a promo. Maybe they'll have one
01:17:50 ◼ ► like they did with the iMac Pro, where it's like, "Don't touch it. It must be looked at."
01:17:55 ◼ ► I'm gonna touch it. Yeah, don't even play it, but you can see it, and then it'll ship on December
01:18:00 ◼ ► 29th, and that'll be fine. But there are also rumors about that new MacBook Pro, like the 15-inch
01:18:08 ◼ ► that's actually a 16-inch that I know Marco's excited about, which maybe they would finally
01:18:13 ◼ ► have a new design where they would not use the old keyboard that has gotten such bad publicity
01:18:19 ◼ ► for Apple over the last few years. Yeah, the latest tweet rumor I saw was, "Oh, actually,
01:18:23 ◼ ► that's going to be a 2020 model," and people were getting sad about it. I don't think we can wait
01:18:28 ◼ ► that long, but yeah, there's a Mac laptop with a new keyboard and a hardware escape key. I feel
01:18:34 ◼ ► like it's in our future. Is it in our future in 2019? God, I hope so. Well, I mean, it wouldn't
01:18:40 ◼ ► surprise me if it is more like 2020. It would be much better if it was in 2019. The iMac is the
01:18:45 ◼ ► same way. We got that new iMac thing. I flew to New York. I talked to the product manager.
01:18:55 ◼ ► and I get there and I'm like, "So it's just a speed bump," right? And when you think about it now,
01:19:02 ◼ ► it's like, "Okay, well, in the spring of 2019, they did new iMacs." It's like, there's no way
01:19:08 ◼ ► there's going to be a new iMac design this year, because why would they have just turned over the
01:19:12 ◼ ► new iMac in the spring if they were going to do a brand new iMac in the fall? It seems like that
01:19:17 ◼ ► is now a 2020 product if it happens. And that's a product that really needs a redesign, right?
01:19:37 ◼ ► We talked about this on ADP. Despite the fact that it looks just like a screen with a little stand,
01:19:41 ◼ ► you're like, "Well, what the hell else can you do? I don't care about the chin. Make the chin
01:19:45 ◼ ► smaller. Who cares?" There are things you can do. There are many design challenges inherent in that
01:19:49 ◼ ► computer that they can take another run at. And whatever it's been seven years now, seven years
01:19:56 ◼ ► is a good run for a case design. And if you think people have these very aggressive images that they
01:20:02 ◼ ► make out there of showing the iMac with the year underneath each design and how radically they
01:20:07 ◼ ► changed, you have the little gumdrops and then the lifesavers, and then you've got the cool
01:20:14 ◼ ► looking ones. You've got Dalmatian flower power, then you've got the little one with the arm on it,
01:20:19 ◼ ► and then you've got the flat white ones, then you've got the flat silver ones, and the flat
01:20:22 ◼ ► silver ones get skinny, and then it's skinny, skinny, skinny, skinny, skinny, skinny, skinny,
01:20:24 ◼ ► skinny, skinny, skinny, skinny, skinny, and present day. There's this huge run at the end
01:20:28 ◼ ► where evolution stops. And in some respects, it's because the design was refined and made
01:20:36 ◼ ► more essential or whatever Johnny Ivey word you want to use. And it didn't need to change in any
01:20:41 ◼ ► radical way. But every seven years or so, it's a good time to rethink it. And so I feel like part
01:20:49 ◼ ► of the reason the speed bumps are just speed bumps is because the new design isn't ready, but you
01:20:53 ◼ ► don't want to wait for the new design to be ready to speed bump them. So you speed bump them in the
01:20:56 ◼ ► existing case with the existing cooling and do the best you can. But I really hope there is a
01:21:02 ◼ ► redesign in the future. I hope the redesign in the future of the plain old iMac is part of the
01:21:07 ◼ ► rededication to the Mac, because I feel like the iMac Pro is the last Mac design that predates
01:21:14 ◼ ► Apple's rededication to the Mac, which sounds weird, but it's like, isn't that the bellwether
01:21:17 ◼ ► of their rededication, the amazing iMac Pro? I don't think so. I think that project and that
01:21:21 ◼ ► design, that idea started before Apple had decided to rededicate itself to the Mac in full.
01:21:27 ◼ ► Oh, yeah. It's literally the replacement for the Mac Pro because they were killing the Mac Pro. And
01:21:35 ◼ ► And changing your mind about the Mac Pro isn't just deciding to make one computer that you
01:21:39 ◼ ► weren't going to make before. It's rethinking the entire idea that it's possible to cover the
01:21:44 ◼ ► problem space of Mac users with a very limited feature set. And you realize that's actually
01:21:49 ◼ ► not, it's not really possible. And furthermore, it's a mistake. Like we're, it's a misreading of
01:21:54 ◼ ► our audience for these products to think that by simplifying the products, we can simplify their
01:21:59 ◼ ► lives and everything will work out fine. And these people are like, my life is complex. I have
01:22:03 ◼ ► complex problems. I need a tool that helps me solve them. No amount of simplifying your
01:22:06 ◼ ► hardware is going to change that. Give me powerful first little computer. So the Mac mini is a
01:22:15 ◼ ► reflection of that because the iMac Pro is the last of the, it was going to be the previous top
01:22:19 ◼ ► end before they realized that it couldn't be the top end because it wasn't top-end enough.
01:22:23 ◼ ► I feel like the definition of what a modern Mac is, what a Mac is now, the iMac Pro is that
01:22:33 ◼ ► because it was the first Mac to have the T2. It fits in, it just doesn't fit where they thought
01:22:38 ◼ ► it was going to fit. They thought it was going to be the very end of the line and it's not. Yeah.
01:22:41 ◼ ► And they didn't, I don't think they changed their definition of like, here's what the Mac in the
01:22:45 ◼ ► future is going to have. It's going to have the T2. It's going to do all these different things
01:22:48 ◼ ► that are, you know, that we're going to take off of the shoulders of other controllers or of the
01:22:53 ◼ ► Intel processor. All of that, I think they still believe, but it, yeah, it was not, it was meant to
01:22:59 ◼ ► be the Pro Mac in an era where there was no Mac Pro. It was meant to be the Apex and it's just not,
01:23:06 ◼ ► it's not the Apex. And the ways in which it's not the Apex is revealing of like Apple's customers
01:23:11 ◼ ► saying, that's an amazing computer, but I can't fit this inside it. It can't do this for me. It
01:23:17 ◼ ► doesn't give me this amount of versatility. That's the change in the thinking. I hope that thinking
01:23:23 ◼ ► will eventually be reflected in the laptop line. I see no evidence of that yet, but I really hope
01:23:28 ◼ ► it will. I mean, a hardware escape key is actually a good step in that direction of saying, we gave
01:23:32 ◼ ► you an escape key, but what we've heard from you is you don't like that escape key. So here's a
01:23:39 ◼ ► hardware version of it, which that seems like such a subtle thing, but it's a reflection. It's like,
01:23:43 ◼ ► well, we gave you what we wanted. You have an escape key, right? And we're just saying,
01:23:47 ◼ ► no, you don't understand. Just having someplace where I can press my finger to make escape
01:23:51 ◼ ► is not an adequate solution. There is enough of a difference between pressing my finger on the
01:23:55 ◼ ► screen and pressing a key that it's worth your trouble to make that a physical key. So please
01:24:00 ◼ ► do that, even though it seems like a subtle thing and a simplification and it's nice and uniform,
01:24:04 ◼ ► and the touch bar goes end to end and it's all awesome and everything. Please think really hard
01:24:07 ◼ ► about that. And the next time you make a keyboard, Oh, and by the way, yada yada, all the other
01:24:11 ◼ ► keyboard problems that we've been discussed forever. But I feel like the hardware escape
01:24:14 ◼ ► key of all the things is the most important sign, kind of like the USB ports that we assume might be
01:24:20 ◼ ► on a pro Mac or whatever. Like, do they recognize a certain amount of ugliness that Apple is willing
01:24:27 ◼ ► to put a complexity and ugliness that Apple is willing to put into its products, non uniformity,
01:24:32 ◼ ► non uniformity asymmetry not backwards looking, but at least not like relentlessly forward looking
01:24:39 ◼ ► because they realize a certain set of customers have a problem or a situation or a preference
01:24:46 ◼ ► that they want served in the best way possible, even if it makes the computers that Apple makes
01:24:52 ◼ ► slightly less pure or less of the vision of the future that Apple thinks should happen. So that's
01:24:59 ◼ ► what I'm looking for in all the new Mac stuff. I think it's reflected in the Mac mini, which
01:25:04 ◼ ► did not reduce its number of ports to some ridiculously small level and it is amazingly
01:25:07 ◼ ► powerful and all that other stuff. Like they made a versatile little computer for people who like
01:25:12 ◼ ► versatile little computers. They could have made that same computer, made it much smaller
01:25:15 ◼ ► and just put like four thunderbolt ports in the back of it and said done and done and no one would
01:25:20 ◼ ► like it. One thunderbolt port in the back of it and they're like, yeah, just figure it out. Yeah,
01:25:23 ◼ ► maybe two. Maybe two. The thing that I think bugs me the most about the new iMacs is the fact that
01:25:31 ◼ ► it's the first Apple product since December of 2016 to be released that is a new Apple product,
01:25:41 ◼ ► or no December 17 when the iMac Pro came out to be released without T2. All of the, oh, the only
01:25:47 ◼ ► other remaining T2 products out there are products that haven't been updated in too long. And we,
01:25:54 ◼ ► there are lots of reasons why. The biggest reason why is that that would require a complete redesign
01:25:59 ◼ ► of the iMac and they would need to get rid of the spinning disks and all of those things.
01:26:03 ◼ ► But it does make it feel like a holdout of a of a bygone era, not 2012 where the design of the
01:26:10 ◼ ► hardware comes from on the outside, but just of the, you know, of 2017 and before when what a Mac
01:26:19 ◼ ► was was different and it's been redefined. And then here come these things that are, I mean,
01:26:24 ◼ ► the good news is in like five years we're going to be talking about how Macs made from in 2019
01:26:30 ◼ ► can't run old versions of the operating system and can't do all these things except for those iMacs
01:26:35 ◼ ► because they didn't have the T2 and they therefore they have this capability. But it just that really
01:26:41 ◼ ► bugs me. At the same time, I don't think the right way. People have talked about like the iMac Pro
01:26:47 ◼ ► being the basis of a new iMac design. It's like the iMac Pro is designed like the like the iMac.
01:26:53 ◼ ► It's got the new cooling system in it and it's a very different system on the inside. But like,
01:27:02 ◼ ► because they really should make an effort to clean those bezels up like the because if you
01:27:13 ◼ ► the bezels on the iMac are and the iMac Pro are enormous. And that would be the first thing that
01:27:20 ◼ ► I would rather be a little thicker, quite frankly, because I don't see the thickness of my iMac
01:27:25 ◼ ► and have the bezels go away. And I know, you know, so I keep thinking there is a new iMac design out
01:27:29 ◼ ► there. But that's what it is, is a really new iMac design. And it'll have a T2, at least in the larger
01:27:37 ◼ ► of the two iMacs, it'll be that new design. But I don't know when that is. Is that 2020? Is that 2021?
01:27:44 ◼ ► It may be a while. My optimistic take is that if we had seen new T2 iMacs that adopted some of the
01:27:55 ◼ ► cooling structures of the iMac Pro, it would mean that any redesign of the iMac case is much farther
01:28:01 ◼ ► in the future than we think it is. Right. Right. The fact that they did this stopgap thing makes me
01:28:07 ◼ ► think that the iMac design is imminent and it wasn't worth their while to basically make a
01:28:14 ◼ ► non-Pro iMac Pro in the old case, like better pooling and stuff. Not so imminent that they could
01:28:20 ◼ ► wait and not update the processors. Yes, exactly. And so it's heartening on multiple levels, the
01:28:25 ◼ ► idea that they did ship the speed bump, that they didn't just say, "Eh, we'll wait it out," right?
01:28:29 ◼ ► That they said, "We can do a speed bump while we wait, and we should do a speed bump while we wait,
01:28:33 ◼ ► because it's better than having nothing." And so I agree with all that. Despite these computers
01:28:38 ◼ ► having some disappointing aspects, all signs point to their reasoning process making sense, assuming
01:28:44 ◼ ► our speculation is correct. And I would say the opportunities to do a new iMac case are more than
01:28:51 ◼ ► just shrinking bezels or changing thicknesses. There are many opportunities. There are problems
01:28:56 ◼ ► with the iMac design inherent in its nature that can be tackled. You could pick just one of them
01:29:03 ◼ ► and spend the entire redesign figuring out one of them is the relationship between your face and the
01:29:07 ◼ ► screen. Unless you have a VESA mount like you, which most people don't, that relationship with
01:29:13 ◼ ► a fixed bent L-shaped stand is not optimal in many different situations. You could do something
01:29:19 ◼ ► about that. Apple has experience making iMac screens that move into different positions and
01:29:23 ◼ ► different heights. They could decide to tackle that. Say they don't want to tackle that. The
01:29:27 ◼ ► second problem with the iMac design is all the ports are on the back, which looks really good,
01:29:30 ◼ ► but it's a pain in the butt when you got to plug things in. How can they fix that without making
01:29:34 ◼ ► it look ugly? What is the solution to ports and cable routing for a computer like the iMac?
01:29:41 ◼ ► They could tackle just that problem and say, "Can we figure out a better way than the current
01:29:46 ◼ ► solution that is not horrendously ugly, that people can plug and unplug? Can we put some
01:29:51 ◼ ► facing the people, some not facing? Where should the ports be?" If you try to tackle both of those
01:29:56 ◼ ► at once, you could have a radically different iMac that is still nevertheless basically a big screen
01:30:00 ◼ ► that's in front of you with very little visible stuff anywhere on it, but is an overall better
01:30:05 ◼ ► computer. I don't expect them to tackle those hard problems. I expect them to be fairly conservative
01:30:12 ◼ ► if the past decade or so of the ever-skinny-ing iMac is true, but the opportunity is there if
01:30:18 ◼ ► someone had a really good idea, basically. I love some of the old iMac designs, like the one with
01:30:23 ◼ ► the little arm, whatever we want to call that design, the big silver arm. I love that design.
01:30:28 ◼ ► I thought it was ingenious. I thought it was a great fit for the technology limitations at the
01:30:33 ◼ ► time. It was just brilliant. It didn't last very long if this technology changes so fast,
01:30:40 ◼ ► and it became pointless once you could flatten the whole thing out. But I'm ready to be wowed by an
01:30:48 ◼ ► iMac design. I'm not sure that's in the cards, because I feel like not that the A-teams are all
01:30:52 ◼ ► designing iPhones and iPads, but just that that's where most of the action is happening. So it makes
01:30:58 ◼ ► some sense to be more conservative with the iMac and maybe just take another crack at it and maybe
01:31:02 ◼ ► just make skinnier bezels or whatever. Well, Apple knows who's buying an iMac, and the thing is the
01:31:07 ◼ ► iMac is doubling as its entry-level desktop computer, and that's the reason why there's
01:31:14 ◼ ► a base model that didn't change at all. That's the reason why there are spinning disks in the 4K iMac
01:31:20 ◼ ► at the low end, even though it's really unconscionable, and you and I agree on this point.
01:31:24 ◼ ► It's because I think on that low end, they are really concerned about people's price sensitivity,
01:31:32 ◼ ► and they're trying to get the lowest price possible. I believe that we have reached the
01:31:36 ◼ ► point where everything should be a Fusion Drive in the 4K iMac. If you're going to buy a Retina
01:31:41 ◼ ► screen, maybe that cheap one that's not even Retina, they should probably not even be selling
01:31:46 ◼ ► it, but just like the $999 MacBook Air, they're using it to hit a price point. But the rest of
01:31:50 ◼ ► them at the very least put some SSD in there so that you could do the Fusion Drive thing and can
01:31:55 ◼ ► be a little bit faster. But that's the truth of it. This is a weird computer that goes from being
01:32:02 ◼ ► entry-level to being as powerful as an iMac Pro. So I think that distorts some of the decisions
01:32:09 ◼ ► they make about the iMac. The iMac has always been their entry-level desktop from its introduction,
01:32:14 ◼ ► right? And that has never stopped them back when the Mac was so much more important to the company,
01:32:19 ◼ ► obviously, from having lots of innovative ideas there. If you look at all those different
01:32:26 ◼ ► iMac designs, lots of complicated, expensive, interesting choices. It's only because the Mac
01:32:35 ◼ ► is so much less important to the company that you see less of that these days. But part of the
01:32:40 ◼ ► beauty of it is that if you come up with a good design, it doesn't have to be expensive to
01:32:46 ◼ ► manufacture or overly complicated. The beauty of a good iMac design is that it solves problems for
01:32:51 ◼ ► the users in an elegant way that just seems obvious. It doesn't look like it's trying too
01:32:56 ◼ ► hard to figure something out, but in general, it's just pleasant to use. And things like how difficult
01:33:01 ◼ ► it is to plug and unplug a little something into any one of the ports. Tackling that problem,
01:33:07 ◼ ► it's a very difficult problem. If you were just a PC maker, you'd just put a bunch of ports on
01:33:11 ◼ ► it and be done with it. But Apple doesn't want it to be in your face and ugly, but it is a pain
01:33:17 ◼ ► to reach around behind and get things. What can we do to solve that? If you come up with a solution
01:33:22 ◼ ► for that, it doesn't have to be expensive. It doesn't have to be pro. If you do it well,
01:33:27 ◼ ► it is perfectly suitable for the lowest of low-end entry-level things. And kind of in the same way
01:33:32 ◼ ► that I was always amazed at the-- what the hell is the name of this one? The one with the silver arm.
01:33:36 ◼ ► Chip transitions happened at the same time as the industrial design transition. So that was the iMac
01:33:41 ◼ ► G4, because there was never a G4 in the old plastic bubble. And then the G5 came out, and that was the
01:33:47 ◼ ► beginning of our kind of single screen with a foot. Then it got complicated, because then they
01:33:53 ◼ ► did an Intel version of that same design. And then they did the aluminum. So there's that white
01:34:00 ◼ ► plastic iMac that could be either Intel or a G5. This is an awkward phase. I think they went-- they
01:34:08 ◼ ► think they went everything behind the monitor a little bit early. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know
01:34:13 ◼ ► what the issues were with the G5 fitting in the sawed-off volleyball. Oh, yeah. The iMac G4, the
01:34:20 ◼ ► one with the arm-- I remember one of the interesting statistics about that was that the
01:34:25 ◼ ► base, the semicircular base, had less volume than the G4 Cube. So you can understand maybe why it
01:34:31 ◼ ► would have been hard to fit a G5 in there with cooling in an optical drive. It might need the
01:34:36 ◼ ► whole volleyball if they wanted to do that. Well, son. Reference acknowledged. I was always amazed
01:34:42 ◼ ► that that computer was available at that price, because it looked so much more expensive than it
01:34:46 ◼ ► was. Kind of like those cars, like this said a lot about Volkswagen. Some Volkswagens feel like
01:34:53 ◼ ► Audis, which is a much more expensive car. Their interiors feel much nicer than the price tag would
01:34:59 ◼ ► allow you to admit. For whatever it was, it was like-- it wasn't cheap, but it was there-- you
01:35:05 ◼ ► could buy the entry-level iMac, and it was that iMac. And for that amount of money, you got a
01:35:10 ◼ ► computer that looked so much more expensive than it was. And I don't know if they were just eating
01:35:13 ◼ ► the margins there or found a way to manufacture that inexpensively or whatever, but that's always
01:35:19 ◼ ► been the beauty of a Mac. Even today's iMacs. You get the cheapest iMac you could possibly get,
01:35:24 ◼ ► and that case is still beautiful. It is seamless. It seems like it's all one magic piece. You can't
01:35:30 ◼ ► figure out how to even manufacture such a thing. It is just as beautiful as the highest-end iMac.
01:35:35 ◼ ► In fact, it's the exact same damn case, other than the screen that's in it. So I have faith
01:35:41 ◼ ► in the ability, especially with such an elemental design, to come up with a design that works for
01:35:47 ◼ ► the cheapest possible computer, that makes people feel like they're getting something special,
01:35:52 ◼ ► and that improves upon the existing design in all possible ways. All right, let's take a break one
01:35:57 ◼ ► last time, and then we'll do some Ask Upgrade. How about that? Our next sponsor is Moo. Very excited
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01:38:15 ◼ ► providing me with my business cards. Moo, let's get physical. All right, John, ask Upgrade time.
01:38:22 ◼ ► I did tell people that you would be here and some of these questions may be specifically
01:38:29 ◼ ► because you're here. Listener SM wrote in to ask, "Tons of movie/TV streaming services will launch
01:38:36 ◼ ► over the next 12 months. In five years time," so not an infinite time scale, a five-year time scale,
01:38:42 ◼ ► "which of them is still around and what will be the top two in terms of subscribers?" In five years,
01:38:52 ◼ ► Amazon, Apple's thing will still be around because they're definitely going to give it at least five
01:38:56 ◼ ► years. Disney's streaming service isn't even here yet, but it will be here in five years.
01:38:59 ◼ ► The only major player I can think might, things that might drop out is maybe Hulu might get
01:39:09 ◼ ► Amazon's certainly not going to sell its service because it's just too big as a company,
01:39:13 ◼ ► even though its service may not be big. So I don't think the landscape will change that much,
01:39:16 ◼ ► except that Disney will be here. And unless there's some other service that I'm not thinking of,
01:39:21 ◼ ► there could probably be consolidation in the fringes. Maybe somebody buys Crunchyroll or
01:39:25 ◼ ► some crap. Yeah, I feel like a lot of those small niche services are going to get swept up by
01:39:30 ◼ ► somebody. Either in whole or in part where the channels thing, the Amazon and Apple channels
01:39:37 ◼ ► approach might allow some of them to survive on their own. But I feel like more likely somebody
01:39:42 ◼ ► is going to be kind of voracious. Right now, the trend in media companies is just keep buying stuff
01:39:47 ◼ ► and get bigger and bigger and bigger. So I'd imagine those other services will just kind of
01:39:57 ◼ ► seeing any scenario where Netflix and Amazon aren't the two biggest still in five years.
01:40:02 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's safe. But the only thing that's weird to me is I'm thinking about is
01:40:06 ◼ ► all the networks and their streaming services, like they're not equipped to compete, but they're
01:40:11 ◼ ► also not inclined to sell unless someone just buys the networks outright, which may be the way this
01:40:17 ◼ ► resolves itself. I'm watching Discovery on the CBS app. That's not a sustainable anything. I
01:40:24 ◼ ► understand what they're doing and why they're doing it. I also understand that CBS is not going
01:40:29 ◼ ► to sell itself to Netflix unless you buy all of CBS. They're not just going to sell the streaming
01:40:33 ◼ ► thing because CBS is not a streaming concern. It is a network with a streaming app. That whole
01:40:38 ◼ ► situation where ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox to a lesser degree, want to have their own streaming thing and
01:40:45 ◼ ► things like AMC and the AMC app, that all just feels untenable. I'm just not sure how it resolves
01:40:50 ◼ ► because they're all attached to various behemoths. Maybe the resolution is Disney buys them all.
01:40:55 ◼ ► And I don't know. You see what happened with Fox, which is Fox sold everything off except
01:40:58 ◼ ► the broadcast. And they kept that. But I'm not sure if the people who own CBS and Viacom,
01:41:06 ◼ ► which they're trying to stick together. But yeah, I think there's a real question for what happens
01:41:12 ◼ ► if you're a network. NBC is universal and it's Comcast. And so they can have a strategy
01:41:18 ◼ ► that involves streaming and also involves cable and involves a broadcast. Aren't they also part
01:41:23 ◼ ► owners of Hulu? Is that NBC? Yeah, they own a piece of it. Disney now owns a majority of it,
01:41:29 ◼ ► but they own, I think Disney owns 30% and they own, or Disney owns 60%, they own 30%. And then
01:41:34 ◼ ► there's an outstanding 10% that's owned by somebody else. Is it me? Do I own it? I should check. It
01:41:40 ◼ ► could be. You should. Yeah. Look under the, let's see if there's a Hulu under your pillow.
01:41:44 ◼ ► As in the radio is unclaimed portions of Hulu that you may own. It could be, it could be,
01:41:49 ◼ ► it could be. There's a class action lawsuit, I'm sure. Okay. Trevor wrote in to say one aspect of
01:41:56 ◼ ► the cancellation of AirPower. I haven't heard discussed much. Is that possible that I feel
01:42:01 ◼ ► like AirPower is the, is the most discussed, least interesting product ever. I haven't discussed much
01:42:08 ◼ ► as the leaks that proceeded over the last few months, many pundits and bloggers seem to have
01:42:11 ◼ ► inside sources or supply chain tipsters that said its release was imminent. Were they all wrong or
01:42:17 ◼ ► lying? And I can answer this with a little bit of a journalism knowledge, which is, a lot of times
01:42:25 ◼ ► rumor reports are based on the best information at the time. And it's kind of hard to point at a
01:42:33 ◼ ► report and say, well, that didn't come true. And therefore that information was bad because the
01:42:39 ◼ ► situation inside the company, the situation on the ground may change. My guess is that all of those
01:42:44 ◼ ► inside sources saying that AirPower was going to be released were based on actual people at Apple
01:42:50 ◼ ► who thought that AirPower was going to be released because at the time they thought it was going to
01:42:54 ◼ ► be released. And it was only later that a decision was made to pull the plug for some reason. And
01:42:59 ◼ ► it's unclear whether that was because they had a last minute safety concerns or whether the FCC
01:43:04 ◼ ► wouldn't, wouldn't authorize it because of the way it was built or it failed in some part of the
01:43:11 ◼ ► process. But I just more broadly, a lot of times, I know this sounds weird, but a lot of times the
01:43:18 ◼ ► rumors are true when they're reported. But the thing is things change. So, you know, everybody
01:43:24 ◼ ► at Apple thinks we're going to release pro you know asteroid, right? That firewire breakout box
01:43:30 ◼ ► that famously never got released, but there were lawsuits about it. At the time they thought they
01:43:35 ◼ ► were going to release that thing. And then my understanding is then there was a demo where Steve
01:43:40 ◼ ► Jobs threw it off a stage like a digital camera. And that was the end of that. So that's my guess
01:43:45 ◼ ► about AirPower is like at the time it wasn't just the tipsters or the sources. It was Apple thought
01:43:51 ◼ ► they were going to ship it. And then things changed. And we don't know the whole story there,
01:43:56 ◼ ► but clearly things changed. So I don't think they're wrong. I don't think they're lying.
01:44:00 ◼ ► I don't think their sources are even necessarily bad. One of the challenges with this is that the
01:44:06 ◼ ► facts on the ground can change after you've heard from your source. And, you know, that that's part
01:44:11 ◼ ► of the difficult business of being a tipster, I suppose. Yeah. And most of these things also,
01:44:16 ◼ ► they don't have a full picture, right? So if you're just involved in some ask one aspect of
01:44:21 ◼ ► the ecosystem that involves AirPower, you will have seen over the past several years ever increasing
01:44:29 ◼ ► signs of AirPower's imminent arrival. If you're involved in the OS, you see or may even be working
01:44:34 ◼ ► on ways to integrate AirPower into the OS. Maybe you're doing 3D renders of animations that are
01:44:40 ◼ ► going to show when AirPower is connected. If you're working in marketing or PR, maybe you're making
01:44:46 ◼ ► display ads for AirPower. If you're working on the packaging, maybe you're working on the packaging
01:44:51 ◼ ► for AirPower and the manual for the AirPods is going to mention AirPower. And if you were talking
01:44:57 ◼ ► to all these people over the last year, they would all be saying AirPower is coming because I'm doing
01:45:01 ◼ ► all this stuff for writing to AirPower. And here we are, we all, I mentioned this, we all bought
01:45:05 ◼ ► AirPods. If you bought them on the day of release that come with a box that has a big sticker on it
01:45:09 ◼ ► that mentions AirPower. The person who made that sticker, if they were a tipster would say AirPower
01:45:13 ◼ ► is imminent because I just stuck a sticker on a box that we're sending out to customers that
01:45:17 ◼ ► mentions AirPower. And yet AirPower never arrived. And all those people could be 100% right and every
01:45:22 ◼ ► sign points to AirPower coming, but none of them are Tim Cook or whoever the decision maker is about
01:45:26 ◼ ► canceling the thing. So as far as they're concerned, of course AirPower is coming. We're doing,
01:45:31 ◼ ► at this company, we're doing everything we can surrounding AirPower. Every aspect of support
01:45:35 ◼ ► for AirPower, which we saw from like people hacking iOS and displaying all the AirPower animations and
01:45:40 ◼ ► all the AirPower ads, like, but in the end, someone said, don't actually ship this product to customers,
01:45:46 ◼ ► even though everything else that mentions it shipped to customers. So listener Phil says,
01:45:51 ◼ ► what is John's Mac Pro hierarchy of needs? So to review this concept, this is from ATP.
01:45:58 ◼ ► This is actually, it was just on the fly in the middle of an episode. It was the MacBook hierarchy
01:46:04 ◼ ► of needs of saying, we're all disappointed with the current line of laptops that have been for
01:46:07 ◼ ► a while and we hope new ones are coming and we have all sorts of grand dreams and plans of
01:46:10 ◼ ► what they should include. But if you had to list the things that you needed, like number one,
01:46:16 ◼ ► it has to have this number two, it has to have that number three, like in priority order. And
01:46:19 ◼ ► then at each point in the priority order, draw a line and say, if they do one, two, and three,
01:46:31 ◼ ► this will be the best laptop ever Apple ever made. Sometimes they're not mutual exclusive
01:46:36 ◼ ► and it's not that simple. But in general, that's the concept. So what is my Mac pro hierarchy of
01:46:40 ◼ ► needs? Unlike the MacBook pro, they haven't been releasing disappointing Mac pro models for years.
01:46:50 ◼ ► They've been releasing the same disappointing Mac pro models since 2013. So it's not like
01:46:56 ◼ ► there's been one after another, like at this point, any Mac pro, like the number one item
01:47:02 ◼ ► in the hierarchy is a new modular power wall computer because Apple doesn't sell one. They
01:47:08 ◼ ► sell a tiny little modular computer where you can connect the monitor to it, but it's the mini.
01:47:12 ◼ ► It's clearly not your pro level thing. That's it. That's the only computer they sell. It doesn't
01:47:21 ◼ ► the proof of life and actual professional high-end computer that doesn't have a monitor built in that
01:47:28 ◼ ► has the capacity to hold and run the most powerful stuff, the biggest CPU, the most RAM, tons of hard
01:47:35 ◼ ► drive space, the fastest GPU, you know, just existence. Second one I feel like is I'm tempted
01:47:44 ◼ ► to say Apple monitor just because I'm so obsessed with that, which Apple has also said is coming,
01:47:56 ◼ ► but I want it to be at least as good as the 5k IMAX one. And I would prefer if it had something
01:48:02 ◼ ► like face ID built in or whatever, but anyway, the monitor, this is so boring. It's like,
01:48:06 ◼ ► I wanted to do a Mac pro and then I want there to be an Apple monitor. And then the number three
01:48:10 ◼ ► for me is powerful GPU. GPU is more powerful than in any existing Mac, because it's another thing
01:48:17 ◼ ► you can't get. You can get the biggest GPU you want in your IMAX pro. And that's the fastest GPU
01:48:21 ◼ ► you can get in any Mac and you can't get a better one and you can't upgrade it. So I want the Mac pro
01:48:27 ◼ ► to have a better GPU than any iMac and that all things that come with that. You have to be able
01:48:33 ◼ ► to cool it. There has to be room for it. So on and so forth. Does it have to be upgradable?
01:48:37 ◼ ► Probably, but I'm just going to say a good GPU. And that's, that's my, basically those three items
01:48:41 ◼ ► are my line of acceptability. If it exists, it comes with a really good Apple monitor and has
01:48:46 ◼ ► a powerful GPU. Notice I didn't even mention the CPU. Oh, it has to be a faster CPU than any iMac.
01:48:50 ◼ ► Nope. You can just use the same ones in the iMac pro. It'll be fine. Like I don't, I'm not saying
01:48:54 ◼ ► it has to be the best in, you know, in that for me personally, that's not the biggest deal. I can
01:49:00 ◼ ► continue to go down the line by listing ever more esoteric things like somewhere along there, I would
01:49:04 ◼ ► put in a face ID on the Mac, which I think desperately needs to exist, but yeah, is lower on
01:49:10 ◼ ► the list than all those items. And I'm willing to wait for it. Is swapability of the GPU so that
01:49:15 ◼ ► you could replace it with a better one later? My fourth item would be upgradability, more extensive
01:49:21 ◼ ► upgradability. Like the line of acceptability is there. If they, if they provide that and it has
01:49:25 ◼ ► like, even if like almost nothing in it is upgradable, more powerful GPU sort of implies
01:49:32 ◼ ► that it would be on a card. It doesn't necessarily dictate it, but it doesn't have to be like the old,
01:49:36 ◼ ► the old Mac pro had very powerful GPUs that were not upgradable. That's my line of acceptability,
01:49:42 ◼ ► those three it's, it doesn't mean it would be great and doesn't even mean that I'd be super
01:49:46 ◼ ► happy with it, but I'm saying, okay, you did the thing. You may hit a Mac pro that texts all the
01:49:51 ◼ ► boxes, but upgradability is number four, that it is more upgradable than everything else. Yes.
01:49:59 ◼ ► as more upgradable than any other Mac, like, because again, otherwise what the hell's the
01:50:03 ◼ ► point of the Mac pro, if it's not more upgradable than an iMac pro, like it has to be more upgradable.
01:50:08 ◼ ► Uh, there are degrees of that. Uh, but I feel like the most important upgradable thing is probably
01:50:19 ◼ ► sold as upgradable things in the whole rest of the PC industry. So I don't think it's too,
01:50:23 ◼ ► too much of a stretch existence though. That's a good number one. I like it. Got it. Got to exist.
01:50:28 ◼ ► Yeah. I mean, just like a product like the Mac pro introduced from Apple that is not six years old.
01:50:35 ◼ ► It'd be good. What are your, what are your chances? What do you think your chances are? Picture
01:50:40 ◼ ► yourself on it's new year's Eve. You're not out late because it's annoying to be out late on new
01:50:45 ◼ ► year's Eve. Is there a Mac pro in your house? If Apple is selling it, uh, and if it, if it
01:50:52 ◼ ► fills these three items, uh, almost certainly. Yeah. So as long as it's, it exists, has a monitor,
01:50:58 ◼ ► has a powerful GPU. Yeah. Yeah. You're going to go ahead and buy it. Cause I, you know, I don't,
01:51:04 ◼ ► what would stop me from getting it? Like, cause my backup plan is I'm at pro, right? Um,
01:51:08 ◼ ► if this exists, if it was, if you know, it's a modular computer, it comes with an alpha model,
01:51:14 ◼ ► there's at least as good as an iMac and it has a more powerful GPU than an iMac. There's not much
01:51:18 ◼ ► that would stop me from getting that over an iMac pro because it's better than an iMac pro. Like it
01:51:22 ◼ ► suits my needs better. It has a more powerful GPU. The monitor is separate. So like, you know,
01:51:28 ◼ ► we talked about upgrade abilities number four, but the fact that the monitor is separate means that
01:51:32 ◼ ► if they come out with a new Mac pro, I can get it and not replace the monitor. I say, as I said,
01:51:37 ◼ ► in front of a monitor that is more than 10 years old, listen to Brian, this is Brian Hamilton says,
01:51:42 ◼ ► after two years of the switch, have your feelings about the ergonomics of the joy cons changed at
01:51:48 ◼ ► all? I don't touch the joy cons because I use the pro controller. So that's a no your feelings
01:51:54 ◼ ► haven't changed, which is don't use them. Uh, I mean, well that's just for me personally,
01:52:01 ◼ ► bad idea for me to even attempt to try them. But for smaller people's hands, they're fine.
01:52:06 ◼ ► Yeah. I think we have a pro controller now. Um, yeah, they're, they're cute and fun, but I've
01:52:15 ◼ ► tried to use them for an extended period of time and it's just painful. They're not great for adult
01:52:19 ◼ ► size hands. I think the quality of the components is good, but they are very, very small. Yeah. Oh,
01:52:24 ◼ ► uh, don't tell my son because we're keeping it a secret from him. Um, because it's for me,
01:52:30 ◼ ► but I bought a, I bought a PS4. Did you get a pro? No, I didn't. Come on. There are, there are
01:52:36 ◼ ► reasons to complicate it to get into your TV. Yeah, but it's not hooked up to the 4k TV.
01:52:41 ◼ ► That's the point of this. This is for me. This is my secret PlayStation. You got one of the, the,
01:52:50 ◼ ► the new slim ones, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I got a, I got a deal open box on Amazon with, uh,
01:52:57 ◼ ► Spiderman. So it's basically my Spiderman box. I'm going to play Spiderman. Not going to let my son
01:53:08 ◼ ► just going to live out here in the garage. One of these days, he's going to notice that it's there
01:53:11 ◼ ► and he's gonna be like, wait, what? One of the things I like about Spiderman is that it's,
01:53:15 ◼ ► it's got the settings and it's got the friendly neighborhood setting is literally basically combat
01:53:19 ◼ ► just happens and it's fine. And you watch the story. I'm not playing on that. I'm playing on
01:53:25 ◼ ► the next, the next setting up, which is combat is easy, but you do have to do it. Once you get the,
01:53:30 ◼ ► your, your PS4 and you're looking for games. I have my, I finally put my games list up on my,
01:53:35 ◼ ► uh, blog. You should take a look at lots of good PS4 games there. Some of which you might've
01:53:39 ◼ ► already played, but some of which you might not have. Angelo writes, if you could go back 25 years
01:53:43 ◼ ► and warn your young self about something in tech in 2019, what would it be? So the way this is
01:53:50 ◼ ► phrased as a warning, it's like, it has to be, you can't say like here, the stocks to invest in,
01:53:56 ◼ ► cause that's not a warning. That's like a, it's like a tip or advice. A warning is something bad
01:54:02 ◼ ► is going to happen. And I get to go back 20 years, 20 years and warn you about it. And I think at
01:54:07 ◼ ► this point, the main thing that I would warn people, warn myself about is what the dominant
01:54:14 ◼ ► platforms, the bad effects of dominant platforms like YouTube and Facebook, like the, the, the way
01:54:19 ◼ ► and Twitter for that matter, the way that they've allowed toxic ideas to flourish and spread.
01:54:26 ◼ ► Right. I'm not sure what me 20 years ago could do about this, but it's because it's phrased
01:54:33 ◼ ► as a warning. I would say Facebook seems like a more pleasantly designed version of MySpace now,
01:54:41 ◼ ► but here's what it's going to become and YouTube, you know, there's going to be a thing called
01:54:44 ◼ ► YouTube and it's going to be seemed like a nice way to put your videos up. And it might not be
01:54:49 ◼ ► easy to see, but eventually this is what I'll turn into. You'll always be, you know, three
01:54:54 ◼ ► suggestions away from Nazis, right? And Twitter looks like it's fun, but they will shirk their
01:54:59 ◼ ► responsibilities entirely to maintain any semblance of order on the platform and it will
01:55:04 ◼ ► enable all sorts of bad things. So that's what I would warn myself about. I don't know what I would
01:55:09 ◼ ► be able to do about it, but I think it is the, the most salient aspect of modern computing that is,
01:55:15 ◼ ► would not have been obvious 25 years ago. And all the people who are talking about it 25 years ago
01:55:21 ◼ ► sounded a little bit detached from reality because lots of people always warning you about terrible
01:55:26 ◼ ► things are going to happen. Like, you know, whatever it was like, this was the seventies,
01:55:30 ◼ ► it was, it wasn't nuclear winter, but there was some other, like the world is going to freeze in
01:55:34 ◼ ► the seventies. You remember that whole thing? Or, I don't know, global cooling. Yeah. There was
01:55:40 ◼ ► something, anyway, or the idea that there's some sort of oppressive system that's going to be,
01:55:45 ◼ ► like, you sound, you sound like you're disconnected from reality. If you were to accurately describe
01:55:51 ◼ ► the situation of those technology things in 2019, 25 years ago, it would sound fantastical. And
01:55:58 ◼ ► people 25 years ago were saying that. They were also saying all sorts of other crazy ideas that
01:56:02 ◼ ► didn't happen. Right? So that's, that's the trick about going back in time is you know the truth
01:56:06 ◼ ► about what's going to happen, but it sounds so ridiculous and dire. It just happens to be
01:56:12 ◼ ► what actually ended up happening. So that's what I would warn myself about. I don't know what I
01:56:15 ◼ ► would do with that information though. Yeah, it depends on exactly how you interpret this.
01:56:19 ◼ ► Cause I was thinking, so 1994, it worked out this way anyway, but I feel like what I would kind of
01:56:25 ◼ ► want to do is warn myself that although the temptations to abandon Apple in the next four
01:56:30 ◼ ► years as it does its death spiral would seem to be great. Don't because Apple in 2019 will be
01:56:39 ◼ ► enormous and just stick with it kid. I would never consider that because I never wavered and neither
01:56:46 ◼ ► did you. You didn't waiver, did you? There was a time where it felt like I was going to have to
01:56:50 ◼ ► make a career change of some sort. You were going to be unemployed in Greenland. Exactly. Out of no
01:56:54 ◼ ► decision of my own, I was going to suddenly be writing about Windows NT and I was not happy
01:56:59 ◼ ► about this at all. But then again, there were people when they shut down Mac user, they gave
01:57:05 ◼ ► people the option and some people did get go work at, you know, personal computing or whatever it
01:57:11 ◼ ► was. They had to write all their articles in all capital letters. Yeah. With three dot extensions
01:57:15 ◼ ► at the end. Backslashes, Jason, backslashes. I don't know. I think you're right. I think maybe,
01:57:19 ◼ ► maybe what I would say is, you know, watch for the rise of these social media companies and
01:57:26 ◼ ► don't trust them. And if you can find a way to become an early investor and that's not a warning
01:57:31 ◼ ► anymore and change their direction. No, no. It's like, give Mark Zuckerberg cash. So you have a say
01:57:36 ◼ ► over what he does. Cause he's going to destroy everything. I think what you want to do is like,
01:57:41 ◼ ► I mean, what, what, what's actionable with that warning would be to like befriend Mark Zuckerberg
01:57:47 ◼ ► and distract him socially so that he never found Facebook. Like you just, you don't want to,
01:57:51 ◼ ► you're not going to kill him. You're just going to be like, let's go hang out and do this. I have got
01:57:55 ◼ ► a great idea for a startup and convince Mark Zuckerberg to hang out with your startup that
01:58:02 ◼ ► It's a great, it's an awesome new VR startup. It does VR ML on the, on the web. But because it's
01:58:09 ◼ ► a black mirror episode, it turns out my space ends up being worse than Facebook. Yeah. It's not,
01:58:13 ◼ ► it's not impossible. I like this. This is the, the new fangled science fiction story where you go
01:58:23 ◼ ► make Hitler successful in art school, right? He just, it just needs one thing to be different.
01:58:28 ◼ ► He just needs validation. Yeah. If he was just, if he was just a more successful painter,
01:58:34 ◼ ► All right. Well, we, we don't alas have the time travel to go back 25 years and work. We're in our
01:58:39 ◼ ► young selves. Thanks a lot, Angelo. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, John, thank you so much for being
01:58:45 ◼ ► on Upgrade again. It's, I know it's been four months, so thank you for returning and, and
01:58:51 ◼ ► filling in for Myke while Myke is flying over the Atlantic between pen shows and his home.
01:58:56 ◼ ► Yeah. Unlike Myke, I love the Mac more than I love pens. Yeah. Well, we got to talk about the Mac
01:59:01 ◼ ► and it's great. Cause then Myke's going to hear this episode and he's going to be like,
01:59:04 ◼ ► I'm glad you talked about the Mac. So I didn't have to, cause that's the thing that he does.
01:59:11 ◼ ► finding things we want to talk about. Well, you know, it's like Casey, we talk about the
01:59:15 ◼ ► Mac pro like, you know, it's part of the deal. It's something you gotta, you gotta talk about
01:59:19 ◼ ► that stuff too. All right. Well, thank you to John. I would like to thank our sponsors as well.
01:59:25 ◼ ► FreshBooks, ExpressVPN and Moo. Myke will be back next week with me. I'm always here on Upgrade.