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Upgrade

222: That's Not a Plan

 

00:00:00   [Music]

00:00:11   From relay FM, this is Upgrade, Episode #222, Upgrade this week is brought to you by Away,

00:00:17   Pingdom, and Luna Display. I am Jason Snell, not Myke Hurley, you can tell because I'm not English.

00:00:23   But I'm hosting because Myke is on assignment this week, and instead I have a special guest co-host.

00:00:29   It is John Saracusa, you may know him from such podcast as Reconcilable Differences right here on

00:00:36   relay FM, Robot or Not on the Incomparable, and what's this, Accidental Tech Podcast.

00:00:42   That sounds interesting. Hi, John.

00:00:44   Hello, Jason. I just noticed that this is Episode 222. I'm really excited to get a run of twos.

00:00:51   But nobody wants to talk about numerology, John. I do. I really want to talk about it,

00:00:55   but that's not the premise of the show. So let's talk about Snell Talk, the question that's not

00:01:01   about anything that Myke insists on asking me at the beginning of every show. And I thought maybe

00:01:06   we could talk about, both of us could answer this question. Imagine that. Like, we'll see. We'll see.

00:01:12   It is from Technotional, not his real name, probably. And Technotional asks, "What's the oldest

00:01:19   thing you own or is in your home? And more judgmentally, why is it there?" Well, I was

00:01:27   super confused by this question in the notes. Let me tell you why. First of all, I thought

00:01:32   Technotional was trying to say, "What's the oldest thing in your house related to technology or

00:01:39   something?" Because this is a technology podcast, but Technotional is not really a word. And I'm

00:01:44   like, "Is this a segment that I just don't know about?" No, it's just the name of the entity that

00:01:50   has the sentient nebula that sent us in this question. And so now I have to rethink the whole

00:01:54   question. Yeah, it's not the oldest technology product or whatever, which is what I was thinking

00:02:00   of. Like the oldest computer, oldest electronic thing or whatever, but like the oldest thing.

00:02:04   I'm going to let you go first while I scramble to think.

00:02:06   And you live in Massachusetts. For all I know, your house is the oldest thing. Although it's not

00:02:10   in your house. It is your house. But okay, so the oldest thing in my house, and there's some good

00:02:16   layers here. We have an upright piano. It is a, for those, I imagine there are probably even piano

00:02:24   podcasts out there, for those piano nerds who are listening in, it is a Kanabe upright piano from

00:02:30   1892. And it was restored in the '70s. My family bought it from the person who restored it. So it's

00:02:37   not a family heirloom. It hasn't been in my family since 1892 or anything like that. But it was

00:02:42   restored in the late '70s and my parents bought it from the restorer. And the most, I would say,

00:02:49   notable interesting thing about it is that when they restored it, they decided to make it, to

00:02:58   install in it, a computerized player piano system. So it is a player piano in addition to being a

00:03:05   regular piano. But you notice I said computerized and I also said late '70s. It has inside it a

00:03:13   circuit board from the late '70s, a system called piano quarter. It used to have a cassette tape

00:03:19   deck underneath the far right edge that you could rotate out and pop in a cassette and play the,

00:03:26   the cassette was a data cassette. If you played it in a regular audio player, it made this hideous

00:03:31   sounding noise like data tapes of the period because you had cassette drives on computers and

00:03:35   stuff like that too. But when you played it in this cassette deck that was attached to the player

00:03:40   system, you flip on the switch, there'd be a little spark, it's always scary, and it would take

00:03:47   off and it would play. And we had a Christmas cassette that my dad would just play. And these

00:03:53   cassettes are like 15, I think they were double speed. I think it was like 15 minutes on a side

00:03:57   and he would just like 15 minutes flip it over, 15 minutes flip it over and that music would just

00:04:03   run forever. Does it still work? The answer is yes. Shockingly, the player technology in it still

00:04:11   works. But about 10 years ago, maybe more, it might be more like 15 years ago now, you always

00:04:17   drop a decade. That's what Merlin taught me. I replaced the cassette deck with, you could,

00:04:28   basically there was a guy on the internet who was selling these conversion kits where you pop off

00:04:32   the bottom of the piano and pull out the cassette deck thing and you could plug in, it's a wireless

00:04:38   transmitter, it's a wireless audio transmitter. And that's the receiver side and the sender side.

00:04:44   And it was basically patched so that it would plug, it was plugged compatible with where the

00:04:49   cassette deck used to feed in. And the sender is a USB audio transmitter, standard USB audio device.

00:04:59   And that guy who had this hardware setup also had literally every tape that they ever made for that

00:05:04   system converted into MP3s that you could play in iTunes and just essentially airplay to a player

00:05:11   piano. And it totally works to this day. Although I don't use it that often, but I will at Christmas

00:05:16   time, which we're just about to start decorating this week, I will get that tape that I have

00:05:23   committed to memory because my dad played it endlessly during the holidays. So little '70s tech,

00:05:28   little '2000s tech, and a piano from 1892. And that's my answer. What about you, John?

00:05:33   Did your piano from the 1800s get upgraded for Airplay 2 or no?

00:05:37   No, it's still using, well, it still sadly has to use this. It's not quite new enough to be

00:05:44   considered vintage like the Airport Express. But it does require this proprietary USB audio

00:05:53   transmitter thing. But fortunately, USB will be with us forever. And it just shows up as a

00:05:59   standard audio device. So it doesn't require, the guy who sold it, he had this whole thing where it

00:06:04   was like in Winamp and you're supposed to use Winamp with it and all of that. And I said,

00:06:08   I'm on a Mac and I could run Winamp in emulation, but I'd really rather not. And he said,

00:06:11   oh, I can just send you the audio file version, the MP3 version instead of the,

00:06:16   because he was using like a MIDI translator or something like that, because he had taken all

00:06:20   the tapes and like converted them back to their source data. He knew the data format that they

00:06:25   were in. It's pretty amazing that this guy did this. And I think he was like getting his

00:06:30   master's degree or something in mechanical musical instruments or something. It was all part of this

00:06:35   thing and I just kind of fell into it, but it works. It's pretty amazing. And so, yeah, I have a

00:06:40   special custom iTunes library on my server, the separate library that is just all the beeps and

00:06:47   chirps of the piano quarter playback. You could have like a creepy reenactment of Westworld going

00:06:53   on in your house. You've got this. Oh yeah, it's totally jangly piano. The only problem is that

00:06:59   I don't have any Radiohead because it's from the late seventies early eighties.

00:07:03   That's like I probably got updated tapes. Yeah, there is a command line utility that you can

00:07:07   run that'll convert MIDI files into piano quarter files, but it just doesn't, it really only sounds

00:07:14   good when it's the original tapes that they, because it, before I switched it out, you could

00:07:19   put a blank cassette in it and press play and record and play on the piano and it would record

00:07:24   it, which is kind of mind blowing. And that's how they made all the tapes is they were recording it

00:07:30   on a device that was using the system and the MIDI conversions that I tried sounded okay,

00:07:36   but they were never a match for the kind of piano performances that they got on these things.

00:07:41   Well, that's pretty neat. And I definitely don't have anything, A, I don't have anything that old

00:07:46   and B, I don't have anything that interesting. The oldest thing in my house is probably a mouse turd

00:07:52   because my house is from the thirties and it's, you know, full of mouse turds. That's like when

00:07:59   we opened up the wall to redo to the doorway to the garage and we found a can of beer, an open empty

00:08:07   Burgermeister beer can that was presumably from the people who built the house in the fifties.

00:08:11   Yeah, yeah, that's probably old, but that doesn't really count as like a thing that I own or

00:08:15   whatever. I do own that technically. I'm probably going to go with like, so my grandparents passed

00:08:23   away many years ago. We sort of collectively, the grandchildren raided their house of all the things

00:08:29   that nobody wanted, right? It's all the, all the, you know, belongings and cherished belongings go

00:08:35   out to the siblings, so on and so forth. And eventually there's nothing left that anyone wants.

00:08:38   And so that's when the grandchildren get to come in and go through grandma and grandpa's beautiful

00:08:42   picturesque sort of frozen in time Levittown suburban house. I'm not going to say unmodified

00:08:48   because that generation, when they got these houses, they all did stuff to the house. My

00:08:52   grandfather put like a back porch thing and extended the roof and did a bunch of stuff to

00:08:57   the house, right? So it wasn't original, original, none of them were, but it was frozen in amber

00:09:02   compared to like the neighboring houses and the inside as well. If I could have taken the whole

00:09:06   house with me, I would have, but I couldn't do that. So I had to, you know, what's left that

00:09:11   nobody wants. And what I ended up taking was a bunch of kitchen utensils that I remember from

00:09:15   like going over my grandmother's house for, you know, dinner on weekends. She only lived like

00:09:20   20 minutes away from us and used to go over there a lot. So I have some wooden spoons. I have a like

00:09:25   tin funnel, you know, a bunch of kitchen supplies that are all older than me, probably older than

00:09:32   my parents. So one of those things surely wins as the oldest sort of possession in my home.

00:09:37   - That's nice. That's nice. I have, when my grandmother died, she had a whole bunch of glass

00:09:42   paperweights. And I remember going to the, I forget where, probably my uncle's house, there was a kind

00:09:50   of a collection there. Like, yeah, we've got a bunch of them. Some, they'd already been raided

00:09:54   a little bit, but we've got a bunch of them if you want to take it. And I remember one of them was

00:09:59   this, or there were a couple that I remember. There's this glass turtle and there was another

00:10:02   one that was this sort of pink seashelly kind of thing. And I have both of those and it's just,

00:10:07   it's a nice little thing. I always think of my grandmother when I look at those.

00:10:09   And then I realized I also have, my wife was talking about this the other day,

00:10:14   because she really likes the fact that we have my mom's KitchenAid mixer. When she,

00:10:20   when my parents moved into a motor home, they had no need for heavy appliances anymore. And we got

00:10:24   the KitchenAid mixer. We had registered for one when we got married and they were too expensive.

00:10:29   We were in our early twenties, nobody we knew had the money for a KitchenAid mixer.

00:10:33   But we ended up getting the one that my mom bought in the late seventies. It's avocado green. It's

00:10:41   so old that the color it is has come back into fashion. So that's, it's gone a whole cycle,

00:10:47   but it still works great. So I made sweet potato pie with it, like for Thanksgiving this year.

00:10:53   That's great. Old tech, some old tech survives. It's funny. Some old tech really lasts and stands

00:11:01   the test of time. I think maybe they were designed to like that circuit board in that piano. It

00:11:05   blows my mind that it's still functional all this time later, 40 years later, but it is.

00:11:10   Well, I mean, the environment of a piano is not subject to undue stresses and hopefully wild

00:11:16   swings in temperature and everything was so big and chunky back in like the traces on the board

00:11:19   are probably like, you know, the thickness of pencil lead and they're just, the chips are huge,

00:11:24   it's just gargantuan, right? So even if there's a little bit of corrosion and moisture or whatever,

00:11:29   it takes a lot to really damage it. Yeah, I think so. And where it's been in that piano,

00:11:33   you're right. Like we don't store that, we don't, the piano doesn't live in the,

00:11:37   in the damp, cold part of the house, right? And you're in California, everything just is preserved

00:11:42   out there too. It's our streets. Our streets are fine too. It's just fine. All right. We do have a

00:11:48   few follow-up items before we get into the topic. Believe it or not, old technology was not our

00:11:53   topic, but thank you to Technotional, the entity who supplied our Snell Talk question. I want to

00:11:59   remind everybody the upgradees, nominations and votes are still going on. I'll put a link in the

00:12:04   show notes again. This will be the fifth annual. Myke really loves it when we use annual things

00:12:09   for stuff on upgrades. So the fifth annual upgradees, voting will close on Christmas Eve

00:12:16   and then that show will come out on, I think, New Year's Eve. So that'll be really exciting.

00:12:22   Hundreds of votes already, but plenty of time to still get your votes in the next few weeks.

00:12:27   I had a couple of follow-out items because basically I wanted to, so here's the thing,

00:12:32   Jon, I listen to ATP. If I'm not listening live, I listen as soon as it comes out.

00:12:36   And it, you know, I know all you guys and, and that just adds even more frustration to the fact

00:12:42   that you can't hear me when I'm talking back to your podcast. But I've got you. It's what

00:12:46   the chat room is for. Yeah, it's true. It's true. Well, when I'm cooking dinner, it's harder to be

00:12:51   in the chat room. Usually I'm listening to you when I'm listening to live, I'm actually cooking

00:12:55   dinner and then I send pictures of what I'm cooking to Casey. You could probably make some

00:12:59   kind of Siri shortcut so that you could just yell things into the air while you're cooking.

00:13:03   That's right. That's actually, that's an interesting idea. Some emoji, I'll just

00:13:08   communicate via emoji in the chat room. I do have some follow-ups. So one of the things you

00:13:12   guys were talking about was about sleep shutdown and sort of Mac idle techniques that people have.

00:13:23   And I was fascinated by this because I, so I have an iMac Pro at my desk and before that I had a 5k

00:13:32   iMac. The whole time I've been, well, after like the first couple of months in, in this office

00:13:37   full-time, I bought an iMac, a 5k iMac when those came out and then an iMac Pro. I, at the end of

00:13:45   the day, when I'm not going to be coming back in, I'm going to close the door and I'm done for the

00:13:50   day. I hold down the option key and move up to the Apple menu and I choose shut down and my computer

00:13:58   shuts off and that, and then I walk away. And I was fascinated to hear all of the stories of

00:14:05   putting your computer to sleep or leaving it on. I get why Casey leaves it on. That's why I have

00:14:09   a server is so I don't have to leave my iMac on to run Plex. But you, you made a case for putting

00:14:18   your computer to sleep instead of shutting it down. And I guess this is the point where you

00:14:24   judge me. I wasn't really making a case for putting it to sleep. Like to give a little more context

00:14:28   here for the younger people listening for all the ulcers, we remember computers as a thing that

00:14:34   existed in your house in a dedicated single place. There's sometimes called the computer room. And

00:14:40   when you want it to use it, you went into that room, you turn the computer on, you use it. And

00:14:44   when you were done using it, you turn the computer off and you left the room to leave the room with

00:14:48   the computer on would be like leaving the light on like there, these computers didn't sleep. There

00:14:52   was no sleep mode or anything like that. You, they're on when you're using them and they're

00:14:55   off when you're not using them. And you know, if you want to go back far enough, it's before there

00:14:59   was any kind of shutdown process. Like, well, I'm done. And you'd flick the switch and turn the thing

00:15:02   off. And again, if you didn't, if you left the room, it's like, you forgot to turn the computer

00:15:06   off. It would be like leaving a blaring spotlight on it. It was just great. So lots, lots of people

00:15:11   have habits formed in those times and you know, or similar habits for light switches or anything else,

00:15:19   faucets, stuff like that. They're just like, well, when you're done using it, you get up and leave,

00:15:24   you turn the thing on shut the thing off or whatever. On ATP what I was mostly saying is if

00:15:28   those are your habits and you've never thought about the fact that all modern Macs have some way

00:15:32   that they can sleep, that you should give it a try. Now you're not, I'm not speaking to you when

00:15:37   I'm doing that segment. You know about sleep. You don't need to know anything about like,

00:15:40   it was just for the people who it hadn't occurred to them that things had changed or that they had,

00:15:44   they had built habits based on other things that are not like modern computers. One of the examples

00:15:49   I gave was people who have iOS devices, iPhones, you know, I've never seen an Apple watch,

00:15:53   but iPhones or iPads or whatever. And when they're done using their iPhone or their iPad,

00:15:58   they will hard power down the thing. Like just hold down the power button, slide that little

00:16:02   red slider, shut it all the way down. That's madness, madness, madness. And then, you know,

00:16:06   15 minutes later, like I check my email again and they'll hit the power button and the white

00:16:10   Apple logo will appear and they'll wait for their iPad to boot and they'll check it. And I know real

00:16:14   people in the real world who do this and I have not been able to convince them not to do it.

00:16:17   And I think it has to be just based on those types of habits of like a light bulb or whatever. So

00:16:21   what I was basically saying is if you've never tried it, if you've never tried not shutting down

00:16:26   your computer, but just putting it to sleep, consider trying it. Now, I don't know if this

00:16:31   is something you've tried, obviously you know about it, but I don't know if it's something

00:16:33   you've tried and rejected, but I find that it is a big upgrade because the computers are

00:16:39   basically silent when they're off. Yes, they do sip some small amount of power, but it's not that

00:16:43   bad. And when you want to use it, you just come up to it and you hit the space bar and it's ready

00:16:46   to go right where you left off. Yeah. So my reasoning, so I used a laptop as my primary

00:16:52   for a long time. And so obviously it would be sleeping. It would, that would be its state,

00:16:59   right? You close it, it goes to sleep. But why is that obvious? It's only because that's what

00:17:02   happens when you close it. Yeah. Well, it's because you could shut down your laptop. That's true. I

00:17:07   feel like, yeah, that would be, I mean, it's such a natural thing to close it when you're not using

00:17:11   it. That's the trick, right? If you talk about the ceremony of turning off a light switch,

00:17:15   closing a laptop is the ceremony, I feel like. So you don't need to do shut down or whatever.

00:17:21   You just close the laptop. But with the iMac, here's my rationale. I think it's a couple of

00:17:26   things that fitting in part of it is ceremony, which is I kind of like the idea that when I'm

00:17:30   done at the end of the day and I'm basically signing out, um, I actually am placing a slight

00:17:35   barrier to me coming back out and going back to work, which is I shut down the computer. I had

00:17:41   that happen this weekend where I was going to come out here and look at something really quick. And I

00:17:44   was like, Oh, I shut it down. Didn't I? Well, forget it. I'll just look on the iPad. And I just

00:17:48   kind of like blew it off. So I think part of it is the ceremony of like, I'm done for the day.

00:17:52   I'm not going to come back in here. This is it like a little bit of a barrier to going back to

00:17:56   work. I'm going to go out in the other room, going to be with my family. Um, part of it is that I've

00:18:01   got a, uh, or do I, I don't anymore. I had for a while, a voltage sensing power strip that would

00:18:09   turn off some other devices when, um, when I turned this off, actually, no, I do still have that

00:18:16   when I turn the computer off and I don't know if that will work with sleep or not, but basically

00:18:20   like a couple other things, um, like my iPod, Hi-Fi that I use as an external speaker and that

00:18:25   thing will just stay on forever. And when nothing is plugged into it, it emits a slight hum and it's

00:18:30   super annoying. But when I shut the computer down, it's not well engineered. When I shut the

00:18:37   computer down, it powers off. And, uh, that I like that if I go to sleep, will it also maybe,

00:18:43   but really my big motivator is that use all those years using the laptop. My feeling was every now

00:18:49   and then it would be like, uh, I don't know how many days or weeks since I had last restarted or

00:18:55   shut down and I would need to restart because the computer was misbehaving. Um, and I thought, and,

00:19:03   and, and this may be completely cargo cult, but my, my rationale in part for shutting down my

00:19:08   computer at the end of the day and starting it up in the morning is look, it's a fresh start,

00:19:14   essentially start fresh. It's a, it's a fresh reboot. Everything's coming up from zero. And,

00:19:21   uh, and, and I'm not going to have at some point in the middle of the day, a moment where I'm like,

00:19:27   I guess I better restart because things are, things are a little bit wonky. Cause I feel like

00:19:31   if you leave the computer without a restart, eventually things get a little out of whack

00:19:35   and you got to restart. Cause my, like my mom, this was always her thing with her laptop is,

00:19:40   oh, my laptop is really acting strangely. And I'd say, have you shut it down and restarted it?

00:19:44   Because that will probably solve it. It always solved it. That was always the thing. And so,

00:19:49   you know, part of me is just like, why not wipe the slate at the end of the day? And I don't need

00:19:53   the computer to be active and it doesn't take very long to start it up in the morning because it's a

00:19:59   pretty fast computer. And, uh, so that's why that's what I do. So a sign of a modern, uh,

00:20:05   high quality computer is that it doesn't deteriorate over time to the point where you need

00:20:09   to restart it. Like, uh, like, uh, enter a mob warfare and the Godfather just to get out all the

00:20:15   bad blood everyone said, you don't clear out the bugs. You gotta, you gotta get a fresh bowl in

00:20:20   there. I mean, if you have to do that, it's a sign that something is wrong. I think these are habits

00:20:24   from a long time ago, but I also, it's the feeling like, you know, if you've got a memory leak and

00:20:29   something, um, but it only manifests over, you know, 96 hours or whatever, over a hundred or 150

00:20:37   hours of uptime and I restart or I shut down and power up every day. I'll never have to deal with

00:20:45   that. But how much of that is reality today versus all that time ago? I don't know. I think in the

00:20:50   end it comes down to the ceremony more than any, anything else. I kind of don't mind it. It does

00:20:55   mean I'll tell you something though, John, I don't think people at Apple shut down their computers.

00:21:00   And the reason I'll tell you this is there has been a bug in the, in the startup, which I believe

00:21:04   is bridge OS. I believe this is not even Mac OS. It's the, in the bridge OS. Um, there has been a

00:21:09   bug since I got my iMac pro and they still haven't fixed it. And it's a year now and they haven't

00:21:14   fixed it. And the bug is this, which is if I'm there ready to type in my password on startup and

00:21:21   I type it in quickly and hit return, the next thing that happens is it puts up the text that says

00:21:27   incorrect password, incorrect password. It blinks it incorrect password. You can actually start

00:21:33   typing other things and it will delete the text in the bullets, in the, in the password box and let

00:21:40   you input more text. But at some point after about 10 seconds, it just continues on because it was

00:21:46   the correct password all along and it'll boot your system. It is, it is so perplexing. And, um, I

00:21:53   think they never see it because I think the people who are in charge are not starting up the computer

00:21:57   every morning. Well, they're not as fast as the typists. Maybe that's it. Maybe that's it. Yeah.

00:22:02   They don't, they're not booting their computer impatiently every morning because they just put

00:22:05   their computers to sleep. And some computers, you know, if you're listening to this, well,

00:22:10   I have to restart my computer at least once a week or it gets wonky. That is still definitely

00:22:13   a thing that happens, but it's a sign that something is wrong. I don't think people should

00:22:16   accept it that, Oh, that's, that's just the way computers are. It's not just the way computer,

00:22:20   it's the way some computers are computers with weird, you know, hardware or software issues,

00:22:26   or that are breaking around the process of breaking. Like there's many things that can

00:22:29   cause this to be the case. I find laptops are much more likely to be like this. I have to

00:22:34   hard reboot my laptop basically every two and a half weeks. And I think it's terrible. Like

00:22:40   I'll come in from a weekend and I'll lift the lid on my laptop and it will just be like, Nope,

00:22:44   nothing doing like either it would be totally black or the screen will come up and we'll just

00:22:47   get a beach ball forever. And I'll try to wait it out. And it's like, well, guess what? You're

00:22:51   getting hard rebooted. And that's one of the reasons I really dislike my laptop. It shouldn't

00:22:55   be the case that when I left my lid, you know, either doesn't turn any of the screens on or shows

00:23:01   me all my stuff and then a beach ball. And I just, there's no getting out of it. You can't force quit

00:23:06   anything. You can't SSA chin. You can't do it. That's just, and then I have to hard reboot every

00:23:09   two and a half weeks or so. Ten years of using my laptop as my primary and having it attached to an

00:23:14   external monitor at work most of that time, I cannot tell you. I mean, that's partly what has

00:23:21   trained me for this is that I, yes, it will betray you at some point. And it will often happen when

00:23:27   you're just opening the lid and something has gone wrong in the background. Although the worst,

00:23:32   the worst one is always that you take your backpack off when you get home and it's hot

00:23:36   because the computer's been running and blowing the fan on the inside of a very small space

00:23:41   inside your backpack, because it didn't properly, uh, go to sleep when you unhooked it and put it in

00:23:48   your bag. That's the worst that happened all the time. Yeah. Laptops are terrible, but, uh, and

00:23:52   there's not, not all laptops. I've had some laptops where there's not been the case. I don't remember

00:23:55   this ever happening with my 2011 MacBook air that we had at home, just this particular work of a

00:24:00   laptop was a 2017 MacBook pro. Um, but I find that unacceptable, you know, but the desktops have,

00:24:06   I would find it even more acceptable desktop. This, this 2008 Mac pro that I'm sitting in front of

00:24:11   the only time it gets reboot is for system updates. Like it just, and there's not many,

00:24:16   not many of those anymore because it's still running. Okay. I pretend it just,

00:24:18   it just runs forever. Nevermind. I just put it to sleep every day. I'm not doing it as some sort of

00:24:23   weird uptime contest or whatever. It's just the way I use my computer when I want to use it.

00:24:26   It's ready to go. When I don't, it is completely silent and sitting over there in the corner,

00:24:31   ready for me to use it. So if you haven't tried that, uh, listeners, uh, give it a try. It's kind

00:24:36   of fun to have to know that your computer is silently waiting for your return. Even desktop

00:24:41   computers can go to sleep. Um, okay. I have more to talk about much more to talk about,

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00:27:33   All right, we do have a little bit more follow-up before we move on to topics, which is just that

00:27:37   you did your thing on ATP last week where you had your shared Google Sheet with Geekbench scores and

00:27:44   prices for iPads and for MacBooks and for Mac Mini too, which I actually took out when... So I made

00:27:52   some charts too because it was fun. I'm not sure what it really tells us. Somebody wrote me on

00:27:57   Twitter and said, "You know, it has the biggest multiplier of all of Geekbench score to dollar

00:28:03   price is probably the Apple TV 4K." And I was like, "Okay, well, yeah, but no, I think that goes

00:28:10   a little bit far." But the point was, you know, the iPad and the MacBook are different. And it's true,

00:28:15   but it's still kind of fascinating to think of just as a vague kind of processor power that's in

00:28:23   these iPads for what they cost. And it is impressive when you think of it that way, that for

00:28:32   the $799 of the 11-inch iPad Pro, there's a lot of processor power in there. The ARM processors that

00:28:40   Apple is using in its current iPads are way more powerful given the price than the Intel processors

00:28:50   and MacBooks. And there's a lot going on there and there's no like, "Ha ha! So I've proven it." But

00:28:54   it was a fun exercise to go through that. So thank you for talking about it and sharing that

00:28:59   spreadsheet with all the data. Again, I would say more kind of entertaining and thought-provoking

00:29:06   than proving any particular point, but I still found it worth the time to think about it.

00:29:13   **Matt Stauffer** I thought it was, I mean, I originally made these charts back when the new

00:29:16   iPads were introduced. So I was thinking of, "Here are these new products and how do they stack up

00:29:20   with Apple's existing products?" And, you know, we're talking about different aspects of them and

00:29:24   it's useful sometimes to graph things. If I had to do some more graphs, and if you want to do

00:29:31   some more graphs, I would encourage you to do this. The interesting story is how iOS devices,

00:29:37   iPads, iPhones, all that stuff started as this curiosity that it was so amazing that it could

00:29:45   run anything based on OS X, as Steve Jobs said, that it could run a miniaturized version of this

00:29:51   full-fledged big bad operating system on a phone and do it successfully because the phones were

00:29:57   tiny and had incredibly weak processors, couldn't even shoot video to begin with. They're just

00:30:03   such small-scale, weakling little sister products. And if you could graph the relative performance of

00:30:15   or just graph the performance period to pick any metric that you want, whether it's Geekbench or

00:30:20   something else, of the Mac line, the various Mac lines, and the iOS lines. And in the beginning,

00:30:27   the Macs, of course, are these big, bad, you know, desktop and laptop computers and they do all this

00:30:32   great stuff. And, you know, how could you ever get the operating system that runs on those in any form

00:30:37   onto this weakling little phone? And the phone just had no memory and was super slow. What,

00:30:42   there was like 200 megahertz? I don't know. I'm not going to guess what the clock speed was in the

00:30:45   original iPhone. Someone is looking up Wikipedia right now and will tell me in a moment.

00:30:50   But eventually, when you're not paying attention, every year it's like, "Oh, the new phones are

00:30:54   great. They're faster than ever. Oh, the new phones are great. They're faster than ever. And

00:30:56   these new iPads, look how fast they are. Oh, there's an iPad Pro." You assume that, okay,

00:31:01   but yeah, but the Macs are getting faster too, right? But these lines cross at a certain point.

00:31:05   And first it's just the iOS devices crossing over the low-end products and then the medium-end. And

00:31:11   now I feel like with these latest ones, it's very difficult to find, you know, how many Macs

00:31:18   does Apple even make that are faster at a reasonable suite of compute-intensive things

00:31:25   than the iPad? And the answer is not many. Like, it's just among the portables, but the two very

00:31:31   fastest MacBook Pros are faster. And then presumably the iMac Pro, although the iPad Pro

00:31:36   did beat the iMac Pro in a couple of benchmarks, which is mind-boggling when you think about that

00:31:41   $5,000 computer with all this cooling and all this stuff, that the iPad can beat it doing anything,

00:31:46   literally any operation. It doesn't make any sense unless there was some dedicated... This

00:31:49   is the LLVM compiler benchmark, like the one aspect of the Geekbench mix. And so seeing that

00:31:56   story, like seeing that over the years, over the decade and, you know, 11 years or whatever it's

00:32:01   been for the iPhone, just to watch those little devices just crawl up out of the muck and

00:32:06   eventually overtake almost the entire Mac line. I think that's a fascinating story.

00:32:11   There's the stagnation of Intel and all the other issues, but like charting them, as I said, in ATP.

00:32:17   My goal with the charting, the reason I took the Mac Mini out of a bunch of my graphs, I put it in

00:32:23   the bottom ones, but in the top ones I took it out, is I wanted it to be like, if you just glance at

00:32:26   this chart, it would be like, "Oh, here's the price and performance of single-core and multi-core of

00:32:30   the Apple's laptop line." And then I'd be like, "Well, the type's really small. I hid the iPad in

00:32:35   there. Can you guess where it is?" And you would never guess just offhand that it would be way over

00:32:39   there on the right-hand side with these, especially with the big separation of single and multi-core.

00:32:42   So you could graph this stuff endlessly. I still think it's a fascinating story. And it's one of

00:32:48   those things that sneaks up on you if you don't take a chance to look at it. Now, your scatter

00:32:52   plot that you did is even more interesting, especially since you've got these circles around

00:32:56   the different regions or whatever. And then the Mini and the MacBook Pro is way up in the upper

00:33:01   right of performance and cost. I bet Apple doesn't view its products in this way. I can't imagine

00:33:10   any chart like any of these ones that any of us have made ever showing up in something inside

00:33:15   Apple, because that's not how they view their products, not how they market their products. And

00:33:19   realistically speaking, it's not how we should think about their products either, because there's

00:33:23   so much more to them than these benchmark numbers or whatever. Exactly. I had a bunch of people say,

00:33:28   "Well, yeah, but the iPad doesn't have a keyboard and the Mac Mini," because I took it out of mine

00:33:33   because I wanted it to just be on mobile, but the Mac Mini scores incredibly well, the new Mac Mini,

00:33:37   because it's cheap and it's got a bunch of pretty fast processor options. But of course,

00:33:43   that doesn't have keyboard or display or anything like that. And that's all true, right? The point

00:33:49   is not to—that's what I meant by sort of it doesn't prove anything. Yeah, there's a lot going

00:33:53   on here that is not addressed in these charts, and yet it is kind of enough to scratch your chin a

00:34:00   little bit and be like, "Well, look at that. Isn't that interesting, where the iPad manages to sit

00:34:05   and where the MacBook is versus the MacBook Air and all of that?" Yeah, because we are asking

00:34:11   these things to do some of the same things. They both run Photoshop, right? So you're in Photoshop

00:34:16   on an iPad or on a Mac, and you would think, "Well, of course, I'll run it on a Mac because

00:34:20   it'll do much better on a Mac." It's like, "Well, which Mac do you have?" Let's see if that's really

00:34:25   true. And the idea of when Apple says that the iPad Pro is faster than 90% of the laptop shipped

00:34:32   in the last couple of years, there is that moment of like, "Well, okay, I hear you, but what does

00:34:38   that really mean?" And it lets you visualize that. It's like, "No, these are faster than

00:34:43   every MacBook other than—at least in these tests." And again, these are semi-synthetic benchmark

00:34:50   tests, but faster than any MacBook other than the 15-inch MacBook Pro models. And that's, again,

00:34:56   it's different. There are lots of caveats there. I had a bunch of people dropping into my Twitter

00:35:01   mention saying, "Ah, yes, but the iPad is useless because it doesn't whatever." I'm like, "Whatever,

00:35:05   I don't really care, and I'm not going to engage in that." It's just kind of fascinating to see that

00:35:10   power there. I honestly think that the most interesting thing about this discussion is

00:35:15   not about the iPad. It's about an Apple-built processor in a Mac. That was always the question.

00:35:23   It's like, "Well, they can't really—" And you guys talked about this on ATP last week.

00:35:28   The iPad Pro shows that there is a vast swath of Apple's product line that could be converted

00:35:35   today with existing processors and be no slower than they currently are.

00:35:40   And be better. Have longer battery life. Be either faster or have a fantastically longer

00:35:46   battery life or both. Wikipedia says the original iPhone was underclocked to 412 megahertz,

00:35:53   the Samsung processor. It was a 620 megahertz processor underclocked to 412 megahertz.

00:35:58   Yeah. The thing about Apple not thinking that these graphs never appearing in Apple's

00:36:04   headquarters as they envision their product line is like—this is how we see the external face,

00:36:09   where they show, "Here's our lineup of products." They like to put them in size order and have

00:36:14   increments of price. They always have this slide somewhere in the presentation of like,

00:36:17   "Here's this one, and it costs this much, and then you can step up to this one, and it costs

00:36:21   this much." They seem to like to have nice gradations of price where you add 100 or 150

00:36:27   or whatever as you go up to the next one, and they come in three or four sizes. They have product

00:36:33   lines. It's almost as if they like to think of them as almost a physical family, like nesting

00:36:40   dolls or a matched set of things. The physical attributes and the prices as an almost physical

00:36:48   attribute as far as Apple is concerned. And yes, also the capabilities. But never would they say,

00:36:54   "Okay, let's see how these devices spread out over any specification, whether it be

00:37:02   RAM or clock speed or performance on a mixed set of benchmarks or application performance."

00:37:09   Like, they never do that. And it's mostly because the results are not sensible and really never have

00:37:15   been sensible. Here we're trying to highlight how the iOS line has come from behind and overtaken

00:37:20   the Mac line. But just forget about iOS. Just within the Mac line, the layout of the dots and

00:37:25   any scatter plot of the Mac line has never been. Look at this beautiful curve. You pay more money,

00:37:31   and you get a better product. It's always been all over the place because when you get to the high

00:37:34   end, the margins get bigger and things get more wildly out of whack. And there's these tight

00:37:38   clusters around certain capabilities based on the processors they're using at the time with a few

00:37:42   outliers. It's not how Apple thinks about their products, and certainly not how they present

00:37:47   into the outside world. I don't think it's how they think about them internally. And I don't

00:37:49   think it's healthy for us to think about them that way. But this is purely a technology story of when

00:37:57   does our Macs become feasible? When does it become inevitable? And the turnaround of the October

00:38:03   iMacs is like, now it's almost becoming inevitable. Intel really gets a fire lit under it, or Apple

00:38:08   makes its own x86 chip, or there's a bunch of other alternatives that we talk about at Infinitum on

00:38:13   ATP. But it's not looking good for Intel-based Macs. I used to be a believer that Apple wouldn't

00:38:21   switch the Mac away from Intel, mostly because I felt like in that era, and I think this was

00:38:26   actually how Apple felt at the time, they didn't care enough about the Mac to put in an effort to

00:38:33   do a chip transition. But then we had the whole, you know, let's come on down and have a rap

00:38:40   session about the Mac. And we feel everybody's pain, and there's going to be a Mac Pro, and

00:38:48   you know, and stay tuned for that iMac Pro at the end of the year, and all that stuff that we got in

00:38:54   2017. And they revised the Mac Mini for crying out loud. Right, right. Like this is, I would guess

00:39:00   that at some point, maybe early last year, Apple had a, something happened where Apple was like,

00:39:06   okay, we're changing our assumptions about the Mac. We're either going to do the Mac or we're

00:39:10   not going to do it. Are we going to do it or are we not going to do it? And I feel like a lot of

00:39:13   this stuff is all kind of a part of a whole, which is bringing in the Mac Pro and revising the Mac

00:39:21   Mini. But it's also like the marzipan stuff I think you can throw in there. Like, I think their

00:39:26   new strategy is traditional computer form factors will still be the Mac, but they'll be running,

00:39:33   they'll be able to run all of the software that's in the iOS app store as well. And at that point,

00:39:39   when I see them doing all of that, making all this effort, I look at it and I go, oh, okay,

00:39:43   well now you will totally switch to ARM because we've seen that the processors are capable of it,

00:39:49   especially on the laptop end. And so I, yeah, in a year I've gone from, I don't think they,

00:39:55   I guess a year and a half ago, I thought, I don't think they care enough. A year ago, I thought,

00:39:59   I don't know if they're going to be able to do it. When will they be able to do it? And this year

00:40:04   with these iPad Pros, especially, it's just like, oh, well, they're there. Like, it's just a matter

00:40:08   of how they want to roll it out. They're already present. Yeah, once you get to the point where

00:40:11   you are looking forward to and anticipating and wanting, like, you start thinking, finally,

00:40:17   I would love to have a laptop with this processor in it, right? When you lust after that product,

00:40:22   that product that doesn't exist, then it becomes so much more real. Related to that, I wrote a piece

00:40:27   for Macworld a couple of weeks ago, which was based entirely on just a moment of realization

00:40:32   while Apple was talking about the iPad Pro and the MacBook Air because they were at the same event,

00:40:40   right? And I had that moment where I thought, you know, what's interesting is the iPad,

00:40:44   the MacBook Air does not have processor configurations. It's one processor for your

00:40:52   son's homework computer, your kid's homework computer, right? There's the one processor.

00:40:55   Well, you can build it with an i7 for an extra $300. No, there's one processor that's available

00:41:02   for it. And I had that moment where I thought, oh, you know, that's just like all the iOS devices.

00:41:07   They don't let you vary it and build your own processor configuration. There's just the one.

00:41:12   And when you say Apple internally isn't thinking about it in the terms of like, well, there's this

00:41:17   thing and this thing and that thing. I think that's true. I also think that there's a tendency

00:41:21   inside Apple is my guess to really think of the product as what's this product for and what do we

00:41:26   want to build it? And I think the idea of kind of old school configurator where, you know, there was,

00:41:33   you know, Dell was so successful with it in the early 2000s, right? You remember this,

00:41:37   that the huge, there was huge pressure on Apple. I think Tim Cook was probably a part of this.

00:41:40   Huge pressure on Apple to be able to reduce their channel inventory and let you customize

00:41:48   your order online. That was like Dell mastered that and everybody else felt the pressure

00:41:53   on doing that. You want to reduce your channel inventory because it's very expensive to build

00:41:57   computers and not know if somebody's going to sell them or not. And if nobody buys them,

00:42:01   if nobody buys them, you're, you got to put them in a landfill or something, or you got to put them

00:42:05   on sale. And, but a part of that was custom configurations. And I remember how big a deal

00:42:12   it was when you could build to, you know, configure to order, build to order a Mac and choose it.

00:42:18   But internally at Apple, when I think about how they are designing these products, especially the

00:42:21   iOS products, like the last thing that they want to do is make something maybe like the Mac Pro,

00:42:28   right? But for most of the computers, they don't want to have things that are like totally modular.

00:42:32   And there are like 16 different variations based on Ram and storage. And like, they want to minimize

00:42:38   that as much as possible. And on iOS, they've done that where basically you've got storage and color,

00:42:43   and that's it. Like those are your options, storage and color. And if you want a different set of

00:42:48   features, get the other model, like get the, get the 10 R or get the 10 S or buy the iPhone seven,

00:42:54   get the regular iPad or get the iPad Pro. And on the Mac right now, they don't do that. But I

00:42:59   looked at this error when it came out and I was like, eh, that's, that seems more Apple to me

00:43:03   today of just saying, uh, no, it's got the processor that it's, that's in it. And if you

00:43:08   don't want that processor, get a different model. That's mostly a consumer friendly move, because I

00:43:13   think people are relieved only to have to pick storage size and color for their phones. Cause

00:43:18   that's, those are for the most part, you can't give, you don't want to give consumers too much

00:43:23   to think about. Um, but there are lots of examples of products where they do seemingly intentionally

00:43:30   give consumers a lot to think about buying a car as one of them, depending on what kind of car you

00:43:34   buy. A lot of car makers have tons and tons of options and it's like, Oh, geez, I really have

00:43:38   to think of all this. I mean, the more, in fact, the more expensive the car, you guys,

00:43:41   sometimes the more options are where you can customize every aspect of the interior down to

00:43:45   every single color and materials for the seats and the dashboard and the floor. Like, Oh, just,

00:43:50   can you just make me a car? That's like, you know, and they have presets or whatever, but,

00:43:54   uh, there's something to that. And that when Apple offers you, like you just said, Oh,

00:43:58   upgrade to the I seven or 300 bucks, those options very much like car options tend to cost way more

00:44:05   to the consumer than they do to Apple. Right. Big markup on those. Um, and if you do the generally

00:44:12   consumer friendly thing of saying, Oh, the MacBook air, it's going to CPU option. Apple forgoes these

00:44:17   fat, fat margins on upgrading the CPU for some minor bump in speed that is noticeable and

00:44:25   measurable, but not in proportion to the amount of extra money. Look at the chart, look at that

00:44:30   chart, that scatterplot chart I made. That's got the Mac book on there with the two build to order

00:44:35   options on a faster processor in the 12 inch Mac book. And it, it, it does nothing like, except

00:44:42   raise the price. It moves everything. All the, all the items move very slightly upward and off to the

00:44:48   right. And it does cost Apple more, especially with Intel because Intel marks up those, those

00:44:53   things, but like, and it costs Apple, what it costs Apple is that they've got to build it so

00:44:57   that it can have different processors in it. Right. That is the one thing that is the fundamental cost

00:45:01   for clock speed and the pin outs of the same. It's not that big of a difference, but like,

00:45:04   what we're getting is like in the, in the Mac line, there's been this expectation that certain

00:45:12   things are customizable and it's given the product designers, like the, like not, not the actual

00:45:18   physical product, but like the thing for sale, like sort of price designing it, that they have

00:45:23   these knobs that they can turn. They can say, okay, well here, here will be our base model.

00:45:27   And here are the three dials that people are going to turn and, you know, hard disk space or, you

00:45:31   know, screen size, CPU, like there's all sorts of things. And all of those kind of like the phones

00:45:37   were, I don't know if this is still true, but historically, iPhone buyers have always wanted

00:45:42   to buy the fanciest model and it sells even better than the cheaper model. And in most cases,

00:45:47   that a surprising number of people will forego the base model to the point where at various times,

00:45:51   Apple has made the base model sort of undesirable to get people to get the option, sort of like the

00:45:56   car that doesn't come with the floor mats or doesn't come with air conditioning, even though

00:45:59   everybody wants air conditioning. Right. I am very much in favor of reducing some of these options

00:46:04   because I, I hope, I think, and I hope what it will mean is that they will not put like the not

00:46:10   so great CPU. And if they have to pick one CPU, they have to pick a pretty okay one, because if

00:46:16   there are no other options, there's no way to upsell. That's the one computer everyone's going

00:46:20   to be testing and trying. And if it's a slug, people are gonna say this whole computer is a

00:46:24   slug. Whereas before, if it's a slug, it would be like the reviewers would say, oh, just make sure

00:46:28   you get the upgraded CPU option back when, back when actually it did make more of a difference

00:46:31   than it does in the MacBook or whatever. And same thing with storage. I'll make sure you don't get

00:46:35   the 16 gigabyte phones. They're a little bit tight. Right. And nobody did buy them who got,

00:46:39   you know, in our circle of friends, we were like, don't, that's too little. Right. That's like,

00:46:42   it's the good, better, best buying psychology. Right. We did. Nobody wants the good. If they

00:46:46   can get the better, they'll always buy the middle one. And so you can say, Hey, it starts at $999,

00:46:51   but the middle one is $1,199. And at that point, yeah, it actually starts at $1,199, but the $999

00:46:56   will get you in the store. Although, you know, every new car that I've ever bought has had all

00:47:02   those options. And then they've said, well, we've, we've really only got three on the lot.

00:47:06   Um, so you can, and so you can either wait in nine months and maybe we'll get you one that has

00:47:11   been built to your specifications, or you can look at the three we've got and choose the features or

00:47:16   colors and drive it. And, uh, both of, both of the new cars that I've bought in that fashion

00:47:22   have been that essentially, which is like, Oh, this one has seed heaters. Great. This one's dark

00:47:28   gray and super boring. Minivan. Yeah. Okay. Whatever. It's here. We'll take it. Yeah. The

00:47:33   figurative and literal weight of inventory in the car will do slightly different than it is in Apple's

00:47:38   market because you'd look, you got to get these big, giant, bulky, heavy things on the lot. And

00:47:44   the physical reality of that is such that they are much more likely to price that to move. Whereas

00:47:49   Apple's putting things in every tiny boxes and doesn't have that problem. But anyway, I do hope

00:47:53   that Apple takes this as an opportunity to reduce options that are not meaningful, but like, I mean,

00:48:00   my dream would be that they all come with the good one because it's like, it doesn't cost that much

00:48:03   more and just put the good one in there. And it seems like they will be able to transfer all the

00:48:08   obscene margins to store. Yeah, exactly. Cause if you'd look at the prices to get like a one

00:48:12   terabyte SSD in the Mac, it's like, well, double the price. Yeah. No, I think that, I think that

00:48:16   is what they've shown on iOS is that storage is where you build in the margins. And I mean,

00:48:20   that's why I bring up that iPad pro is like, I feel like the iPad pro has the good processor,

00:48:24   right? It's not, that's like the eight 12 exits. Yeah. Like that's not, that's not like downclocked

00:48:29   and they could have put a slightly faster one in there and you know, or there's some different

00:48:33   variant that has nine cores instead of six or something like that's, they put the best one in

00:48:37   it. Or that the 11 has, has a slightly slower one and the 12.9 has a, has a faster one. Like, no,

00:48:43   they're, it's the eight 12 X. Everybody gets it. It's good. And would you like a terabyte of

00:48:48   storage with that? Yeah. Well they do. They do hold the Ram, which they don't talk about,

00:48:51   you know, first rule of Ram club and iOS known talks about Ram club. It only gets so at six

00:48:56   gigabytes on the one terabyte model, which is, which is nonsensical and further confuses people

00:49:01   who can't distinguish between Ram and storage. But like those two things are not connected.

00:49:04   They don't, that's why I don't talk about it. They're connected in that they're both the highest

00:49:08   they can go. So if you give us the most money, I'll keep you an extra, extra two gigs of Ram.

00:49:12   I feel like the, the current, and especially in the next like two or three years, we're going to

00:49:18   see, this is going to be the era where all of the learning that Apple has done in the last decade on

00:49:24   iOS is actually going to get applied to the Mac in a way that it hasn't really been up to now.

00:49:31   And that's that thing I said about how they turned the corner last year. I think that they made a

00:49:35   change in how they perceive the Mac, but I feel like we're on it now. Like this is, it's, it's

00:49:39   about to happen where a whole bunch of those kind of like classic Mac computer assumptions,

00:49:44   that were actually magnified a little bit by going to Intel. Cause it's like, now it's just an Intel

00:49:49   PC, like follow all of those assumptions about how you build an order and configure a computer.

00:49:55   And Apple has spent the last 10 years, 10 plus years with iOS. And I think that they're going to

00:50:03   apply a lot of iOS learning to the Mac and it's going to change the Mac. It's going to

00:50:08   make the Mac a different place. And I don't know if this will be specifically what they do,

00:50:13   but it just, it feels like that is coming where there's gotta be a reckoning where,

00:50:17   where Apple can reconcile these sort of two different worlds that it's making products in

00:50:23   with the Mac versus iOS devices and kind of get them back kind of on the same page.

00:50:29   It's going to be interesting. So hopefully, eventually you will stop

00:50:32   shutting down your Mac because you don't shut down your iPad every night. Do you?

00:50:36   I do not. I never, never do that. Although every now and then, my mom doesn't have her

00:50:42   laptop anymore, but every now and then I have to have her turn off her iPad, but she doesn't

00:50:46   turn it off every day. I just, every now and then I have her turn it off and turn it back on. And

00:50:49   then guess what, John, everything works fine after you turn it off and turn it back on. You just

00:50:53   don't need to do it every day. You're not going to, yeah, it's fine. It's fine. In fact, it goes

00:51:00   so long that my mother says, Oh yeah, I forgot. That's right. You just turn it off and turn it

00:51:03   back on. Yeah, that's it. All right. Let's take a break and let me tell you about our next sponsor.

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00:52:28   download and all of Relay FM. So this is a little bit later than we usually do upstream in the show,

00:52:33   but I thought that we could talk about it because you and I are, we're TiVo owners, we're paying

00:52:39   attention to media stuff and Myke and I talk about media stuff and what Apple is doing and I think

00:52:44   one of the most interesting things to happen on its own, maybe not as interesting as what it might

00:52:50   mean, is the news that came out last week. Amazon announced that Apple Music is going to be on

00:52:56   Amazon Echo devices and this is not the first third-party speaker to have Apple Music on it.

00:53:04   The Sonos stuff all supports Apple Music and has since it was Beats, so since the very beginning,

00:53:09   and I've been listening to Apple Music stuff on my Sonos speaker for quite a while now,

00:53:14   but I do think it's really interesting because this is core Amazon Echo now. You're going to be

00:53:22   able to use the lady in the canister to play your Apple Music and I wonder, given a conversation

00:53:30   that Myke and I had last week and I wrote a piece at Macworld last week about it, about Apple trying

00:53:36   to balance the classic Apple "we make money on profit margins on the hardware we sell" with this

00:53:43   services narrative that we're growing, money we get from people in our ecosystem that is a service we

00:53:50   sell them in addition to the hardware and how when you think about them spending a billion dollars on

00:53:56   TV content to roll out next year, it's hard to imagine what my piece says is it's hard to imagine

00:54:02   that the profit margins on the Apple TV are ever worth justifying over getting people to watch your

00:54:11   streaming service and making a more affordable piece of hardware that you can attach to a TV set

00:54:17   that lets you watch Apple's video service because the services narrative is really strong and how

00:54:22   much money can Apple really be making from the Apple TV anyway. And I used an example,

00:54:27   our friend Steve Lutz who wanted to buy the Buffy the Vampire Slayer complete series on iTunes,

00:54:31   but he's got an iPad and he's got an iPhone, but he was never going to buy an Apple TV so he could

00:54:36   watch it on his TV set. And then this Amazon Echo Apple Music thing happened and I thought, okay,

00:54:43   is this an outlier? Is this just like it being on Sonos and not a big deal? Because it feels

00:54:48   a little bit like it might be Apple saying we're changing a little bit about where our services are

00:54:55   available because growing our services revenue is important and not like we're going to take it to

00:55:00   Amazon and we're going to convert them all as much as it is that a lot of their customers already

00:55:07   have one and their service doesn't go there and that makes it less valuable. I don't know,

00:55:12   what do you think about this idea that Apple is trying to maybe change how it views growing

00:55:19   services revenue versus its traditional strategy with hardware? I think, I mean, it's hard to tell

00:55:25   because we don't know what's going inside Apple, but from the outside it still seems like Apple is

00:55:30   hesitant. So they want to expand Apple TV, but there have been a few rare cases where Apple has

00:55:39   fully committed to this. If you look at the competitors, it's a stark contrast. Like Netflix

00:55:43   is a great example. Netflix's business was they want you to subscribe to Netflix. That is the most

00:55:48   important thing about their business. And if there was a barrier like Steve Lutz who wants to watch

00:55:54   something, like what's stopping you from subscribing to Netflix? If your answer is, I don't have any

00:56:00   way to watch Netflix on my TV. Netflix addresses that problem by going to anybody who has any

00:56:05   device that can show video in any possible way over the past decade or so and said,

00:56:09   let us help you build Netflix into your thing. To the point now where television has come with

00:56:14   remote controls, where there's a button on the remote control that says Netflix. That's the

00:56:19   level of dedication Netflix has to getting it so you have no excuse not to subscribe to Netflix.

00:56:25   Your TV does it, your cereal box does it, your car can play Netflix like there's nothing in your life

00:56:30   that cannot play microwave, your refrigerator. By the way, the Roku for people who don't remember

00:56:35   this far back, the original Roku was called the Netflix box. It was not even called the Roku. It

00:56:40   was called the Netflix box. And it was essentially a deal between Netflix and Roku because Roku was

00:56:47   making like audio players and they wanted to get into video and Netflix desperately wanted to box.

00:56:52   It could point to people too and say, here's where you can do your Netflix, what was it? Instant

00:56:56   watch or something when it was branded as like not a DVD and you got it free with your DVD

00:57:03   subscription. That was the beginning of that strategy where they're like, we need a box

00:57:09   that you can plug into your TV and watch Netflix. And now every microwave and garage door opener

00:57:15   will play Netflix if you want. Yeah. And they were doing those deals and making those boxes and

00:57:19   getting all that stuff in. While they were involved in the five to seven year process of getting any

00:57:27   kind of software onto televisions, because dealing with television makers, it's a long lead time and

00:57:31   smart TV wasn't there and it was bad. But if you are truly committed as Netflix surely is, because

00:57:38   it is their one and only business, truly committed to people subscribing to your service, you want

00:57:44   your service to be available to everyone. Apple has services, but thus far has not shown a Netflix

00:57:54   level of commitment to making any of its services available to everyone. It's mostly they're

00:58:00   available to people who buy Apple products. And yes, they have Apple Music on Android and

00:58:05   Sonos or whatever. So they're dipping their toe in like, we would like more Apple Music subscribers,

00:58:10   Shirley in the Wood. People who work for Apple Music are like, hey, we should make those

00:58:13   subscriber numbers go up. How do we do that? But they're not taking the full court press,

00:58:20   Apple Music has to be everywhere in the entire world. They're just not. Part of it is because

00:58:24   they feel like there's a certain minimum level of experience they have to maintain. But part of it

00:58:29   is just that it's not an Apple's DNA to do that. The biggest counter example, obviously, although

00:58:34   you know, you're an old man like me, so I don't see if we have the same thing. What is the thing

00:58:38   that comes to mind when you think of the case where Apple actually did this and went wide?

00:58:41   The one that comes to mind is when they did the what third generation iPod and put it on Windows?

00:58:47   Yep, that's it. So they could have sold MP3 players to Mac users with Firewire attachments

00:58:53   for 500 bucks for a long time. And they, you know, they started doing that. But eventually it's like,

00:58:58   look, do you want, you know, eventually the iPod, eventually the iTunes Music Store, do you want to

00:59:02   sell music to Mac users? Do you want to sell music to Apple customers? Or do you want to sell music

00:59:10   to everyone? And they, you know, it was a difficult internal argument and they weren't.

00:59:16   Steve Jobs was against it.

00:59:18   Right, Steve Jobs was against it. And in the beginning, this is not what they did. They didn't

00:59:23   introduce, you know, it wasn't from the beginning and had to come later. That's what made iTunes,

00:59:28   iTunes, right? In the days of, you know, purchasing digital music, iTunes was king because

00:59:32   it went out to everyone and, you know, it was a simpler world where everyone just basically

00:59:38   meant Mac and Windows. Like there wasn't, you know, like this moment feels very much like that

00:59:43   in the sense that you've got, I feel like you've got this internal culture at Apple that is like,

00:59:49   this is what we do. And in that moment, it was what we're not going to make this work on Windows.

00:59:55   Like this is our advantage is that it only works on the Mac. And then you've got this other force

01:00:00   that's saying, wait, wait, wait, there's a greater opportunity here. We should go big with this

01:00:06   because this is a bigger thing than just being ancillary to our existing products. We want this

01:00:12   to be a thing that's that's much larger. And that's why when I look at it, I think, I think

01:00:18   the real question is not does Apple want, you know, does Apple want a lot of people to subscribe to

01:00:25   the service that they're spending a billion dollars on content for? Because of course they do.

01:00:29   The question to me is how badly do they want it? And can they override some of those feelings?

01:00:37   Because the two things they could do, one of which is they could just let other boxes

01:00:43   play iTunes content or play this TV content like Roku and the Fire TV and your microwaves in your,

01:00:51   you know, whatever else they could do that where like you literally don't even need

01:00:55   any Apple hardware at all. And you can get the Apple video service. The other thing they could do

01:01:00   is take the Apple TV and make it more affordable and you still need an Apple product. And I'm not,

01:01:06   I'm not sure which one they're going to do because on one level, keeping saying, look,

01:01:12   we make premium hardware, like think of the HomePod. We make premium hardware. It's really

01:01:16   great. HomePod is so awesome. It's got all these things. This is Apple talking. Although I like my

01:01:20   HomePods now that I have two of them and I really like them. Would I have gotten them if I could

01:01:25   just talk to my Amazon Echo and got it to play Apple music? Maybe, maybe not. But with that,

01:01:31   what they're saying is, look, we have this premium hardware that has a big profit margin for us,

01:01:35   which is the HomePod. And you can listen to Apple music there, but you can also listen on Sonos.

01:01:39   You can listen on Amazon Echo. It's fine. So if they do that model for video, what they should do

01:01:46   is let you play Apple video stuff and maybe AirPlay as well on Roku's and Fire TV's because

01:01:52   they still have a premium hardware product that you can get that they'll say is nicer. And it's

01:01:57   got this great remote that isn't that great. And you could play games, but there aren't that many

01:02:02   games. But there it is. Right. So that feels like they could do that strategy. And yet I have a

01:02:10   harder time imagining Apple's video stuff running on a Fire TV than I do with Apple making a $75

01:02:18   version of Apple TV. I wonder what they say to themselves in their meetings because like they're

01:02:23   like, you know, before they're spending what is it billions? Is it multiple billions of dollars on

01:02:27   like original? I think the report is that they were going to spend a billion dollars on video

01:02:33   content, but you know, it's an ongoing process. So there was an initial report of the hundreds of

01:02:38   millions of dollars. And I think that's more like a billion dollars now, but it's all very vague

01:02:42   because you just get these kind of like leaked Wall Street Journal reports about it. But they're

01:02:45   spending a huge amount of money. And to keep this as an ongoing concern, they will need to continue

01:02:50   to spend a huge amount of money for this content because, you know, this year's content will cost

01:02:56   this while there's still next year's content. So I let's just say for a round number, it's a billion

01:03:01   dollars a year on content. And it's almost like it almost feels like a trial balloon because it's

01:03:05   like this will be our initial thing. And like they don't seem committed to it in the same way that

01:03:09   Netflix has been like, they're going to spend all this money, but it's like, all right, so you're

01:03:14   going to spend a hundred million hundreds of millions or a billion dollars if it turns out

01:03:17   really well and you get lots and lots of subscribers to the Apple service forget it and you don't have

01:03:21   done anything. You just still have the Apple TV, no new, cheaper Apple TV, no expansion or whatever.

01:03:26   Like what do you see is how does this evolve over time? What is, what is the progression?

01:03:30   What defines success? If you could say, and I'm going to project forward five years in the future

01:03:35   of Apple's video service, and here's what it looks like. It's inevitable that you have to either like

01:03:41   decide that you're always going to be a minor player and live in the shadow of the big ones.

01:03:45   Or if you're going to spend all this money, you need to be able to sell these shows that you're

01:03:52   paying to be made to as many people as possible. Like there's no, there's no way out of that.

01:03:57   Right. So, and even if your plan is like, Oh, we make a cheaper Apple TV. That's not a plan.

01:04:01   Like that doesn't get you an Apple, Apple video button on your television remote. Right. That's

01:04:06   a tiny step for someone who's reluctant. Like, Oh, people don't want to buy the big Apple TV.

01:04:11   Maybe they'd buy it. You know, people don't want to buy anything. They just want to buy a TV and

01:04:15   press the button and be able to watch. Like if you're successful with your content and you have,

01:04:19   you know, insert unknown name of new intellectual property, video program, you know, whatever your

01:04:25   thing is, whether it's game of Thrones or orange is the new black or like, you know,

01:04:30   serial on the podcast word. If you have some amazing content that people want to see,

01:04:34   the barrier to entry has to be basically zero. If you want to be able to sell to the most people,

01:04:39   the barrier to entry Netflix, isn't zero because people don't have smart TVs, whatever,

01:04:42   but it's as close to zero as possible. Netflix is constantly working to bring it down to zero.

01:04:47   Apple is not working to bring the barrier to entry down to zero. Apple is, you know, like dipping its

01:04:54   toe in, but at the same time spending a billion dollars on content, I would never want to spend

01:04:58   a billion dollars in content that can only be seen by people who own Apple TVs. That is madness.

01:05:02   Right. Right. Right. Well, I mean, you can watch them on iPads and iPhones, and I'm sure they'll,

01:05:06   regardless of whatever else happens, they'll point that out.

01:05:09   Yeah, but even then, like if you can't watch it on Android, that's 80% of the world.

01:05:12   So I here's, here's what I think they are trying to do is I think they're not trying to

01:05:17   reach everybody in the world. I do think that they want to reach everybody who has a foot in

01:05:24   their ecosystem so that they can, you know, again, services revenue is all about kind of

01:05:28   accumulating more money for people who have a foot in their ecosystem, but where it breaks down. So,

01:05:33   so if like, no, you don't own an Apple product and you hear about that new Jennifer Aniston,

01:05:38   Reese Witherspoon show, and, uh, you know, yes, maybe you're like, oh, how can I, can I get that?

01:05:45   Even though it's on Apple, I don't have any Apple things that is, uh, that would be an argument for

01:05:50   being on Roku and fire TV and stuff like that. But I think at the very least, what Apple wants

01:05:54   is that if you own an Apple product, you should, you should, they want you to watch that show.

01:06:00   They want you to be into it. And if you're like our friend, Steve, and you've got the Apple stuff,

01:06:07   but you're like, yeah, but I want to watch that on the TV and you're going to be making me pay

01:06:11   150 bucks to put it on my TV. Like that's never going to happen. So like there's, there's this

01:06:17   intermediate step, which is just get the people who are already in your ecosystem and are already

01:06:22   paying you money to pay you more money for this video show. But what you can't do, what seems to

01:06:27   be a bridge too far for probably most of them is for the, to sell them another piece of high margin

01:06:33   hardware. Like that is too far that that seems to be too far to go. Yeah. I still, I still feel like

01:06:38   it's a, it's still like a bargaining stage where it's like, oh, we can do this and that'll get

01:06:42   everyone in their ecosystem. I was thinking before about iTunes being this, you know,

01:06:47   not an Apple phenomenon, but being a world of music phenomenon. It's hard people to remember

01:06:51   in this days of streaming, but buying digital music, basically equaled iTunes for a long time.

01:06:55   The iPhone, arguably the next mass market, even though Android has massively more market share,

01:07:04   the iPhone was and is as successful as it is because you don't have to be a Mac user to get

01:07:09   an iPhone. Absolutely. Just the math of it. You can't, I mean, there have to be, I always say this

01:07:13   to people and they're like, that doesn't sound right. Which is there have to be more iPhone users

01:07:18   who use PCs than Macs. Otherwise the math doesn't work like it can not be. And it's interesting to

01:07:24   think about that in that, that the reason that happened, I mean, whether it was conscious or not,

01:07:29   it piggybacked on iTunes on that one iTunes decision. How could Apple sell iPhones to people

01:07:33   who didn't have Macs? Well, when you get an iPhone, you have to hook it up to your computer

01:07:37   to iTunes, which already ran on windows, which was the only other computer platform that mattered.

01:07:42   Right? So that one decision to go wide with iTunes and digital music, basically allowed them to

01:07:47   immediately go wide with the iPhone. Again, iPhone does not dominate the way iTunes did in its heyday,

01:07:53   but it would be considerably smaller if you needed to have any Apple device other than an iPhone.

01:07:59   Most people have iPhones, like, I wonder if that's their only Apple device because it is so popular.

01:08:04   They sell so much of that stuff and iPads are, you know, I think iPads sell about the same amount as

01:08:09   Macs these days. Well, they don't report unit sales anymore. So who knows? At this moment,

01:08:14   before we go over the precipice of that, we can guess that, yeah, there are more iPads being sold

01:08:20   than Macs because they're cheaper and they're generating, I think, roughly the same revenue.

01:08:24   So I think in unit sales, there are maybe like twice as many iPads being sold as Macs.

01:08:28   But still. Everyone's watching YouTube and Netflix on those iPads. They're not watching Apple's...

01:08:31   So anyway, Apple's investment, Apple putting so much money in it gives me some hope that someone's

01:08:37   going to be in some meeting and go like, "This doesn't make sense. We can't spend this kind of

01:08:40   money and limit and still, like, as your point, be held hostage essentially by the people who make $150

01:08:49   high margin black puck that people have hatched their televisions. Show us your numbers and your

01:08:56   projections. If we give away your product for free, here are our projections." Not that Apple's

01:09:02   ever going to do that, but like... But it feels like the right way forward is that, which is to

01:09:08   say this is kind of a beachhead. And it also allows us to say that this experience is best on Apple

01:09:13   TV. So we make premium hardware. It's the best experience here. But yes, you can also watch it

01:09:19   on your cheap TV stick. And that's fine too. Just like they can say, "Yes, you can play Apple Music

01:09:24   on your Amazon Echo, but the HomePod is awesome and you should go buy one that costs a lot more."

01:09:29   **Matt Stauffer** They need everybody to be talking about, "Have you seen House of Cards?"

01:09:34   And they need the conversation to be about this great show. And if you want it, you have to get

01:09:38   Netflix or Apple Video or whatever. That needs to be the conversation. If the conversation is,

01:09:42   "What do I have to buy to watch this?" Something has gone wrong. They need to get on Netflix's level.

01:09:47   **Brian Smith** And I think the answer is probably for them to take the TV app and put it in other

01:09:52   places. Because the TV app, if you haven't noticed on the Apple TV especially, Apple's basically

01:09:59   poured all their video into the TV app. iTunes purchases are in the TV app. Obviously, their

01:10:07   service is going to go in the TV app. Other services are in the TV app. I feel like that TV

01:10:13   app, although its debut was underwhelming and it's still not a very good app, I was just trying to

01:10:19   play. I saw that Arsenal was playing this morning and I'm a fake American soccer fan. And I opened

01:10:28   the TV app because I got a push notification and it was like, "Watch now on NBC." And I tapped on

01:10:33   it and nothing... Oh no, I tapped on "Watch now" and the "Add to watch list" button, which was

01:10:40   below it, clicked. And I thought, "Well, that's a mistake. I must have tapped the wrong one. It's

01:10:43   early in the morning and I'm bleary-eyed and I haven't had my tea yet." And so I pressed the

01:10:47   play button again. And again, it took it off the watch list. And it was literally the one button

01:10:52   was clicking the other button. I thought, "Well, this is ridiculous." And I kind of quit the app

01:10:56   and I went back to it. And then it wouldn't accept touch input on that one little tile at all.

01:11:01   I was like, "What is happening here?" I switched to the NBC app and played the soccer match and it

01:11:05   was fine. So the TV app is a mess is what I'm saying. That said, that kind of makes sense to me

01:11:13   for Apple if it's going to do this to say basically, "We're going to open the gate to iTunes

01:11:17   rentals, iTunes purchases, and all of our iTunes, all our card stuff, plus our TV services, plus we

01:11:25   will resell you other TV services all inside this app on whatever device it is." And that might be

01:11:32   actually the smart thing about why the TV app exists is what if the TV app is actually Apple's

01:11:39   whole strategy for embedding video in other stuff. But I don't know. In the end, to me,

01:11:46   Jon, it comes back to culture, which is even if we all look at this and say, "You can't spend a

01:11:52   billion dollars over there and not do this over here," the part over here is counter to so much

01:11:59   Apple culture. There's so much cultural baggage about like, "No, no, no. We can't put the crown

01:12:06   jewels on Roku or Fire TV because we're a hardware company." And the truth is they're not a hardware

01:12:12   company. They're more complicated than that now. This services narrative says that they're really

01:12:17   not a hardware company, or they're a hardware company to the extent that the hardware is like a

01:12:24   personal seat license at a stadium. It is the thing you buy that gives you the right to spend

01:12:29   more money. But I don't know. That's a big leap for them to change like that. And I wonder internally

01:12:36   if this is the sort of mixed feeling struggle. It may also be that, because we don't know,

01:12:41   until they announce it, we won't know that this was a struggle, but it's over now. That may

01:12:46   entirely be because it's hard to believe that the person who authorizes a billion dollars in

01:12:50   outlay for entertainment is also going to be like, "Oh, no, but we have to protect our Apple TV

01:12:54   margins." That's very important. Yeah, well, the more cynical take is that the entire narrative

01:13:00   about services revenue is Apple needs something to point to that's growing and doing well while

01:13:06   they work on the next big thing, which is insert whatever thing, whether it's a car or AR glasses

01:13:11   or so on and so forth. Apple TV is not going to be the next big thing. Well, Apple TV is not it,

01:13:16   but you could say the company could still be committed to selling you high margin hardware

01:13:21   and everything else is in service of that. It's just that they haven't found the next high margin

01:13:24   hardware product to sell. They thought maybe the watch would be it, but not quite. And maybe AR

01:13:29   glasses and maybe a car. I don't believe that, but if you wanted to get a cynical take, you could say,

01:13:34   "I think this services narrative is just like, 'Look over here, a line that's going up on a graph.'"

01:13:40   That doesn't seem right to me because I think Apple, again, based on the amount of money they're

01:13:45   spending on original content, you don't do that as a distraction while you work on the hourglasses.

01:13:48   Yeah, exactly. Before we move on, I wanted to at least ask you, this is something that I just

01:13:53   noticed in myself, which is I'm not using my TiVo as much. And some of that may be just like what

01:14:00   I'm watching, but I found that the last few months I've been using my TiVo for some live TV and a

01:14:05   couple of shows, and I've been spending a lot more time on my Apple TV input watching stuff from

01:14:12   streaming services. And it's not like I'm not using my TV subscription, my cable subscription.

01:14:17   I am watching a bunch of stuff still that kind of comes through that gate, but I'm also watching

01:14:22   so much stuff that's coming through streaming. And I just, I don't know, have you felt like a trend

01:14:27   in this direction too? Because I feel like I'm not anywhere near the point where I can be like,

01:14:31   "Okay, traditional linear TV is over for me. I am not going to be able to do that for a long time,

01:14:37   I think." But I am feeling like traditional linear TV and what's on my TiVo hard drive

01:14:43   is way less important to my entertainment life than it used to be.

01:14:46   Yeah, I think it's a content issue. It's a proliferation of content. It used to be that

01:14:51   there were fewer channels and that there were, you know, what were they? You probably know the

01:14:56   right terms for this, but like the seasons of television, like the fall lineup of television,

01:15:00   what is the other one? The spring lineup? I don't know.

01:15:03   Yeah, mid-season, whatever.

01:15:05   Yeah. And those were the shows, and the shows were the shows, and then they expanded out into

01:15:10   channels, and there were more channels, but then they had their shows. And now I think,

01:15:14   I don't know if it's the majority, but a huge amount of video content is not "on television."

01:15:20   We just talked about Apple spending a billion dollars. Why the hell is Apple making TV shows?

01:15:24   Because everybody's doing it. Netflix makes TV shows. There's Hulu original shows,

01:15:28   and CBS puts things that are only available in the CBS app and not on regular TV.

01:15:32   And for me, what that means is that a lot of the things that I watch

01:15:36   are part of some other non-television subscription that I subscribe to. I pay for Hulu,

01:15:42   pay for CBS All Access to watch Star Trek, pay for Netflix, pay for Amazon Prime that

01:15:48   has its own original content. Many of those just aren't on the television, so of course the TiVo

01:15:52   is not going to show those. And for my particular tastes, lots of sci-fi or gritty fantasy stuff,

01:15:59   there's stuff that's maybe not suitable for television, or at least non-premium cable

01:16:05   television. It means that more and more of my watching is not something that TiVo could record.

01:16:13   Or sometimes it is. Sometimes Hulu has shows at the same time as they're aired on television,

01:16:17   and I can watch them in either place, and that gets really confusing. But I think that's basically

01:16:21   what it comes down to. Now, the other weird thing for me is, when my TiVo records something,

01:16:26   I could watch Game of Thrones when it comes back, eventually, on my iPad or on my Apple TV,

01:16:34   but I also subscribe to HBO, like the real full-cable HBO, and my TiVo records. And when

01:16:41   everybody else is having streaming problems for the season premiere of Game of Thrones, I don't,

01:16:46   because my TiVo has it, or I can watch it live, and that never fails, unlike the stampede of people

01:16:52   trying to go to their iOS app. So I'm comforted by that. So sometimes when I do have the choice

01:16:57   of which venue to watch it in or what service or whatever, I will watch it on the old-fashioned TiVo.

01:17:01   And the second thing is, often my TiVo will record lots of random stuff that I will watch on my iPad

01:17:08   from my TiVo in my house, which is another interesting thing. It's like, well,

01:17:11   you know, it's one of my iPad shows where it's not worthy of the big television, and I'm already

01:17:17   in bed, and I just want to watch, you know, maybe I want to watch a little one little program before

01:17:21   I go to bed, and I'm already tucked in and everything, and I'll just pull out my iPad,

01:17:25   and my iPad can let me watch anything. I can watch, you know, all the Apple stuff, Apple

01:17:30   proprietary stuff, all my services have apps on the thing, and there's also a TiVo app, and I can

01:17:34   watch my shows off of my TiVo. So does that count as using my TiVo? I suppose so, but it's not the

01:17:39   same as it traditionally was. Do you put in headphones for that? Oh yeah, yeah. Okay. It can't

01:17:45   be disturbing people. Yeah, well that's what I was going to say, is that would be really terrible if

01:17:49   you were, like, watching a show that your wife doesn't watch. AirPods! I use my AirPods. Okay,

01:17:54   that's good. I approve. That works. That works. Yeah, I don't know. The reason I watch, you're

01:17:59   gonna love this, the reason I watch HBO, I would say HBO Go, I have not had any any stream failures

01:18:05   on HBO Go with Game of Thrones. I watched the entire last season of Game of Thrones on HBO Go,

01:18:10   and I think the previous season, and the reason that I do it is because the full HD version on my

01:18:17   local cable system is the Pacific feed, which means HBO Go or HBO in HD shows it at 9 p.m.,

01:18:25   but at 6 01 p.m., 9 Eastern, the episode drops on HBO Go, and so I can just watch it, so I can

01:18:33   watch it three hours earlier than they would otherwise give it to me by watching it on

01:18:37   streaming. You can pretend you live in the one true time zone. I know. It's, I'll tell you,

01:18:42   Jon, I'm a big believer in the West Coast, but the one place where the West Coast really lets you

01:18:47   down is the inability to watch shows. There are all these, like, the podcasts I do about,

01:18:54   that are the flashcasts that are right after a show airs. Those are all shows that are available

01:18:59   that air somewhere where I can watch it or get it in advance, because, like, network shows,

01:19:06   I can't do it. The people I know, the TV critics I know who live in the West Coast have, like,

01:19:12   either have a, like, a waiver for, like, DirecTV to show East Coast channels, or they've got, like,

01:19:21   a sling box in New York at the corporate office in New York that lets them watch the shows, because

01:19:27   there are all these sort of, like, you know, shows on the 8 o'clock Eastern, and you can't wait

01:19:32   three hours and then watch it and then write about it if that's your job. So that's the thing where

01:19:39   the West Coast is way behind. But HBO lets me do that, which is really nice. And actually,

01:19:43   my cable company does that. They've got a bunch of, like, live TV channels that are the East Coast

01:19:48   feeds, so if I really want to see something, you have to watch it with commercials, if it's

01:19:52   a commercial channel. But you can get some of those as well. But yeah, it's hard out here.

01:19:57   The world is not made for Pacific time. It's sad. All that's sad about the TiVo. I do hope the TiVo

01:20:05   stays in business and makes new non-bent TiVo boxes, because I will keep buying them for as long

01:20:11   as television is a thing. And it is still a thing. The thing that I'm dreading is that Comcast,

01:20:17   I'm a Comcast subscriber for lots of reasons. I did DirecTV for a while, and it was fine,

01:20:23   but I was happy to go back when they came out with the TiVo Romeo. I was like, "This is the time I'm

01:20:26   going to go. I'm going to switch to Comcast." At some point here, they're going to start rolling

01:20:31   out, like, real HD, like, real 4K channels in a way that they rolled out HD channels way back when.

01:20:37   It hasn't happened yet. There are a very small number, and, you know, they did the World Cup

01:20:41   last summer in 4K, but it was only on one satellite provider, and AT&T only had it with their,

01:20:47   like, or Comcast only had it with their special DVR, and it was all a day later. It was really

01:20:53   bad. But at some point, the log jam is going to break, and everybody's going to start doing 4K

01:20:59   channels. And that's the moment where I'm going to be like, "All right, I got to get a new TiVo now."

01:21:04   I guess. The best thing then is we'll have three layers of TiVo menus, the standard deaf menu,

01:21:10   the HD menus, and the 4K menus. And for, like, five years, the only menu that will be 4K is the

01:21:15   home screen. Yeah, no, I really do wish them luck. Although, all that said, again, getting back to the

01:21:21   graph things of, like, graphing the performance of iOS devices versus Macs, if I graph the number

01:21:26   of shows that I watch, like, my top 10 or top 20 shows, like, ranked by how much I care about them,

01:21:31   they used to all be on television, and then all of a sudden, here comes this line that's, like,

01:21:36   shows that are not on TV, right? Shows that are Netflix originals, shows that are Hulu originals,

01:21:40   shows, like, and it just starts crawling up, right? And I don't know if they've crossed yet or

01:21:44   whatever, but the TV line is going down, right? So at a certain point, the TV line goes down to

01:21:48   the point where it's like, "I don't need a cable subscription anymore," because all the television

01:21:51   shows that I care about are not on "television." I'm not there yet, but I look at the trends,

01:21:57   and I'm like, "That could be my future." When that future happens, I won't need TiVo anymore,

01:22:01   but it's not today, so I hope TiVo stays in business, and I will continue to pay them.

01:22:05   I'd pay them so much money. They have no idea how much money I'd pay for new TiVOs. I already

01:22:09   spent, like, $1,000 in each TiVo I get because I get the Lifetime thing, and I buy their fanciest

01:22:13   box, but I really hate that bent thing. I bought one. Don't get me wrong. I bought one, but I hate

01:22:17   it, and I want them to come up with a new non-bent box that is quieter and more powerful.

01:22:21   Yeah, I have the non-bent TiVo Romeo, and I'm going to hang on to that as long as I can,

01:22:26   but hopefully there will be another generation box down the road that I can get to replace it,

01:22:30   and I'm there with you. As a sports guy, it's extremely impractical to cut the cord.

01:22:38   You know, I would need to immediately then subscribe to one of these over-the-top

01:22:43   services that has the sports stuff that I need on it, and at this point, I kind of like,

01:22:50   yes, when my shows are in season and they're piling up on my TiVo hard drive, it makes me happy.

01:22:55   I have one other topic to talk to you about, and then we'll do some Ask Upgrade as well,

01:23:02   but first let me tell you about our final sponsor on this episode. It's Luna Display.

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01:24:10   working at IDG, one of the things that frustrated me is I traveled with my 11-inch MacBook Air,

01:24:15   and I really wanted a second display. And this setup today would be super easy because I could

01:24:21   just use Luna Display with my iPad, and now I would have two screens on the go. You get more

01:24:27   screen real estate without buying a new screen. And who is traveling? You're not going to travel

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01:24:36   your iPad with you. It's perfect. Luna is a complete extension to your Mac. It's going to

01:24:41   support your external keyboard. It's going to support your Apple Pencil and Touch interactions,

01:24:45   so you can actually use Touch to interact with your Mac with just the swipe of a finger. Super

01:24:51   easy to set up, works great. I've used it wired and wireless. If you're on a good Wi-Fi network,

01:24:58   wireless is not a problem, but you can also just set it up to use it wired, and then you don't have

01:25:02   to worry about it at all. And I was able to use the full Retina display on my iPad Pro next to my

01:25:08   iMac and have a little calendar display off to the side. It was really cool. And for travel,

01:25:14   I just cannot tell you how much I would have used this product back in the days where I was doing a

01:25:19   lot of corporate travel because I had my little laptop screen and I always brought my iPad with

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01:25:29   absolutely. I want to do that. I want to go there. Listeners of Upgrade can get an exclusive 10%

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01:25:46   download, and all of Relay FM. All right, Jon, before we go to Ask Upgrade, I wanted to talk to

01:25:51   you about... Basically, I want you to fact check me. I want you to throw a splash of cold water

01:25:55   on some of my crazy ideas. Can you do that for me? - Go for it. - All right. The one that I keep

01:26:00   coming back to is the external display thing. And this is... I admit that this is kind of a dumb idea,

01:26:06   and yet I also think it's kind of a brilliant idea, which is if Apple's going to make external

01:26:11   displays, what about touch screens? Like, this is my counter to the whole Surface Studio argument,

01:26:19   which is what if Apple made a USB-C 4K touchscreen that if you plug it into a Mac, it's just a screen,

01:26:27   but if you plug it into an iPad Pro, it becomes a giant iPad Pro, 24-inch or whatever iPad Pro.

01:26:33   Is that a wacky idea? Is that an unlikely idea? What do you think? - I seem to recall reading on

01:26:39   Twitter from one of the tech nerds who dives into the guts of Apple's operating system. - Steve

01:26:44   Trout and Smith or Dan Wurmbo. - Yeah, or some other person who goes by the handle Longhorn

01:26:52   that I've been following on Twitter. Anyway, it might have been somebody else. Talking about how

01:26:58   the capabilities to have external touch screens, there's nothing really preventing that,

01:27:01   technically speaking, in terms of the connection and the APIs and the protocols,

01:27:07   like that it ought to work. It ought to be a thing that you could do. As for the usefulness of that,

01:27:14   I've been a long-time proponent of much, much bigger iPads. Before they even went 12-inch,

01:27:18   I was asking for bigger iPads, and when the 12.9-inch came out, I'm still asking for bigger

01:27:22   iPads. Before the Surface Studio, I am all in on big iPad. One way to get that, a semi-reasonable

01:27:29   way to have an external screen, it bypasses a lot of the concerns. Who's going to buy

01:27:34   something like the Surface Studio? Just ask Microsoft. Probably not that many people, because

01:27:37   it's like, well, it's not a super high-powered PC, but I also can't pick it up and use it as

01:27:42   a tablet if you have it as an external display. You're like, well, my iPad is my iPad, but I sort

01:27:46   of dock it. This is a well-known pattern that we have where you have something small and portable,

01:27:50   like your laptop or your Duo dock or whatever, and when you sit down at your desk, you get a bigger,

01:27:55   richer experience. When you get up, you take it with you. I think that's perfectly feasible and

01:28:00   would be great, and Apple could do a really cool product like that. I'm not sure if Apple will.

01:28:04   I look at the iPad Pro, it doesn't make me think that they're leaning in that direction.

01:28:08   But that's one way to address this market, because with Photoshop on the iPad and with the iPad stuck

01:28:15   in being a portable product, the Surface Studio seems like it's not a particularly successful

01:28:20   product, but I think it proves an approach. That sort of drafting table, very large display,

01:28:27   pencil stylus pen input on a big screen, maybe not the big cylinder thing you stuck on the screen,

01:28:33   that jury's still out on that, but that whole idea, I think that has legs for sure, as a way

01:28:41   to do sophisticated what we typically think of as personal computer-style stuff, where you've got a

01:28:46   full big keyboard and maybe you've got a mouse and you've got the pen, you've got all that stuff.

01:28:50   Does it have to be related to iOS? Can that be a really fancy touchscreen Mac? Apple's got the

01:28:55   whole OS issue to figure out, but I don't think external touchscreen is particularly wacky. I

01:29:02   think it is one way where they can get to someplace that I think they do need to go.

01:29:08   There are other ways they can get there, but that definitely is one way.

01:29:10   Right. Well, I mean, one of the other ways to get there is like the marzipan apps coming over from

01:29:15   iOS, which are initially designed with touch in mind and then are presumably retrofitted for

01:29:22   traditional mouse and keyboard. When those apps are around and a part of the Mac platform,

01:29:29   I think it reopens the question about if Macs could accept touch input, because then they're

01:29:36   a little bit like, not quite, but a little bit like what Microsoft has done on Windows, where

01:29:42   there are some apps that are traditional apps that are really, they need to be mouse and keyboard

01:29:47   driven. And then there are other apps that are more touch friendly apps. And that would be another

01:29:53   way. Because my feeling is like, ideally you would have the ability to have a big screen and have

01:29:58   touch. And right now, the way Apple's demarcated the platforms is you can either have a little

01:30:05   mobile thing with touch, or you can have a big screen, but you can't have both. Like, and I'm

01:30:11   not sure I understand why you can absolutely not have both, other than that right now, it's sort of

01:30:18   like the Mac is reserved for this part and iOS is reserved for this part. But at some point, you'd

01:30:24   think that the two might come together. And the advantage, by the way, of something over the

01:30:30   Surface Studio that's more like a monitor is that it's not a computer, so you don't need all the

01:30:35   guts, you need, you know, weight to hold it on your table, but you don't necessarily need all

01:30:39   the computer guts that the Surface Studio has, because it's got a whole iMac essentially inside

01:30:44   it in that little base that it's got. Yeah, it's like a docking station for your laptop. When you

01:30:49   take your laptop away, you're not left with the whole computer. It's just the stuff that's on your

01:30:52   desk that you hook up your laptop to. So would they go the other way, do you think? Are they

01:30:57   going to go down the path of touch once they've got marzipan apps on the Mac? Because I think

01:31:00   that's one of the great unanswered questions right now is if you've got apps that started as touch

01:31:05   apps and now they're running on the Mac, it does at least make you, it like opens the door for the

01:31:10   question of, well, why would you not let those Macs now have touch screens so those touch apps

01:31:17   could still be touched or use the keyboard and mouse? So Apple's, the distinction you just drew

01:31:24   of like touch means small and portable, big screen means not touch, Apple draws that distinction,

01:31:29   but in the Mac market, that distinction doesn't exist because there are tons of people who work

01:31:33   every day on very large light up screens that they touch with a pencil that are bigger than an iPad.

01:31:39   Those very large, the Cintiq, the, you know, Wacom Cintiq tablets, right? That what they see on those

01:31:44   screens is a straight up Mac user interface. It's not a touch interface. And then you touch it with

01:31:49   the stylus. It's an external monitor. You know, that's how the Mac sees it. It's an external

01:31:55   monitor. And they use a stylus and they're very big and the interface does not adapt to them. So

01:31:59   there's absolutely no reason other than Apple not making this product that they couldn't come up

01:32:04   with a Mac today aimed at designers that they use an Apple pencil with that shows a straight up non

01:32:09   Mars band, just plain old Mac user interface, right? Mars band definitely, that's your point,

01:32:15   makes it now you can do something other than the stylus. You can use your finger because Mars band

01:32:18   apps are already designed for those metrics and it's reasonable to do. And presumably those Mars

01:32:23   band apps, they won't like intentionally regress them by making everything be tiny and require

01:32:27   pixel precise tapping or whatever. You know, like if as long as you don't get rid of the things that

01:32:32   make it accessible to touch, it will continue to be accessible to touch. But I think there's no

01:32:36   problem having an interface that is, you know, a Mac desktop or laptop experience that has aspects

01:32:48   of the interface that are amenable to touch probably most of the important ones, but that

01:32:54   doesn't expect you to have to use touch for everything. There is an expectation that you

01:32:58   have some precise pointing device, whether it's a track pad, a mouse, or a pencil. I think that's

01:33:03   a perfectly fine assumption. And I think the existence of all the people who weren't using

01:33:06   Macs with a stylus today shows that it's not, you know, it's, it's fine. Like that can be your

01:33:11   distinction. Your distinction is an iPad or a phone or whatever does not expect or demand that you have

01:33:17   a precise pointing device and a Mac does expect or demand that you have a precise pointing device,

01:33:21   but it doesn't mean you can never touch your Mac screen or you can never touch, you know, so I

01:33:26   think some sort of non-religious hybrid arrangement is definitely possible on the Mac and hopefully

01:33:33   we'll get there eventually. Yeah, hopefully. We'll see. I feel like that is another one of

01:33:38   those cultural things where there's some interesting baggage inside Apple. And Apple

01:33:44   overrides that all the time. I mean, I feel like some culture is probably internal to Apple and

01:33:50   some culture is external to Apple. And that's all the people who, you know, we're talking about how

01:33:56   there would never be a stylus for an iOS device because Steve Jobs made that line that is totally

01:34:02   misinterpreted because it was about requiring a stylus. But that was, you know, everybody's got

01:34:08   their taboos and then sometimes the world changes and you need to say, "Oh, that taboo doesn't make

01:34:13   sense anymore." Yeah, they got that pro workflow group, which hopefully has some of the people

01:34:17   who have Cintiqs and are like, "Huh, this is interesting. Why do you have this gigantic screen

01:34:20   that you stare at all day instead of looking at your actual Mac's monitor and you're using a pen

01:34:23   on it? Hmm, how does that work for you? It's like we've been doing this for years. Get with the

01:34:27   program. Maybe you could make us something that would help with this." Well, and I think the

01:34:30   logical thing when Photoshop is on the iPad at a 12.9-inch screen is that people are going to end

01:34:37   the 11 and they're going to use them. And they're going to be like, "Wow, this is great. You know

01:34:41   what would be greater?" "The bigger screen." That is going to be one of the very first things that

01:34:46   happens when Photoshop is on the iPad Pro. It's already happening with like Affinity and other

01:34:50   applications. Sure, sure. But it's just all those people who are going to come over, people who are

01:34:54   artists who have to use Photoshop because it's the workflow for their industry. And there are lots of

01:34:58   them. A lot of people I hear from are like, "Why don't you just use Affinity Photo or something?"

01:35:02   It's like, "Well, if you're industry, it's just like writers. If you're a novelist, your stuff's

01:35:08   going to end up in Word. Sorry, it's going to end up in Word." That's terrible. A final draft for

01:35:13   a script. Yeah, there are standards. And Photoshop is a standard and there are features that are only

01:35:17   available in Photoshop. And I've talked to artists about it. And so they're going to be really

01:35:22   thrilled. It's like, "Finally, I can use my iPad for not just noodling around or doing sketches,

01:35:25   but I can do my whole job. I've got my Photoshop files. I've got my layers and all that." And then

01:35:29   like 10 minutes later, it's going to be like, "Yeah, I need a bigger one of these now." And

01:35:34   what is that? Maybe it's an external display with touch. Who knows? So that they can work on that

01:35:39   thing at their desk at an easel or something like that kind of form factor and then walk away,

01:35:44   unplug, and they've got their 13-inch display or 11-inch display that they can go. Well, we'll see.

01:35:50   I want to do some Ask Upgrade. I am ready. Okay, here we go. PK13 wrote in to say, "How does John..."

01:35:57   See, I told people you were going to be on the show. "How does John feel about the new iPad

01:36:01   Pros? The last time I checked, he had not gone to an Apple Store to check. Is there any update there?"

01:36:05   I still have not been to an Apple Store to see them. I was in Costco and they had a big display

01:36:09   of iPads, all the old ones, so I still haven't seen one in person. How do I feel about them?

01:36:13   I think they're awesome. I would love one. I'm not sure I'm going to buy one because I'm not sure I

01:36:17   actually need one. Right. Okay. Some conversation that I've seen, and this is a Steve Trout and

01:36:23   Smith thing, I think, that I saw him talking about it too. So you are famous in some circles for

01:36:31   having a lot of browser tabs open. I never have browser tabs open. Browser tabs just live and die

01:36:37   and browser windows live and die for me, but I'm also not a web developer. There are conversations

01:36:43   out there about how Microsoft is doing tab sets, and I think the Fuchsia thing that is being

01:36:50   developed by Google also has this kind of concept. The idea that maybe the future of multitasking

01:36:55   and app switching is tabs. Like the Windows 10 stuff, the idea there is that you can have a tab

01:37:02   set and it's got different apps in the tabs. So you can have the same window, a window from the

01:37:06   same app and other apps, and they're just grouped together as a set. As a tab person, do you think

01:37:14   that that's an interesting way forward in terms of multitasking and windowing on, especially touch

01:37:21   devices? Windowing on our devices has always been in an uncomfortable spot. The beautiful simplicity

01:37:28   of the original iPhone and the single thing taking up the whole screen, it was just such a clean

01:37:33   model, and now we've dirtied that model up by bringing in the ugly reality of multitasking and

01:37:39   attempting to divide our ever larger screen into different regions. The thing about tabs though is

01:37:44   that in sort of the natural hierarchy of how you can divide up this real estate. So you've got

01:37:52   the entire screen, and then in the traditional paradigm, within the screen you have windows,

01:37:58   and then within the windows you have tabs. And the Windows 10 thing of the tab sets of sort of

01:38:04   inverting that, sort of like a Safari Force toppy tabs that Stephen Heike was mentioning today,

01:38:09   to say no, no, no, it's not screen window tab, it's screen tab window. And that tabbing is

01:38:18   actually a way to arrange windows. The thing is there is a lot of gymnastics going on in iOS,

01:38:25   for a good reason, but still gymnastics, to avoid having windows, because people are terrible at

01:38:31   managing windows, it's a thing you want to avoid, and yet windows are incredibly useful. And so you

01:38:37   get to split, and maybe you get to tab, and maybe you get to rearrange. I'm not entirely convinced,

01:38:43   based on my personal experience, that people are any better at managing tabs than they are at

01:38:47   managing windows. I think they are better at managing splits because it's a simpler model,

01:38:52   right? It's not, you know, but tabs, we don't know, we're just speculating about it in implementation,

01:38:59   but tabs as we know them gives people more than enough rope to hang themselves. I posted to a

01:39:03   Slack that I think we were both on, that a screenshot from a co-worker's computer, just

01:39:08   incidental, they share their screen as part of a meeting, and they're showing you something,

01:39:13   and then I inevitably look up at their browser Chrome, and they have so many tabs open that

01:39:19   everyone is only visible as a tiny little icon in Chrome. Just so many tabs. And it came up in the

01:39:25   chat, for all the tabs that I put, I've never done that, because I manage my tabs and windows

01:39:31   in a hierarchy, in that sort of my windows are all, you know, my browser windows are kind of

01:39:36   proportioned like sheets of paper, and within that there's a limited number of tabs, but I wouldn't

01:39:40   just keep cramming them in and cramming them in, and yet every time I see someone's computer

01:39:45   at work or in real life who uses tabs, either they don't use tabs at all, or they have all the

01:39:50   tabs, like just tons of tabs and tabs where they're totally useless, where you can't tell what they

01:39:53   are, where it's the same site icon a million times in a row, or it's like Google Docs, Google Docs,

01:39:58   Sheets, Docs, Docs, Sheets, Sheets, Google Docs, you know, whatever it is that they're doing,

01:40:02   maybe there's a theme, maybe there's not, maybe there's 75 tabs open in Amazon, and all you can

01:40:05   see is the Amazon logo. Like, I'm not sure. I'm not sure. Your screenshot, by the way, has 62 tabs.

01:40:12   And this is not like a power user or some super computer nerd, it's just somebody,

01:40:16   just a random person at work who I don't even remember if they were in the engineering

01:40:20   department. Like, this is what happens when you give people tabs as a means to control things.

01:40:25   And same thing with Windows. Like, if you give people windows, they don't know what to do with

01:40:29   them. There's too much freedom, right? Now, all that said, it doesn't mean the way Apple

01:40:34   implements tabs has to be the way Chrome implements tabs. You can be much more limited.

01:40:38   They implement splitting in a very limited way that keeps you from having 100 things, right?

01:40:43   So maybe you can have four tabs or five, and you avoid this problem, and maybe they make a way to

01:40:48   rearrange them that is more intuitive than browser tabs, and you have to deal with accidentally

01:40:52   closing them, and there's lots of issues involved. I think it could be a reasonable next step

01:40:58   in dealing with screen real estate, but I also think that,

01:41:05   collectively, we as humans have not yet come up with a good solution for how to manage information

01:41:14   on a two-dimensional display. I think the Mac interface or the classic Mac interface and

01:41:21   various things in the PC world have come close to coming up with some very good solutions for

01:41:28   extremely sophisticated technical users, whether it be like X windows, heavily customized,

01:41:35   or a Mac with a million extensions or whatever, or the way I use my computer, which is not the

01:41:39   way I expect most people to use computers. The capabilities that exist allow people to work in

01:41:47   very sophisticated ways, but very few people, and that's not a good technical solution.

01:41:52   The beauty of the iPhone is that it let essentially anybody be successful with a phone

01:41:56   that was really a little computer, right? We don't have that solution for doing more than one thing

01:42:01   at a time on a screen, period, full stop. I don't expect Apple to come up with that solution

01:42:05   miraculously, especially not on the iPad. All we're hoping for now is give us a little bit

01:42:10   of the freedom that we experienced on the desktop, which is itself, I think, kind of stuck in a rut

01:42:14   in terms of how it deals with Windows, and it could do much better, without giving users

01:42:21   enough rope to hang themselves. So I think it would be a nice addition, and I think people,

01:42:29   especially iPad power users, are sick of being limited in the ways that multitasking limits them,

01:42:33   and so I would mostly give that feature a thumbs up, but I do not think it is an end state. I don't

01:42:41   think it's not really a solution. It is just another stopgap on the road to coming up with

01:42:48   something that at least lets us use iPads in as sophisticated a manner as we use desktop computers,

01:42:55   while also not making them as big a mess as desktop computers. Tall order, I know.

01:42:59   - Yeah, that is. Well, we can dream. Aaron wants to know, "On an infinite time scale,

01:43:03   both the iPhone and the Apple Watch will stop being produced. Which will stop being made first,

01:43:09   the iPhone or the Apple Watch, and why?" - Well, that's tricky.

01:43:12   - Well, humans will have evolved past the need for arms.

01:43:19   - The thing about the watch is that it's not, like, it is a technology product,

01:43:25   but there's also a fashion aspect, so if you fast forward really far with the technology,

01:43:29   I think they will diverge from each other. Like, you'll be able to make such an amazing

01:43:34   watch eventually that fulfills all the jobs of an Apple Watch, which are limited, as we've learned.

01:43:41   Like, people aren't going to be using really complicated applications on a tiny little screen.

01:43:45   It's mostly just going to do the stuff it does now, but be smaller and cooler looking,

01:43:49   and have one or two more features, and be much lighter, and be on all the time, and battery last

01:43:56   forever, blah blah blah. I feel like the watch line will slide off in that direction, to the

01:44:01   point where it doesn't matter whether or not the phone exists, like that they're divergent. But I

01:44:05   think the only reason Apple would stop making the watch is because it just becomes uninteresting,

01:44:10   technologically speaking. Whereas the phone, I feel like the phone has longer legs and will be

01:44:18   more interesting technologically for longer than the watch. So if I had to put money on one,

01:44:22   I'd put it on the phone. Yeah, I agree with you for much the same reason. Like, at some point,

01:44:27   the need to embed tech in a thing that's on your wrist will be, you know, like, the advantages of

01:44:34   that will go away because that tech will be elsewhere, and then putting something on your

01:44:38   wrist will kind of recede back into being. It'll be less of Apple's core competency. It's like,

01:44:43   well, if it really becomes more of a pure fashion play because the tech is no longer interesting,

01:44:48   that's not really Apple's forte. Last question, this is from Kapila. There's a knock at your door,

01:44:54   it's eddy Q. You can have the new Mac Pro to review three months prior to the announcement

01:44:59   under embargo, or you can have any Ferrari you want to drive for three hours. You must choose,

01:45:05   but choose wisely. The way this question is formulated doesn't make it a difficult choice

01:45:10   at all. Three hours is not a long time, and I would be terrified of messing up a car. Three

01:45:14   months is a long time. I would take the Mac Pro in a second. Three hours, you can hardly be able to

01:45:19   get over my nerves at driving the thing in three hours. So what if eddy Q says, okay, how long

01:45:25   do you want to have this Ferrari so that I don't give you this Mac Pro? If it was also three months

01:45:33   and those three months were in the summer and I didn't have to work, I would take the Ferrari.

01:45:37   All right, okay, yeah, who needs that? I also don't have to pay for any damages to the car.

01:45:40   Yeah, right, I think that's embedded in the question, of course. I mean, he's going to

01:45:44   give you the car to drive. Yeah, yeah. You know, all right, well, that's good. John?

01:45:48   But eddy, you know, you can always bring both. Sure, actually, that's the reveal, of course,

01:45:53   is that the Mac Pro is in the trunk of the car. So, you know, just pull it out of there. And then

01:45:59   eddy speeds off down the street and you're left with your Mac Pro for three months. That's a

01:46:05   pretty good deal. John, thank you so much for being on upgrade. I like to have you visit from

01:46:11   time to time. It's fun. You and I talk about lots of things that aren't computers on podcasts and

01:46:18   aren't robots and are movies and things like that. And like I said, I listen to you talking about

01:46:24   this stuff every week on ATP and I talk about it every week here, but it's fun to talk about it

01:46:30   with you. So thank you for being on. I always enjoy our visits, especially when I can talk to

01:46:35   someone who is closer to the same age and has all the same weird old Apple Mac. I remember the old

01:46:41   times. I remember the old times. We're the best. Steven Hackett just did a thing where he was

01:46:47   posting about, oh, here's this interesting Apple event. And it was the event where they did the

01:46:51   iPod Hi-Fi. And what I didn't say on Twitter, I was like, we should, you know, he and I should do a

01:46:57   like old times podcast someday of like Apple history before I forget all these things. But

01:47:03   what I didn't say is that was a terrible event. It was a disaster on all fronts. It was should not

01:47:09   have ever been called. It was like, here's our a hundred dollar leather iPod case and here's the

01:47:14   iPod Hi-Fi enjoy everybody. And then there was a weird demo room where they had like a fake dorm

01:47:19   room set up, like a set from a movie that you could wander in. And it was super creepy. But

01:47:26   from Steven's perspective, it was like, oh, I found this YouTube video of this weird Apple event.

01:47:30   It's interesting. Like I was there. It was not interesting. It's only interesting in hindsight,

01:47:35   deep, deep hindsight. So yeah, it's nice to talk about the old times. We can talk about system 6.0.8

01:47:43   sometime. Good times. Good times. Well, I want to thank not only Jon, but our sponsors Away,

01:47:49   Pingdom and Luna Display. You can find me, J Snell on Twitter. You can find Jon at Syracuse.

01:47:55   So that's S I R A C U S A, Syracuse on Twitter. And we'll be back next week. Myke will return from

01:48:02   his brutal assignment. Remember to vote in the upgrade ease. And of course, listen to Jon on his

01:48:08   podcast, accidental tech podcast, reconcilable differences and robot or not. And he's also on

01:48:13   the incomparable a lot with me. So you should listen to that too. And until next week, say

01:48:18   goodbye, Jon Syracuse. Goodbye, Jon Syracuse.

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