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
00:00:44 ◼ ► Hello, Jason. I just noticed that this is Episode 222. I'm really excited to get a run of twos.
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
00:01:27 ◼ ► 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.
00:02:06 ◼ ► 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,
00:05:37 ◼ ► 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,
00:06:16 ◼ ► 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
00:07:03 ◼ ► 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,
00:10:20 ◼ ► 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.
00:10:33 ◼ ► 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,
00:11:37 ◼ ► 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.
00:12:36 ◼ ► 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.
00:13:08 ◼ ► 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,
00:22:29 ◼ ► 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,
00:23:36 ◼ ► 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,
00:24:18 ◼ ► 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
00:31:25 ◼ ► 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
00:32:11 ◼ ► 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
00:35:15 ◼ ► 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
00:35:40 ◼ ► 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,
00:36:04 ◼ ► 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,
00:37:02 ◼ ► 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,
00:40:52 ◼ ► 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,
00:41:37 ◼ ► 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
00:43:41 ◼ ► 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,
00:43:58 ◼ ► 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
00:50:08 ◼ ► make the Mac a different place. And I don't know if this will be specifically what they do,
00:50:17 ◼ ► where Apple can reconcile these sort of two different worlds that it's making products in
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.
00:51:07 ◼ ► This episode is brought to you by Pingdom, the company who make website performance monitoring
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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
00:54:27 ◼ ► 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
00:56:09 ◼ ► 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.
00:59:18 ◼ ► 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?
01:00:43 ◼ ► play iTunes content or play this TV content like Roku and the Fire TV and your microwaves in your,
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,
01:01:12 ◼ ► 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
01:04:34 ◼ ► 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,
01:05:12 ◼ ► 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
01:06:47 ◼ ► 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.
01:08:28 ◼ ► 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,
01:14:46 ◼ ► 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,
01:15:05 ◼ ► 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?
01:15:36 ◼ ► are part of some other non-television subscription that I subscribe to. I pay for Hulu,
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,
01:16:05 ◼ ► 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
01:17:11 ◼ ► 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
01:17:25 ◼ ► 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
01:18:37 ◼ ► 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,
01:22:05 ◼ ► 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,
01:22:43 ◼ ► 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,
01:23:09 ◼ ► Have you ever looked at your iPad and wished you could use it as a second display from your Mac?
01:23:13 ◼ ► Luna Display lets you do it. I bought one. I have two now. I have two Luna Displays. I love
01:23:23 ◼ ► it so much. One for my old systems uses Mini DisplayPort, and another one for my new systems,
01:23:28 ◼ ► USB-C. It's amazing. Your iPad already has a beautiful retina display, and you could always
01:23:34 ◼ ► use some extra space when working from your Mac. Or if you've got an older iPad, you know, it may
01:23:39 ◼ ► not even have a retina display, but it's another display, and if it's in a drawer somewhere
01:23:44 ◼ ► especially, you could repurpose it, turn it into a Mac monitor. Luna Display provides crystal clear
01:23:50 ◼ ► image quality, reliable performance, and wireless flexibility. Pop a little piece of hardware into
01:23:54 ◼ ► your Mac and you're good to go. And if you don't have access to a Wi-Fi connection, no worries,
01:23:59 ◼ ► you can connect via USB as well. When using Luna Display, you can set up your workspace anywhere
01:24:04 ◼ ► you want to go. Be more productive at the office, in the studio, or on the go. Back when I was
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
01:24:32 ◼ ► with an external display when you're going into a hotel room or something like that, but you've got
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
01:25:23 ◼ ► me and letting them work together so that I could have more screen real estate. Just, yeah,
01:25:29 ◼ ► absolutely. I want to do that. I want to go there. Listeners of Upgrade can get an exclusive 10%
01:25:34 ◼ ► discount on Luna Display. Just go to lunadisplay.com and enter the promo code "upgrade" at checkout.
01:25:40 ◼ ► That's lunadisplay.com. Promo code "upgrade" at checkout. Thank you to Luna Display for supporting,
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,
01:27:07 ◼ ► 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
01:27:34 ◼ ► 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
01:29:10 ◼ ► 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
01:33:44 ◼ ► 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.
01:40:20 ◼ ► 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
01:41:05 ◼ ► 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.
01:41:56 ◼ ► 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,
01:43:03 ◼ ► both the iPhone and the Apple Watch will stop being produced. Which will stop being made first,
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.
01:43:49 ◼ ► 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.
01:45:48 ◼ ► 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