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Upgrade

115: Rubber Chicken Scenario

 

00:00:00   [Intro music]

00:00:07   From Relay FM, this is Upgrade, episode 115. Today's show is brought to you by Casper,

00:00:14   FreshBooks, and Encapsula. My name is Myke Hurley and I am joined by the one and only,

00:00:21   Mr. Jason Snell.

00:00:22   Hey Myke, how's it going?

00:00:24   Pretty good Jason Snell, how are you?

00:00:26   Good, good. Busy time. Busy time. You know, my mom always says to me, whenever we talk

00:00:33   about what we're doing and the kids are doing and all that, she's like, "Oh, you're just

00:00:36   so busy. You're so lucky to be so young. You're just so busy." And most of the time I just

00:00:40   kind of roll my eyes a little bit and think, "Yeah, you know, it's just life. It's what

00:00:44   we do." But the last couple of months, and I think this happens for all of us who write

00:00:48   or talk about Apple, yeah, it's been really busy.

00:00:51   It's just a busy season. September to November really is the busy season.

00:00:55   It is high season. I feel like I was walking the dog with my wife yesterday and we were

00:01:00   talking about all this stuff and I said, "The good news is we're kind of at the end of the

00:01:08   Apple product cycle for this year." I mean, there's stuff, right? Because now we're going

00:01:16   to kick into the holiday season and make lists and stuff like that, all the end of year stuff,

00:01:22   it's work and the work never stops. The upgrade-ies will be coming. All of that, we got a plan,

00:01:27   it's all going to happen, but it is also kind of nice to feel like as somebody who works

00:01:34   on this stuff that we're on the backside a little bit, can calm down a little bit. Because

00:01:38   it's been kind of nuts, especially if you throw in the, you know, that I was gone for

00:01:43   ten days on my continuous travel adventure with Apple products, you know, an Apple event

00:01:50   right before and a product that I took with me and then as soon as I got back I got the

00:01:54   Touch Bar MacBook Pro and had an embargo for that that dropped this morning. So I'm feeling

00:02:00   a little bit like I can actually take stock of my where I am in my life and where I am

00:02:05   in the world for the first time in a couple of weeks. So that's nice. It's nice to get

00:02:10   that review out in the world and be able to sort of look up from my desk for a moment

00:02:14   and ask what's next.

00:02:17   So we are going to touch on the touch bar later on today in the show, but I did want

00:02:22   to ask just as a--

00:02:23   You've got to touch on the touch bar, Myke.

00:02:25   That's how it works.

00:02:26   You have to.

00:02:27   I mean, otherwise, what's the point of having it?

00:02:29   But I do have this one kind of meta question about the reviews and saying it's busy.

00:02:33   I think something that's maybe made this uncharacteristically busy, I can't ever remember a time where you

00:02:38   or like the majority of Tech Press will review two models of the same computer separately.

00:02:44   Yeah, well, okay, so there was a serious availability kind of roll out issue for the MacBook Pro

00:02:53   models and it's interesting, I've never seen this either. Usually, you know, they release

00:02:59   a bunch and you get the best one, right? That's where you're like, "No, no, no, here's the

00:03:03   best one." You're like, "But what about the others? Ah, bop, bop, nope, nope, you get

00:03:07   the good one, review the good one." That tends to be what happens. But this time, because

00:03:14   availability issue. So after the event, a bunch of reviewers, and I was included in

00:03:19   this, were, you know, it's the thing where you're told, "Come back a little bit later."

00:03:23   And I went and had a sandwich with Dan Frakes, my former colleague at Macworld who works

00:03:28   at the Wirecutter now, because he lives nearby.

00:03:30   Greg "Stryke" Baumgartner The New York Times, right?

00:03:32   Tim "Stryke" Baumgartner By the New York Times, right? Exactly. So

00:03:36   he's employed by that company now. Anyway, we had lunch and all that. And then I came

00:03:40   back and basically you get ushered into their new briefing center and you get demos and

00:03:46   then you leave with a MacBook Pro in a bag. And so I got the escape essentially, right?

00:03:53   The physical button two port 13 inch MacBook Pro and that's what everybody got and everybody

00:03:58   was saying after the event like, you know, they don't have the touch bar ones yet. So

00:04:02   then the next week I'm in Ireland with the physical button 13 inch MacBook Pro and I

00:04:07   I get an email from my PR contact at Apple saying, "Can you come by tomorrow to pick

00:04:11   up the 13-inch with touch bar?" To which I replied, "No, I can't. I'm in Ireland. Can

00:04:17   you send it to me?" There's no response. And I still don't have that model because I think

00:04:24   they were a very limited supply and they gave mine to someone else instead. So that's sad.

00:04:29   But then I get home and they say, "Can you come down and pick up the 15-inch?" So basically

00:04:36   on successive weeks each of these three variations rolled out. And so you end up with these interesting

00:04:42   situations of like, the first one had no embargo, or had, yeah, I think it had like…

00:04:47   They had the new embargo, right, which is just like, talk about whatever you want, but

00:04:51   post your review at a certain point or whatever it is.

00:04:55   The first one was, it was I think just like, your embargo is tomorrow morning or something

00:05:01   like that, just to give everybody a little bit more time, but it was not a lot of time.

00:05:05   then the second one came out and they had an embargo. And it sounds like then the third

00:05:09   one, 15-inch, came out. I'm not privy to all of this. It sounds like the embargo kept getting

00:05:14   pushed back. The embargo I got was Monday morning and that's what I did. So that was

00:05:18   all going on. So there was a lot of moving parts this time, which is kind of unusual.

00:05:21   And so people had to choose. Like, some sites have multiple reviews of the different models.

00:05:27   Some sites conflated all the, you know, all the reviews are all in one. I ended up writing

00:05:34   a hands-on experience piece on day one, and then a travel piece after I posted it literally

00:05:44   over the Atlantic Ocean on my flight back home, and then about the 13. And then this

00:05:50   piece is about 15 because that's the only model I've got. So it's kind of all over the

00:05:55   place about how people chose to review these. And in reality, we can talk about this more

00:05:59   later. What it ended up being was mostly I'm reviewing Touch Bar and Touch ID because these

00:06:04   systems are not that different from the 13 inch model without the Touch Bar. They're

00:06:10   not that different other than the Touch Bar and the Touch ID. So I ended up writing a

00:06:14   review of the MacBook Pro that's very much a review of, it's like an essay about Touch

00:06:18   Bar and Touch ID essentially.

00:06:19   Yeah, I guess the reason that you can write these reviews genuinely about these two machines

00:06:24   is it's been very, I can't think of any time

00:06:27   Apple's released a new product, like a new Mac,

00:06:31   where they have two versions

00:06:32   and one of them has this different feature.

00:06:34   Like they've released in the past,

00:06:36   like oh here's the Retina one,

00:06:37   but there wasn't like another Mac

00:06:39   that was just like the Retina one,

00:06:40   just didn't have Retina, I don't think.

00:06:42   But like this like touch bar is completely different.

00:06:45   As well, like you wouldn't even,

00:06:46   what would you review a Retina screen?

00:06:47   Like screen looks good, moving on,

00:06:49   like you know, what do you do?

00:06:51   But this is like a really weird type of thing

00:06:54   where they're just like, "Oh, here's a computer. It's really powerful. It has all this new

00:06:57   stuff in it. You can get it in space grey. Review it. Here's another one. It has another

00:07:02   screen on it and a fingerprint sensor on it. Review it. It's strange."

00:07:05   BRIAN: Every time I write a review of these things now, I end up trying to think, "How

00:07:11   do I describe..." Basically, you have to wave at the retina screen as you blow past it.

00:07:16   You have to say, "Like all of these computers these days, it has a beautiful, bright, wide

00:07:22   color retina display. It's great to look at. It's like, what can I say about it?

00:07:26   Your mileage may vary, right? You know what Apple does with displays now, and this has

00:07:32   got that, and so there it is. And then I kind of move on, because I'm not quite sure what

00:07:38   else to say. It's got a big, bright, beautiful retina display. And next!

00:07:44   So you can now buy these machines as well, but they're like four to five weeks shipping,

00:07:49   it stands currently. I don't know if you could buy them before but like you can buy them

00:07:53   and they're shipping in like a month. It'll be interesting to see if and how the touch

00:08:02   bar versions slip. So I think were they were they buyable? Like could you already buy these

00:08:08   things? Oh yeah. I can't remember. They're just I think I think they were on sale the

00:08:12   day it was announced and then the ship date was you know basically if you calculated it

00:08:17   if you ordered them right away. The ship date was mid-November, so about now. And they may,

00:08:21   given that our embargo dropped today, they may start trickling out this week. I don't

00:08:28   know, but my understanding is if you go and try to order one today, you won't be able

00:08:32   to get it tomorrow because they're backordered.

00:08:36   I guess my problem is, to check this personally, I don't think I know of anybody who's bought

00:08:39   one. I can't think of anyone that I know. I can't think of any friends of mine that

00:08:44   have actually purchased this machine. Oh, actually, our designer Frank has bought one.

00:08:49   So I mean, he's based in a place in Europe, so…

00:08:54   [Laughter]

00:08:55   A place in Europe?

00:08:57   Place in Europe. He's very mysterious.

00:08:58   I thought he was in a spaceship hovering above Europe.

00:09:01   Above Europe, yeah. There's a space place in Europe.

00:09:03   No, you've revealed it now. He's actually in a place, in a location in Europe.

00:09:07   Mm. Imagine that.

00:09:09   Wow. Mind blown.

00:09:11   John was the first person to recognize the startup chime is gone from the upgrade music

00:09:17   last week. We'd like to make sure that we keep up with the times, so Apple removes the

00:09:22   startup chime, so do we.

00:09:25   Yeah, this was an idea we talked about at ULL and didn't do it then because we were

00:09:32   just trying to get that episode out because it's live and we're at a conference and all

00:09:36   but we did it last time and presumably this time, and we'll see what happens. I don't

00:09:42   know if it's going to come back, Myke. I don't know what our policy, I don't know if somebody

00:09:46   can...

00:09:47   Well, it all depends on whether somebody opened terminal or not, right?

00:09:49   Yeah, I know, right? So we'll see. We'll see what happens if we can get into the podcast

00:09:54   command line and do some tweaking or whether we've lost the startup time forever.

00:10:01   We've spoken a lot recently about your kind of mobile recording setup and your iPad recording

00:10:05   setup and whilst we were at all, listener EJ, Elias who was the creator of the incredible

00:10:14   Podcast Universe map, if you've ever seen that thing, it's amazing.

00:10:20   He mentioned a way, because he records all on iOS and I believe he's writing a blog post

00:10:25   so Elias if you're out there and when you've written this, send it to me so I can put it

00:10:30   in show notes in future episode.

00:10:32   And he had mentioned, because he uses the Zoom solid state recorder like you do, Jason,

00:10:38   and then edits using Ferrite on his iPad. Now, currently there is no way without a Mac,

00:10:46   I believe, to get those two things to talk to each other, right? You need to somehow

00:10:51   – or using some kind of thing, you have to use something. There has to be something

00:10:55   in the middle.

00:10:56   Well, there has to be a PC, basically. There has to be a computer as an intermediary. This

00:11:00   is one of those things. I've written about how one of my big wish list items for iOS,

00:11:05   if they do a productivity update in the spring, is the ability to see more stuff on attached

00:11:12   storage devices, especially if you're using the card reader that Apple provides. Right

00:11:15   now all it'll do is see videos and photos. And now that we've got essentially file pickers

00:11:22   in terms of iCloud Drive and Dropbox and all the rest, and you can see files, why can't

00:11:28   you see files on those cards because right now a portable recorder like the Zoom that

00:11:35   I've got and that Elias has, they are recording waves or MP3s onto that card and it's great.

00:11:44   It's a great way to do portable recording. And then you want to edit and you've got your

00:11:47   iPad for editing and you can't get it over. You have to attach it to a computer that can

00:11:52   read or some other device that can read an SD card because the iPad can't read those

00:11:56   files on the SD card and transfer them and then transfer them to the iPad and then you

00:12:00   can do it. It's maddening. But now there are Wi-Fi enabled SD cards and the one I think

00:12:07   that has kind of occupied the mind share in this is a product called iFi. Right. Photographers

00:12:13   use this a lot in their cameras and they're able to transfer images to a service or to

00:12:20   a device very easily. However, the iFi SD card, it has a companion app on iOS, but it

00:12:27   only allows you to transfer media, movies, and photos.

00:12:31   It's got the same approach that Apple took with their SD card reader and the software

00:12:36   on iOS to read it, which is, this is a media transfer thing.

00:12:39   However, Toshiba make their own called the Flash Air, and the Flash Air app, when you

00:12:46   press a couple of hidden little buttons, not like hidden hidden, but like just not completely

00:12:50   - It's in the settings. - It's in the settings.

00:12:51   You can turn on the ability to take documents from,

00:12:56   or basically anything stored on the Flash Air

00:12:58   and it will download them to the application

00:13:00   and you can use the opening command on iOS.

00:13:02   So it is possible to grab these audio files

00:13:07   from the Flash Air card that has been recorded

00:13:11   in the Zoom recorder from the microphones

00:13:13   and then you're able to open in

00:13:15   and then you're able to open them up into Ferrite

00:13:17   and I believe you've tried this out.

00:13:19   Yeah, I did and it works. I mean that's the bottom line is you can see

00:13:24   and the way it works is you set it up, it's its own wireless

00:13:27   network basically and you have to, your iPad has to connect to it

00:13:30   or iPhone and you can set in the settings

00:13:33   in the app how long, because it uses battery right, or it uses power, so you can say how long

00:13:39   is it trying to set up that network before it gives up so I, you know, I have it set to like

00:13:44   a minute so literally in order to connect to it I need to turn on

00:13:47   because I wanted to save battery. I turn on my recorder and then connect to it by my iPad in

00:13:52   that first minute and then we're good. And then I can see the contents of the card. I can copy any

00:13:59   of those files over to my iPad. And yes, if you toggle a setting in the Flash Air app, then it

00:14:06   uses the open in, I don't know why this isn't on by default, but it provides you with the open in

00:14:12   command, at which point you can move those files over directly into something like Fairite

00:14:17   for editing. The only drawback is the way that that app is written right now. You have

00:14:22   to do them one at a time, even though you can make multiple selections, if you select

00:14:26   multiple files, you can't choose open in. I don't know why. It's kind of dumb.

00:14:30   That's an iOS limitation. You can only pass one file through at a time.

00:14:34   You can only open in one thing? Yeah. I wish there was, you know, it's one of those things

00:14:39   too where, yeah, if there was something else, you could zip it inside of Flash Air or something

00:14:45   like that, but you can't. So anyway, you have to do that one at a time. But this solves

00:14:48   the problem of if I want to go somewhere and record something, I can use, with multiple

00:14:53   microphones, I can use the Zoom recorder and then I can get it to my iPad and edit it and

00:14:57   post it and this closes a gap that probably shouldn't be there, but it closes that gap.

00:15:04   and that's cool. So I bought one, Elias told me about it, I immediately opened my phone,

00:15:11   opened the Amazon app, ordered one, had it sent to my house, it was here when I got back

00:15:15   home and it totally works. So it's a nice work around for now, I hope Apple will update

00:15:20   iOS to just read files off of SD cards in the future.

00:15:26   Last week, Dylan wrote in to ask, has anybody bought the larger Apple TV, the larger storage

00:15:32   Apple TV in our Ask Upgrade segment. And Steve wrote in to say that he owns the larger storage

00:15:38   Apple TV as he heard it has a better buffer for streaming content, so it's able to stream

00:15:43   more content. I've never heard this.

00:15:45   I don't think that's true.

00:15:47   I think that that might be a rubber chicken scenario, Steve, I'm afraid. But he also bought

00:15:52   it for future proofing, which I can kind of get on board with.

00:15:55   What is a rubber?

00:15:56   There might be something that pops up in the future that might mean he needs the storage,

00:16:00   but I'm afraid, Steve, whilst these may be valid reasons for you, they still don't seem

00:16:05   like enough for why anybody should buy that one.

00:16:08   What is a rubber chicken scenario?

00:16:10   You never heard of that?

00:16:11   I know what a rubber chicken is, but I don't-- what is a rubber chicken scenario?

00:16:15   So like, if you're swinging a rubber chicken like above your head, right?

00:16:19   Have you ever heard this?

00:16:21   No, I just googled for rubber chicken scenario in quotes and there's literally two-- there's

00:16:26   two web pages.

00:16:28   So I picked this up maybe from MacBreakWeekly back in the day. They would talk about swinging

00:16:35   a rubber chicken as a method of trying something out in the hopes that it will fix your problem.

00:16:42   Oh I see. So it's like a superstition thing. Like, you know, nothing else is working so

00:16:47   why don't I try this and see if it helps.

00:16:49   So let's blame Merlin for this. I'm just gonna straight up blame Merlin for that. But

00:16:53   I think that if Merlin Man is out there, he will know what I'm talking about. Like this

00:16:57   is the thing that they used to reference. I can hear him saying it. So like the idea

00:17:02   is you swing a rubber chicken above your head. Oh here it is. In the Wikipedia page for rubber

00:17:05   chicken it says "the rubber chicken fix refers to holding a rubber chicken above a problem

00:17:11   often perplexing and having the problem fix itself." I see. Okay. Right, so the idea being

00:17:17   that like this isn't a real thing that exists but it's like a placebo, it makes you feel

00:17:21   better. Alright. Well I again, so to Steve I don't know for sure but I think when it

00:17:27   came out we asked about this and they said that it's the way Apple describes

00:17:32   it is it's to load information from apps so that you basically large you can have

00:17:36   more apps and that those apps have more room to put their data on there but it's

00:17:41   never been very clearly communicated and I think Apple TV you know it's

00:17:46   providing plenty of buffer space for media is my understanding that that is

00:17:51   reserved for media on either model so I could be wrong about that but that's my

00:17:57   recollection from when it came out and that's why we've all been kind of

00:18:00   scratching our heads about the the storage difference in the Apple TV

00:18:03   because while it exists and they charge for it the communication on it is very

00:18:08   limited basically more apps so if you essentially I think what they're saying

00:18:12   is if you are using it for lots of games you can keep all the games on there and

00:18:18   it won't need to remove levels or whatever it'll load them and keep them

00:18:22   there because it's got plenty of space. And our resident Apple TV expert Joe

00:18:27   Steel in the chat room, fake name, said that the apps don't have more room themselves.

00:18:32   Everything is capped, all of the actual data that they can store in them. But as you said,

00:18:37   you can hold more apps, but you can't hold more data within those apps than the smaller

00:18:41   model does.

00:18:42   Tim Cynova I think it's not that you can hold more data.

00:18:44   I think it might be that if you run, you've got your app with content in the app package,

00:18:51   it's got its content and then you're in a low storage situation that it

00:18:57   blows off stuff that it can re-download and maybe that wouldn't

00:19:02   happen but I think Joe's also right that probably in almost any circumstance you

00:19:06   wouldn't get to that point unless you had lots of apps so it comes back to

00:19:09   more apps. I don't think that there are that many good apps to be honest.

00:19:13   Yeah, although I did see, who was it? I saw somebody talking about how they, I

00:19:20   I think side loaded an emulator onto their Apple TV.

00:19:24   - Marco did that.

00:19:25   - Was that Marco?

00:19:25   Yeah.

00:19:26   An emulator onto their Apple TV

00:19:29   and they have the steel case controller

00:19:31   and they play like emulated video games on the Apple TV.

00:19:34   That's what Marco tweeted about.

00:19:35   - The emulator games that you can put

00:19:37   they're like Nintendo games,

00:19:39   they're not gonna take up a lot of space.

00:19:41   - No, no, I know.

00:19:42   It's just, I thought that was an interesting,

00:19:44   but that's an example where you can't do that legally.

00:19:47   It's not in the app store.

00:19:49   So it's too bad.

00:19:50   Oh, I've got one for you.

00:19:53   Just a quick note.

00:19:54   I'm not gonna, I'm gonna write an article

00:19:55   about this at some point.

00:19:56   In the midst of writing my review

00:19:58   and doing all this stuff and being really busy,

00:20:00   I got a text message from my sister

00:20:02   saying that she had a virus on her Mac and could I help her?

00:20:07   And I literally ended up texting with her for three hours,

00:20:10   trying to figure out what it was and how to do it.

00:20:14   And it was made more difficult.

00:20:18   So what she did was she obviously clicked on something somewhere that reset her home

00:20:25   page on Safari to load a page that loads a JavaScript that throws up a dialog box that

00:20:31   says you've been infected call this number and you can't get out of the dialog box in

00:20:37   order to go to the preferences and reset Safari.

00:20:39   This happened, something like this happened to someone in John Siracus' family right?

00:20:43   I think you talk about ATP recently.

00:20:45   And one of the amazing things about Safari that I think is actually a flaw in Safari

00:20:49   that they need to fix is there's no way to reset Safari from outside Safari.

00:20:56   That doesn't make any sense.

00:20:58   Right?

00:20:59   There's not a command line tool.

00:21:01   I deleted every file I'm aware of that feeds Safari on her system and it didn't reset her

00:21:07   homepage.

00:21:08   This is a good thing for Chrome, right?

00:21:09   You could just delete Chrome.

00:21:11   So this is the problem is she had no other browser on her system so I couldn't even send

00:21:15   to web pages because she didn't have a browser. I was, I was, we were in messages and she

00:21:19   started on her iPhone and eventually I said get on messages on your Mac and I was sending,

00:21:24   I was dragging like anti-malware apps into the chat for her to get them through a download

00:21:31   through an iMessage transfer. It was a mess and it turns out that for all of this, and

00:21:37   this is why I wanted to bring this up and why I'll write about it, there is a really

00:21:41   simple solution here, and so I wanted to share it because maybe our listeners will experience

00:21:46   this or experience this with family members. If you get this like blocker, first off make

00:21:52   sure they don't call the person, make sure they don't let them share their screen or

00:21:56   whatever, you know, and if they've done that then it's even more problematic, but how you

00:22:01   solve this Safari blocker problem is actually shockingly simple, which is you turn off Wi-Fi,

00:22:06   you make sure they're not plugged into any networks, because the way this works is not

00:22:10   a page on the hard drive that's getting loaded, it's a page on the internet that's getting

00:22:14   loaded that loads the JavaScript that does the blocker. So if you turn off Wi-Fi and

00:22:18   load Safari it goes, "Oh, I can't find that page," at which point you can go to preferences

00:22:22   and go to homepage and delete the weird homepage URL that's been inserted as your homepage.

00:22:29   And then you're fine.

00:22:30   Oh, I hate that it's that simple.

00:22:32   So three hours to get to, "Why don't you turn off Wi-Fi?" But there it is. So I'll write

00:22:38   about it.

00:22:39   up the "Can't connect to the internet" page and you're good to go, right?

00:22:43   Yeah, yeah, yeah, and unfortunately there are lots of other steps we tried. If you hold

00:22:48   down shift when you launch Safari, it's supposed to kind of like not do it, but it didn't work,

00:22:55   right? Like I thought it was a rogue extension, I thought there was something, no, it was

00:22:58   just this, it was the homepage thing which is not solved. So I don't know what Apple

00:23:03   can do here, but that seemed like, and it sounds like maybe in El Capitan and Sierra,

00:23:09   added more stuff and she was running Yosemite. So it sounds like maybe this is solved in

00:23:16   more modern versions but of course you know what? All of our relatives who ask us for

00:23:20   technical help, they're not running Sierra, right?

00:23:22   I'm not running Sierra.

00:23:24   They're running an old, they're not running El Capitan. They may not even be running Yosemite.

00:23:28   They're running old versions. Anyway, so if this comes up to anybody out there, try turning

00:23:36   off all the networking and see if you can do that to get around it because that don't

00:23:40   be like me and spend three hours troubleshooting this. And from Apple's perspective, yeah,

00:23:45   again, maybe they fixed this, but it would be awfully nice if I could go to maybe settings

00:23:49   and have something I could click somewhere that erased, you know, that reset Safari,

00:23:56   outside of Safari. I don't know. IOS, man. That's what you need. You'll be alright.

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00:25:17   So let's talk about the touch bar shall we?

00:25:21   Oh let's!

00:25:23   So I spent some time this morning reading over your review.

00:25:25   I really like and I'm very happy that you included a video

00:25:28   with this review to kind of give a real flavor

00:25:32   for what's happening because, you know,

00:25:34   this is one of the things like so far, we've seen videos,

00:25:36   but they've been like real quick videos

00:25:38   that people take in demo rooms,

00:25:39   but you were able to sit down

00:25:41   and try out a ton of applications,

00:25:43   including some third party ones,

00:25:44   and really give an idea for what is going on

00:25:49   in the touch bar when you're accessing applications.

00:25:52   and I believe that you were doing a screen capture

00:25:55   and then actually recording yourself

00:25:58   in I assume a very dark room touching on the touch bar.

00:26:02   - Yeah, it was, yeah, so it's about a five minute video.

00:26:06   I decided, I finished writing the story mostly on Friday

00:26:09   and I spent most of Sunday morning doing the video.

00:26:14   And it was, right, I mean I don't do a lot of videos

00:26:17   mostly because they take a lot of time, as you know,

00:26:21   and I want to pick the spots where I think I've got something that actually

00:26:24   benefits from video, but this seemed like

00:26:27   seemed obvious, right? Like I need to show people how this works

00:26:30   and the room wasn't that dark but what I had to do is I basically put an

00:26:35   iPhone

00:26:36   on a tripod and with the glyph

00:26:39   mounting it on the tripod and

00:26:43   and I stopped down the shutter so basically I

00:26:46   had to make it way darker in order for the

00:26:50   for the the screen to be visible on it. So it looks like a dark room. It actually

00:26:54   wasn't that dark, but I needed to make it dark

00:26:56   so that you could see the touch bar clearly. And then, yeah, and I ran a

00:26:59   screen capture. I discovered that QuickTime helpfully

00:27:03   puts a big red button on the control strip

00:27:08   that says "You're capturing the screen. Thanks!" That's not what I needed. But

00:27:14   anyway, I did a screen capture and also was videoing

00:27:17   from kind of above and behind me the touch bar and then I put those two,

00:27:21   composited those two things together so that people could see sort of like what

00:27:24   was I doing on screen and what was I doing on the touch bar and how they connect

00:27:27   because you can't really,

00:27:29   first off you can't capture video from the touch bar right now. You can capture

00:27:32   screenshots but you can't capture video

00:27:34   and the second thing is even if you could capture video from the touch bar

00:27:38   you can't see the fingers and what they're doing on the touch bar. Frankly

00:27:41   why would you need that? The use case of capturing it is so

00:27:46   So slim, Apple's not going to build that in for a long time, if ever, into QuickTime.

00:27:50   Well, plus it has to get it, it has to like get the video stream of itself through the,

00:27:56   you know, through the processor, through the T1.

00:27:59   It might not even be able to.

00:28:01   It may not, right?

00:28:02   And so, anyway, so it was pretty easy to do it once I got the setup, once I figured out

00:28:07   like the tripod, and it was funny, I have this tripod that I, that literally I got in

00:28:13   high school to shoot videos and I still have it. It weighs a ton but I still have it so

00:28:17   I got it out. It was funny though the tripod I got in the 80s with an iPhone 7 Plus on

00:28:24   it shooting 4K video. That tripod never could have imagined that camera could it? No definitely

00:28:31   not pretty amazing that's had VHS camcorders on it and it's had an iPhone 7 Plus shooting

00:28:36   4K video. Anyway so I put it together and yeah I'm pretty happy with how the video turned

00:28:41   out because I think it's good to show people it's a new user interface system and I think

00:28:49   you know the real thing to do is to use it but failing that it's to see it in use and

00:28:54   that was what I was going for with the video as the I mean I also wrote 5,000 words but

00:29:00   I did make a five minute long video too so you know a little bit of both.

00:29:04   So there are I've seen this in your video in some of your photos and photos I've seen

00:29:09   elsewhere. If you get the keyboard under the right light, so like it's all evenly lit,

00:29:16   like you know, there's no light shining from it, or you don't see any finger grease or

00:29:21   anything like that on the keys, the realness of the display of the buttons of the touch

00:29:27   bar, like how much they look like buttons, to me it tricks my brain into thinking it's

00:29:32   all screen. Not all buttons.

00:29:35   Interesting.

00:29:36   So like it's weird.

00:29:37   - I like that the keyboard is screened too.

00:29:39   - Yeah, because I know that's a screen.

00:29:41   So there's like this weird,

00:29:43   and you mentioned Uncanny Valley in yours, in your article.

00:29:47   Where it's like, I look at this,

00:29:48   like I'm looking at your top image, right?

00:29:50   Your banner image with the ginger molasses cookies,

00:29:53   which I'm a big fan of that type of cookie, by the way.

00:29:54   Just FYI, Jason.

00:29:56   - They're really good.

00:29:57   That's, yeah, they're really good.

00:29:59   - If you look at like the left hand side, right?

00:30:02   Of that keyboard of the image,

00:30:04   where it's all like just dark.

00:30:06   - Yeah.

00:30:07   like just looking at that whole thing I'm like I know my brain is like there's

00:30:10   some screen there maybe the whole thing screen it's really weird it's like

00:30:13   tricking my head in a strange strange way I think it's because those keys are

00:30:17   so flat and they're so dark and they're pretty well illuminated now it's a so

00:30:22   weird mix but this is a really really roundabout way of saying that the touch

00:30:26   bar screen does look really cool and Apple have done a great job of

00:30:31   integrating it it looks more like part of the keyboard than part of the screen

00:30:35   Yeah, that's the goal. And so you're seeing your uncanny valley, you know, you're coming

00:30:40   at it from the other angle here. But the idea here is that the touch bar matches the screen.

00:30:44   It's designed to be an input device. It is from certain angles, you can see that it's,

00:30:51   you know, it's glass and it's shiny, but not from where you're sitting if you're using

00:30:56   the keyboard. From there, it looks much more matte. And the idea, you can even see it on

00:31:01   that same image with the cookies. On the left side it looks very black just like

00:31:06   the key next to it. All the way on the right side where there's a little more

00:31:09   of a reflection picking up because there's more light over there, it looks

00:31:12   lighter but so do the keys right below it, right? And that's the idea here is

00:31:18   that it's trying to match it. The whole goal is to make it feel like an

00:31:22   extension of the keyboard and I think they succeeded. It's not a keyboard, right?

00:31:26   Because it doesn't have physical buttons but it's not it's not an iPad either

00:31:30   like it is and the way you use it is very much as part of the keyboard it's

00:31:35   part of the keyboard process it's not it's not a third touch area nor is it a

00:31:41   second trackpad it really feels like it's part of the keyboard I had a I had

00:31:45   a realization at some point so I our friend James Thompson who does pcalc he

00:31:52   kept sending me builds that he's working on of pcalc with touch bar support and

00:31:57   the first build he sent me, one of the buttons on the touch bar was to do a

00:32:02   conversion, like just like Fahrenheit to Celsius or whatever. So you just have

00:32:08   conversions. And what it did was it brought up his conversions dialog on the

00:32:11   screen, and then I would need to move my mouse out there and pick which one and

00:32:14   choose OK. And I had that moment of realization, like, oh, that's not good.

00:32:18   Like, the last thing I want to do when I'm in kind of keyboard mode is trigger

00:32:23   a thing that makes me take my hands back off the keyboard, move down to the track

00:32:26   mouse up and click on something. And I think that was my moment of realization

00:32:31   that although I kind of throw a keyboard and trackpad into one bucket, which is

00:32:35   like input into my Mac, they're not, right? They're not the same. And there are

00:32:40   keyboard-driven people, and there are our mouse and trackpad-driven people, and

00:32:45   other people are kind of in the middle. There's a spectrum there, right, where

00:32:47   people want to do all keyboard shortcuts and stuff. And sometimes for RSI

00:32:51   reasons and other things like that, they want to minimize the mousing that they

00:32:54   do. And other people are very into mousing. They're visual people. They like to click

00:32:58   on the icons. You tell them that they can hit Command+Shift+Z to do the same thing and

00:33:02   they're like, "Yeah, but the icon's right there. I'm just gonna click on that icon."

00:33:06   But what I found with the Touch Bar is it's part of the keyboard. Like, when I'm on the

00:33:10   keyboard, I want to be on the keyboard. And the last thing I want to do is like, "Do-do-do-do-do,

00:33:15   keyboard. Oh, now I need to move down to the mouse. Go up, click something. Do-do-do-do-do.

00:33:19   Now I'm back on the keyboard." Wouldn't it be better if I stayed on the keyboard? If

00:33:24   could-- because switching from one to the other, and it doesn't matter whether

00:33:27   you're on the trackpad or on the keyboard, from one to the other, you're

00:33:30   going to take a little bit of a hit. So I told this to James, and I don't

00:33:34   know if he was already working on it or not or whether I influenced him, but I

00:33:36   told this to James because he's just using the simulator, and he sent me a

00:33:40   build where instead of it triggering the function or the the conversion image on

00:33:46   screen, what it did is bring up a list of favorite or recent conversions you've

00:33:51   done in pcalc on the touch bar. So I touch conversion and it says Celsius to Fahrenheit

00:33:57   and I tap that and it does it and I was like that's it. Like that's the difference.

00:34:02   Is I'm staying on the keyboard and so that was it stuff like that where it's you know

00:34:06   it taught me that that Apple has taken a lot of care. I imagine that they spent a lot of

00:34:13   time debating and watching how people use different approaches to this and you still

00:34:18   see it in some of the ways different apps implement the touch bar, like it's kind of

00:34:22   all over the place. Like, I think some of them I use and I go, "Oh yeah, this is exactly

00:34:26   right." In others I'm like, "I don't really understand what's going on here." And over

00:34:31   time I think we'll all kind of figure out together what the best practices are for this.

00:34:35   But Apple's given it a lot of thought and it definitely struck me that this is what

00:34:40   they figured out, is it's part of the keyboard. Like, that is its purpose. And no, you can't

00:34:47   feel it like you can feel physical keys but I would make the argument that nobody really

00:34:51   touch types or very few people really touch type F keys like I don't touch type F keys

00:34:57   and so I was always looking down to press a function key anyway this isn't that different.

00:35:02   It's different if you got like a big slider and stuff like that that's a very different

00:35:05   kind of thing and we'll see how people adapt to that but when it's just sort of like extra

00:35:10   buttons that change based on what you need and you can quickly tap them and you know

00:35:14   it in the calculator. Like, it's really cool to be able to--I would use both Apple's calculator

00:35:18   and James' PCALC. Like, it used to be, if I wanted to take the square root of something--and

00:35:23   there's probably a keyboard shortcut, but I never used it--I would, like, type the number

00:35:28   on the keyboard, and then I'd move to the mouse and push my cursor to the square root

00:35:31   button and click it, and then I'd get the square root. Well, with the touch bar, I put

00:35:36   in the number, and then I'd tap square root on the touch bar, and there's my answer, and

00:35:40   and I've never left the keyboard.

00:35:41   And that's better, I mean that is better.

00:35:44   - So this kind of leads into something

00:35:48   that you said in the video and you kind of echoed it

00:35:51   in the, I first saw the video,

00:35:53   so you said it in the video,

00:35:54   you echo it in the review as well.

00:35:56   And I'm gonna paraphrase you a little bit.

00:35:58   But you basically said that the touch bar

00:35:59   kind of helps you keep your fingers in the keyboard position

00:36:03   without needing to reach for the track pad.

00:36:04   Now this is very counter to all of the upset

00:36:09   that people were feeling before this was announced, right?

00:36:12   The idea of like,

00:36:14   this is gonna ruin my touch typing experience,

00:36:17   this is gonna be a way I'm gonna have to keep reaching up

00:36:20   there and that kind of thing.

00:36:21   So this, it seems to me at least that like,

00:36:24   you're someone who's a touch typist,

00:36:26   that this is actually helping you improve

00:36:28   your keyboard experience because you're

00:36:31   staying on the keyboard as opposed to, as you say,

00:36:34   reaching for the trackpad.

00:36:36   This just seems counter to what I think we were expecting.

00:36:39   - Yeah, it surprised me a little bit too,

00:36:43   but it definitely was that feeling like,

00:36:45   it's not something I really anticipated,

00:36:47   but it's what I ended up experiencing,

00:36:49   that when I've got my hands, you know,

00:36:52   as I'm talking here, I've got my 10 fingers

00:36:55   sort of spread out in like keyboard positions.

00:36:57   Like I've got my hands out and in keyboard position, right?

00:37:01   And I'm doing things on my computer

00:37:02   that are like, you know, typey, typey, typey,

00:37:04   whether it's in a text window or it's something else,

00:37:07   I'm doing something very keyboard-y.

00:37:08   And then in other contexts,

00:37:10   I will be entirely like on my track pad

00:37:13   and maybe I've got one hand on a keyboard shortcut

00:37:17   or something, but that's a very different kind of mode.

00:37:19   And that's the part that I discovered

00:37:21   is that when you're in typing, typing, typing mode,

00:37:24   there are some times when you have to come off the keyboard

00:37:26   in order to do something to interact

00:37:28   with the app that you're using.

00:37:30   And that's often because there's no keyboard shortcut

00:37:34   or you don't know it.

00:37:35   There may be one, but you don't know it.

00:37:37   You just, for whatever reason, you haven't learned it.

00:37:39   - Because you can learn all the keyboard shortcuts seriously.

00:37:41   - Right, and so what you end up doing, right,

00:37:44   and discoverability is part of this too,

00:37:46   that like I used headings and notes

00:37:49   that I've never used before.

00:37:50   And there's a keyboard trick.

00:37:51   It's like Command + Shift + H to do a heading.

00:37:52   But on this, I was like,

00:37:54   "Oh, I could just tap the touch bar and go style header.

00:37:56   "Got it."

00:37:58   And that was different.

00:37:59   So anyway, when I'm in that mode of typing,

00:38:02   I think that's one of the big changes is,

00:38:06   suddenly I've got these other options

00:38:09   that allow me to do, rather than taking my hands out

00:38:12   into push the cursor on the screen mode

00:38:16   and go up to the top of the window and click the button

00:38:19   to do the thing I wanna do

00:38:20   and then maybe go back to the keyboard,

00:38:23   instead, if that interface button is on the touch bar,

00:38:27   my hands are staying in typing position

00:38:29   and I'm reaching up with a finger and going, boop,

00:38:31   and then continuing along my way.

00:38:34   And I know that's a little thing,

00:38:36   but I got to appreciate the fact that that was,

00:38:41   that was a useful thing.

00:38:45   And there is as small as it might seem,

00:38:48   maybe it's a micro distraction or something,

00:38:51   but it's a mode shift when you go from

00:38:54   my hands are in keyboard position

00:38:55   to my hands are in driving the mouse on the screen position.

00:38:58   and I think good touch bar apps let you reduce the number of times you need to switch.

00:39:06   Hmm, yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense.

00:39:11   And switching from trackpad to keyboard is also a mode switch, right?

00:39:16   I mean, that's the challenge. I would argue maybe that, yeah,

00:39:21   trackpad in one hand and hand on a keyboard doing copies and pastes and things like that

00:39:26   quite the same as the full-on typing feel it's a little bit different and I do that all the time

00:39:31   but yeah I don't know it's like that the modes are broken when you're using sliders on the touch bar

00:39:38   uh maybe okay because that's more of a track patty thing yeah yeah I think I think

00:39:46   everybody look uh Christina Warren's piece at uh Gizmodo about this she said how much she loved

00:39:55   the Final Cut Pro stuff. I really didn't like it. And some of that may be just having to get used

00:40:01   to it, but it was very complicated at points where there was like a slider and all of this stuff.

00:40:07   And I was thinking to myself, is this better, you know, than using my trackpad or using, well,

00:40:17   using my trackpad to make a gesture or using my trackpad to drive something on the screen?

00:40:22   And it's certainly different, right? And I think that's one of the things we all have to learn is

00:40:27   having that touch surface with the screen feedback where you're doing like swiping

00:40:33   and stuff like that. Is that--what kind of mode is that? Is that a totally new mode?

00:40:41   Is that an extension of the keyboard? It doesn't feel like an extension of the keyboard to me.

00:40:47   it feels like an alternative touch interface and that's that you know I

00:40:55   don't know I I don't know where this is going to go because we could speculate

00:40:58   about the trackpad turning into a screen to write and they haven't done that but

00:41:04   they could do that at some point I don't know I don't know it those interfaces

00:41:09   didn't work for me like the more kind of button exposing interesting features

00:41:15   stuff worked for me. I want you to try and explain to me Jason the control

00:41:22   strip. I have no idea if I'm missing something here but I am very confused

00:41:28   and continue to be very confused about what the control strip is, what it does

00:41:34   when it's there when it isn't and I think part of this is I think that Apple

00:41:40   are trying to be too cute in giving a part of this touch bar a name that kind of harkens

00:41:47   back to classic Mac in the attempt to try and make some Mac people happy. Because what

00:41:54   they've done is they've created a new thing which has its own brand and then they've created

00:41:58   a sub-brand within it. Because the control strip is being referred to as this thing when

00:42:04   really it should just be like the permanent buttons on the touch bar. That's what they

00:42:09   should be referred to in my mind but calling it Control Strip it only makes it more confusing

00:42:14   to me because quite frequently I mix Control Strip and Touch Bar up in my head as what

00:42:19   they actually are.

00:42:20   Haha, I mean my argument would be that it's a little bit like referring to the Max Menu

00:42:26   Bar like the Menu Bar is part of the display but it's a special part of it and that's

00:42:34   how the Control Strip, that's what the Control Strip is. It's not, it's almost always

00:42:38   there though, if it was always there 100% of the time, then fine. That's the control

00:42:44   strip corner, but that's not even how it works, right?

00:42:47   It's there most of the time. It's actually, it's there except when it's not.

00:42:53   Nothing like some consistency. Well no, it's there basically if you think

00:42:57   of it as a layer. Like the bottom layer of the touch bar is the control strip and the

00:43:03   application area. The control strip is three or four buttons on the right side

00:43:08   and then everything else is the application area. That's the bottom layer.

00:43:12   Now one of the things you can do with the touch bar is open an overlay where

00:43:19   you basically tap on something and something comes up that's a layer on top

00:43:23   of it and there's a little X at the far left that lets you close it again. When

00:43:29   you open an overlay it overlays the touch bar. So the touch bar is always

00:43:35   there except if you're in kind of a modal context where you opened a thing

00:43:44   like the emoji picker. The idea there is it wants to give, touch bar wants to

00:43:50   give the most space possible to essentially a new window, a new layer

00:43:55   that you've opened, that you opened yourself, that the app can't do it but

00:43:59   that you did it. You opened this thing using the touch bar. So if I tap the emoji picker,

00:44:05   the emoji picker takes the whole touch bar space. It doesn't just leave the control strip

00:44:11   on the side. But it's modal and it's got the X on the left to tell you that you can clear

00:44:17   out of it. And then you go back down to the first layer which is appstep on the left and

00:44:22   control strip on the right. So control strip is mostly there.

00:44:25   So the only things that can hide Control Strip are modal views within Touch Bar?

00:44:31   I think so?

00:44:36   Modal things and Touch ID things, which are kind of modal too, right?

00:44:39   Because the Touch ID label comes up right where the Touch Bar or the Control Strip is.

00:44:43   See, I did it.

00:44:44   And points the little arrow at the Touch ID and says, "Touch it, touch it."

00:44:49   But otherwise, yeah, as far as I could tell, and there's things that are inconsistent.

00:44:54   QuickTime recording thing, for example, it was there and then at one point it went away

00:44:59   and I couldn't figure out why it went away. Sometimes iTunes loses track of, or the system

00:45:04   loses track of what iTunes is playing. There are bugs. There are some bugs here. But for

00:45:08   the most part I think that's how it's supposed to work. That's what it's meant to be, is

00:45:12   that the control strip stays on that base level, but if you usher something else up

00:45:15   by tapping on something that pops up a new strip on top, or if you tap the left side

00:45:21   of the control strip to bring up like the full on... because I think that's the more

00:45:25   confusing thing about the control strip is when you tap the little arrow on the left

00:45:28   side of the control strip it brings up a whole big control strip that's not the same like

00:45:34   it doesn't just reveal more to the left the ones that are that are in your standard control

00:45:38   strip go away and are replaced with this like new layer of control strip and it's all customizable

00:45:44   although again differently customizable like you can't put the same buttons on the big

00:45:49   control strip that you put on the small control strip.

00:45:51   Oh I'm so confused Jason.

00:45:53   You have different options there.

00:45:55   I think, see?

00:45:56   Right?

00:45:57   That's more confusing to me.

00:45:58   Because I can get with the control strips on the bottom layer.

00:46:01   But then you can expand the control strip, but it doesn't really expand it, it kind of

00:46:05   brings up a new level of, like a full on control strip instead.

00:46:13   Control strip is such a bad name.

00:46:14   it doesn't, it absolutely does not explain what is there to me. Like, I just don't, I

00:46:20   just don't get it. It should have a different name in my mind.

00:46:24   CURTIS SMITH But the idea is, so the idea is it's like

00:46:26   the system, I mean, they, they, you know, I guess menu bar is already taken or toolbar

00:46:30   or something like that.

00:46:31   WILLIAM

00:46:31   - System shortcuts, or like, system keys.

00:46:33   - 'Cause that's what it is.

00:46:35   I mean, ideally one day, third parties will be able

00:46:37   to put stuff in there, that would be really nice.

00:46:39   That's the one thing that I think this is,

00:46:41   Apple opens so much up to third parties

00:46:43   that I'm not gonna complain too much about it,

00:46:44   because all third party apps can use Touch ID now,

00:46:47   and I use 1Password and it works great.

00:46:50   Third party apps have access to that Touch Bar now,

00:46:53   that's great too.

00:46:54   What they don't do is they can't drop things

00:46:56   in Control Strip, which would be kinda nice,

00:46:57   because if you had the ability to key off

00:46:59   some sort of system-wide macro or whatever,

00:47:02   that would be really cool to have there,

00:47:03   but you can't do that yet.

00:47:05   But that's what it's for.

00:47:06   It's for volume and brightness and Siri

00:47:10   and all of that sort of thing.

00:47:12   That's why it's there.

00:47:13   - Maybe it should have just been called Control Center

00:47:15   and then everybody would understand what that was.

00:47:17   - Well, maybe so.

00:47:18   - Because, yeah.

00:47:20   It's like Control Center made sense

00:47:22   because there was already notification center, but you know.

00:47:25   - Right.

00:47:26   I don't mind the name Control Strip

00:47:27   because I've got that history with it

00:47:29   and it is kind of like the old control strip, kinda, sorta,

00:47:33   but it's probably, I could see your point

00:47:35   that it's maybe a little too cute.

00:47:37   - Yeah, there is a, Will in the chat room mentioned,

00:47:40   there is, can you explain what Touche is?

00:47:42   He's given me a link,

00:47:45   there's something that Daniel Jalka has made.

00:47:46   - Oh yeah, so Daniel Jalka wrote an app called Touche

00:47:49   that basically lets you do an emulated touch bar

00:47:51   on your Mac if you've got the build of OS X

00:47:54   that is the one that ships on these systems,

00:47:57   you can download it and install it. It's a new, gotta love Apple sometimes, it's a later

00:48:04   build of 10.12.1, so it's 10.12.1, but it's a more recent 10.12.1 that ships on these

00:48:12   new systems. It's a later build, which I don't know why you wouldn't call that 10.12.2? How

00:48:17   do you get this later build of 10.12.1? Daniel Jowkut on the site, he's got a link to it.

00:48:24   can download from Apple as an installer and then just run it as an OS update and you're

00:48:28   updating 10.12.1 to 10.12.1. Anyway, if you do that, if you've got the later version or

00:48:34   a future version, 10.12.2 and on, anything that's got the touch bar stuff put in there.

00:48:38   That wasn't in there before because they didn't want to give it away and then they put that

00:48:41   image in that gave it away. If you have that, you can run Touche and it will show you like

00:48:47   what the touch bar would show and you can take screenshots and stuff like that. So that's

00:48:53   That's what it is.

00:48:54   To tie up November's episodes into a question for you, what does the Touch Bar say about

00:49:02   Apple's current attitude to the Mac?

00:49:05   Does it show if they care and how much, and does it indicate how, or to you at least,

00:49:12   how you think that the Mac platform should change?

00:49:17   I think it absolutely shows that they care because of the amount of work they put into

00:49:21   it.

00:49:22   I think the answer is going to be everybody gets their own opinion about if this is what

00:49:27   they should care about, but it shows that they care. This is, if you…

00:49:32   They might not care about your thing, but they care about it as a whole, the platform.

00:49:36   Yeah. If Apple didn't care about the Mac, why would they build entirely new tech based

00:49:44   on iOS stuff with custom processor and a custom, you know, this custom screen and that really

00:49:53   on, if you've got these models, changes the Mac UI, like it adds a whole other layer of

00:50:00   Mac UI that didn't exist before. If Apple really felt like, look, the Mac is good, it's

00:50:05   fine, it's a legacy system, let's just eke it out for as long as we can, they wouldn't

00:50:10   have made this product. They wouldn't.

00:50:11   Yeah, I expect the person hours of development on this is much higher than usual because

00:50:16   they had to get all of the separate application teams to update for this, all right, and to

00:50:22   add this, which they don't—they very rarely have something that does this outside of like

00:50:28   a full OS update, right? Like there's some new feature that all of the apps have to support.

00:50:32   Yeah, here are the apps that Apple had to update to support Touch Bar. So in addition

00:50:37   building the touch bar and all the hardware that went into that and Touch ID

00:50:40   and everything they had to do with that and and getting the secure enclave to

00:50:45   talk to the Mac system and and have that be secure. They had to update, well they

00:50:50   did update, they probably wanted to update others too and they didn't, but

00:50:53   they updated activity monitor, calculator, calendar, contacts, finder, Final Cut Pro,

00:50:58   GarageBand, iMovie, iTunes, Keynote, Mail, Maps, Messages, Numbers, Pages, Photos,

00:51:03   preview QuickTime player Safari system preferences and terminal plus a bunch of other apps like

00:51:09   text edit stickies notes and script editor that use the standard text interface pick

00:51:15   up a touch bar but I think maybe they did that for free or for cheap but they updated

00:51:21   a lot of apps so this is a huge effort on the software on the Mac software side. I love

00:51:25   the activity monitors in there. Oh yeah the person dealing with activity monitor you know

00:51:31   know, they're just having their moment in the sun, you know.

00:51:34   Yeah, and terminal and activity monitor, those are key utilities that they have, they did

00:51:39   it. I use activity monitor all the time.

00:51:41   Really?

00:51:42   I love it.

00:51:43   What for?

00:51:46   See if there, why is my system behaving strangely, what app is behaving weirdly, can I force

00:51:51   quit it, can I get it to go away, what's the, you know, am I right that my computer is slow,

00:51:59   is something taking a lot of CPU cycles?

00:52:00   I use it a little less now that I have iStat menus, but I still use it, yeah, all the time.

00:52:04   If I have any of those problems, I will open Activity Monitor, but I very rarely have any

00:52:11   problems that need me to open Activity Monitor.

00:52:14   Yeah, I'm in there.

00:52:16   I was just using it last night because I ran Geekbench on a bunch of these systems, and

00:52:21   Activity Monitor's great because you can see if the photo library sync or the photo detection,

00:52:30   the machine learning is running because that will kill. You can't just start up a system

00:52:36   brand new and run a benchmark on it because it's going to index all your files with Spotlight

00:52:41   and it's going to do all these photo things. So I just used that last night to make sure

00:52:46   that everything had calmed down and I didn't have processes running in the background that

00:52:51   I didn't want to run so that I could get kind of a fair test. But anyway, the larger point

00:52:58   here is, "Yeah, this is a huge investment in Apple on something new on the Mac," and

00:53:03   I think if they didn't care, why would they do that? I do wonder if this is one of the

00:53:09   reasons why the Mac has seemed so logy for so long, is that there's only so much investment

00:53:14   Apple wants to do in the Mac, and they kind of poured it all into this while everything

00:53:18   else kind of stayed put, at least for now, and again, maybe there's—since this was

00:53:23   supposedly rumored to be coming out this summer, perhaps they've already moved on and are

00:53:27   working on something else now that we'll see next spring. But that may be part of it, that

00:53:32   this was so ambitious that it took more out of the Mac prioritization queue than perhaps

00:53:41   they intended or it slowed something else down. But it totally shows they care. Now,

00:53:46   you could argue it's like, well, it's just the MacBook Pro, it's not on any other systems,

00:53:49   it's not even on all the MacBook Pros. That's true, two-thirds of the Mac's Apple cells

00:53:53   are laptops, though. So you could see, I was having this conversation on Twitter earlier

00:53:56   today. You can see like this will motive-- app developers will be motivated. Mac app

00:54:01   developers will be motivated to support the touch bar because if Apple sticks

00:54:04   with this touch bar thing it will eventually be on all their laptops and

00:54:07   maybe on external keyboards at some point too, but even if it's just on

00:54:12   laptops that's two-thirds of the Macs and that means that if it's not available

00:54:16   on a majority of Macs at some point it will be probably pretty close. That's a

00:54:20   few years out but I also throw in there that if you're a Mac developer you're

00:54:25   looking, you know, you're hungry, I would think, for original foundational features

00:54:32   of Mac OS because there aren't, you know, they don't do that many of them, right?

00:54:38   It tends not to be-- Mac is much more sleepy now, and this is a big one, so I think

00:54:42   developers are going to be excited, and I think it's going to be something

00:54:46   that is fairly widely used eventually just because the laptop is the,

00:54:54   you know, the definitive Mac, if there is one, is a laptop, because for a long time

00:54:59   they've sold way more laptops than they have desktops.

00:55:02   Last question for you. If somebody bought the MacBook escape, the MacBook with the function

00:55:09   row, the hard function row, the actual keys there, should they regret this decision? So

00:55:15   that's a tough question, because, you know, like it's, you know…

00:55:19   That's a personal regret. I would say, you know, a big part of it is that it's, um,

00:55:24   it is price, right? This is a, this is a much more expensive. These, the 13 and the 15,

00:55:30   they're much more expensive.

00:55:31   Well, maybe a better question is, is the extra price worth these two features? The touch,

00:55:35   touch strip, the control center. Oh my word. What is it called? Touch bar, touch bar. I'm

00:55:41   being serious. I wasn't, I wasn't like, I just remember the name.

00:55:44   See, this is where the names fit. Touch bar and touch ID.

00:55:47   Mm-hmm. Control ID, you mean, right?

00:55:49   Yes. ID strip.

00:55:51   Finger control.

00:55:53   Are they worth the extra money?

00:55:55   Like, the extra, what is it, like maybe a thousand dollars or something?

00:55:58   Well, it's, so,

00:56:00   it's more than, I mean, this is how they get you, right?

00:56:03   It's more than just the touch bar.

00:56:06   So, it's also, like, the 13

00:56:11   escape has a 2 GHz i5.

00:56:15   the 13 Touch Bar base model has a 2.9 GHz i5. So it's not just the Touch Bar and Touch

00:56:28   ID, it's also faster. And that's $300 different. Yes, I said $1000, I just threw that out there,

00:56:35   it's $300. Yeah, if you go up to the $15 from the $13, it's a big difference, but it's a $300

00:56:40   different. So, you know, I think what I'd say is Apple rarely charges less than

00:56:45   $200 for a small, even a small processor bump when you do a bill to order. And the

00:56:53   the bump between the escape version and the touch bar version, of $300 you get a

00:57:02   much faster processor and the touch bar. You get two more ports. So I would

00:57:10   say the reason you get the non-touch bar MacBook Pro is either that you really love physical

00:57:19   function keys or you absolutely can't justify an extra $300. The price is just, you have

00:57:27   a very limited budget and getting to $1499 was hard enough and you don't want to go further

00:57:34   up. So if you have the extra cash, if you have the ability to spend that extra money,

00:57:40   should. I gotta say, I mean, everybody can decide for themselves, but for $300 more,

00:57:45   you get the faster processor and the touch bar and touch ID. If you, I don't think, I

00:57:50   mean, like I said, Apple puts specs, build to order specs for a faster processor and

00:57:55   it's $200 to $250 when they do it, usually. It's a big change, and this is from a 2 GHz

00:58:01   to a 2.9 GHz i5. It's a big step up. So, in the end, these are expensive computers. If

00:58:10   want more than 256 SSD you're going to pay through the nose for that. If you want

00:58:13   more than 8 gigs of RAM you're going to pay through the nose. So it's neither of

00:58:16   these systems is going to be $1499 or $1799, right, if you want to spec them up.

00:58:21   And so that's part of your judgment too. But I think the $300

00:58:25   difference for the 2x reports, the TouchBar and TouchID, and the faster

00:58:31   processor, that's a pretty reasonable dollar difference for what you get.

00:58:37   I don't think that the base model Touch Bar 13 is unreasonably priced over the Escape.

00:58:48   I think that's a reasonable price. Now that may not be enough. Like I said, there are

00:58:52   plenty of reasons why it might not be enough. But I look at the difference between those

00:58:56   two systems and think, "Wow, only $300 for all of that extra stuff? That's not bad."

00:59:02   That could be if you would ask me to pick a number out for just the Touch Bar and Touch

00:59:06   ID with the specs all being the same I might say $300 that Apple would do but you also

00:59:11   get the processor boost.

00:59:13   There you go. This episode is brought to you by FreshBooks. So you're racing against the

00:59:19   clock to wrap up free projects, you're getting ready to prep for a client meeting later in

00:59:23   the afternoon, you're dreaming of your touch bar all whilst trying to tackle a mountain

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00:59:34   But it can also be very challenging as well. And our friends at FreshBooks believe the

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01:00:08   don't want regular jobs, I believe a lot of that comes from the fact that we are the internet

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01:02:07   enter the code upgrade in the how you heard about us section so type in upgrade where it says how

01:02:12   did you hear about us so they know that you came to them from this show. Thank you so much to

01:02:17   refresh books for their support of upgrade and relay FM. I was not expecting to take

01:02:22   that little rant in the middle of the spot there but I did and if you have skipped the

01:02:26   ad you should now go back and listen to it because I had some stuff to say. Plus you

01:02:31   should always listen to the ads anyway. Let's talk about mobile recording gear again. I

01:02:39   But like it's all we talk about this these days because if anybody keeping score I just

01:02:47   bought a house like I actually own it now. If you're keeping score with like kind of

01:02:52   like where I am across this process across the various shows we own the home we have

01:02:57   the keys it's ours and we have a lot of contractors visiting I'm actually going there tonight

01:03:03   because I have a plumber coming at 8 a.m. tomorrow morning.

01:03:06   Is that going to be your first night sleeping there?

01:03:10   If we sleep there, we may actually stay in a hotel which is across the street. The place

01:03:13   is not completely ready yet. Mainly with plumbing being one of the things that we need taking

01:03:20   care of.

01:03:21   Sure. That's the plumber.

01:03:23   Once the plumber's been tomorrow and hopefully got everything done as we need it, then yes,

01:03:28   we can start staying there. So because of this, because we have multiple contractors

01:03:36   coming multiple times for many different things, I am going to have to record some shows from

01:03:41   this empty apartment. So I need gear that can help me with that, and I have amassed

01:03:49   a list of items. So I just want to run through this list of items with you, Jason.

01:03:54   But before you do that, let me ask you some other things. So you live in East London.

01:04:02   I live just east of London. East of London.

01:04:04   So technically. I'm just outside of what is considered the London border in the O'Toole

01:04:10   East.

01:04:11   Is it, would it be Essex? Is that what we would call it?

01:04:13   Technically classed as Essex, yes.

01:04:15   Okay. But you're moving to South London.

01:04:17   Yeah.

01:04:18   But not south of London.

01:04:19   No, this is considered South London.

01:04:22   be properly in South London. How long, so you're shuttling back and forth a lot. How

01:04:26   long is that? Currently, it depends on my mode of transport, like from place to place.

01:04:32   It would take me about 90 minutes to get there via public transport and about 35 to 40 if

01:04:38   I was to take an Uber or something. Oh, okay. I'm kind of splitting that depending on what

01:04:42   I'm going there for and when. So like, because we will be leaving here very late this evening,

01:04:47   we'll take an Uber, if I'm just traveling in the daytime, it's like a train, if I've

01:04:50   got a bunch of boxes with me, then maybe I'll take you with that kind of thing.

01:04:53   So it's…

01:04:54   All right, yeah, because I'm just trying to imagine moving that distance and not having

01:04:59   a car is going to be a challenge.

01:05:03   Yep, yep, but hopefully it won't be very long.

01:05:07   A couple of weeks, maybe.

01:05:09   Yeah, okay.

01:05:10   Okay, so you're gonna take in an Uber or in your backpack or something, your packing

01:05:15   list of "Myke records podcasts in an empty house."

01:05:19   Yeah, some of this stuff is gonna stay there after I take it there today

01:05:23   But some stuff I'll be bringing backwards and forwards

01:05:26   So this list currently consists of the map of adorable which I have kept

01:05:31   I have now adorn right stickers. It is part of the car. That's that's it. It's in the it's in the

01:05:36   It's forever yours, yep, I'm in the collection it's in the collection

01:05:43   I've been actually editing a show on it today like a heavy edit of a show

01:05:48   and it's been absolutely fine.

01:05:52   Now I know the parts where it will cause struggles

01:05:55   is doing things like bouncing the show,

01:05:57   so like exporting it out.

01:05:58   But to be honest, I don't care about that

01:06:00   because I know it's gonna do that,

01:06:02   I know it's gonna take longer,

01:06:04   I'll just let it do its thing and I'll do something else.

01:06:06   But all I care about is can I perform the actual tasks

01:06:11   to my usual abilities?

01:06:14   And it so far seems like yes I can.

01:06:18   I have, it seems funny, and it's very easy to get jaded about like having a big 5K iMac

01:06:25   or something like that, but I have edited hundreds of podcasts on an 11-inch MacBook

01:06:31   Air.

01:06:32   Like I've got the mid-2013 MacBook Air right now.

01:06:36   I have edited so many podcasts on this thing, and it's not, it's an 11-inch MacBook Air,

01:06:41   right?

01:06:42   And it's fine.

01:06:43   So, and that MacBook is quite similar.

01:06:47   I think in all respects other than the beautiful screen to this particular MacBook Air that

01:06:53   I've got. So it's a totally suitable system for editing audio.

01:06:57   It's quite possibly the greatest form factor of any Mac that I've ever used. The lightness

01:07:02   and thinness of that thing is just incredible. It's incredible. It's incredible. I like am

01:07:11   in love with the form factor. It's perfect, I think. Like the 11 inch MacBook was great.

01:07:18   I mean I had one of those. I used one of those for many years and it was great for that reason.

01:07:22   This thing blows that away from a form factor perspective.

01:07:25   It's the spiritual successor. It fills that same slot but it's a beautiful system. Yeah,

01:07:33   it is. I don't love the keyboard.

01:07:35   However, that trackpad, that's why I have the problems with the trackpad. The Magic

01:07:39   trackpad or whatever it's called on any of the laptops again I think has a

01:07:43   different name on the laptops I hate I hate it I hate it so much I I love my

01:07:49   standalone one perfect you would never even know on any of the laptops I cannot

01:07:54   stand it it feels terrible it feels terrible especially on the the really

01:08:00   thin one right like the MacBook I just it just feels terrible to me it just

01:08:04   doesn't feel like it's clicking at all. I don't like it.

01:08:08   Do you get missed clicks?

01:08:11   Yeah, I do. I've always had that problem. Steven has the

01:08:15   had the first one, the first MacBook Pro that had the

01:08:19   trackpad in it, and it would miss my clicks constantly.

01:08:23   I've had that on the Touch Bar MacBook Pro too. I'd never experienced it

01:08:27   before, but it misses, like,

01:08:29   and it seems random, and I thought it was originally like my shirt was pressing

01:08:32   into it or something like that, but no,

01:08:34   It just sometimes every 10th or 15th click,

01:08:38   just one of the clicks doesn't click

01:08:39   and you gotta take your finger off and put it back down

01:08:41   and then it clicks again.

01:08:42   And I've never experienced that on my magic trackpad

01:08:46   on my desk.

01:08:47   Never. - No, I never had

01:08:47   that problem either, but I have it constantly,

01:08:50   I have just loads of problems, I just don't like it.

01:08:51   Anywho, let's go back to the list.

01:08:53   - Yeah, MacBook durable.

01:08:54   - The MacBook charger.

01:08:56   I have an Anker USB-C hub.

01:08:59   So it has power pass through from USB-C to USB-C

01:09:04   and four USB ports.

01:09:06   - Good, 'cause you know you need to have power

01:09:09   and have a microphone to record a podcast.

01:09:12   - I have, I'm gonna be taking the Apple USB-C to a dongle

01:09:16   just in case something doesn't work with the one that I have.

01:09:20   - Okay.

01:09:21   - A microphone, I'm gonna be taking a sure,

01:09:24   what is the one that I have,

01:09:25   this is the one you have, is the one you take with you.

01:09:29   The beta-- - Oh, the beta 58a?

01:09:31   - Yeah, so it's the nice one, not the really expensive one.

01:09:34   - Right. - Let's take one of those.

01:09:35   - It's the Jason one, not the Marco one.

01:09:37   - The Jason one.

01:09:38   An XLR cable, a microphone stand.

01:09:41   The apartment is completely empty,

01:09:43   so I have bought a foam microphone shield

01:09:47   in the hopes that it will somehow maybe possibly help

01:09:50   with some of the inevitable echo.

01:09:53   - Yeah.

01:09:53   - So it's just like this little foam surround.

01:09:55   It might help, it might not, but it's all I can do.

01:09:59   I'm taking my EE mobile Wi-Fi LTE thing,

01:10:03   'cause we don't have internet in the place yet.

01:10:05   - Which is fine, 'cause you essentially

01:10:06   don't have internet now, so that's no change.

01:10:09   - I have a new problem in that cell connection

01:10:12   is not very good in the new place.

01:10:13   - Oh no.

01:10:14   (laughing)

01:10:15   - I just can't escape it.

01:10:17   So this won't be a problem when we get broadband,

01:10:20   'cause we're getting fiber, but right now we don't have it.

01:10:23   So we'll see what happens over the next couple of days,

01:10:25   who knows?

01:10:26   I'm taking a Tascam USB audio interface

01:10:29   to plug my microphone into and then to plug that into the Mac Pro.

01:10:33   And also an iPad Pro so I can actually get some real work done while I'm there.

01:10:37   Boom.

01:10:38   Zing.

01:10:39   Uh, yeah.

01:10:40   So I could do this with less stuff.

01:10:44   You could.

01:10:45   I could remove the Mac completely from this.

01:10:48   But I want to try and maintain as much audio quality as possible because it's not going

01:10:54   to sound as good as normal.

01:10:56   I know that because I don't think for me that microphone sounds as good even though it sounds

01:11:00   fine but you know for me it doesn't sound as good.

01:11:03   And there's going to be echo which I will be able to get rid of some of but not all

01:11:07   because that's just the nature of echo.

01:11:10   But I want to try and minimize the effect on the listener as much as possible.

01:11:14   They don't need to go through this with me, right?

01:11:17   So I want to try and minimize that as much as possible whilst I'm doing this over the

01:11:22   the next couple of weeks I think it's gonna be,

01:11:26   where I'm actually gonna be shuttling back and forth.

01:11:29   So we'll say I have no idea if and how

01:11:32   it's even gonna work, right?

01:11:33   Like I have no idea, right?

01:11:35   This wifi thing might just crap out on me completely

01:11:38   and then I can't do it and then I'll have to go to plan B,

01:11:41   which I don't have.

01:11:42   I have no idea how it's gonna sound.

01:11:45   I don't even know where I'm gonna sit, Jason.

01:11:47   I don't really have any furniture in that place.

01:11:51   - Yeah, there's probably a counter in the kitchen

01:11:53   or something you could use.

01:11:54   - I could do that, however, that will cause

01:11:56   the most echo possible because the kitchen,

01:11:59   so I will probably be recording in what will be mega office

01:12:03   because it's the smallest room.

01:12:06   - Right, you're gonna be laying down on the floor?

01:12:09   - Well, I have a table and chairs.

01:12:11   - Okay, good.

01:12:12   - But I don't think I can get the table out of the door

01:12:15   in the living room to get it into the office

01:12:18   'cause it's too big.

01:12:20   Um, and I have an inflatable mattress.

01:12:23   We need MacGyver to come and solve your problems with, well, let's see, what are our assets?

01:12:30   We've got a table, we've got some chairs, we've got an inflatable mattress, oh well,

01:12:33   I can build a podcast studio for you.

01:12:34   What I, so I thought, what would probably end up happening is I will be bringing the

01:12:39   chair from the table and chairs into the office.

01:12:45   Uh huh, you'll put the, you'll put your microphone shield on that.

01:12:48   Yep.

01:12:49   - And then sit on the floor. - And then sit on the floor

01:12:50   as well.

01:12:51   And then so I will sit on the chair.

01:12:54   - Microphone stand, okay.

01:12:55   - I bought a microphone stand for this as well.

01:12:57   So I'll put, and then I have it all in front of me.

01:13:00   There is also the possibility of sitting in a closet,

01:13:03   but I don't know if I want to do that.

01:13:05   Actually, no, I can't do that

01:13:06   because the only closet I could fit in

01:13:08   doesn't have a light in it.

01:13:09   And I'm not gonna sit in the dark.

01:13:11   So this is my life, ladies and gentlemen,

01:13:15   for the next couple of weeks.

01:13:17   And I just wanna clue you all in on it

01:13:18   so you know what to expect.

01:13:20   - That's exciting.

01:13:21   - I actually don't think there will be an up,

01:13:23   I have no plans to record an upgrade from there,

01:13:25   but as it stands currently,

01:13:27   I will be recording "Connected", "The Panadict", "Quartex",

01:13:32   and maybe something I haven't mentioned to you yet,

01:13:36   a standalone mic at the movies episode,

01:13:38   which is not including you.

01:13:39   - Ooh.

01:13:40   - I may also be recording from there this week.

01:13:42   - So many movies for mic.

01:13:44   - Yep, lost all the great movies.

01:13:46   Maybe there'll be some next week and then upgrade will be included, but hopefully I

01:13:51   will only need to be there this week.

01:13:54   We should hopefully have the majority of this work done this week, which would be amazing.

01:14:03   But then I'll have Mega Office and then we'll be able to talk about all of the great things

01:14:07   that I'm putting in there because I have grand plans, Jason.

01:14:10   Grand plans.

01:14:11   That's good. It's all part of our process, but the transitional stuff is hard. I remember that. When we moved to...

01:14:19   The distance doesn't help either. That's the thing that's why I asked about that. When we moved to this county from the county we previously lived in, that was a challenge because that was a long way to go.

01:14:31   go so we couldn't just pop over you know moving in a town moving a couple miles

01:14:37   away you can just keep popping back and forth and you have a big move but you

01:14:41   can also have the little stuff here and there and when it was when it was

01:14:45   distant it was very difficult because we could only do that a few times and yep

01:14:50   yeah so yeah like I'm popping back and forth but my pops are very large it's a

01:14:55   big pop it's a bit of pop because I don't really want to stay there on my own

01:15:01   I just don't really want, there are no comforts

01:15:04   in this place at all right now.

01:15:07   So I'm planning on traveling backwards and forwards

01:15:11   every day with the exception of like tomorrow

01:15:15   because we're gonna be staying locally

01:15:17   because I really don't wanna wake up at half past five

01:15:19   in the morning to start this process.

01:15:22   So there you go, this is it.

01:15:25   So we should probably wrap up today with some Ask Upgrade.

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01:17:36   of this show and Relay FM.

01:17:39   Casper Mattresses thank you. Oh look at that. Classic upgrade. Can I use a MacBook Pro charger

01:17:49   with a USB-C to lightning cable to fast charge my iPad Pro, or would that be too much power?"

01:17:55   asks Lucas.

01:17:56   I think it's fine because I think your iPad Pro will just take the power that it requires.

01:18:04   Yeah, I, somebody was explaining this to me recently and I may be misremembering it, but

01:18:10   it's good to go down, bad to go up, is my understanding. So like if you have a brick

01:18:16   for a more powerful machine, you can use it on a less powerful machine, but you shouldn't

01:18:20   go the other way. That's my understanding.

01:18:23   Right, right, because it's going to take, I mean that's the example of it's going to

01:18:26   take forever to charge anything or you're going to lose, even though you're plugged

01:18:30   in, you're going to lose battery because it's not getting enough.

01:18:34   Because it's trying to push more power than it can.

01:18:37   I don't know how electricity works, but just to remind everybody too, it's only the large

01:18:43   iPad Pro that's got the fast USB 3 charging so that's the one where it will

01:18:50   benefit from one of the those macbook USB C cables or charging bricks if you

01:18:55   use the USB C to lightning cable. One of the nice things about all these systems

01:18:59   by the way that doesn't get talked about enough I think is that if you have a

01:19:04   USB C computer and you get that lightning to USB C cable you only have

01:19:10   to take one power brick with you and you can use it to charge either your computer or your

01:19:15   iPad which is or your iPhone frankly which is pretty cool because it used to be with

01:19:19   MagSafe that you know the Mac charger only ever charged the Mac and it couldn't be put

01:19:24   to other uses.

01:19:26   Yep, in that vein Rajeev asked do you think Apple will keep the lightning port on iOS

01:19:30   devices but add USB type C to the AC adapter end? I think next iPhone will come with a

01:19:37   USB C brick.

01:19:39   break. Yeah, I think you're probably right. They make the cable now, they make the bricks.

01:19:46   I think the next iPhone will come with that for sure. I think maybe the iPad even will,

01:19:52   but we'll see. Yeah. You know, like the iPad Pro, if you can ship that with the USB-C,

01:19:56   so it's going to be a better charger. It's a fast charger. For the large iPad Pro. I

01:20:01   think that we may see that now roll out for all of the future iOS products from this period

01:20:06   on. And the argument is always like, but wait a second, there's so many computers out there

01:20:10   that don't have USB-C. Apple doesn't think that most people need to connect their iOS

01:20:16   device to a computer at all, right? This is one of those Apple opinionated things where

01:20:20   Apple has decided just because some people do it doesn't mean that we need to make all

01:20:25   our decisions based on those people. And they've made a lot of effort to make it so you don't

01:20:31   need to connect via a wire your iOS device to a PC or a Mac.

01:20:36   That's like there's so many things that they've tried to make that not something

01:20:39   you need to do.

01:20:41   So as long as they've got a cable for you to charge and if you absolutely need it then

01:20:46   they you know then get an adapter but I do think that that's what they're going to

01:20:51   do.

01:20:52   I actually don't think there's any reason anymore that you need to do it.

01:20:55   I think because now I think it's for esoteric reasons.

01:20:59   for esoteric reasons like sideloading files or whatever but they're all techy reasons

01:21:03   that most people who are getting a brand new iPhone don't need to do and Apple would say

01:21:09   that they're edge cases and everybody who's an edge case is going to be like "oh no!"

01:21:13   but really this is what Apple's been pushing everybody toward with these products.

01:21:15   Even with the file sideloading, there's a ways to do that. You should drop off. Do you

01:21:19   mean that I don't think that there's any reason anymore because if memory serves that now

01:21:25   iCloud backups are encrypted so...

01:21:28   Other than the, you know, the old "my phone doesn't work, I need to plug it in and restore

01:21:33   it," but that's it.

01:21:34   Yeah, take it to the Apple Store.

01:21:36   Oh.

01:21:37   I mean, that's, again, there are reasons, there are arguments against it, but I think

01:21:42   that Apple, I think the difference between Apple and the perception of Apple oftentimes

01:21:47   is we all go, "but look over there, there are these people who need this thing, and

01:21:56   like four percent of your user base and

01:21:57   Apple looks at it and goes "yeah it's just four

01:21:59   percent of our user base we're not gonna

01:22:00   we're not going to cater to them and

01:22:02   make our product less good" and those

01:22:04   people will get adapters and they'll

01:22:05   deal with it and they won't say

01:22:07   it that way but that's kind of the

01:22:09   approach they take is at some point if

01:22:11   you if you're Microsoft with Windows

01:22:13   back in the day you let the edge cases

01:22:17   dictate your product because they were

01:22:20   all you know "oh we ought to be compatible

01:22:22   with everything" and Apple's never been

01:22:24   like that. Apple's always like "yeah you

01:22:26   know most people don't need it now and if you need it there's an adapter and so

01:22:29   we're gonna pull pull the lever and I think 2017 is the year where USB a type

01:22:38   connectors are ushered out of the Apple product line I agree all of it Johnny

01:22:46   just got a new 5k iMac and wants to know if he can connect to the 5k LG monitor

01:22:52   to it. Johnny, you cannot. The system requirements require Mac OS Sierra 10.12.1 or later and

01:23:03   a Thunderbolt 3 enabled Mac of which there is one?

01:23:10   Of the MacBook Pro.

01:23:13   So no, maybe person in the future will be able to but Johnny unless you buy another

01:23:20   iMac probably in spring as we believe it will come out then then yes probably you will be

01:23:24   able to but no you will not and not even with a dongle even if you take a long excursion

01:23:31   to dongle town you will not be able to pick up anything that will help you with this i'm

01:23:36   afraid that's where you're moving isn't it mike you're moving to dongle town wow looking

01:23:42   at my packing list yes i am uh gabriel would like to know uh would it help if apple put

01:23:49   a MagSafe-like connector on the other end of the USB-C cable, the adapter side. We were

01:23:54   talking about the fact that we were unhappy that MagSafe was going away. I mean, yes,

01:24:00   if they could do it, it would be great, but they haven't, and I assume there's a reason.

01:24:06   Yeah, and it's a USB-C standard cable, so you would need to create like a breakaway

01:24:12   in there somewhere, and that's going to increase the cost, and it's going to increase

01:24:17   the bulk and the complexity of manufacturing it. And I feel like, I mean, not to go back

01:24:23   to it, but I feel like this is one of those levels where, again, Apple just said, "USBC

01:24:28   is more, um, more of a benefit than MagSafe. So we're just going to do USBC." And the nice

01:24:35   thing about USBC is it's a standard. So if somebody wants to make a breakaway cable,

01:24:40   they can do it. Apple can't stop them. It's not like the days of MagSafe where like, if

01:24:44   weren't an officially licensed MagSafe accessory manufacturer, you couldn't tie

01:24:49   into charging a Mac on a plane from a battery. You couldn't do it because you

01:24:55   had to go all the way back to the plug. And now USB-C is a standard, so if

01:25:01   somebody wants to invent clever ways to bring kind of breakaway tech to USB-C

01:25:09   charging, they can do it. Apple doesn't have to do it anymore, and I don't think

01:25:13   Apple will but maybe somebody else will try. And finally today Brando asks is

01:25:18   there any more word on Xcode for the iPad in latest in light of the latest Mac

01:25:23   news the iPad seemed like a more and more appealing development option at

01:25:28   least for me any any conversations I'd seen or word about this was all leading

01:25:34   up to playgrounds, Swift playgrounds since then nothing. Yeah well Swift

01:25:41   playgrounds is step one. Yeah, I think it will happen and I think Swift Playgrounds is the

01:25:46   indication that it will happen, but I don't think we're going to see it at WWDC.

01:25:52   You know, it's possible, but yeah, I tend to agree with you that I feel like,

01:26:01   are they going to have Xcode, even if it's a very specific kind of Xcode for

01:26:09   for iOS in 2017, because presumably they would unveil it at WWDC, right? I don't know, I

01:26:17   wouldn't put money on it. I do think it's inevitable, but...

01:26:20   I think we might see more from Swift Playgrounds at WWDC 2017, like it will be able to do more,

01:26:27   but I don't think they're going to unveil Xcode for the iPad. I think we need to be

01:26:33   further down the Swift road before that happens, because it... I just assume it will be Swift

01:26:39   only. So yeah. There you go. Alright that wraps up this week's episode of upgrade if

01:26:48   you'd like to find our show notes you can head on over to relay.fm/upgrade/115 if you

01:26:54   want to find Jason online he is @jsnell on the twitter and he is at sixcolors.com I am

01:27:02   @imike thanks again to our lovely sponsors for this week's episode the fine folk over

01:27:09   at Casper, Freshbooks and Encapsula. As always thank you for listening we'll be

01:27:15   back next week until then say goodbye Jason Snow.

01:27:19   Beep!

01:27:21   Oh no Jason just booted.

01:27:22   [Mimics Jason's booty]

01:27:24   No you got it wrong. You got it wrong.

01:27:26   It's not you.

01:27:27   Oh, oh. Okay.

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