Connected

00:00:00 ◼   ► [Music]

00:00:05 ◼   ► From Relay FM, this is Connected, episode 128. Today's show is brought to you by

00:00:11 ◼   ► Hover, Pingdom and Encapsula. My name is Myke Hurley and I am joined

00:00:16 ◼   ► by Federico Vittucci. Ciao Federico!

00:00:18 ◼   ► Ciao Myke, how are you?

00:00:19 ◼   ► I am very well. I'm Mr Stephen Hackett, how are you?

00:00:21 ◼   ► Howdy.

00:00:22 ◼   ► We got a big show today. We got lots of little things happening here.

00:00:26 ◼   ► It's a weird show. It's gonna be good there.

00:00:29 ◼   ► Yeah, isn't it always weird? I mean, it's not like we are completely normal, so there's

00:00:36 ◼   ► a bit of weirdness in each show. Anyway, we have a lot of follow-up.

00:00:40 ◼   ► Yes, we do. I have begun my process of becoming Federico Vittucci.

00:00:45 ◼   ► So basically, most of our follow-up this week, I'm looking at our document. It involves something

00:00:50 ◼   ► that Myke has done, or said, or bought. So, Myke, what's the...

00:00:55 ◼   ► Isn't that just like the general theme of the show?

00:00:58 ◼   ► Yes, of course. What do you want to start with, Myke? You have plenty of choice.

00:01:02 ◼   ► So I've begun the switch to Todoist.

00:01:04 ◼   ► Okay.

00:01:05 ◼   ► I don't want to spend too much time talking about Todoist specifically today because

00:01:10 ◼   ► I'm still kind of understanding how it works and moving all of my processes over and my

00:01:16 ◼   ► project templates and stuff from OmniFocus. So I'm still working through all of that.

00:01:20 ◼   ► So far it's not a disaster.

00:01:23 ◼   ► Okay, that's hyper is.

00:01:25 ◼   ► There are things that I don't like, but the benefits that I'm getting because there is

00:01:31 ◼   ► that web backend currently outweighing the things that I don't like.

00:01:37 ◼   ► But there is one other thing that I did which I'm very excited about which is I signed up

00:01:41 ◼   ► for Zapier.

00:01:43 ◼   ► And I'm using Zapier for just a couple of little things right now.

00:01:48 ◼   ► There's some stuff that we've really wanted reporting from Freshbooks into Slack that

00:01:52 ◼   ► we've not been able to do with other services but Zapier there is integration which I've

00:01:57 ◼   ► been able to do so we can pull some of that data in.

00:02:00 ◼   ► And also a lot of like for the hashtag #AskUpgrade and stuff like that I create these Google

00:02:06 ◼   ► sheets and there's been some fields that I've wanted like for the sheet to pull in the person's

00:02:11 ◼   ► name from Twitter when they tweet with a hashtag rather than just their username.

00:02:16 ◼   ► IFTTT cannot do this but Zapier can.

00:02:20 ◼   ► So I'm on the Zapier train, I've already signed up for a plan and everything.

00:02:25 ◼   ► I'm like I'm so in, I'm in like Flynn.

00:02:27 ◼   ► There's just a couple of things that I've wanted to do for months and I've not been

00:02:33 ◼   ► able to do them and it's been really annoying and every time I have to perform a task which

00:02:37 ◼   ► is related to that, it's frustrating to me that I've not been able to get the automation

00:02:42 ◼   ► that I was using to work in the way that I wanted, but Zapier can do it.

00:02:48 ◼   ► You mentioned something interesting.

00:02:50 ◼   ► When you say the backend of Todoist allows you to do things that weren't possible before,

00:02:56 ◼   ► does that involve Zapier also?

00:02:58 ◼   ► It will.

00:02:59 ◼   ► Okay.

00:03:00 ◼   ► Like I'm digging around with this stuff now, right?

00:03:03 ◼   ► I've kind of had these tabs open on my devices and I keep poking around and seeing what this

00:03:07 ◼   ► does and seeing what that does and trying to set up some workflows for Todoist and I'm

00:03:14 ◼   ► I'm looking at trying to use Zapier to connect Todoist and toggle together my time tracking.

00:03:23 ◼   ► My eyes are being opened to some of this stuff now and I'm excited about it and it's a great

00:03:30 ◼   ► way to waste some time. There's nothing better than wasting time by creating a productive

00:03:37 ◼   ► system.

00:03:38 ◼   ► Is it really a waste of time?

00:03:42 ◼   ► time that I should maybe be using in theory on doing something else which is on my task

00:03:47 ◼   ► list as opposed to just poking around with integrations?

00:03:50 ◼   ► You know when I do that, when I play around with Workflow and with Zapier, I have an entry

00:03:56 ◼   ► in my time tracking.

00:03:58 ◼   ► It's called research.

00:03:59 ◼   ► So whenever I play around, it is research because eventually it ends up either in the

00:04:05 ◼   ► newsletter or on Mac Stories or I create some automation of my own.

00:04:10 ◼   ► So it is research after all.

00:04:11 ◼   ► And it's not like...

00:04:12 ◼   ► I mean it would be a waste of time if I was spending a couple of hours on YouTube checking

00:04:17 ◼   ► out, I don't know, cats for example.

00:04:20 ◼   ► That's a waste of time.

00:04:21 ◼   ► But trying out automation and scripting, it's research.

00:04:24 ◼   ► Yeah, I've been thinking about maybe classifying it as workflow, like workflows or something

00:04:31 ◼   ► like that, like in my time tracking, that I'm doing something which is useful, which

00:04:36 ◼   ► which is trying to improve my workflows and my productivity.

00:04:40 ◼   ► Yeah, it's very interesting.

00:04:42 ◼   ► I'm very happy to hear that, Myke.

00:04:44 ◼   ► Thank you.

00:04:45 ◼   ► I'm kind of scared about what you will do

00:04:50 ◼   ► in the sense of you're going from one extreme to another.

00:04:55 ◼   ► And I just want to see what you come up with.

00:05:00 ◼   ► Because I feel like you've been stuck on an old system for a long time

00:05:05 ◼   ► and now you have this infinity in front of you and I want to see what you do.

00:05:13 ◼   ► I mean you're already paying for a plan on Zapier, you know it's like all these changes have been very condensed

00:05:20 ◼   ► in a short amount of time, so I want to see what you come up with, I'm really curious.

00:05:25 ◼   ► Yeah I think I kind of need a plan of some kind because of the hashtag stuff,

00:05:31 ◼   ► like these are just tweets that are just pouring in.

00:05:33 ◼   ► And I need to have a plan there to keep pulling those in.

00:05:38 ◼   ► And that is something that is very useful for me.

00:05:40 ◼   ► It saves me a lot of time.

00:05:42 ◼   ► Yeah, so I'm really happy about that.

00:05:43 ◼   ► And I'm poking around and I'm interested

00:05:48 ◼   ► to see what's gonna come out of the other side.

00:05:50 ◼   ► - Nice, nice.

00:05:51 ◼   ► - We were wondering, we were wondering,

00:05:54 ◼   ► there was question as to whether 2017

00:05:57 ◼   ► would continue the tradition of Myke is right.

00:06:00 ◼   ► or not and it turns out that yes it will because I remember on this show many weeks ago when

00:06:10 ◼   ► we were talking about the MacBook Pro and Steven bought the MacBook Pro with keys, the

00:06:18 ◼   ► function grow keys and I am very sure that I made a prediction at this point that he

00:06:24 ◼   ► would inevitably...

00:06:25 ◼   ► Why didn't you call it with a nickname? Because you know I don't like nicknames?

00:06:29 ◼   ► Why didn't you call it the MacBook escape?

00:06:32 ◼   ► Well, because I know you don't like them. You get really upset.

00:06:36 ◼   ► You're so sweet. Thank you, Myke.

00:06:38 ◼   ► You're just going to start shouting at me. I can't win. If I don't say it, you shout

00:06:42 ◼   ► at me. If I say it, you shout at me.

00:06:44 ◼   ► So Stephen ordered the MacBook escape. And at the time, I remember saying that I believed

00:06:53 ◼   ► it would be only a matter of time until he bought the Touch Bar. And I made the case

00:06:57 ◼   ► for him to buy the Touch Bar because I knew this would inevitably happen to him. Stephen,

00:07:03 ◼   ► what did you do in the time that you were away from the last episode?

00:07:08 ◼   ► You bought me a candle. So I had to buy a MacBook Pro.

00:07:13 ◼   ► This is the line, no, this is the worst justification.

00:07:18 ◼   ► It's really not.

00:07:20 ◼   ► How does this work?

00:07:22 ◼   ► Basically, the things you buy grow exponentially.

00:07:24 ◼   ► So if Myke buys a candle and you buy a MacBook Pro

00:07:27 ◼   ► as a consequence, do I need to buy a car?

00:07:30 ◼   ► - You need to buy a boat.

00:07:32 ◼   ► So Myke and I both had birthdays recently.

00:07:37 ◼   ► Our birthdays are just a couple days apart.

00:07:40 ◼   ► Many, many years apart, but just a couple days apart.

00:07:43 ◼   ► And Myke bought me, I think somewhat jokingly,

00:07:47 ◼   ► it was a very strange gift.

00:07:49 ◼   ► - Definitely. - The 12 South,

00:07:50 ◼   ► the 12 South candle that smells like a new Mac,

00:07:53 ◼   ► or they say smells like a new Mac,

00:07:55 ◼   ► and I thought, look, I'm in a unique position here

00:07:58 ◼   ► where I can answer the question,

00:08:01 ◼   ► does this candle smell like a new Mac?

00:08:04 ◼   ► So I set up my camera and did a little YouTube video

00:08:08 ◼   ► about that, but I needed a new Mac to compare it to.

00:08:13 ◼   ► And if it hadn't been $4,000 or whatever it was,

00:08:17 ◼   ► I would have bought a Mac Pro for this,

00:08:19 ◼   ► just 'cause it had been really funny.

00:08:21 ◼   ► 'Cause then I could also do the whole,

00:08:22 ◼   ► I bought a new Mac but it's not new bit.

00:08:25 ◼   ► But I didn't and I looked to see what was available

00:08:27 ◼   ► in my Apple store and they had a 13 inch touch bar

00:08:30 ◼   ► that I could pick up the same day.

00:08:31 ◼   ► So I ordered that, I unboxed it on video.

00:08:35 ◼   ► If you watched the YouTube video,

00:08:36 ◼   ► I'm actually unboxing it on the video

00:08:37 ◼   ► so I also got to kind of make fun of unboxing videos,

00:08:40 ◼   ► which I think are just ridiculous.

00:08:43 ◼   ► And I was gonna return it and then I set it up

00:08:45 ◼   ► and then I migrated my user to it and then I sold mine.

00:08:48 ◼   ► No, no, no, no. Where is this line? Where does this line… I like that it's like,

00:08:53 ◼   ► "Oh, I set it up, I migrated my user, oh, and then I decided to keep it."

00:08:57 ◼   ► And it's like two years later, it's like there's a jump.

00:09:01 ◼   ► Can you describe what happened in between?

00:09:03 ◼   ► You made a huge decision before you decided to keep it. That decision was

00:09:07 ◼   ► migrating your user account to it.

00:09:09 ◼   ► Yeah, that was my mistake. That is when I decided to keep it. It just happened to me.

00:09:15 ◼   ► the user just jumped across the desk into the new MacBook Pro.

00:09:18 ◼   ► Just fell itself in there over USB-C.

00:09:22 ◼   ► Yeah, so I sold the Escape to someone in the chat room

00:09:26 ◼   ► who remained nameless, but it's definitely Kyle.

00:09:29 ◼   ► And so yeah, it's nice.

00:09:34 ◼   ► I feel like I should do a review of it

00:09:35 ◼   ► since I reviewed the Escape.

00:09:36 ◼   ► I can tell you right now the battery life

00:09:38 ◼   ► is worse than on the Escape, like noticeably so,

00:09:41 ◼   ► which is a real bummer.

00:09:42 ◼   ► But the touch bar is cool.

00:09:45 ◼   ► So all that happened. You should go watch the YouTube video so I can justify the expense.

00:09:49 ◼   ► Please click on any ads that YouTube shows you and we'll be all set.

00:09:53 ◼   ► You should do more smelling videos. I thought it was really funny and it'd be kind of great

00:09:58 ◼   ► to see you compare different types of smells with Apple products.

00:10:03 ◼   ► I think there's a line.

00:10:04 ◼   ► I don't know, chemicals maybe? It would be interesting.

00:10:06 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:10:07 ◼   ► I think there's a line in the video. It's like it definitely has a smell. I'm watching

00:10:11 ◼   ► it back in the edit I was like well I said that on camera, so that's in the video.

00:10:15 ◼   ► My favorite thing about how this whole thing unfolded is that was totally a joke gift that

00:10:20 ◼   ► I bought you in the hopes that you would make a YouTube video out of the gift.

00:10:24 ◼   ► It worked. It worked.

00:10:25 ◼   ► What I did not in my wildest dreams imagine is that me buying that candle for you would

00:10:30 ◼   ► lead to just another successful moment in my predicting life where you ended up then

00:10:35 ◼   ► buying and keeping a touch bar MacBook Pro.

00:10:39 ◼   ► - Yeah, and now Kyle is trolling me with my subhead

00:10:43 ◼   ► to my MacBook Escape article,

00:10:44 ◼   ► in which I defended my choice not to buy the touch bar model

00:10:47 ◼   ► even though, comma, as a Mac nerd, comma,

00:10:49 ◼   ► that's the one I totally should have bought.

00:10:50 ◼   ► So that'll be some follow up on 512 pixels.

00:10:53 ◼   ► So yeah, so that's a thing.

00:10:56 ◼   ► I think we're ready to move on.

00:10:59 ◼   ► I'm ready to move on.

00:11:00 ◼   ► Federico, you bent Google to your will.

00:11:03 ◼   ► - Did I really?

00:11:03 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:11:04 ◼   ► - You were quoted in the New York Times

00:11:06 ◼   ► as Mr. Vittucci. - I was.

00:11:08 ◼   ► And now Google has done what you asked them to do.

00:11:11 ◼   ► It's not just me, it's really a bunch of people that came together to express common concerns.

00:11:15 ◼   ► But they're not on the podcast, you're on the podcast.

00:11:17 ◼   ► Well, they are in spirit. They are with me in spirit.

00:11:21 ◼   ► I think...

00:11:23 ◼   ► So basically what happened?

00:11:25 ◼   ► I was complaining in December about

00:11:29 ◼   ► how Google AMP

00:11:31 ◼   ► works on mobile devices.

00:11:33 ◼   ► And not necessarily the AMP technology which is open source and it's not

00:11:36 ◼   ► directly controlled by Google by the way that AMP integrates with Google Search,

00:11:40 ◼   ► with Google Search results. Google has redesigned Google Search to cache an AMP

00:11:48 ◼   ► version of a web article and by caching this version, not just caching actually

00:11:53 ◼   ► also pre-rendering so that when you search on something on Google now and

00:11:58 ◼   ► you see there's a little lightning bolt icon next to the headline of a story. When

00:12:04 ◼   ► you tap it, that's actually pre-rendered from Google's servers. It's

00:12:09 ◼   ► basically loading an iframe in a web browser and when you tap it, it loads

00:12:14 ◼   ► instantly because it's basically hidden from view. But when you tap it, there's no

00:12:18 ◼   ► minimal resources are fetched across the internet because the

00:12:23 ◼   ► majority of the story is already being prefetched. And the problem there is that

00:12:27 ◼   ► by doing pre-rendering, Google is, instead of using the publisher URL in the story,

00:12:33 ◼   ► they're using a google.com/somethingpermalink.

00:12:38 ◼   ► And that's because, of course, prerendering has to happen on Google servers to be fast, you know, worldwide.

00:12:43 ◼   ► And I complained about this because I feel like, especially in this day and age of, you know, fake news and, you know,

00:12:50 ◼   ► the lack of attribution on stories,

00:12:53 ◼   ► I feel like it's fundamental to retain control of your own website, of your own domain name, and your own,

00:13:01 ◼   ► authority when it comes to the stories that you publish. And by enabling AMP, you are effectively selling yourself to Google's control,

00:13:09 ◼   ► which is, I enabled AMP on Mac Stories and within a couple of days, people who were clicking on Google search results

00:13:17 ◼   ► were not seeing the macstories.net permalink they were seeing Google's.

00:13:21 ◼   ► And I don't like that and I got so many complaints from people saying

00:13:24 ◼   ► "Why is that when I open Mac Stories, instead of getting your own link, I get some google.com link?"

00:13:30 ◼   ► So when it comes to permalinks, when it comes to other companies wanting to control my stuff,

00:13:37 ◼   ► I always know right away, I don't need to think about it. I made the decision within a couple of days.

00:13:44 ◼   ► It's like I really don't like this, I want my links, I want people to land on my site and see my site's name.

00:13:50 ◼   ► So I disabled AMP, and that tweet that I sent got a surprising amount of retweets and favorites and replies,

00:13:57 ◼   ► including some people from Google who got in touch, they were really lovely actually,

00:14:00 ◼   ► and they provided some feedback but we were disagreeing on the basic premise.

00:14:04 ◼   ► And there was this story on Search Engine Land by Dan Sullivan, I think.

00:14:11 ◼   ► And it was not, basically the summary of the story is, it was not just me.

00:14:17 ◼   ► A lot of publishers were concerned that Google, by rewriting the permalinks,

00:14:21 ◼   ► were effectively shutting down publishers from controlling their own websites in Google Search.

00:14:27 ◼   ► You can agree with this approach, you can disagree with this approach.

00:14:31 ◼   ► I personally stand firm on my idea that as a website owner, especially an indie website,

00:14:36 ◼   ► you know I'm not some big shot publication like the New York Times or The Verge,

00:14:40 ◼   ► I need to control my name and I need to make sure that people share my links.

00:14:44 ◼   ► I complained about this and then eventually the New York Times did a story.

00:14:48 ◼   ► I was on vacation when this came out, but they did a story and they quoted my Twitter at the beginning of the article

00:14:54 ◼   ► and also they got in touch with other publishers.

00:14:56 ◼   ► And there was a common concern, you know, that when you open a story from Google mobile search results,

00:15:01 ◼   ► which I would argue is the majority of people do that these days,

00:15:03 ◼   ► you don't see the real permalink of a website, you see the Google.com cache pre-rendered in the browser.

00:15:11 ◼   ► Yesterday, finally, Google, not finally because it's been a long time,

00:15:15 ◼   ► it's been actually a surprisingly short turnaround.

00:15:18 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:15:18 ◼   ► Google announced some changes to the display of AMP pages on mobile search results.

00:15:25 ◼   ► It's not a drastic redesign, it's not like they're not gonna pre-render anymore.

00:15:32 ◼   ► Instead, they're still gonna do the pre-rendering, they're still gonna do the google.com

00:15:36 ◼   ► permalink, but they will make it easier to see the real website address of the publisher.

00:15:43 ◼   ► So there's going to be a link icon in the Google AMP,

00:15:47 ◼   ► the top bar, at the top, you know, the little horizontal bar that you get.

00:15:51 ◼   ► There's going to be a new button.

00:15:52 ◼   ► You can tap that button to see the full link,

00:15:55 ◼   ► and you can tap and hold the link to copy it, to send it, to share it with other people.

00:16:00 ◼   ► Eventually Google hopes that

00:16:02 ◼   ► major companies will agree on

00:16:06 ◼   ► supporting this new API, this proposed API called the Web Share API.

00:16:12 ◼   ► The Web Share API would allow website owners to embed share buttons in websites,

00:16:19 ◼   ► which you might say, well, that's not new, there's plenty of share buttons.

00:16:22 ◼   ► This time, instead of opening some web pop-up, they will open the native share interface for each individual OS.

00:16:30 ◼   ► So on Android, you will get the share menu, on iOS you will get the share sheet, and so forth.

00:16:35 ◼   ► This is something that Google Hope's browsers will agree upon so publishers can use it.

00:16:40 ◼   ► I'm impressed at Google here that they took this feedback and have made, I think, a perfectly

00:16:47 ◼   ► acceptable change in all honesty. You know, that they are making the, you know, there's obviously

00:16:55 ◼   ► some technical reason or a political reason why they want to keep their short URLs. I get that.

00:17:00 ◼   ► Like, that's fine. Like, they're making the service, it's their service, you can choose if

00:17:03 ◼   ► you want to use it or not. But, you know, there was a complaint that, you know, that you and

00:17:07 ◼   ► others had about the fact that you still want to have your branding and your URLs

00:17:10 ◼   ► there if somebody wants them so they surface that and I think that's good I

00:17:15 ◼   ► mean I like AMP I like that so because you know sometimes I'm searching for

00:17:19 ◼   ► something on my phone and an AMP article pops up and I click it is there

00:17:23 ◼   ► immediately and I'm not waiting I like that convenience but I have found it

00:17:26 ◼   ► frustrating that I then can't grab the URL to either share or add it to a

00:17:31 ◼   ► document for for show notes or something like that which is typically what's

00:17:33 ◼   ► happening you know there have been many times where I've like I've googled

00:17:37 ◼   ► for an article, I found the AMP article, I can't get the URL, so I then have to Google

00:17:42 ◼   ► the title of the article to try and find the original post on the website to get the URL.

00:17:48 ◼   ► And so like, that is frustrating, but having it just there a button away, I mean, you know,

00:17:53 ◼   ► you can tell me if you think that this is a fair thing Federico, but I think that that

00:17:57 ◼   ► is a perfectly fine compromise.

00:18:00 ◼   ► I think it is fair.

00:18:02 ◼   ► It is better than what we used to have.

00:18:06 ◼   ► I still would prefer to see the full link

00:18:09 ◼   ► without having to tap a button.

00:18:13 ◼   ► Basically, I would like to see the full link at the top

00:18:16 ◼   ► instead of just the base domain.

00:18:18 ◼   ► But that's probably just me.

00:18:20 ◼   ► And I think it is fine that people can tap a button

00:18:23 ◼   ► to get the full link.

00:18:24 ◼   ► There's some technical concerns in terms

00:18:27 ◼   ► of the performance of Google AMP itself.

00:18:30 ◼   ► Too many times, some elements of web pages don't work.

00:18:35 ◼   ► Videos don't load.

00:18:37 ◼   ► Images get stuck loading.

00:18:39 ◼   ► Interactive galleries don't work.

00:18:40 ◼   ► And this is because Google wants to keep it extremely lightweight

00:18:44 ◼   ► to basically fit in a few dozen kilobytes, really.

00:18:49 ◼   ► So when you go from a full experience,

00:18:51 ◼   ► like The Verge, for example, or The New York Times,

00:18:54 ◼   ► and you get this super stripped down view,

00:18:57 ◼   ► which is fine, and it's great because it doesn't consume a lot of megabytes,

00:19:00 ◼   ► but then stuff doesn't work, I'm not sure what the best compromise is there.

00:19:04 ◼   ► So if the plugin keeps evolving and the standard keeps accepting different modifications,

00:19:10 ◼   ► like for example, you can use pull quotes, that would be nice,

00:19:14 ◼   ► or you can use some other website elements that don't add megabytes to the resources, to the assets.

00:19:20 ◼   ► So if you can make it a little more flexible,

00:19:23 ◼   ► and maybe if you can surface the full domain

00:19:25 ◼   ► without having to hide it behind the button, that'd be nice.

00:19:28 ◼   ► But I think it's definitely an improvement.

00:19:31 ◼   ► I'm thinking about it.

00:19:33 ◼   ► I don't wanna put AMP back just yet.

00:19:37 ◼   ► I'm actually focusing on supporting Apple News right now

00:19:40 ◼   ► because I want to support the Apple News format,

00:19:42 ◼   ► which I wanna talk about later.

00:19:44 ◼   ► But I think Google is moving in the right direction.

00:19:46 ◼   ► So I'm happy to see this change.

00:19:48 ◼   ► - I mean, I looked at AMP for my site a while back

00:19:52 ◼   ► and didn't implement it, basically for the same reasons

00:19:54 ◼   ► Federico outlined, that I didn't,

00:19:56 ◼   ► I liked the speed increase and stuff,

00:19:57 ◼   ► but I didn't like the control that it gave

00:19:59 ◼   ► and the sort of masking of my URL.

00:20:03 ◼   ► I'm not sure this is enough to make me implement it.

00:20:07 ◼   ► It'd be pretty simple,

00:20:07 ◼   ► it's not really like an investment complaint.

00:20:11 ◼   ► I kinda wanna see how this plays out,

00:20:14 ◼   ► but I think it's definitely a move in the right direction

00:20:17 ◼   ► to kind of understand and hear what the community

00:20:22 ◼   ► saying and I find that very encouraging that they listen to these complaints and I think

00:20:27 ◼   ► with a pretty good solution for it, you know, they have to render on their side to make

00:20:32 ◼   ► it work but I think showing the URL the way they are is definitely a step in the right

00:20:36 ◼   ► direction so I'm kind of with Federica, I want to kind of see where this goes but so

00:20:41 ◼   ► far I like these changes and I think that it shows that they are listening to the people

00:20:45 ◼   ► who actually make this content.

00:20:49 ◼   ► This week's episode is brought to you in part by our friends over at Hover. If you're sitting

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00:22:48 ◼   ► It was a monumental day over here in my office as I am now the proud owner of Gigabit Internet.

00:22:59 ◼   ► So jealous.

00:23:01 ◼   ► There is a company that is, I had never heard of this company before.

00:23:06 ◼   ► They are called Hyperoptic and I had a leaflet put in my postbox and they basically said

00:23:14 ◼   ► this is our service, your apartment building has been wired with fibre.

00:23:21 ◼   ► Call us, we'll come and install it and you can choose either 20 meg, 100 meg or a gigabit.

00:23:29 ◼   ► And I was like okay, I'll call you immediately.

00:23:34 ◼   ► And I arranged it and they came today to install it and it was a whole big thing.

00:23:40 ◼   ► They had to bring a cable into my house which seemed kind of weird, right?

00:23:44 ◼   ► Like drilling a hole in the wall to bring a cable in from the hallway outside to the

00:23:49 ◼   ► apartment building.

00:23:50 ◼   ► It was a very peculiar process.

00:23:52 ◼   ► And they set up all of the hardware and then I was sad because I ran speed tests and I

00:23:58 ◼   ► was getting like 70 down and 20 up.

00:24:01 ◼   ► I was like, this is not what was promised.

00:24:04 ◼   ► So I spent the morning trying to work out what was going on.

00:24:07 ◼   ► This is a tale of weird networking, by the way,

00:24:11 ◼   ► just to set this stage.

00:24:13 ◼   ► And I couldn't get it to work,

00:24:16 ◼   ► and I tried it over ethernet, like on a Macbook,

00:24:19 ◼   ► on a Dina's Macbook Pro.

00:24:20 ◼   ► And then I contacted the customer service,

00:24:23 ◼   ► and I was like, what's going on?

00:24:24 ◼   ► Like, I'm not even getting 100 meg,

00:24:27 ◼   ► and I'm paying for a gig here.

00:24:28 ◼   ► Like, you know, what's happening?

00:24:31 ◼   ► It wasn't until after I sent the messages to the customer service team over

00:24:35 ◼   ► Twitter DM that I realised the way that I was connecting to

00:24:39 ◼   ► Ethernet was via an adapter, like a USB

00:24:44 ◼   ► adapter. And I was like, I wonder if that will cause any problems.

00:24:48 ◼   ► It turns out, yes, it's limited to 100 gigabytes.

00:24:52 ◼   ► And so I couldn't test the speed.

00:24:57 ◼   ► I had no way of testing the speed barring taking my unplugging my iMac taking out to

00:25:03 ◼   ► the hallway because it was all installed in the hallway because it has to be put in a

00:25:06 ◼   ► specific place because they need to put their own socket in there that kind of stuff it

00:25:09 ◼   ► has in it they have all of these different things that they have to do to make it work

00:25:15 ◼   ► so I then went to Amazon and I ordered some stuff like buy a prime now and I got this

00:25:22 ◼   ► this router and I got like a little Wi-Fi extender because I'm not sure what it is I'm

00:25:26 ◼   ► going to be doing. So I got out of this older router a TP-Link AC 1900 whatever

00:25:34 ◼   ► that means. Oh yeah that one. Everyone's favorite. Oh yeah yeah yeah. And this was just from

00:25:38 ◼   ► some googling and like looking at some reviews and stuff like that to try and

00:25:42 ◼   ► find something that could deliver up to a gigabit in bandwidth right. By the way

00:25:48 ◼   ► I know I'm butchering all of the gigabyte gigabit stuff like it doesn't

00:25:51 ◼   ► matter you know what I mean right like everyone knows what I'm talking about

00:25:54 ◼   ► about here right like who can keep track of this stuff it arrived I set it all up

00:25:59 ◼   ► and now I have insane Wi-Fi speeds so I was doing some more research and their

00:26:05 ◼   ► hardware I forgot to mention is the hardware that hyperoptic provides that

00:26:09 ◼   ► though the Wi-Fi speed is capped it's like G or something I don't think or N

00:26:14 ◼   ► but basically it's capped to like a hundred megabytes so which I find it's a

00:26:20 ◼   ► little bit stupid to be honest. It's like you're offering Gigabit Internet but I

00:26:25 ◼   ► have to have it physically connected to any device to get that so I went for

00:26:30 ◼   ► some I went I tried to find a router that could give it to me and so now like

00:26:34 ◼   ► I ran a speed test earlier and I had 500 up 500 down and I've run some other

00:26:40 ◼   ► tests and it's like 600 down and 500 up and it's incredible. I uploaded a 2

00:26:49 ◼   ► you

00:27:02 ◼   ► and I still need to tinker with some stuff.

00:27:05 ◼   ► Like currently I can only connect one device to it.

00:27:08 ◼   ► Like I'm working through some problems,

00:27:10 ◼   ► but honestly I don't care what I have to do.

00:27:13 ◼   ► I don't care how many devices I need

00:27:16 ◼   ► to plug into this house.

00:27:18 ◼   ► - That's awesome.

00:27:19 ◼   ► - I don't care about like just how bad

00:27:21 ◼   ► I have to convince Adina that it's okay

00:27:23 ◼   ► that there are like 40 routers in the hallway.

00:27:27 ◼   ► We're gonna find a way to make this work everyone

00:27:30 ◼   ► because this kind of speed is mind boggling.

00:27:35 ◼   ► - So as you were talking, I just looked it up on Google.

00:27:38 ◼   ► I searched for Rome Gigabit.

00:27:41 ◼   ► And I found this company called Unidata Giga Fiber.

00:27:44 ◼   ► So--

00:27:47 ◼   ► - They only went for all of the words with their name.

00:27:49 ◼   ► - Unidata Giga Fiber.

00:27:52 ◼   ► And they have a webpage where you need to send your info

00:27:56 ◼   ► and then they're gonna tell you

00:27:58 ◼   ► if your area is covered by the gigafiber.

00:28:01 ◼   ► So I just quickly, I used the auto-fill of Safari,

00:28:06 ◼   ► which is pretty awesome, I should say.

00:28:07 ◼   ► Anyway, I submitted my info and now I'm waiting

00:28:10 ◼   ► for an email that's kind of weird

00:28:12 ◼   ► that they cannot check on the database online.

00:28:14 ◼   ► - They should just know, right?

00:28:15 ◼   ► - They will send me probably a letter, "Dear Federico."

00:28:18 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:28:19 ◼   ► I'm waiting for information.

00:28:21 ◼   ► I'm pretty sure I'm not gonna get gigabit fiber in my home,

00:28:25 ◼   ► but what's the harm in trying?

00:28:28 ◼   ► So I'm very jealous and happy for you especially,

00:28:32 ◼   ► because I know, Myke, you've been waiting

00:28:33 ◼   ► for fast internet for so many years.

00:28:36 ◼   ► - And now I have all of it.

00:28:38 ◼   ► - That screenshot that you sent us, it is incredible.

00:28:43 ◼   ► - Yeah, I'm very excited about this.

00:28:47 ◼   ► I know that there are ways around the problems

00:28:49 ◼   ► that I'm currently facing.

00:28:50 ◼   ► I know that there is a route,

00:28:52 ◼   ► like the company has got documents on it.

00:28:55 ◼   ► will allow you to use your own hardware but like I might need to work with them

00:29:00 ◼   ► a little bit to try and get some switches flipped and or I'm you know I'm

00:29:04 ◼   ► gonna try and just plug in something into the hardware that they bought me to

00:29:07 ◼   ► see if that does anything like this is gonna take some tinkering because I'm

00:29:11 ◼   ► wanting to do some stuff that is outside of the norm but this is like like I

00:29:18 ◼   ► tried downloading the Godfather from iTunes it's like a 8 on 9 gigabyte movie

00:29:24 ◼   ► and it was like, it'll be done in four minutes.

00:29:27 ◼   ► It's like this is, I don't care what I have to do.

00:29:29 ◼   ► - Imagine how much faster it would be

00:29:31 ◼   ► if you ran ethernet to your iMac

00:29:33 ◼   ► and weren't limited by the wireless.

00:29:36 ◼   ► - I know, I'm thinking,

00:29:37 ◼   ► I tell you what I'm thinking about trying,

00:29:39 ◼   ► 'cause I've never, I have mixed reports of this.

00:29:42 ◼   ► The power line stuff?

00:29:45 ◼   ► - No.

00:29:45 ◼   ► - No, you don't think about that?

00:29:47 ◼   ► What is your problem with the power line stuff?

00:29:48 ◼   ► - The AC will be faster.

00:29:49 ◼   ► If you get 802.11ac, you'll be better off.

00:29:52 ◼   ► - Okay, that's what the hardware

00:29:54 ◼   ► that I've bought, the additional hardware that I bought is AC. Yeah that will be

00:29:59 ◼   ► better than the powerline stuff. Networking is horrific is what I've

00:30:03 ◼   ► discovered. It is disgusting and terrible and it's not for humans to understand

00:30:07 ◼   ► and I hate to know. Just fly me over. I pay for Comcast business class in my house. It's the

00:30:13 ◼   ► fastest thing I can get. There's no cap. Jason's been

00:30:18 ◼   ► talking about a lot of upgrade about the gigabyte cap on residential Comcast and

00:30:21 ◼   ► should just pay for business class. But I get 60 down and 15 up. Like that's pretty

00:30:27 ◼   ► much my average. I think I pay for like 60/20 maybe so I don't quite get the upload I'm

00:30:31 ◼   ► supposed to get. But it's consistent but I too have plugged my address into different

00:30:39 ◼   ► fiber things. So AT&T and Comcast have both announced residential fiber in Memphis and

00:30:45 ◼   ► my address is in like both of their systems and whoever gets to me first I will buy fiber

00:30:50 ◼   ► from them. But it's just it's frustrating that that options are so limited and

00:30:56 ◼   ► here in the US like there are only a handful of companies that offer like

00:31:00 ◼   ► anything better than DSL. And so for me I have Comcast and I have AT&T U-verse but

00:31:06 ◼   ► AT&T U-verse caps out at like 24 down so it's not really a competitor to you know

00:31:13 ◼   ► Comcast at 60 or more so they're definitely like limited options it's all

00:31:19 ◼   ► about where you live and you know I've got friends in towns with Google fiber

00:31:23 ◼   ► that's available two blocks in their house but not where they are like all

00:31:26 ◼   ► this stuff is so expensive to put in and difficult to put in it's very slow to

00:31:30 ◼   ► roll out but I'm happy for you Myke and a little more than a little jealous but

00:31:35 ◼   ► um it'll be it'll be a big change to you you you having to tether in the past

00:31:41 ◼   ► which you have to do I mean there's one thing that you can take solace in and

00:31:44 ◼   ► in that I'm ruined.

00:31:46 ◼   ► - Yeah. - Forever, yes.

00:31:48 ◼   ► - Like, whenever we move from here in years time,

00:31:53 ◼   ► we will be used to this speed.

00:31:55 ◼   ► And that, I don't even think in five years

00:31:59 ◼   ► it's gonna be as wide,

00:32:01 ◼   ► it's still not gonna be widely available,

00:32:03 ◼   ► 'cause it's like it's brand new infrastructure

00:32:04 ◼   ► in a lot of instances.

00:32:06 ◼   ► So, I'm trying not to think about that,

00:32:10 ◼   ► and just enjoy the speeds I have.

00:32:13 ◼   ► Myke, we had a little bit of follow-out.

00:32:14 ◼   ► You, speaking of upgrade, on yesterday's episode,

00:32:19 ◼   ► episode 127, spoke to Jason about some,

00:32:24 ◼   ► so numbers you came up with.

00:32:25 ◼   ► And I'm gonna try to paraphrase or try to boil down

00:32:28 ◼   ► your conversation 'cause I know you got some stuff

00:32:30 ◼   ► you wanna fill in.

00:32:32 ◼   ► You looked at the sales numbers of iPads versus Mac

00:32:36 ◼   ► and basically kind of drew a line where the current OS

00:32:43 ◼   ► supported so on the iPad that's about four years ago on the Mac that's closer

00:32:48 ◼   ► to what like six years ago

00:32:49 ◼   ► yeah 2009 2010 is kind of as old as a Mac can be to still be able to run Sierra

00:32:56 ◼   ► right it's actually kind of split there a couple of nine models so you you look

00:33:01 ◼   ► at the sales numbers across the quarters that fall within the you know the most

00:33:06 ◼   ► recently supported devices which i think is a smart way of doing it trying to

00:33:10 ◼   ► come up with a number of how many iPads are out there, hypothetically, that can run iOS

00:33:15 ◼   ► 10, and then how many Macs out there that can, hypothetically, run Mac OS Sierra. And

00:33:21 ◼   ► the numbers, of course, are what anyone paying attention should expect. The iPad drastically

00:33:28 ◼   ► outnumbers the Mac. I'm actually opening your spreadsheet now.

00:33:32 ◼   ► 252 million iPads and up to 133 million Macs.

00:33:36 ◼   ► - Okay, so the iPad is roughly twice as big,

00:33:40 ◼   ► and if not a little bit more.

00:33:43 ◼   ► And that's something that if you look at the sales numbers

00:33:45 ◼   ► in any particular quarter, that kind of plays out,

00:33:49 ◼   ► that the iPad more or less, twice as big.

00:33:52 ◼   ► And in your, I think your math of sound,

00:33:57 ◼   ► I think the way you go about this is sound,

00:33:59 ◼   ► Jason pointed out, was it Benedict Evans

00:34:01 ◼   ► did a similar thing recently?

00:34:04 ◼   ► So you're a fancy analysis guy now.

00:34:09 ◼   ► Yeah, good luck with that.

00:34:10 ◼   ► And the conclusion you drew is that if,

00:34:15 ◼   ► at this point the iPad's way bigger

00:34:18 ◼   ► and Apple should treat it as such

00:34:22 ◼   ► and put the investment into it as such

00:34:24 ◼   ► that it is much bigger than the Mac.

00:34:27 ◼   ► And I can't really argue with any of that.

00:34:33 ◼   ► I don't know if I feel like I summed up your argument well, but I want to get into it a little bit

00:34:38 ◼   ► If you feel like I've done it justice

00:34:40 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean that there are a couple of additional points that I think really drive that home

00:34:46 ◼   ► And there's something Jason said that I really liked where he said that

00:34:49 ◼   ► You know quite succinctly the iPad is Apple's second biggest computer platform

00:34:53 ◼   ► by unit sales

00:34:56 ◼   ► And another one like something else I found interesting was in 2016 alone

00:35:02 ◼   ► Apple sold 45 million iPads compared to 18 million max

00:35:05 ◼   ► And this is in a time when everybody's saying that the iPads on decline and the iPads dying and the iPad is useless and nobody needs

00:35:11 ◼   ► Them or wants them

00:35:13 ◼   ► That's what I feel is like the general rhetoric

00:35:15 ◼   ► in blogs and on other podcasts where

00:35:19 ◼   ► typically me and Federico are not part of and

00:35:22 ◼   ► It's you know, all I was trying to do is like I'm not trying to make a point to say that

00:35:30 ◼   ► The iPad is the ultimate device and everybody should use it. It's it's more that like I think we need to be aware of

00:35:37 ◼   ► The fact that it is a very popular device and those sales numbers

00:35:43 ◼   ► My feeling is more people work on an iPad than we think that is like just a conclusion

00:35:50 ◼   ► I put trues to draw from this is that that with this just a pure sales numbers and how they differ

00:35:56 ◼   ► I would expect that the number of people that use their Macs that they buy to work on and use their iPads that they buy to

00:36:03 ◼   ► Work on is closer than we think and also like what people actually tend to really use computers for like

00:36:10 ◼   ► They're not all used to code applications and develop websites

00:36:15 ◼   ► like

00:36:16 ◼   ► People buy their computers for the reasons that they use them and that can be defined as work because they are working on them

00:36:22 ◼   ► Whatever it is, they're doing it doesn't mean they're doing their job on them

00:36:26 ◼   ► But they're doing whatever they do on them and I feel like that there are more people that buy iPads for this purpose

00:36:33 ◼   ► Then we believe there to be and I think I wanted to try and just outline this with some of the actual data the hard

00:36:40 ◼   ► statistics to say like

00:36:42 ◼   ► We all agree that the iPad needs work

00:36:44 ◼   ► Apple need to put that work in because at this point I really

00:36:50 ◼   ► Honestly don't think Mac OS needs that much more done to it

00:36:56 ◼   ► iPad needs it.

00:36:59 ◼   ► Well I think I have a problem with that sentence we come back to. I think you can

00:37:03 ◼   ► have both but I think your overall idea that Apple needs to treat the iPad more

00:37:09 ◼   ► importantly than it seems to be especially on the software side is

00:37:13 ◼   ► definitely like I'm on board with that that the last time we got anything

00:37:19 ◼   ► really viable was OS 9 and that it is still in the shadow of the iPhone as far

00:37:26 ◼   ► as software development from Apple itself and I think I think you're

00:37:29 ◼   ► absolutely right that that's a problem. Here's what I think there's a as Myke's

00:37:35 ◼   ► numbers show there's a silent majority of people who need to buy a computer

00:37:40 ◼   ► when they need to do so they get an iPad but those people don't go on tech blogs

00:37:45 ◼   ► don't go on podcasts to talk about it. They don't even browse Twitter. Just when

00:37:50 ◼   ► you step out of the Apple media typical scene that you see how people

00:37:57 ◼   ► are using iPads. And to say this doesn't mean that the iPad is perfect or that

00:38:03 ◼   ► Apple is doing a good job with keeping up with the software. It's just from a

00:38:08 ◼   ► statistical perspective there is a silent majority of people who don't

00:38:13 ◼   ► record podcasts who don't write blogs, they use iPads, they mind your own

00:38:18 ◼   ► business and they get actual work done on the iPad. Again, that doesn't imply

00:38:23 ◼   ► that the iPad is great, or I mean the iPad is great, but the iPad is perfect

00:38:27 ◼   ► and there couldn't be better, it's just people do use them and people, you know,

00:38:33 ◼   ► we could argue they keep them around for a long time, but we talked

00:38:38 ◼   ► about this before, I have several examples of friends who use iPads for

00:38:41 ◼   ► things that you've done here on this show or other shows or other websites,

00:38:46 ◼   ► and I think Myke's point to take a look at the numbers and to kind of try to

00:38:52 ◼   ► extrapolate a theory out of that, I think it totally works. And the

00:38:58 ◼   ► conclusion is the Mac is great, the iPad is great, they cater to different types

00:39:02 ◼   ► of people, but there are more people buying iPads than Macs. Probably because

00:39:06 ◼   ► they're cheaper, I don't know, probably because the same tasks can be done on a

00:39:09 ◼   ► a cheaper device that could be the reason I don't know but those are the

00:39:13 ◼   ► numbers and you know again it's so hard to try and draw anything from them

00:39:18 ◼   ► because Apple doesn't give that information it's all of it is guesswork

00:39:22 ◼   ► but I wanted to look at this because for some reason in my brain I just assumed

00:39:29 ◼   ► that Apple sold more Macs than iPads I don't know why I thought this but like

00:39:35 ◼   ► It's just the way that the tone is set.

00:39:39 ◼   ► I get that. And I feel like

00:39:43 ◼   ► there's an unwritten rule in the

00:39:47 ◼   ► Apple media space that 1 max sold

00:39:51 ◼   ► equals 3 iPads. I feel like

00:39:55 ◼   ► that's the general consensus because if you sell 5 million Macs that's still more impressive than 12 million iPads.

00:39:59 ◼   ► For some reason. Because it's stable.

00:40:03 ◼   ► - Yeah. - Right, okay.

00:40:04 ◼   ► - And, hmm, I think that,

00:40:08 ◼   ► I mean, I think the whole notion that like,

00:40:11 ◼   ► for one to win, the other has to lose is just stupid, right?

00:40:15 ◼   ► Like, the idea that, and like, you know,

00:40:17 ◼   ► I've written blog posts, I think a lot of something

00:40:19 ◼   ► you'd have to bleep for one of them,

00:40:20 ◼   ► about macOS being the tag-along operating system to iOS,

00:40:24 ◼   ► and some people really got mad at me about that,

00:40:26 ◼   ► but like, I'm as diehard a Mac user as it comes, right?

00:40:30 ◼   ► And I have no problem accepting that the iPad sells more

00:40:35 ◼   ► and that Apple views it as the future of computing

00:40:38 ◼   ► for some types of consumers.

00:40:41 ◼   ► That does not have to mean that the Mac goes away.

00:40:44 ◼   ► Now, unfortunately, a lot of the press thinks that

00:40:49 ◼   ► that's untrue, that if the iPad is the future of computing,

00:40:53 ◼   ► it should work a certain way,

00:40:55 ◼   ► or it should sell in certain numbers,

00:40:57 ◼   ► or that because of that the Mac is going to fade away

00:41:01 ◼   ► into history, and I just don't see that being true.

00:41:03 ◼   ► Apple can do both.

00:41:05 ◼   ► Now what Apple needs to do is prove that they can do both.

00:41:08 ◼   ► That the Mac is on this annual software cycle,

00:41:11 ◼   ► the iPad is on an annual software cycle,

00:41:14 ◼   ► but it is, the iPad is kind of really every other year

00:41:19 ◼   ► at this point.

00:41:20 ◼   ► We saw some stuff with iOS 7, we saw stuff with iOS 9,

00:41:23 ◼   ► 10 didn't get anything.

00:41:25 ◼   ► And Apple needs to prove that,

00:41:28 ◼   ► and a whole bunch of different areas, right,

00:41:29 ◼   ► that it can walk and chew gum at the same time

00:41:31 ◼   ► because Apple really sucks at that, currently.

00:41:33 ◼   ► They focus on one thing and then put it on the shelf

00:41:36 ◼   ► and focus on something else.

00:41:38 ◼   ► And they need to be better at getting

00:41:40 ◼   ► all these things updating on a regular basis.

00:41:43 ◼   ► And maybe that means that macOS comes off an annual cycle.

00:41:47 ◼   ► Most Mac users I know would be actually

00:41:49 ◼   ► would be okay with that.

00:41:52 ◼   ► Maybe it means that they need to separate the iPhone and iPad operating systems internally

00:41:59 ◼   ► more, right?

00:42:00 ◼   ► Or still the iPad is running sort of this weird fork of iOS and like maybe, you know,

00:42:05 ◼   ► maybe it's time that has its own team and maybe it does.

00:42:07 ◼   ► We don't know that for sure, but it's sure seems like iPad features are kind of second

00:42:12 ◼   ► to the rest of iOS and maybe it needs some more specifically focused resources.

00:42:19 ◼   ► But at the end of the day, we can all get along.

00:42:23 ◼   ► Just because the iPad is selling more from the Mac

00:42:26 ◼   ► doesn't mean the Mac's going away.

00:42:27 ◼   ► Just because the iPad sales continue to fall,

00:42:29 ◼   ► which is something we should talk about,

00:42:30 ◼   ► it still hasn't found level ground,

00:42:33 ◼   ► doesn't mean that it's failed,

00:42:34 ◼   ► doesn't mean that it is the dream

00:42:37 ◼   ► of the future of computing is broken.

00:42:40 ◼   ► It means that they sold a whole bunch to a bunch of people

00:42:44 ◼   ► who haven't replaced them yet.

00:42:46 ◼   ► And maybe they sold them to a bunch of people

00:42:48 ◼   ► are never going to buy another one again. Like, those people are out there too. But

00:42:52 ◼   ► it, it, as long as it finds its number at some point, then I think that's fine. I don't

00:42:57 ◼   ► think it's super, super problematic quite yet. I mean, it's bad, right? Like, the number's

00:43:02 ◼   ► falling. If you look at this spreadsheet Myke did, the numbers start way bigger than they

00:43:07 ◼   ► are now. But they'll, they'll figure that out. I think it will level off someplace above

00:43:12 ◼   ► the map.

00:43:13 ◼   ► What I don't get is exactly what you mentioned, like the need for one of the two to be a winner.

00:43:20 ◼   ► Why there's a need to be a single winning platform in this thing. I just don't get it.

00:43:29 ◼   ► The Mac is great, right? I don't use it, but whenever I need to use a computer, because there's something that iOS cannot do,

00:43:37 ◼   ► The Mac is fantastic, like I had to use a PC lately and my god it was awful, right?

00:43:45 ◼   ► But I just don't get this obsession with having to declare a winner in this...

00:43:51 ◼   ► It's not even a battle, it's not even a run, it's a...

00:43:55 ◼   ► I mean, the more computers Apple sells the better, whether it's an iPhone or an iPad or a Mac.

00:44:01 ◼   ► And to an extent you could argue that as software moves towards services it becomes even more irrelevant

00:44:09 ◼   ► which

00:44:11 ◼   ► software you use as long as you access a service from an Apple computer.

00:44:17 ◼   ► So when it's starting to be like the main software is in the cloud, right? So you use Apple Music, use iCloud, use Apple News.

00:44:26 ◼   ► Maybe you like the tablet more, I like the phone more, and Myke likes the computer with the keyboard, and it's fine.

00:44:33 ◼   ► So I think we got stuck,

00:44:35 ◼   ► as bloggers and podcasters and everyone else, we got stuck on this metaphor that Steve Jobs used with the tracks and the PCs.

00:44:43 ◼   ► It was beautiful, really. Great idea.

00:44:45 ◼   ► Beautifully conveyed. But we got stuck on this

00:44:49 ◼   ► parallel between the two and having to choose one.

00:44:54 ◼   ► And I think the majority of people will switch to tablets. That's what I think.

00:45:00 ◼   ► Actually, if we had to pick a single winning device, that would be the smartphone.

00:45:07 ◼   ► There's no contest. The iPhone has absolutely destroyed everything else.

00:45:15 ◼   ► So if we really want to have this discussion of what is winning right now, that's the iPhone.

00:45:20 ◼   ► And you have no idea, I think a lot of people have no idea how many things users do on iPhones.

00:45:27 ◼   ► It's just incredible, right?

00:45:29 ◼   ► But then if we start talking, so we cannot mention the iPhone because it's a phone, we're talking about computers,

00:45:36 ◼   ► okay, let's assume that the iPhone is another computer.

00:45:39 ◼   ► What's the problem with having to debate whether people need to use iPads or Macs?

00:45:48 ◼   ► I think as long as we move from traditional software and OSes to services to iCloud and whatever else is coming from Apple,

00:45:58 ◼   ► I think this discussion is totally irrelevant. It leads us nowhere.

00:46:03 ◼   ► If anything, we need to discuss how can they be better, because there's always going to be people who want a big screen with a keyboard,

00:46:10 ◼   ► and there's always going to be people who like me and Myke, they want a piece of glass that they hold with their hands.

00:46:15 ◼   ► There's always people who like pizza and people who like pasta.

00:46:18 ◼   ► So do we need to pick one or can we just focus on making better pizza and pasta?

00:46:22 ◼   ► That's how I look at it.

00:46:23 ◼   ► So let's just focus on the things that the iPad needs to be better

00:46:28 ◼   ► and especially the things that the Mac needs to improve that.

00:46:32 ◼   ► And I think we'll be fine because in the end we're buying Apple stuff

00:46:36 ◼   ► and we're using Apple services, we're signing up for Apple services,

00:46:40 ◼   ► we're paying subscriptions, so everything will work out.

00:46:44 ◼   ► That's my view. I don't get this "Oh, the Mac is doomed" or "Oh, the iPad is doomed". I just don't get it.

00:46:50 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean I think in particular this past season of this has been played up a little bit due to the lack of Mac hardware, right?

00:47:01 ◼   ► That there was... I mean the Mac Pro is still an issue, right? There's no getting around that.

00:47:06 ◼   ► But there was angst over the new MacBook Pros and some of it was justified and a lot of it wasn't.

00:47:11 ◼   ► there's a lot of upset people about Pro hardware,

00:47:14 ◼   ► and I'm one of them, right?

00:47:15 ◼   ► Like when I upset my studio,

00:47:17 ◼   ► if there had been a Mac Pro that was worth buying,

00:47:19 ◼   ► I would have bought that over an iMac.

00:47:21 ◼   ► But there wasn't, so I didn't have an iMac.

00:47:23 ◼   ► And I love my iMac and I'm really happy with it,

00:47:25 ◼   ► but it would have been nice to have an option

00:47:26 ◼   ► to look at something more powerful.

00:47:28 ◼   ► But there's not, and there's a real problem there,

00:47:30 ◼   ► and Apple needs to, I think not only fix the Mac Pro,

00:47:34 ◼   ► either update it or get rid of it,

00:47:37 ◼   ► but they need to tell us what happened, right?

00:47:40 ◼   ► point they owe their pro users an explanation because not knowing is worse

00:47:44 ◼   ► than you know not not knowing. I really messed that up. And so there was a lot

00:47:51 ◼   ► there's a lot of angst around off that and you see the iPad numbers come out

00:47:54 ◼   ► and they're twice as big as the Mac but they're still falling right so it's kind

00:47:59 ◼   ► of easy to pick on the iPad and there are a lot of people who can't get their

00:48:03 ◼   ► work done on it for whatever reason. There are a lot of people who just like

00:48:07 ◼   ► the Mac more and like all that stuff kind of got mixed together and for

00:48:12 ◼   ► everybody I think you're absolutely right as we move to more services the OS and

00:48:15 ◼   ► hardware we use really don't matter as much right like it matters more that all

00:48:19 ◼   ► my data is on that device and that has to do with services and we are kind of

00:48:24 ◼   ► returning to a world of like thin clients and you can pick the platform

00:48:28 ◼   ► you want and as long as it has the apps and the services you want you can get

00:48:31 ◼   ► your work done we are returning to that world for a lot of people right that

00:48:35 ◼   ► There are going to be those of us who choose to do our work on the Mac or people who have

00:48:39 ◼   ► to do it on the Mac for whatever reason.

00:48:42 ◼   ► But the average consumer has more options than ever and that's good.

00:48:48 ◼   ► It's good for people to be able to say, "Hey, you know what?

00:48:50 ◼   ► Traditional laptop form factor doesn't work for me for whatever reason.

00:48:54 ◼   ► The accessibility is better on iOS.

00:48:56 ◼   ► I like the hardware better.

00:48:57 ◼   ► The software is easier to understand."

00:48:59 ◼   ► Those are all good things for people to have options.

00:49:05 ◼   ► What nerds need to understand, including the three of us,

00:49:08 ◼   ► is that those options don't have to be threatening.

00:49:11 ◼   ► We don't have to be afraid that the Mac is going away.

00:49:15 ◼   ► When you actually look at the evidence,

00:49:17 ◼   ► yeah, there's some things in the Mac line they need to fix,

00:49:19 ◼   ► but honestly, there have always been things in the Mac line

00:49:21 ◼   ► Apple needs to fix.

00:49:22 ◼   ► I mean, if we had done this podcast 15 years ago,

00:49:24 ◼   ► I would be ranting about the 256 megabytes of RAM

00:49:27 ◼   ► Apple ships when everyone else is shipping a gig.

00:49:30 ◼   ► There have always been things in the Mac line

00:49:32 ◼   ► people have justifiably complained about. But that's fine, right? That's part of it.

00:49:39 ◼   ► And we can move forward from this knowing that you know what the iPad is out there,

00:49:42 ◼   ► it's doing well, there's concern about the sales numbers but you know assuming that that

00:49:48 ◼   ► strains itself out, then Apple has these two platforms and one is geared towards a certain

00:49:54 ◼   ► type of user and another is geared towards a different type of user and there's lots

00:49:58 ◼   ► of overlap in the middle and that's all just fine.

00:50:02 ◼   ► And I think that everyone could take a breath

00:50:06 ◼   ► and we can move on.

00:50:10 ◼   ► - Shall we?

00:50:11 ◼   ► - Let's move on.

00:50:12 ◼   ► So speaking of Macs a little bit,

00:50:14 ◼   ► this came out right after we recorded,

00:50:17 ◼   ► y'all recorded, a report in Bloomberg by Mark Gurman

00:50:20 ◼   ► saying that Apple is developing ARM chips

00:50:24 ◼   ► and basically to add to Macs

00:50:26 ◼   ► to lessen their dependence on Intel.

00:50:28 ◼   ► And this has all been covered a bunch.

00:50:30 ◼   ► I don't necessarily want to cover the article again.

00:50:33 ◼   ► Because of some things that have come out of the article.

00:50:37 ◼   ► For me, at least, the first thing I think of

00:50:39 ◼   ► is the PowerPC to Intel transition,

00:50:42 ◼   ► which was very much a rip off the band-aid type thing.

00:50:47 ◼   ► They moved the whole platform in like a year.

00:50:49 ◼   ► They actually migrated all their systems to Intel

00:50:52 ◼   ► faster than they said they would.

00:50:53 ◼   ► When they first announced it,

00:50:54 ◼   ► they said it was gonna take like a year and a half

00:50:55 ◼   ► for two years, it took a year.

00:50:58 ◼   ► And it went very smoothly.

00:50:59 ◼   ► I was a Mac user at the time.

00:51:02 ◼   ► I was a genius, you know, kind of in the second wave

00:51:05 ◼   ► of Intel machines, so we're still servicing lots

00:51:07 ◼   ► of Power PCs, and it was fine,

00:51:09 ◼   ► people didn't really have problems.

00:51:11 ◼   ► It was very, very well done.

00:51:13 ◼   ► Apple did a great job in that transition.

00:51:15 ◼   ► Really, it's, I think it went pretty much perfectly.

00:51:19 ◼   ► This, though, is really different.

00:51:22 ◼   ► So with that, when they replaced the PowerBook

00:51:24 ◼   ► the MacBook Pro. The PowerBook went away, the MacBook Pro was here and that was it.

00:51:30 ◼   ► You were running an Intel machine and you had Rosetta to handle the software

00:51:32 ◼   ► that was still you know on PowerBC hadn't been updated for the Intel codebase

00:51:39 ◼   ► yet. And it was it was like I said it was perfectly fine perfectly smooth and it

00:51:43 ◼   ► was fast. You bought a new computer you were on Intel. And this is really different.

00:51:48 ◼   ► This this story is saying Apple is going to be using ARM chips inside Intel

00:51:53 ◼   ► Intel base Macs to take over a certain functionality.

00:51:56 ◼   ► And so the first example of course is already here.

00:51:58 ◼   ► It's right here on my desk.

00:51:59 ◼   ► The touch bar is run by what they call the T1 chip.

00:52:03 ◼   ► My understanding, our understanding is that

00:52:04 ◼   ► basically it's an Apple watch.

00:52:06 ◼   ► And it is handling the touch ID stuff, the touch bar,

00:52:10 ◼   ► and it's kind of its own little arm computer

00:52:12 ◼   ► inside the MacBook Pro.

00:52:13 ◼   ► And the two computer systems talk to each other

00:52:16 ◼   ► and everything's hunky-dory.

00:52:17 ◼   ► And then you, like, you would never know

00:52:19 ◼   ► it was a separate computer in there.

00:52:21 ◼   ► super fast like it's really well integrated and so the the narrative has

00:52:26 ◼   ► become well what else could Apple take over from Intel with an ARM chip and

00:52:30 ◼   ► power nap is brought up in the article I'm not sure I really buy that I mean

00:52:34 ◼   ► power nap is already really efficient if you're not aware if your Mac is asleep

00:52:38 ◼   ► if it's a notebook even if it's unplugged if you set set up this way it

00:52:43 ◼   ► can do things like fetch iCloud content check your email I think Dropbox now

00:52:48 ◼   ► we'll work with Power Nap I think,

00:52:50 ◼   ► where it'll sync stuff in the background, small stuff.

00:52:53 ◼   ► And so when you open your computer

00:52:56 ◼   ► and wake it up, it has new mail,

00:52:58 ◼   ► and your calendars are up to date and that sort of thing.

00:53:00 ◼   ► Messages still doesn't support it,

00:53:02 ◼   ► so if you're like me and use your laptop

00:53:04 ◼   ► every couple times a week,

00:53:06 ◼   ► the first three minutes is messages catching up,

00:53:08 ◼   ► which is super annoying.

00:53:10 ◼   ► But Power Nap handles a lot of the other type of stuff.

00:53:12 ◼   ► And they've said, "Well, what if we move that to ARM?"

00:53:15 ◼   ► I don't know, I mean,

00:53:17 ◼   ► Macs already sleep for like 30 days, you know, on battery power, they seem super efficient.

00:53:20 ◼   ► But the idea is that they could use ARM for other, you know, little things.

00:53:24 ◼   ► And I just find that really interesting because it's so different from PowerPC to Intel.

00:53:29 ◼   ► And two that it is, if Apple does this, then they can really like tailor these chips to

00:53:34 ◼   ► their strengths.

00:53:35 ◼   ► And if you look at something like the the iPad Pro with its or excuse me, the the iPhone

00:53:42 ◼   ► seven with its chipset, you know, too fast cores, too slow cores, and they kind of balance

00:53:46 ◼   ► things out and if the screen is not on it's using the slow ones to fetch stuff in the

00:53:50 ◼   ► background.

00:53:51 ◼   ► Like this whole idea of Apple customizing chips for the application they're going to

00:53:55 ◼   ► be used in and really being able to squeeze every bit of energy efficiency out of them

00:54:01 ◼   ► that's really interesting and it could be really different looking than the Switch.

00:54:06 ◼   ► Maybe this isn't the Switch to ARM, maybe that Switch isn't going to happen in any sort

00:54:11 ◼   ► of nearby timeframe, but it's going to be this slow, gradual evolution where the MacBooks

00:54:20 ◼   ► and the MacBook Pros in particular have their Intel base, Intel powered running, you know,

00:54:26 ◼   ► Intel code, you know, x86 stuff on them, but little bits of the system are handled by little

00:54:33 ◼   ► like tiny embedded arm computers.

00:54:35 ◼   ► And that's just really fascinating to me.

00:54:37 ◼   ► Do you think that this suggests that there will eventually be another transition or do

00:54:42 ◼   ► you think it's just going to be a case of Apple just filling these computers up with

00:54:46 ◼   ► more and more system-on-a-chips that they're building or whatever?

00:54:51 ◼   ► I kind of view, and I could be wrong, I kind of view this as like a stopgap from a complete

00:54:56 ◼   ► switch.

00:54:57 ◼   ► If they're going to be able to make these machines more energy efficient and still keep

00:55:02 ◼   ► all the benefits of being on Intel which to recap very quickly virtualization so

00:55:08 ◼   ► you can run Windows and Linux and other stuff natively and Thunderbolt. So

00:55:13 ◼   ► Thunderbolt is an Intel technology unless they somehow license that and then

00:55:19 ◼   ► you know ram it down the throat of an ARM chip.

00:55:21 ◼   ► Thunderbolt is Intel and that is really potentially problematic when you just

00:55:26 ◼   ► moved your entire pro notebook to thunderbolt and then you have to get rid

00:55:31 ◼   ► that they have to replace it with something or they have to license it and figure out

00:55:34 ◼   ► how to make it work with ARM.

00:55:36 ◼   ► So there's a lot of benefits to staying on Intel.

00:55:39 ◼   ► So I view this as Apple kind of warding that off saying look we can take over certain aspects

00:55:44 ◼   ► and we can have machines that can be lighter and thinner blah blah blah but are still energy

00:55:48 ◼   ► efficient but we still get all the benefits of Intel.

00:55:50 ◼   ► I see that working in Apple's favor that they can they can do things with Intel chips that

00:55:55 ◼   ► no one else can do because they're augmenting them with these ARM systems on a chip.

00:56:00 ◼   ► eventually this leads to an ARM Macbook but I don't think that them doing this

00:56:07 ◼   ► necessarily means that is kind of my overall thought today.

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00:57:18 ◼   ► of this show and relay FM. Federico.

00:57:24 ◼   ► Okay, what have I done?

00:57:25 ◼   ► People that use third-party Twitter applications can still have the access of being able to

00:57:32 ◼   ► look at somebody's tweets and seeing where they're tweeted from.

00:57:36 ◼   ► A long time ago, this was discovered upon you and you embarked on a long love affair,

00:57:45 ◼   ► one could say, with the official Twitter app and you defended it for a long time.

00:57:50 ◼   ► And then you moved to Tweetbot 4.

00:57:53 ◼   ► Yes.

00:57:54 ◼   ► But anybody that's been paying attention to you recently will notice that you, uh,

00:57:59 ◼   ► you, you, your, another affair has begun, uh, we're too terrific.

00:58:03 ◼   ► Well, you know, I like to try different things. You like to tweet around?

00:58:09 ◼   ► I do actually. And I, I think it's, um, it's useful to me to do this. Um, I used to be, uh,

00:58:22 ◼   ► into the official Twitter app, because it showed a lot of promise.

00:58:26 ◼   ► And that was before... that was 2014, it was kind of, you know, before Twitter really got awful.

00:58:35 ◼   ► I feel like the need for a third-party client has grown exponentially, especially during the

00:58:43 ◼   ► most recent political season in Europe and in the United States. And I feel like the official app has

00:58:50 ◼   ► not allowed people to filter out a lot of bad things going on on the service.

00:58:54 ◼   ► Plus, that's from a social network perspective, but from a software perspective on the iPad,

00:59:04 ◼   ► the Twitter app is really, really ridiculous. And around the same time, the iPad Pro,

00:59:11 ◼   ► you know, Apple was working on this bigger iPad and Tapbot Studio came out with Tweetbot 4,

00:59:19 ◼   ► which has this beautiful split column layout on the iPad which really takes advantage of the bigger display.

00:59:25 ◼   ► So I used Tweetbot for almost two years. I love Tweetbot. I set up hundreds of filters and all my little things.

00:59:36 ◼   ► I even have workflows for Tweetbot. So I really like the app. It's clean and it's fast.

00:59:43 ◼   ► But I've been keeping an eye on Twitter Refic because I feel like the ICON Factory is doing excellent work on iOS.

00:59:49 ◼   ► We saw the app Linea last week, they're doing lots of iMessage stickers.

00:59:54 ◼   ► And I feel like the ICON Factory is really, especially over the past couple of years,

00:59:59 ◼   ► is back on a frequent update cycle, which I really like.

01:00:03 ◼   ► I like developers that are committed to the platform, I like developers that release frequent updates.

01:00:08 ◼   ► That's something that I like. It makes me feel good about using an app that is frequently updated.

01:00:14 ◼   ► And Twitterific, I feel like there's some stigmas about the app in the sense that people think it's a Twitter client for people who really are not power users.

01:00:28 ◼   ► And that couldn't be more true because there's lots of powerful features in Twitterific.

01:00:33 ◼   ► Speaking of, I need the ability to filter out tweets. I don't want to see some people, I don't want to see some topics.

01:00:41 ◼   ► Because I follow other websites to get that information. I also don't want to see trolls in my timeline.

01:00:49 ◼   ► So, Twitterific has a different implementation of mute settings than Tweetbot. You can muffle or you can mute.

01:00:59 ◼   ► What is the difference between these?

01:01:01 ◼   ► The difference between muffling and muting is subtle but visually it is important.

01:01:07 ◼   ► The Muffle basically silences a keyword, a hashtag, a user or, this is a difference from Tweetbot, a domain.

01:01:17 ◼   ► If you want to silence all tweets from, I don't know, macstories.net, you can do that.

01:01:21 ◼   ► So you can silence on a domain basis also.

01:01:24 ◼   ► But the Muffle doesn't remove the tweet from your timeline outright.

01:01:29 ◼   ► it collapses it into a tiny cell with light gray text.

01:01:37 ◼   ► So it's a tiny bubble that says if you tap this you will see the tweet, otherwise it's collapsed.

01:01:43 ◼   ► So it's a way to show you that your filters are working,

01:01:48 ◼   ► that there's tweets that have been hidden from the timeline,

01:01:52 ◼   ► but you can still contextually reveal them if you want to.

01:01:56 ◼   ► So if you have, for example, a topic that you're not sure you want to completely mute,

01:02:02 ◼   ► you can muffle it, and then every once in a while maybe you can tap on "Muffle Tweet"

01:02:07 ◼   ► and you can take a look at it before you decide.

01:02:10 ◼   ► Are you willing to give some examples of things that you've muffled in the past?

01:02:14 ◼   ► So I can try and get an idea as to why you would do this over just muting it?

01:02:19 ◼   ► For example, there was a movie that I...

01:02:26 ◼   ► So, La La Land, for example.

01:02:28 ◼   ► I created a muffle because I didn't want to mute it, but I also didn't want to see tweets

01:02:33 ◼   ► about it.

01:02:37 ◼   ► So I just created a muffle and I skipped those tweets.

01:02:40 ◼   ► And then when I watched the movie, I deleted the muffle.

01:02:44 ◼   ► There are just some topics that I don't want to completely remove.

01:02:48 ◼   ► I want to get the amount of tweets that people are sending about the topic, but I don't want to read them.

01:02:55 ◼   ► It's also a reminder to turn it off when the time is right.

01:02:58 ◼   ► Also, yes, exactly. It's a reminder and also it gives me the idea of what people are talking about without having to look at it.

01:03:04 ◼   ► I don't know if it makes sense. I think it makes sense in practice, but it's hard to describe.

01:03:08 ◼   ► And also, of course, I also have my mute filters and like I mentioned there's a difference between tweetbots.

01:03:14 ◼   ► you can mute by domain, which I think is excellent.

01:03:16 ◼   ► If you don't want to mute a single person,

01:03:19 ◼   ► you don't want to mute a single hashtag or keyword,

01:03:22 ◼   ► you just want to make sure that anything

01:03:24 ◼   ► that comes from a specific website

01:03:25 ◼   ► never finds its way to your timeline.

01:03:28 ◼   ► That's a great way to do so.

01:03:28 ◼   ► - Can you not do that with keywords in Tweetbot?

01:03:31 ◼   ► - You could, but it's, that's my second point.

01:03:34 ◼   ► You could do the same with keywords,

01:03:36 ◼   ► but it's just more convenient in Twitter if it,

01:03:38 ◼   ► because you don't have to go into the keyword screen

01:03:41 ◼   ► and type it out manually.

01:03:43 ◼   ► In the timeline you can tap on a button and it opens a pop-up with a bunch of options.

01:03:48 ◼   ► It says "What do you want to muffle?" and it recognizes usernames, hashtags and domain names.

01:03:55 ◼   ► So you can just choose visually from a menu what you want to hide.

01:04:00 ◼   ► If you want you can go into a dedicated page, type out the keyword and muffle or mute manually.

01:04:06 ◼   ► But it's just easier.

01:04:08 ◼   ► I'm scrolling my timeline, I see something that I don't want to see, like a hashtag or a website that I don't like,

01:04:14 ◼   ► I just open the menu and I do it from there, so I don't have to switch between pages. It's very convenient.

01:04:20 ◼   ► What I don't like is that one of the best features of Tweetbot is you can create essentially timed rules.

01:04:29 ◼   ► You can say "I want to mute this person for two days because they're being super annoying about this event that I don't care about."

01:04:36 ◼   ► or "I want to mute this person for a week as a punishment."

01:04:40 ◼   ► I don't know how many people do that.

01:04:42 ◼   ► Still, you can do that in Tweet, but you cannot do the same in Twitterrific.

01:04:46 ◼   ► And I do miss that functionality.

01:04:48 ◼   ► There's also something else that I like, which is the Media Viewer in Twitterrific.

01:04:54 ◼   ► There's this feature called Center Stage that is basically a glorified media timeline.

01:05:01 ◼   ► lets you swipe, lets you move across images, videos, GIFs, it's really nice.

01:05:07 ◼   ► But especially I like two smaller details, and that's you can swipe horizontally on the screen

01:05:16 ◼   ► to reverse and advance a GIF, so you can basically alter the loop, you can move it backwards and forwards

01:05:25 ◼   ► with your finger, which is super polished. And the same works with videos, so if you want, you know,

01:05:30 ◼   ► There's no traditional video controls, so you just need to swipe and you can start over or you can move a few seconds forwards.

01:05:37 ◼   ► That's really nice.

01:05:38 ◼   ► But also when you play a video on Twitterrific, it doesn't pause music or it doesn't pause podcasts.

01:05:44 ◼   ► It just lowers the level of the background audio and it plays the video at the same time.

01:05:51 ◼   ► It's kind of like on a computer really where you can listen to multiple things at the same time.

01:05:55 ◼   ► So that's really convenient because you know, usually I open Twitter videos of dogs. There's not a lot of sound going on

01:06:03 ◼   ► But there's still like I don't know a dog barking for example, I can have that next to my music

01:06:08 ◼   ► I mean, it's kind of cute. Let me ask you

01:06:10 ◼   ► What is the utility of being able to reverse a gif with your finger?

01:06:14 ◼   ► Oh, it's nice too if you want to catch a detail or a funny expression

01:06:19 ◼   ► I think it's just funny to not especially for long

01:06:23 ◼   ► GIFs, it's great not to have to wait for the end of the loop or to just close it and tap it again

01:06:30 ◼   ► You know if there's like a funny face in the middle that you want to see you can just swipe backwards

01:06:35 ◼   ► I think it's that's that's cute. That's how I use a feature. It's a power

01:06:39 ◼   ► And finally I want to mention how

01:06:43 ◼   ► Twitterific, this is not like an ad it's just a

01:06:48 ◼   ► Federico tries apps, it's a new segment

01:06:52 ◼   ► It's gotten a lot better, I feel like, in recent updates, like the performance of the timeline

01:06:57 ◼   ► used to be, if you have hundreds of mute filters, which I do, the performance in the timeline used to be

01:07:04 ◼   ► poor, used to be all stuttery and not smooth at all. Now it's much better with the last update that came out last week.

01:07:11 ◼   ► And also you can see in the mute filters page

01:07:15 ◼   ► you can see how long ago a filter was last matched.

01:07:21 ◼   ► I had, for example, yeah, I had filters for Eurovision 2015.

01:07:26 ◼   ► - Didn't even know, man.

01:07:30 ◼   ► - That of course I could delete because, you know,

01:07:33 ◼   ► we're waiting for the next edition, which I will mute.

01:07:36 ◼   ► - Come on.

01:07:37 ◼   ► - No.

01:07:38 ◼   ► I had filters for all politicians, for example,

01:07:42 ◼   ► like guys that are no longer around,

01:07:44 ◼   ► not because they're dead,

01:07:45 ◼   ► just because they're not famous anymore.

01:07:48 ◼   ► So I could delete those filters

01:07:51 ◼   ► because they were just sitting there and Twitterrific tells me that.

01:07:56 ◼   ► So I think there's a... my conclusion is this.

01:08:00 ◼   ► There's a lot of Twitter power users, people like me who use Twitter for...

01:08:04 ◼   ► in the tech bubble, sort of, or maybe they follow some video game people

01:08:10 ◼   ► that assume that Tweetbot is THE app for power users.

01:08:15 ◼   ► I think Twitterrific is just as powerful, some different things,

01:08:21 ◼   ► Some things I don't like, but it's a very, very solid alternative from a company that I really like,

01:08:27 ◼   ► because they're good people and they release frequent updates, they do good work,

01:08:31 ◼   ► so I think it's worth checking out again. That's what I have to say.

01:08:34 ◼   ► I have some questions for you.

01:08:35 ◼   ► Do you run any of the unified timeline stuff?

01:08:38 ◼   ► No.

01:08:39 ◼   ► Because this has always been like a linchpin of Twitterific, right? Everything in one view.

01:08:43 ◼   ► I don't like the idea.

01:08:44 ◼   ► I've always found in my testing over the years, especially since more modern apps,

01:08:52 ◼   ► like Tweetbot and stuff came out, that Twitterrific seemed like in some ways that the unified timeline

01:08:58 ◼   ► was holding it back. It would be able to pull less tweets than other applications and you'd

01:09:03 ◼   ► be left with more gaps to fill, like when you tap here to fill the gaps in your timeline.

01:09:08 ◼   ► And I'd always assume this is probably because they're polling the API more to fill the timelines in the way that they do them.

01:09:16 ◼   ► Is this the case still? Do you find yourself having to tap that button 20 times in the morning to get the evening's tweets?

01:09:26 ◼   ► No, like Tweetbot, I find that I need to tap it a couple of times to load 400 tweets, for example.

01:09:36 ◼   ► I disabled a unified timeline right away. In fact once you download

01:09:43 ◼   ► Twitterrific there's likely a bit of setup that you need to do. You need to

01:09:47 ◼   ► disable the unified timeline, especially if you're coming from Tweetbot so you

01:09:50 ◼   ► have a certain mindset, you're used to certain features. You disable the

01:09:54 ◼   ► unified timeline, you choose the system font, maybe you enable dark mode and then

01:09:59 ◼   ► you activate iCloud syncing and yeah I think that's it.

01:10:04 ◼   ► So they have their iCloud syncing now?

01:10:06 ◼   ► Yeah, it works well.

01:10:08 ◼   ► Across iOS devices?

01:10:10 ◼   ► There's no Mac app, sadly.

01:10:12 ◼   ► And I've always as well, like we're terrific, just with the way that the UI's built, been terrified every time I send a DM, because it just feels like I'm tweeting.

01:10:23 ◼   ► Oh no, that's much better now. There's a proper threaded conversation.

01:10:27 ◼   ► So I think it was added last year to much rejoice from a lot of people.

01:10:32 ◼   ► It's finally normal.

01:10:33 ◼   ► It doesn't look like a tweet anymore.

01:10:34 ◼   ► It's just a blind fear every time I've said anything.

01:10:38 ◼   ► It's fine, it's fine.

01:10:39 ◼   ► It looks like a normal private conversation.

01:10:41 ◼   ► Alright, so let me ask you then.

01:10:43 ◼   ► Do you recommend that I try it again?

01:10:47 ◼   ► That's my point.

01:10:50 ◼   ► I don't know your Twitter usage, but I feel like personally, at least for me, I don't

01:10:54 ◼   ► spend as much time in front of my iPad Pro just browsing Twitter as I used to.

01:10:59 ◼   ► If it were like early last year, and this is something that's also related

01:11:06 ◼   ► to my toggle time tracking, I've been trying to cut back my Twitter usage,

01:11:10 ◼   ► that's another discussion, I feel like if you spend a lot of time working with

01:11:14 ◼   ► Twitter, you know, keeping conversations and all that, on the iPad Pro I feel like

01:11:19 ◼   ► Tweetbot is a superior app because it's got a better iPad layout. It truly uses the

01:11:24 ◼   ► big screen of the iPad Pro with the two columns and this is an area where

01:11:30 ◼   ► Twitterific is lacking because they do have a sidebar

01:11:33 ◼   ► But it's not nearly as useful as the column in Tweetbot

01:11:38 ◼   ► There's a sidebar to navigate sections, but there's still a lot of space left on the right where you know

01:11:44 ◼   ► Tweetbot basically lets you perform

01:11:48 ◼   ► tasking inside the app itself, so you can scroll the timeline and scroll dimensions

01:11:54 ◼   ► at the same time. It's kind of like TweetDeck in a way.

01:11:56 ◼   ► Yeah, it is.

01:11:57 ◼   ► And you cannot do the same with Twitterrific, so if you're an iPad user, you spend a lot

01:12:01 ◼   ► of time scrolling the timeline, replying to people, I don't recommend the app. But, if

01:12:09 ◼   ► you're like me, I've cut back on your Twitter usage, try not to spend too much time on it,

01:12:16 ◼   ► and just catch up on Twitter from your iPhone in the morning and maybe sometime in the evening

01:12:22 ◼   ► and reply to a few people and maybe save a few links for later, I think Twitterific is

01:12:27 ◼   ► an excellent app.

01:12:29 ◼   ► Especially because of these mute filters, not necessarily the functionality of the filters,

01:12:36 ◼   ► but the way you can easily create them.

01:12:38 ◼   ► I feel like that's really nice, the app is polished, it's fast, it works well, I prefer

01:12:44 ◼   ► on the iPhone honestly.

01:12:46 ◼   ► - Steven, I'm assuming this is just a flat out,

01:12:50 ◼   ► not good for you.

01:12:51 ◼   ► - I mean, I just installed it while Federico was talking

01:12:53 ◼   ► and it's completely frozen, so.

01:12:55 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:12:56 ◼   ► It's still not for me.

01:12:57 ◼   ► - Oh, wow.

01:12:58 ◼   ► - But I mean, it's because there's no Mac component, right?

01:12:59 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's the problem.

01:13:00 ◼   ► And I mean, Twitter was a great Mac app for a long time

01:13:03 ◼   ► and clearly it's not economically feasible

01:13:05 ◼   ► for them to continue to make that, which I understand.

01:13:07 ◼   ► I mean, it stinks, but I need something that is everywhere

01:13:11 ◼   ► and there are a lot of nice things in the iOS app,

01:13:14 ◼   ► But I would want all the mute filters and stuff everywhere,

01:13:18 ◼   ► which is what keeps me with which we bought.

01:13:20 ◼   ► - All right, thanks so much to Pingdom

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01:15:06 ◼   ► and relay FM. Another thing that I have noticed which is new and interesting about you Federico

01:15:14 ◼   ► is, you know, we send links to each other every now and then. It's typically at the

01:15:18 ◼   ► moment news related to the Nintendo Switch. We will send back and forth to each other

01:15:23 ◼   ► as we are both in an almost fever pitch as we are less than a month away. Like we are

01:15:28 ◼   ► now counting down for weeks until the Nintendo Switch is released which will be a very exciting

01:15:33 ◼   ► day for everyone. And every now and then you'll send me a link and it is an Apple news link.

01:15:41 ◼   ► And sometimes, I mean who knows where this ends up opening for me because I deleted Apple

01:15:46 ◼   ► news from my devices. Sometimes Apple news opens up in a web browser, it takes me to

01:15:51 ◼   ► the actual original page. Or sometimes, this has happened, Apple news reinstalls itself

01:15:57 ◼   ► and then I start getting notifications. Which is very peculiar, I'm not really 100% sure

01:16:01 ◼   ► how that's happening, but that does happen and so I'm wondering are you

01:16:08 ◼   ► just an Apple news user now? Like are you using it? What are you using it for? How often do you use it and why?

01:16:14 ◼   ► Honestly like a little bit of everything. I didn't like Apple news when it

01:16:21 ◼   ► launched in iOS 9. I like it much better in iOS 10 possibly because of the design.

01:16:26 ◼   ► I'm a fan of the... I think the Apple music design works better in Apple news

01:16:31 ◼   ► than Apple Music, honestly. And I use it because I find that it does a decent job at guessing

01:16:40 ◼   ► what I want to read, and it gives me the stories that I would otherwise miss, because I didn't

01:16:51 ◼   ► bother to add certain websites to my RSS. Or it shows me websites that I didn't know

01:16:57 ◼   ► existed but I end up liking those websites. So basically it gives me recommendations for

01:17:04 ◼   ► music I like, Nintendo stuff, PlayStation news, unfortunately some politics a little too much maybe,

01:17:11 ◼   ► and Apple news. So there's a heavy focus on US politics right now, of course.

01:17:17 ◼   ► Can you stop it from showing you that stuff?

01:17:21 ◼   ► You can dislike things, but I'll tell you, the reason why I mute Twitter aggressively

01:17:34 ◼   ► is that I'm reading a lot of political news these days. And I'm reading them in Apple

01:17:40 ◼   ► News, and I'm also... I think I will end up subscribing to both The Times and The New

01:17:47 ◼   ► New Yorker. Those are the two types of publications that I like, you know, for news reporting

01:17:53 ◼   ► and for long-form stories. So I'm spending a lot of time actually reading stuff, news

01:17:59 ◼   ► from journalists instead of, you know, people retweeting Donald Trump. And I feel like that's

01:18:07 ◼   ► a better investment of my time. And I feel like Apple News does a decent job at giving

01:18:13 ◼   ► me a mix of everything. I like, you know, I tap on the heart icon every once in a

01:18:20 ◼   ► while to train it. I dislike topics when I find something that's truly out of my

01:18:25 ◼   ► league, like sports stuff doesn't show up anymore because I've been disliking

01:18:30 ◼   ► everything related to sports. It basically told me nothing about the

01:18:35 ◼   ► Super Bowl so that was nice. Yeah that was good. I like that it has me

01:18:40 ◼   ► notifications you can choose to have news, you can choose to have editorial

01:18:45 ◼   ► recommendations or you can choose to get notifications for selected publications

01:18:49 ◼   ► that enable the feature like Wired or The Verge they support notifications in

01:18:53 ◼   ► Apple news. So do you get notified every time they publish a story? I don't think

01:18:58 ◼   ► it's every time I think it's when they decide to push a notification to people

01:19:02 ◼   ► that's my understanding like it's not every single story. I would like to

01:19:08 ◼   ► subscribe to be able to subscribe to pay for more publications in Apple News

01:19:13 ◼   ► there's an option in iOS 10 to subscribe to stuff like I subscribe to the BBC

01:19:19 ◼   ► Focus science magazine just to try it out because it's a subscription with the

01:19:25 ◼   ► Apple News format but unfortunately there's not enough websites like you

01:19:30 ◼   ► cannot subscribe to the Times or the New Yorker or lots of other blogs they don't

01:19:35 ◼   ► have Apple news subscriptions. So I would like to have that. There's not much to say

01:19:41 ◼   ► really, it's a place where I go, I get a bunch of news, does a decent job, the

01:19:46 ◼   ► Apple news format works fine, otherwise it's also okay because it loads from

01:19:51 ◼   ► RSS and it does pre-rendering of the in-app WebView. And it's not an RSS

01:19:58 ◼   ► replacement, it's a place where I go to when I want to find some topics without

01:20:04 ◼   ► without having to worry about my unread badge or having to manage my subscriptions.

01:20:10 ◼   ► I just go there, read, tap on the heart icon and that's about it.

01:20:14 ◼   ► You're using this alongside your RSS app as well?

01:20:19 ◼   ► Yes. In my RSS app I have more of a curated selection of websites that I follow

01:20:26 ◼   ► and also independent blogs from people I read and friends.

01:20:30 ◼   ► Like for example I read Steven in my RSS reader, not in Apple News.

01:20:36 ◼   ► And I do the same for other websites like Darren Fireball or Ben Thompson for example.

01:20:41 ◼   ► In Apple News I discover more I would say mainstream news maybe

01:20:45 ◼   ► from publications that are very high volume, I don't want to have in my RSS service,

01:20:50 ◼   ► so I get a selection of the high volume websites in Apple News

01:20:55 ◼   ► because the algorithm knows what I want to see.

01:20:59 ◼   ► Whereas my RSS service would just throw 50 articles a day at me. Yeah, that's the difference

01:21:05 ◼   ► So you might get like the Verge stories

01:21:08 ◼   ► about Apple paintings, but not about

01:21:11 ◼   ► Wi-Fi routers

01:21:13 ◼   ► Exactly. Yeah, I understand that I can get that I can get behind that like, you know

01:21:18 ◼   ► One of the things that I have about my kind of way of getting this stuff is typically through Twitter is I can ignore so

01:21:24 ◼   ► many of the headlines. But I remember when I was dealing with this in RSS, it was way

01:21:30 ◼   ► more annoying to have those like 25 articles come up because you're kind of in the mode

01:21:35 ◼   ► of checking what they all are. It's way easier, at least I find, to kind of skim through and

01:21:40 ◼   ► ignore stuff when it's on Twitter than it is when it is in your RSS feed, especially

01:21:45 ◼   ► because a lot of these publications add images. So you can very visually see if this is something

01:21:50 ◼   ► that interests you as well, like I find anyway on Twitter and maybe on Facebook and stuff

01:21:54 ◼   ► like that. Stephen, do you use Apple News at all?

01:21:58 ◼   ► I don't. I was just listening to Federico's idea of letting it pick stories for him. I've

01:22:03 ◼   ► used RSS for so long. I have a lot of stuff in there that I don't read everything. I kind

01:22:08 ◼   ► of have a folder of stuff that if I got time I'll sort through it, but then I have some

01:22:13 ◼   ► other folders of stuff I want to read. Every single thing that comes out. Go Mac Stories

01:22:17 ◼   ► or other blogs, friends of ours.

01:22:20 ◼   ► The thing for me about Apple News is that

01:22:25 ◼   ► stuff, like something like the New York Times, for instance,

01:22:30 ◼   ► which I pay for, I read on their website,

01:22:34 ◼   ► I would want that sort of stuff,

01:22:35 ◼   ► that subscription stuff in Apple News,

01:22:37 ◼   ► and some of that's just not as fully built out

01:22:40 ◼   ► as I would like for it to be.

01:22:42 ◼   ► I think the Washington Post and some others are in there,

01:22:46 ◼   ► but others are not.

01:22:47 ◼   ► And so if it was the place for like,

01:22:50 ◼   ► you know, I could subscribe to all my RSS stuff

01:22:53 ◼   ► and get all this paid stuff kind of in one place,

01:22:55 ◼   ► I may be more willing to look at it,

01:22:57 ◼   ► but so far it really hasn't come up as like a big,

01:23:01 ◼   ► a big hole in my setup.

01:23:03 ◼   ► And maybe that's just because the way I have RSS setup

01:23:07 ◼   ► where I have some stuff that I don't read all of it,

01:23:10 ◼   ► I sort of skim it.

01:23:11 ◼   ► If I don't have time, I just mark it all as read.

01:23:12 ◼   ► So for me, it has never been a big deal

01:23:15 ◼   ► a big deal. I have it installed on TIN but I don't, very rarely would I say I open it

01:23:22 ◼   ► in Perusa and because of that I don't have it you know finely tuned like

01:23:26 ◼   ► Federico does. This may be part of my same problem with things like Spotify

01:23:30 ◼   ► and like Discover Weekly where I just don't like I want to put things into it

01:23:35 ◼   ► and I don't really care to be introduced to other stuff like I have my own way

01:23:39 ◼   ► about reading and finding new sites to read. I have my way of going about finding

01:23:43 ◼   ► new music and for me some of that suggestion stuff is like it's such a pain to get it trained

01:23:48 ◼   ► and even then like it may not I find a bunch of that annoying and so that really doesn't

01:23:52 ◼   ► interest me quite quite yet.

01:23:55 ◼   ► Yeah I understand that I mean I feel like I wouldn't want to use something like this

01:24:01 ◼   ► because I'm very picky about the the stories that I want to come to me and if I'm deciding

01:24:09 ◼   ► "Oh I want to just unwind and read some tech news." I don't want to see political stories.

01:24:17 ◼   ► It breaks my brain in that way. I choose when I want to go and read that stuff. I will go to the

01:24:25 ◼   ► BBC and see what's happening. I really don't like the disruption and the mismatch. Which is one of

01:24:32 ◼   ► the reasons I'm very heavy on my mute filters like Federico for tweets and stuff like that.

01:24:38 ◼   ► but I don't think that this is something that I would want in a new service either.

01:24:42 ◼   ► Especially like notifications and widgets and things like that.

01:24:46 ◼   ► This stuff can just be so pervasive

01:24:50 ◼   ► in your life and that doesn't really work for me.

01:24:54 ◼   ► And I think that's fair. I mean there's another conversation to be had about filter bubble stuff

01:24:58 ◼   ► but I agree with you that if you, having stuff

01:25:02 ◼   ► like Jump In that you're not expecting. I really hated the news widget in iOS 9

01:25:06 ◼   ► there's part of spotlight suggestions

01:25:08 ◼   ► and you really couldn't turn it off very easily.

01:25:11 ◼   ► I'm glad that's gone.

01:25:12 ◼   ► I do think though there is something to be said

01:25:16 ◼   ► to have type artists you're not looking for

01:25:18 ◼   ► be introduced into your stream.

01:25:20 ◼   ► That's one reason I pay for the New York Times

01:25:23 ◼   ► and read it and have their app installed so I can get that,

01:25:26 ◼   ► but I don't necessarily want that in.

01:25:29 ◼   ► My RSS setup is, as you might imagine, a lot of tech.

01:25:34 ◼   ► And when I'm in that mind frame,

01:25:36 ◼   ► RSS's work for me, right?

01:25:37 ◼   ► Like I find things to link to,

01:25:38 ◼   ► find things for the shows I'm on,

01:25:40 ◼   ► and when I'm gonna sit down with my iPad

01:25:43 ◼   ► and like read the news,

01:25:44 ◼   ► and I'm gonna go to the New York Times,

01:25:45 ◼   ► go to the Washington Post, go to these other sources.

01:25:47 ◼   ► And so for me, they're separated,

01:25:49 ◼   ► so I totally understand like not wanting

01:25:50 ◼   ► to cross those streams.

01:25:52 ◼   ► But at the same time, there's benefit to it, right?

01:25:55 ◼   ► There's benefit to a system like this

01:25:56 ◼   ► that once you train it, it can surface things

01:25:58 ◼   ► that it thinks are important to you.

01:26:00 ◼   ► You can get a wider variety of sources.

01:26:04 ◼   ► You can basically get a wider variety of types of stories.

01:26:08 ◼   ► And a lot of people aren't gonna use RSS,

01:26:10 ◼   ► most people don't.

01:26:12 ◼   ► Most people just, you know, can use the app built in

01:26:14 ◼   ► and you say, "Hey, I like this stuff,

01:26:15 ◼   ► "I don't like this stuff."

01:26:16 ◼   ► And I think a lot of people kind of out in the world,

01:26:20 ◼   ► you know, you guys were talking last week

01:26:21 ◼   ► about Federico spying on his friends' phones.

01:26:24 ◼   ► I see a lot of Apple news links on Twitter and Facebook

01:26:26 ◼   ► from friends and family.

01:26:27 ◼   ► I think people are using it.

01:26:28 ◼   ► I think people are training it to a certain degree,

01:26:31 ◼   ► but like that it's built in, like that it's sort of simple,

01:26:33 ◼   ► they have all their stuff in one place.

01:26:35 ◼   ► And so from like a service perspective,

01:26:38 ◼   ► I think it's doing well.

01:26:39 ◼   ► And I've got 512 pixels in there.

01:26:41 ◼   ► I'm not using the Apple News format stuff.

01:26:42 ◼   ► They have a couple RSS feeds for me.

01:26:45 ◼   ► I actually just logged into it

01:26:46 ◼   ► and my setup is very simple.

01:26:49 ◼   ► I don't know how much readership I'm doing in there,

01:26:51 ◼   ► but it's easy from a producer standpoint as well

01:26:54 ◼   ► to be involved.

01:26:55 ◼   ► - All right, that about wraps it up today.

01:26:58 ◼   ► If you wanna catch our show notes,

01:27:00 ◼   ► go to relay.fm/connected/128.

01:27:03 ◼   ► You can find Federico online.

01:27:04 ◼   ► He is @vitici, V-I-T-I-C-C-I,

01:27:07 ◼   ► and he's at macstories.net.

01:27:09 ◼   ► Steven is at ismh, and he is at 512pixels.net.

01:27:13 ◼   ► And I am at iMyke, I-M-Y-K-E.

01:27:15 ◼   ► Thank you so much to our sponsors, Encapsula, Pingdom,

01:27:18 ◼   ► and Hover for supporting this week's show.

01:27:20 ◼   ► And thank you for listening.

01:27:22 ◼   ► We'll be back next time.

01:27:23 ◼   ► Until then, say goodbye, guys.

01:27:25 ◼   ► - Arrivederci.