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The Talk Show

227: ‘Little Q&A’

 

00:00:00   Hey, it's your internet pal, John Gruber, trying something different, something new

00:00:05   after 226 episodes of this edition of the talk show. It's just me today, no guest. And

00:00:13   it's July 31st. I have two sponsors scheduled for July, sort of been remiss this month doing

00:00:24   regular episodes. So I'm trying something new. It's just me. And I'm going to talk in

00:00:30   your ear here. And for what to talk about, I tweeted this morning asking for questions,

00:00:39   ask me anything more or less. And I am overblown. I thought I could knock this out in an hour,

00:00:45   get all the good questions. One, I like a sort of a short one hour episode, get through

00:00:49   all the questions. There's no way that that's going to happen. I have just spent the last,

00:00:54   probably close to four hours sorting through the questions on Twitter. They're terrific.

00:01:02   I've categorized them. I don't think there's any chance. I'd be lucky if I get through half of them.

00:01:07   I think it could be really fun. So my thanks to everybody who asked questions. My apologies to

00:01:15   everybody whose questions I don't get to. Maybe I'll do another episode like this, but anyway,

00:01:19   it's just me answering your questions today on the talk show. And before I do,

00:01:25   why don't I knock this out of the way and tell you about Squarespace?

00:01:30   Squarespace has been sponsoring this podcast longer than any other sponsor I can think of.

00:01:37   There's a bunch of repeat sponsors who I'm sure you're all familiar with, but Squarespace

00:01:42   is the king, and I thank them for their continuing support.

00:01:46   Here's the thing, though.

00:01:47   I truly believe in Squarespace.

00:01:50   I really do think that it is the best way

00:01:54   for almost anybody to get a website off the ground.

00:02:01   And it doesn't matter what type of website you're building.

00:02:04   You could host a blog, you could host a podcast,

00:02:08   You can put up a store, you can set up a portfolio,

00:02:13   and you get so much customization.

00:02:17   The main thing, I hear, oh, you go there,

00:02:20   you get templates to choose from, and I start thinking,

00:02:22   ah, you're gonna get like a cookie cutter site.

00:02:25   You use Squarespace sites every day,

00:02:27   and you don't even realize it.

00:02:28   I do this all the time.

00:02:29   The main reason I often find out

00:02:31   that somebody's using Squarespace

00:02:33   is I see a typeface that they're using,

00:02:35   and I select it, and I go into the Safari web inspector,

00:02:38   and start looking at the source code

00:02:39   to see what typeface it is.

00:02:41   This just happened to me this week

00:02:42   with a company, a great company, local company here in Philly

00:02:45   the Philly Bread Company.

00:02:47   You can go to phillybread.com, see their website.

00:02:49   They're using, which obviously, some version of Courier,

00:02:53   but I could sort of suspect it wasn't like

00:02:56   the system version of Courier,

00:02:58   and it definitely isn't Courier new.

00:03:00   So I went into the web inspector to see what they're using,

00:03:03   and in fact, it is Courier STD,

00:03:05   which is sort of a web-hosted version of Courier.

00:03:08   looks great. It's a great look for their site. It's a great fit for their brand. Anyway,

00:03:12   poking around the source code, guess what? It's a Squarespace site. Again, they're there

00:03:16   making cool bread. They make the best English muffins. They call them Philly muffins. Oh

00:03:21   my God, they are the best English muffins I've ever had in my life. You guys, if you

00:03:24   don't live in, if you do live in Philly, see where you can get them. And if you don't live

00:03:27   in Philly, you're missing out. But anyway, they're using Squarespace. It makes total

00:03:33   sense because all they want to do is make great bread. They're, they're not here to

00:03:38   website and spend a lot of time on it and maintain it etc etc. Squarespace is the way that you can

00:03:45   make your website and just have no work. Just make it easy. It just runs and they handle everything.

00:03:54   You can register your domain with them. They have the CMS so you can post new content. They also

00:04:02   have award-winning tech support. The next time you need to make a website or and knowing the people

00:04:08   who listen to this show, the next time somebody comes to you for help making a website, go to

00:04:14   Squarespace, get started, give it an hour, give it even just half an hour and see how far you can

00:04:19   get. You'll be amazed and it's really just a terrific product and service. Go there and you

00:04:28   you get a free trial. I think it's 30 days. Get started. And

00:04:33   then just remember this code talk show know that just ta l K

00:04:37   sh o w. When you do sign up to pay use that code and you get 10%

00:04:42   off. They let you sign up for a whole year at a time so you

00:04:45   could save 10% on a whole year of Squarespace hosting just by

00:04:49   remembering that code. talk show. Alright, let's get

00:04:53   started. There's a lot of questions. Like I said, I don't

00:04:55   I'm going to get through them all. First category is questions related to the new 15-inch MacBook Pro,

00:05:02   which I've been testing now for about two weeks and pretty much doing all of my computing on.

00:05:08   I've kind of thrown myself in knee deep. And let me issue this. This is a correction from the show

00:05:14   I did last week with Marco Warmant talking about this. And I raved about Migration Assistant,

00:05:19   a product from Apple that lets you get a new Mac, use Migration Assistant. You can copy over

00:05:24   all of your stuff from another machine.

00:05:28   I said it copied almost everything,

00:05:30   except it didn't get my login items.

00:05:33   Well, I ended up looking into this

00:05:34   and it turns out that the login items,

00:05:38   the things in the users and groups system pref panel

00:05:41   that are apps that,

00:05:43   and a lot of them are usually background apps

00:05:45   that start automatically when you log in.

00:05:51   A lot of the ones that I thought didn't get moved over, I looked at my source machine,

00:05:55   which is my old personal 2014 MacBook 13-inch MacBook Pro. It turns out I looked there and

00:06:02   the ones that I thought I had set up as login items weren't set up there either. And so

00:06:07   I think what has happened for a couple of these things like TextExpander and the Keyboard

00:06:11   Maestro, Engine Keyboard Maestro is a great, great utility. And part of what makes it work

00:06:19   is that there's this invisible process in the background and engine and it has to be

00:06:22   running otherwise the keyboard maestro doesn't work.

00:06:26   Another one that I didn't think moved over was a great little background service called

00:06:29   Fast Scripts by Daniel Jalkett. Fast Scripts is like a system-wide scripts menu that lives

00:06:36   up in the menu bar and lets you have these Apple scripts, shell scripts, anything like

00:06:42   that. You can run them anywhere in the system. Love it. I don't know what I would do without

00:06:47   it. Anyway, I think that these apps, they weren't in my login items on my previous MacBook

00:06:51   Pro. And I think what was happening is that for you, because I do have the preference

00:06:55   turned on to reopen previously running apps when I log back in. So if I restart the machine

00:07:02   or log out and log in, I have the preference set to reopen whatever apps were already running.

00:07:06   I think for years now, because I have that set, those background things have been relaunching

00:07:10   automatically every time I restart or install a system update without being login items,

00:07:17   were just relaunching because I have that preference on. So my apologies to the migration

00:07:21   assistant team. It's even better than I thought because the couple of login items I did have

00:07:26   on that machine did make it over to the new machine. So even your login items move over,

00:07:31   they're definitely supposed to. And even on my machine, the ones that were there as login items

00:07:35   did. So glad to get that off my chest. I felt very guilty about having having besmirched

00:07:43   even one tiny aspect of migration assistant given how amazingly good it turned out to be.

00:07:49   So here we go. Actbook Pro. James Atkinson asks, "Probably already asked, but does it get loud

00:07:58   under load?" Well, that's the first question, so it wasn't asked already, James. That's a very

00:08:04   good question. In my personal use, which is not very strenuous, I'm not doing video editing, I'm

00:08:11   I'm not doing anything particularly heavy.

00:08:15   The fan has never come on, so it is dead silent.

00:08:18   And I've done some stuff that is somewhat stressful.

00:08:20   I've imported images, shot in raw on my Fuji X100S

00:08:25   into photos and had them process in the background.

00:08:29   I have installed a bunch of stuff from Homebrew,

00:08:33   some of which needed to be compiled

00:08:35   by the Xcode command line tools.

00:08:38   The fan never came on.

00:08:40   The only thing that I've done in the two weeks I've had this machine where the fan came on

00:08:44   is when I let my son Jonas play Fortnite on it. And yes, when he was playing Fortnite,

00:08:50   the fan definitely came on and the machine definitely got hot. Was it loud? It was no

00:08:58   louder than I would expect than it would be for a MacBook under duress, you know, that

00:09:06   was being stressful. I don't think it was any louder than previous machines, probably

00:09:10   And if anything the people who wish that the thing could run faster under load

00:09:15   They probably wish that it got louder that it had a bigger thicker

00:09:19   more significant cooling system

00:09:21   You can definitely hear it when it's under load, but fortnight was the only thing I've done where that even kicked in

00:09:28   Again I don't know how else to say it other than while the fan is running. I don't I don't know how it could be any quieter

00:09:38   Next question is from somebody whose Twitter name is

00:09:41   ironically racist

00:09:45   Satirically, so hopefully that means they're not actually racist. I don't know but it's a good question

00:09:52   in your opinion, do you think Apple should not will should a

00:09:57   swallow their pride and reverse course with touch bar and

00:10:02   and thickness of MacBook Pros, presumably.

00:10:05   B, make a new top of the line Pro,

00:10:10   MacBook Pro, presumably again,

00:10:11   for pros that's thicker with legacy ports,

00:10:14   hardware function keys, higher end components, et cetera.

00:10:19   Or C, stay the course.

00:10:20   So I think A and B here are actually the same thing.

00:10:23   I mean, swallowing their pride and reversing course

00:10:26   with the touch bar and thickness,

00:10:28   and B, making a new top of the line Pro that's thicker

00:10:31   is the same thing.

00:10:33   So I sort of feel like it's A or B,

00:10:36   are they going to make a thicker quote unquote pro

00:10:39   or B stay the course?

00:10:40   And I suspect, again, he's asking whether they should,

00:10:44   not will, I think they will stay the course.

00:10:46   Whether they should, I don't know.

00:10:51   I think that a significantly thicker

00:10:56   like gaming PC laptop style laptop

00:11:01   is just not in Apple's DNA

00:11:02   and I don't think it should be in their DNA.

00:11:04   I don't think they should do it.

00:11:06   A little bit thicker, what's the point?

00:11:09   I know that there's a lot of,

00:11:12   hey, the previous generation was thin enough.

00:11:15   Nobody asked for them to make it thinner.

00:11:18   Why not keep it the thickness that it was

00:11:20   and have it run faster, et cetera?

00:11:24   I get it.

00:11:25   And there is something to this right where and I think Marco and I talked about this

00:11:31   on my show last week where the current lineup of MacBook Pros I think it compared to the

00:11:40   desktop is roughly analogous to the regular iMac 5Ks. They are excellent machines. They

00:11:49   are premium machines. They are definitely not low end machines. These are premium personal

00:11:54   computers with terrific displays excellent consumer to prosumer

00:12:01   performance but Apple saw fit with the iMac to do the iMac Pro which is not

00:12:11   just like a little name it's not just that they tacked on the word Pro to it

00:12:17   and and anodized the aluminum in a space gray color and gave you a black keyboard

00:12:22   keyboard and trackpad. Internally, they're using Intel Xeon processors, which are totally

00:12:29   professional grade. They're using professional-grade RAM. They didn't just shoehorn those into

00:12:35   the same enclosure. It is an entirely different—as much as they look the same cosmetically side-by-side,

00:12:42   the cooling system in the iMac Pro is entirely different. If you took it apart, it's just

00:12:47   an entirely different system architecture. And it is in every way that it is different

00:12:53   than a regular iMac other than the cosmetic difference of the space great aluminum. Put

00:13:00   that aside in every other way that they're different. They are different in ways that

00:13:03   are truly for professionals who need high end computing performance. Is there such a

00:13:12   need in the laptop lineup. And I kind of think there is, I do. There are people who use laptops

00:13:19   for whatever reason, like, you know, developers who work at a place where everybody gets issued

00:13:26   a laptop, that's just it. Or you move around, you know, and you, you know, even if you want a

00:13:31   display, rather than get an iMac or an iMac Pro, you want to plug your MacBook into the external

00:13:37   display or another example video and photo professionals who are doing stuff in the field,

00:13:44   right? You're out there shooting photos in the field and you want to process them in light room

00:13:49   or Photoshop or whatever you're using right there on the spot where you need a portable for that and

00:13:53   you need the best performance that you can possibly get. And it's weird. I do. I mentioned

00:14:00   this with Marco. I kind of feel that Apple has backed themselves into a corner marketing wise

00:14:06   by calling all of the premium non super thin MacBooks quote unquote MacBook Pro. They've

00:14:11   already used the pro moniker. So with the iMac, the iMac, again, the regular iMac five

00:14:19   K's are amazing machines. They are not like baby computers. They are terrific computers.

00:14:24   I use one from 2014 and it is still to my touch super fast. It is super fast, still

00:14:30   has a beautiful display. I love it. But the iMac Pro is pro in ways that there is no corresponding

00:14:40   MacBook Pro that is that much more "pro" than the standard machines. Is that reason enough not to do

00:14:47   it just because they've already used the pro name for the MacBook Pros? That seems a bit silly,

00:14:51   and I don't think that actually explains why they wouldn't do it. But I think it kind of belies their

00:14:57   thinking on the matter that that they sort of see what they've got what they're shipping

00:15:01   is pro. I don't know if that's a good answer for should they it's a little bit rambling

00:15:08   but that's the best I can do. I got to move on. J Robert Lennon asks, Have you found a

00:15:14   meaningful use for the touch bar or does it seem to you that it's going to go the way

00:15:18   of the iPod Hi Fi? Here's a corresponding question from the other perspective. Taylor

00:15:23   Alan asks, do you think there's anything Apple can do to change the narrative around the

00:15:28   touch bar? I like it and find it useful for editing an email. The touch bar is one of

00:15:34   those things, and I think it's as often the case, but the people who hate it, the people

00:15:38   who wish that Apple had never done it or that they would just forget about it, brush it

00:15:43   under the rug and go back to hardware keys. They seem to think everybody agrees on that.

00:15:49   And I don't think that's the case at all. I mean, it clearly Taylor Allen here who asked

00:15:53   question likes it. I don't hate it either and I personally wonder how much the the

00:16:01   hate around the touch bar is specifically about the absence of a

00:16:04   hardware escape key. I use the escape keys somewhat often. I miss it. I don't

00:16:12   like the software one on the touch bar but I don't use it as much as some

00:16:17   people. Some developers use it a lot just because there are text editors that

00:16:22   developers use like them that pretty much you're hitting escape as often as you hit

00:16:26   the spacebar that frequently and not having a hardware escape key is it can be a problem.

00:16:33   So what I kind of wish that Apple had done with these new MacBook Pros that just shipped

00:16:38   this month. I and I think I said this back in 2016 when I first reviewed these machines.

00:16:46   I kind of wish that they had put a hardware traditional hardware escape key right up in

00:16:51   the top left corner above the tilde and back to key just and made the touch bar go from

00:16:59   that escape key over to the touch ID button on the other side. We already have a button

00:17:05   up there in the touch bar, a real button. That's the touch ID sensor. That's a button.

00:17:09   It's not part of the touch bar. I don't think cosmetically it would look bad if there was

00:17:14   hardware escape key up there in the corner and they're already not using the part of

00:17:23   the touch bar all the way to the right. That's what I kind of wish that they had done as

00:17:28   a 2.0 touch bar and I wonder how much of the complaints that would alleviate. For me personally,

00:17:35   everything else about the touch bar I like. I've never liked using the F1 through F12

00:17:40   keys for things like brightness and sound. It's always seemed like occludes to me. It's

00:17:45   always seemed ugly to me that they've got the F1, F2, all that printed on it, and these

00:17:51   cryptic little icons for the brightness and stuff like that. They've seemed very fiddly

00:17:55   to me ever since they've started doing it. And it seems to me very un-Apple-like to have

00:18:01   those keys. I think that the touch bar is elegant. And for things like brightness and

00:18:05   sound volume adjustment. I like the touch bar better than using hardware buttons. It's

00:18:12   not perfect though, because you have to look at it. You can't do it by feel. So I guess

00:18:18   if you really memorize where the volume keys are, you could get there without having to

00:18:22   look. But I think this is more elegant and I like it. And I don't think it's going to

00:18:29   go away. I don't think that Apple is going to abandon it.

00:18:33   week on my show Marco mentioned a trick that you can use. You don't need third-party software

00:18:40   at all. You can go into System Preferences, Keyboard, and there's a modifier keys button,

00:18:47   and then it brings up a little alert where you can change what the modifier keys do,

00:18:51   and you can change the caps lock key to map it to escape. And that's what Marco's been

00:18:56   doing with these keyboards. I've turned it on, and I think it's pretty cool because I

00:19:01   don't really use caps lock for caps lock.

00:19:03   Using it as escape is a pretty good workaround

00:19:10   and it's really smart.

00:19:11   It even is smart enough to know once you've said,

00:19:13   hey, use the caps lock key for escape,

00:19:16   it no longer triggers the green light for caps lock.

00:19:18   So it's not like every other time that you use caps lock

00:19:21   for escape that the green light for caps lock

00:19:23   comes on and off.

00:19:24   It just never comes on once you've said,

00:19:26   don't use it for caps lock.

00:19:28   That's a pretty good workaround.

00:19:30   Otherwise though, if you really want a high-end MacBook

00:19:34   with hardware function keys, I think you're out of luck.

00:19:37   I think that that chip has sailed.

00:19:38   And honestly, I don't get it.

00:19:41   I don't get what you'd want the other F keys for.

00:19:44   Sorry.

00:19:48   Josh Senners, editor at Tidbits, wrote,

00:19:53   "I have a friend wanting to max out a MacBook Pro.

00:19:56   "Is the i9 a good buy after the fix?"

00:19:59   meaning the supplemental software update

00:20:01   that came out last week to fix the weird bug

00:20:03   where in some certain cases,

00:20:04   the Core i9 high-end MacBook Pro

00:20:09   actually was performing worse than the four core Core i7.

00:20:13   Or is it too limited thermally?

00:20:16   To go back to Joss's question.

00:20:18   As far as I can tell,

00:20:19   after the supplemental fix last week,

00:20:21   the Core i9 is working perfectly.

00:20:24   Again, I haven't run extensive benchmarks,

00:20:26   but I've looking at the YouTube YouTubers like Dave David Lee, I think his name is who

00:20:32   originally reported the issue where Adobe Premiere Pro was actually running slower on

00:20:38   the core I9 and only got acceptable performance when he literally put it in this freezer and

00:20:46   then got similar results running it not in the freezer after the supplemental fix. As

00:20:51   far as I can tell, the supplemental fix actually fixed it. It was a bug. It was relatively

00:20:56   simple in the core. I nine runs as fast as Apple promises. If you look at Apple's promised

00:21:03   performance gains and you know, I think they say like up to 70% faster than last year's

00:21:07   ion model. That's about right. I don't think the core I nine is magic. I think as Marco

00:21:15   said last week on the show effectively, they, they really probably should have just kept

00:21:19   it as a, they still should have called it a core. I seven. It's not really like a new

00:21:24   They've added two cores, but they've stayed on a 14 nanometer process.

00:21:30   And you effectively get the performance you'd expect going from four cores to six cores.

00:21:36   And that's it.

00:21:37   So if that sounds good to you, I would definitely recommend this machine.

00:21:40   I think it's exactly what Apple describes it as.

00:21:42   I don't think there's any thermal problem with it.

00:21:45   And it's a good time to buy, because we know that Apple doesn't really update machines.

00:21:50   not going to come out with new MacBook Pros three months or six months from now. They,

00:21:54   you know, pretty much the best you can hope for is once a year. So if you have the professional

00:21:58   need and you want the fastest possible MacBook that you can get, you should definitely get

00:22:03   the core I nine MacBook Pro. It is. It is absolutely what Apple says. It's the fastest

00:22:08   MacBook Pro you can buy. It's faster at everything. How much faster? It depends on how much you

00:22:15   know, whatever the task is, how much it can be multi-threaded or parallelized, whatever

00:22:19   you want to call it. But I think it is exactly as Apple describes.

00:22:24   Cameron Williams asks, Apple still makes the best laptops, but would you say they're still

00:22:29   great laptops? I say yes. Do I think they're perfect? No, but I don't know that they've

00:22:35   ever been perfect. Probably the closest to perfect was around 2014. And you know, there

00:22:43   are, you know, that's what I own and I love that machine. It's obviously slower than the

00:22:50   current ones. It's four years old, but boy, that was as close to perfection as, as Apple

00:22:56   could get, had great battery life, had a retina display, had a great selection of ports. And

00:23:03   I think if there's any downside, there are two things that you, you know, people, they're

00:23:06   all, they're both obvious and they've both been discussed to death, but the two things

00:23:10   that are questionable on the current MacBook Pro lineup are the keyboard and the port situation.

00:23:17   On the keyboard front, the reliability issue was a huge problem. Does this silicone membrane

00:23:25   that they've started shipping as of this generation this month, does it fix the reliability problem?

00:23:31   The jury's out. Only time will tell. I've used this thing for two weeks. I had it at

00:23:36   Marco's Beach House. I mean, I didn't take it to the actual beach, so it's not like I

00:23:40   actually exposed it to sand. But I've had no problems with any of the keys. But two

00:23:46   weeks in, who does? I mean, the problem a lot of people have is it happens a year in

00:23:50   or two years in or three years in. I expected a keyboard to work for years and years. There's

00:23:57   no reason with a 2000 or 3000 or even more MacBook that you shouldn't expect it to work

00:24:03   for years and have the keyboard work with perfect reliability. So the jury's out on

00:24:08   whether this fixes that. In terms of the keyboard working as designed, you know, the big issue

00:24:14   is the travel. In other words, these keys don't move as far down as the previous ones.

00:24:20   But Apple's been doing that. That's that's been true forever. The keyboard, you know,

00:24:24   Apple's laptops going back to the power book era have always moved in one direction in

00:24:29   the long run. They've always gotten thinner and because the machines get thinner and lighter,

00:24:34   the keyboards necessarily have to get thinner. I two weeks in, especially using this machine

00:24:42   almost exclusively for the last two weeks, I'm getting used to the keyboard and to me,

00:24:47   laptop keyboards are always a compromise. I mean, and I'm weird because I like to use

00:24:52   an old Apple extended keyboard to mechanical keyboard

00:24:56   with lots of travel and clicky feel

00:25:00   that has a keyboard, a hardware keyboard at my desk

00:25:03   that has way more travel and clickiness

00:25:05   than anything that Apple sells

00:25:07   or any modern keyboard really has

00:25:09   other than new mechanical keyboards.

00:25:11   And compared to that,

00:25:14   compared to a real mechanical keyboard,

00:25:17   no laptop keyboard ever has felt great to me

00:25:20   in terms of what I think typing on a laptop compared to typing at my desk. And you get

00:25:26   used to it. It's always a compromise. I find that I'm used to this. Even as someone who

00:25:32   really likes a clicky keyboard with lots of travel, I can get used to this. And the longer

00:25:35   I use it, the more it feels okay. But it's a personal preference. But I don't expect

00:25:44   them to go back to more travel. I think once they go to this, if you don't like it, if

00:25:49   if you think that the travel isn't enough,

00:25:51   bad news for the future,

00:25:53   'cause I don't think they're ever gonna go back.

00:25:55   The port situation is the bigger problem, I think.

00:25:58   And again, Marco Arman and I talked about this at length

00:26:02   in the previous episode of this show,

00:26:04   but the USBC ecosystem several years

00:26:09   into these USBC-only MacBooks

00:26:12   simply isn't where Apple surely expected it to be.

00:26:16   You can't get a good USBC hub.

00:26:19   You really can't.

00:26:20   And there are tons of USB-A plugs and peripherals out there.

00:26:25   And at the very least, I don't use a lot of USB peripherals,

00:26:31   but even as someone who doesn't use a lot of them,

00:26:35   even I already need a USB-A to USB-C adapter.

00:26:40   Even right now, I'm recording this podcast

00:26:44   using the 15-inch MacBook Pro.

00:26:46   I need a USB adapter just to plug my microphone in.

00:26:49   I mean, I guess I could buy a different cable,

00:26:52   but I don't have that cable, so I needed the adapter.

00:26:55   That's a downside, but I don't think it means

00:26:59   that they're not great laptops.

00:27:00   I still think they're great laptops.

00:27:01   I think that they have tremendous fit and finish,

00:27:04   absolutely beautiful displays,

00:27:07   and overall, and great track pads.

00:27:14   I think they're great laptops overall. I really do. Tom Bridge asks, does the true tone display

00:27:21   actually matter? I think it does. And I think it's exactly the same on the Mac as it is

00:27:27   on iOS, where for me at least true tone isn't something I notice. It's something I don't

00:27:34   notice. But then when I look at a non true after I get used to it, when I look at a non

00:27:38   true tone display side by side with a true tone display and indoor lighting, I am appalled

00:27:43   by the non true tone display. I think it looks off. I it's again, it's just something that

00:27:49   you don't appreciate until you see it till you get used to it and then go back to one

00:27:53   that doesn't have it. I love that this machine has it and it's probably my single favorite

00:27:58   thing about it compared to my personal 2014 MacBook Pro. Here's a question from Brandon

00:28:08   Miller. I'm curious about the difference you see, meaning me, between night shift and true

00:28:14   tone. You're pretty on the record about liking true tone, but to me they're pretty similar

00:28:19   and make the screen look terrible. We have these great accurate screens and they make

00:28:22   it look like someone peed on them. So that's interesting. But to me, I think there's a

00:28:29   big difference between night shift and true tone. I believe it that Brandon here and I

00:28:33   I believe other people can see the true tone effect and don't like it that they can tell

00:28:38   no matter what the color is ambient color in the room is they can see that the display

00:28:44   is doing something faking something you know doing a color shift to accommodate for it

00:28:50   and it throws everything off I believe you that you see it and if you do see it I'm sure

00:28:53   you hate it but I think the point of true tone is that for most people they don't see

00:28:59   it and it actually makes the display seem more natural even though it's actually not

00:29:05   showing true colors. Whereas night shift is purposefully shifting the color in a way that

00:29:11   is supposed to be noticeable. You're supposed to be, you know, there's no way that people

00:29:15   don't notice that there's everything is as a yellow greenish sickly tint to it. When

00:29:21   I see somebody using night shift on an iPhone, I'm appalled. I often think, cause I go, I

00:29:26   I don't have it turned on.

00:29:28   Nobody in my family uses it,

00:29:29   so I don't see it for weeks at a time,

00:29:31   and then I see somebody using it,

00:29:33   and I often, my first thought for a moment

00:29:35   is always like maybe they dropped their phone

00:29:37   and broke the display in some way,

00:29:39   and now it shows weird colors,

00:29:41   and then I think, oh no, no, they've got night shift on.

00:29:43   Like to me, it looks so gross that it seems broken.

00:29:46   Your mileage may vary, obviously.

00:29:50   Other people might have the same feeling with True Tone,

00:29:52   but to me, night shift is doing that on purpose,

00:29:54   And I still believe that the,

00:29:56   if it works with your eyes,

00:29:59   if you feel like your eyes aren't bothered as much

00:30:01   when you're using night shift,

00:30:03   good for you and keep using it.

00:30:05   But I think the pseudo science

00:30:06   that it makes you sleep better is a crock of shit.

00:30:08   I don't think that there's any truth to that at all.

00:30:11   Again, if your eyes are comfortable, you can tell.

00:30:13   But I think this idea that it helps you sleep better

00:30:15   at night because you're not showing blue tones

00:30:17   on the screen is a big pile of horseshit.

00:30:20   Dimitri, no last name, asks,

00:30:24   Do you think it's worth to upgrade from a 2017 base 15 inch

00:30:29   to the new base model 15 inch with upgraded RAM

00:30:33   and for two extra cores?

00:30:36   Also, can fan speed be adjusted by the user?

00:30:39   I don't think it's worth upgrading from a 2017.

00:30:43   I really don't.

00:30:45   Unless you're really RAM constrained,

00:30:48   but if you're RAM constrained, you know it.

00:30:50   If you really need 32 gigs of RAM rather than a 16 gig config, you know it, and I guess

00:30:57   it is worth it if the work you're doing actually maxes out the RAM. Otherwise, I can't see

00:31:03   that it would be worth upgrading from a 2017 model. I would just use that for a couple

00:31:09   of years and then upgrade. Can the fan speed be adjusted by the user? No way. I mean, I

00:31:15   don't even know where you would do that. I mean, maybe there's some kind of command line

00:31:18   stuff you can do that's off the books. But it's certainly in terms of the controls that

00:31:23   Apple exposes and system preferences, there's no control over fan speed. But I don't think

00:31:27   you need to worry about it. The fan never kicks in for me. Joel Houseman asks, "Does the new keyboard

00:31:35   with the membrane feel any different than the previous version of this horrible keyboard?"

00:31:40   Tell us what you really think, Joel. I think it definitely feels a bit different.

00:31:46   I don't have an extensive number of these side by side to compare with, but I did compare it to

00:31:51   the regular just plain MacBook from 2017. And I remember using these, the first generation of it,

00:32:00   or maybe that was the second generation and the 20s. I think the first generation butterfly was on

00:32:05   the original one port MacBook. Second generation started with the 2016 MacBook Pros that switched

00:32:11   to this design. And now this is the Apple's calling the third generation. I think it definitely

00:32:16   feels better, feels different and better. And it definitely sounds better. There's no

00:32:22   question about it. It's there's, there's, it's just quieter and it's a more pleasing

00:32:26   sound while you're typing. It's it truly is a third generation keyboard. There's, you

00:32:31   know, whether you like it or not, whether you think it's still a horrible keyboard,

00:32:36   there's no question in my mind that it's more than just a putting a membrane on the old

00:32:40   keyboard. It's a different, you know, it's definitely a generation ahead. It's like a

00:32:44   3.0. And I like it better. Jeff, no last name, asked why didn't Apple include a plug adapter

00:32:52   extension given the cost is $2800? That's a great question. So for those of you, if

00:32:58   you don't know, up until this up until they started switching to these USB C adapters

00:33:03   for MacBook Pros, you're when you bought a new MacBook or MacBook Pro of any kind or

00:33:09   or a power book going back to then,

00:33:10   you'd get the rectangular power adapter,

00:33:12   which by default has a little prong

00:33:15   that you can open up and plug right into the wall.

00:33:17   So the adapter's right in the socket.

00:33:20   Or they'd ship an extensive, maybe a five or six foot cord,

00:33:24   and you could swap, pop the little prong

00:33:27   off the power adapter, put the extension cord on instead,

00:33:30   and get an extra six feet.

00:33:32   And they used to include that in the box,

00:33:33   and they don't anymore.

00:33:38   Presumably why they didn't include it is that Apple has determined or guessed or figured that most people don't use it

00:33:44   and therefore they can save some money by not including it and

00:33:48   Perhaps more than the cost of the extension cord itself

00:33:53   I feel like the the big savings is in space in the packaging that the packaging

00:33:58   I don't have the box in front of me, but the box for this

00:34:02   I don't believe that that they could fit that power cord in the box

00:34:07   the box that they're actually shipping these things in,

00:34:10   they'd have to make the box at least a little bit thicker

00:34:13   to include a power cord.

00:34:15   And so I guess, you know, they're saving a bit of money,

00:34:21   but as Jeff says for $2,800 plus,

00:34:24   what could be an up to, you know,

00:34:26   the config I'm using here is like a $5,000 config.

00:34:29   And I think it goes up to like 7,000

00:34:30   if you maxed out the SSD storage.

00:34:33   For a multi-thousand dollar laptop,

00:34:36   I think it's a nickel and dime move not to include the power cord. So I sort of feel

00:34:40   like where Apple should meet users halfway. My idea would be that, okay, if you don't

00:34:44   want to include it by default, because most people don't use it, don't. But anyone who

00:34:48   buys one of these machines who wants one should be able to get one for free. Like maybe while

00:34:54   you're buying online, they could say, would you like a power adapter cord? And if you

00:35:00   say yes, it would ship in a separate little box. And if you're buying in the store, they

00:35:04   could ask you as you're buying it and then just give you one. I really think it's ridiculous

00:35:08   that you have to with a 20 to 3000 $4,005,000 laptop that you have to spend money to get

00:35:14   a power extension cord. I'm personally a fan of them with my personal MacBook, I keep the

00:35:20   extension cord on the power adapter, at least in my the one that I take with me in my backpack

00:35:26   traveling because I usually don't need it. Usually the the length between the adapter

00:35:33   in the mag safe thing is long enough for me,

00:35:36   but often enough, I do need the extra length

00:35:40   that the extension cord enables

00:35:42   that it's worth keeping it in my backpack.

00:35:44   So, you know, at least a couple times a year,

00:35:47   I find myself needing it, and so it's worth having.

00:35:50   And I do feel like it's sort of a nickel and dime move

00:35:52   with these machines not to include it.

00:35:55   Paul Sprangers asks,

00:35:58   "A thicker MacBook Pro which has more ports,

00:36:01   more CPU power, more GPU and battery life.

00:36:04   Should Apple get on that?

00:36:05   Well, this is sort of a repeat of a previous question.

00:36:07   Best I can say is in theory, yes, but I don't expect it, no.

00:36:14   Sam Armstrong asks, will Apple ever back down

00:36:19   from their current laptop keyboard?

00:36:23   I am planning on getting a Windows machine

00:36:25   unless they make major changes.

00:36:26   Back down is the wrong way to look at it.

00:36:29   If you're expecting them to go back to the previous keyboard design,

00:36:32   it is not going to happen. And I don't think it should. I don't think it's,

00:36:35   I think that while there are some people who hated and hate this design and wish

00:36:39   that they would, I don't think that that number is enough to justify it.

00:36:43   In theory,

00:36:45   would they ever go to a keyboard with more travel in a,

00:36:49   in some future world where maybe with arm based max,

00:36:54   the actual computer part is so much smaller and it maybe needs

00:36:59   so much less physical battery inside the case that without making the machine thicker, they

00:37:04   could put a keyboard in that has slightly more travel. In theory, they could do that.

00:37:09   It would make me happy. I don't expect it to happen though. Why should one consider

00:37:16   the core I nine is a question from a guy named mayor and may why you are no last name or

00:37:21   no first name. I don't not sure which but why should one consider the core I nine over

00:37:25   where the Core i7, given the core count is the same,

00:37:28   is typing uncomfortable on the laptop when it gets hot.

00:37:31   Well, the core count isn't the same,

00:37:35   so I'm a little confused by this,

00:37:36   because the Core i9 has six cores,

00:37:38   and the Core i7 models have four cores.

00:37:41   So if you need more cores,

00:37:42   the Core i9 actually is worth it.

00:37:44   I think it is also slightly faster

00:37:48   at single-threaded stuff.

00:37:50   But if you don't really have multi-core needs,

00:37:53   If you don't do stuff that can be parallelized,

00:37:56   you probably shouldn't buy the Core i9 model.

00:37:57   You should save the money and get a quad core Core i7.

00:38:01   When the machine gets hot,

00:38:03   the only time it's gotten hot for me

00:38:04   is when my son was playing Fortnite.

00:38:07   And like most or perhaps every other MacBook

00:38:11   I've used in recent memory,

00:38:13   it really only gets hot in the area above the keyboard

00:38:17   in that aluminum strip between the top of the keyboard

00:38:21   and the display hinge.

00:38:23   That's really the only spot where I see it,

00:38:27   I feel it getting hot.

00:38:28   The keyboard itself doesn't get hot,

00:38:30   so I don't think it gets uncomfortable.

00:38:32   Mikey Lauren asks,

00:38:39   "Is 13 inch still the best compromise for you?"

00:38:43   That's a very good question.

00:38:45   I've been a fan of the 13 inch MacBook Pros for a while,

00:38:47   and even before that,

00:38:50   Before I was using a 13 inch MacBook Pro,

00:38:52   I was actually using an 11 inch MacBook Air

00:38:54   for a few years as my portable.

00:38:56   Using this 15 inch though for the last two weeks

00:39:01   has been eye opening in some ways

00:39:03   in terms of really appreciating

00:39:06   the extra screen real estate that it provides.

00:39:08   I've done a lot of stuff with side by side windows,

00:39:13   including putting together all these Q and A's.

00:39:16   I actually solicited them by Twitter

00:39:19   and I also said you could send them by email.

00:39:22   As I said before, I spent close to four hours

00:39:24   putting these questions together,

00:39:26   and I only got through the ones sent by Twitter.

00:39:29   I actually literally have not looked at my email

00:39:31   in like 48 hours, so just going through Twitter.

00:39:36   But putting them together, I had a BB Edit window

00:39:39   with a bunch of open text documents based on categories,

00:39:43   and Tweetbot over on the right,

00:39:45   and I could drag tweets over from Tweetbot to BB Edit

00:39:50   in a way without overlapping the windows,

00:39:52   just side by side, full width for both windows

00:39:56   that I don't think I could have done on the 13 inch.

00:39:58   I mean, I could have, but something would have,

00:40:01   the BB Edit window probably would have had

00:40:02   been uncomfortably narrow.

00:40:03   I do appreciate the size.

00:40:06   For me personally though, because it's not my only machine,

00:40:09   because primarily I, at home, and mostly at home,

00:40:13   I use a 5K iMac at my desk.

00:40:16   The portability advantages of 13 inch,

00:40:21   that it's smaller, it fits in a smaller bag,

00:40:25   it's a little bit lighter.

00:40:26   You can use it in more crowded conditions

00:40:31   like a coach seat on an airplane more comfortably

00:40:35   than you could a 15 inch.

00:40:37   I think for me personally,

00:40:38   13 inch is still the best compromise,

00:40:39   but I have to admit using this 15 inch for two weeks,

00:40:42   I'm a little bit more torn on the issue

00:40:46   than I was two weeks ago.

00:40:48   But if I had to, if you said you have to buy

00:40:50   a new MacBook Pro today, I would probably buy a,

00:40:54   I would buy a 13-inch MacBook Pro.

00:40:56   But it's close.

00:40:58   Here's a guy whose name on Twitter is Squash Alcatraz.

00:41:04   I don't believe that's his actual given name.

00:41:07   It's probably a pseudonym, but if it is your name,

00:41:10   You know, your parents probably owe you an apology.

00:41:17   Which is the bigger dud? MacBook leather sleeves or iPod socks? I love this question. For those

00:41:23   of you who don't remember, iPod socks were a real product that Apple came out with probably

00:41:28   sometime around 2003 2004. But maybe 2003 I don't know. But it was in the spinning hard

00:41:33   drive era of iPods when they were thicker, more like the size of a pack of cards. And

00:41:43   one year they came out with new iPods and they also came out with these socks, which

00:41:46   were literally like socks. And the idea was you could slip your iPod into it and then

00:41:51   throw it in your backpack and not worry about the iPod getting scratched up. It wasn't really

00:41:55   padded but it would certainly scratch proof and it was easy to slide them in and out.

00:42:00   I believe that they sold for something like 19 or $20.

00:42:05   Maybe they were $29 knowing Apple.

00:42:07   I'm almost certain they weren't more than $29

00:42:10   'cause I think that would have been scandalous.

00:42:12   I had one, I had a gray one, of course,

00:42:15   not really much for colors.

00:42:17   I liked it.

00:42:18   It was actually a useful way.

00:42:19   I actually used it as intended.

00:42:21   Like when I was throwing an iPod into a bag for travel,

00:42:25   I would put it in the sock.

00:42:29   Was it overpriced for a cotton sock?

00:42:31   Even if it was $19, yeah, I guess,

00:42:33   but I thought it was useful.

00:42:35   So I would say the bigger dud

00:42:36   are these new MacBook leather sleeves,

00:42:38   because I think people did buy the socks.

00:42:40   I don't think they were a hit.

00:42:42   They didn't really, they came out with them once,

00:42:44   only talked about them once, never talked about them again.

00:42:46   But these leather sleeves are 180 for the 13-inch

00:42:50   and $200 for the 15-inch,

00:42:52   and I don't think they're worth it.

00:42:53   I don't think they're good.

00:42:54   I don't think they're, they don't feel premium to me.

00:42:58   Somebody last week after Marco and I laughed about this thing on the show last week, somebody

00:43:06   pointed me to a company called Saddleback Leather and they make leather sleeves for

00:43:11   Mac books and I haven't touched them but they certainly look like better leather and they

00:43:16   have like a lifetime guarantee or a hundred year guarantee. I mean literally like they

00:43:21   guaranteed past your lifetime to last.

00:43:24   And they're only $100.

00:43:26   I mean, it really, it does seem like the prices

00:43:29   on these MacBook leather sleeves are exorbitant.

00:43:31   It doesn't really make sense to me

00:43:32   to spend $200 on these things.

00:43:34   I mean, I think the discussion would be very different

00:43:36   if they were, I don't know, $70 or something like that.

00:43:41   I don't expect these to sell at all.

00:43:43   So I would guess the bigger dud

00:43:45   is the MacBook leather sleeve.

00:43:47   TJ Draper asks, "I9, do the fans run much? How loud?" Again, for me, only playing Fortnite,

00:43:55   and that was Jonas playing Fortnite. Other stuff I do, they don't, and they're not that

00:43:59   loud. They're no louder than you would expect.

00:44:05   Samer Farha asks, "Is not having a physical escape key an issue, or is it fine in practice?"

00:44:11   Well, I talked about this.

00:44:14   I think it is an issue, but it is fine.

00:44:16   And being able to map caps lock to escape, I think,

00:44:19   does alleviate it to some degree,

00:44:20   although you're going to have to change some habits to get

00:44:23   used to that.

00:44:24   If Apple sold upgradable storage and RAM, but thicker MacBook,

00:44:29   would you consider it?

00:44:30   This is a question from Gordon McDowell.

00:44:33   If Apple sold upgradable, but thicker iMac,

00:44:36   would you consider it?

00:44:38   Their phones get thicker, but their laptops get smaller.

00:44:41   Or phones get bigger, but the laptops get smaller.

00:44:44   I think upgradable components,

00:44:48   they're trade-offs, and that's the way the world used to be,

00:44:53   that you could buy a machine

00:44:54   and upgrade the RAM a year later.

00:44:56   You could upgrade the storage at any time.

00:45:01   You can't do that anymore.

00:45:02   Everything's all sealed up.

00:45:05   The RAM is soldered onto the motherboard.

00:45:07   Uh, it is what it is. I think that it's the way of the future though. Uh, and, and we're

00:45:12   never going to go back. Uh, and it, to me, it's not really a selling point. I do appreciate

00:45:17   when I was younger and, and I was strapped for money. I do appreciate the fact that I

00:45:22   could get the best machine I could afford, which wasn't necessarily the best machine

00:45:26   period. And then later, uh, a year later, maybe two years later, I mean, at one point,

00:45:32   I think I upgraded the RAM in my 1991 Mac LC like four or four years after I bought

00:45:38   it, maybe five. I don't know. But I upgraded from four megabytes to 10 megabytes of RAM.

00:45:48   I think that the LC had two megabytes built in and then there were two slots, which I

00:45:55   to one megabyte SIM cards in and then I upgraded to two four megabytes Sims a

00:46:01   years later for a total of ten megabytes of RAM which is funny because you know

00:46:08   like a fart sound uses ten megabytes of RAM these days I appreciate that that

00:46:15   you know and I'm sure you know there's always you know the students today who

00:46:19   probably can't buy a maxed out MacBook and then years from now maybe they could

00:46:23   could upgrade it in theory. So I, you know, I'm not saying that upgrade ability has no

00:46:31   positive sides, but it's just the way the, it's just the way of the world today. And,

00:46:35   and I think the way that machines have gotten thinner, the way that the, the unibody construction

00:46:40   of these things it's just, just how it is. I mean, it's, it's no more, you know, I get

00:46:49   over it is my answer. Nick here, author of the excellent pixel envy website asks, and

00:46:57   he prefaces his question with in parentheses for real. In what ways does this meaning this

00:47:05   15 inch MacBook Pro not feel like a spiritual successor to say the first 15 inch MacBook

00:47:11   Pro or the power book G4? And is that a problem or is it simply evolutionary? It's a good

00:47:18   I feel that it mostly does feel like the true spiritual successor to me the modern Apple laptop era starts not with the power book

00:47:25   G4 well

00:47:27   specifically the titanium power book G4

00:47:29   Where Apple moved from plastic and you know black or very dark plastic

00:47:37   construction to metal cases

00:47:40   Titanium was obviously substandard in many ways it flaked it it you know

00:47:47   It didn't last.

00:47:50   It showed a lot of wear on the palms

00:47:53   because it just wasn't adorable material.

00:47:55   Aluminum clearly is Apple's go-to material for the last,

00:48:00   geez, I don't know, what, 15 years?

00:48:05   Maybe more.

00:48:08   And the aluminum era, for Max,

00:48:16   for iPods, for watches, they use it everywhere.

00:48:21   And I don't see that coming to an end soon.

00:48:25   I mean, eventually they'll move on to something, I guess.

00:48:28   But they really, really use and have redefined

00:48:32   the way that machines are constructed.

00:48:35   I mean, you find aluminum laptops now,

00:48:37   and it's the standard across the industry

00:48:39   'cause they all copy Apple.

00:48:40   But that's clearly, this is where they,

00:48:44   To me, there's a clear evolution from the titanium G4

00:48:49   to this month old 15 inch MacBook Pro.

00:48:53   I think it is the spiritual successor in almost every way.

00:48:56   And if there's any way that it's not,

00:48:58   it's the port situation.

00:49:00   Where especially for the 15 inch pro laptops,

00:49:05   Apple obviously, and you know,

00:49:08   it's obvious to anybody who follows the company,

00:49:10   even remotely, Apple moves away from legacy ports faster

00:49:14   than any other computer maker.

00:49:17   You name the port, Apple is probably the first

00:49:21   to abandon it, even if you include the floppy disk

00:49:24   as a port, which I think is fair.

00:49:26   Apple moves away from ports faster than anybody,

00:49:31   but the 15-inch Pro laptops have always had

00:49:34   what I would, at least by Apple standards,

00:49:36   a generous assortment of ports

00:49:39   that people would find useful.

00:49:41   I think it's most telling that Apple had for years

00:49:45   included an SD card reader in their Pro laptops,

00:49:48   even in the 13-inch model,

00:49:50   which is sort of an Unappley type thing to do,

00:49:54   to include something so specific, but it's useful.

00:49:58   And I think that given,

00:50:02   if the USB-C ecosystem were in better shape

00:50:05   and it was easier to get everything with USB-C by default,

00:50:10   and if there were really good USB-C ports

00:50:13   or hubs available that could power,

00:50:17   supply power and multiple other ports,

00:50:19   it might be a little different,

00:50:20   but I feel like the failure in this

00:50:22   is the failure of USB-C as a whole,

00:50:25   and that's the one area where it feels,

00:50:27   but it doesn't, it's not for lack of spirit, right?

00:50:31   I feel like the spirit is there,

00:50:33   it's just that the actual market

00:50:36   has failed Apple in this regard.

00:50:38   All right, that's the end of my MacBook Pro questions.

00:50:40   Here we are, we're almost an hour in.

00:50:42   I'm never gonna get to all of these topics.

00:50:44   I've still got a whole topic on the Mac in general,

00:50:48   not specific to the MacBook Pro, iOS,

00:50:52   and including both the software and iPhone and iPad,

00:50:57   a whole category on HomePod, Apple TV, entertainment,

00:51:01   category on Apple in general,

00:51:04   and then last, a miscellaneous and personal

00:51:07   category of questions. There is absolutely no way. I'm one out of six categories down

00:51:12   and I'm almost an hour in and I really thought that this whole thing was only going to last

00:51:15   an hour. So I don't know what I'm going to do. If this proves popular, maybe I'll do

00:51:19   a second episode with the same sort of format, no guests, just me answering these questions.

00:51:27   But before I get to the rest of these Mac questions, let me take a break and thank my

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00:53:46   satisfied look that's the big deal you go to a mattress store you can try it you can sit on it

00:53:50   you can see if you like it uh kind of gross in my opinion but you can at least try it out before you

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00:55:48   apply. My thanks to Casper for sponsoring this show. All right, let's move on to questions

00:55:55   about the Mac and then I don't know what I'll do. Ben Beard asks, what are your thoughts

00:56:03   on future MacBooks with ARM processors? The ATP guys think it could happen as soon as

00:56:08   2020 related question. Jay dubs asks, do you think Apple will put a powerful, more powerful

00:56:15   a series chip in the MacBook pros and use it just to power marzipan apps as a way to

00:56:21   transition to arm and extend battery life. I don't think that that's going to happen.

00:56:29   I think that putting a, a, a, an Apple arm chip in as the touch bar processor as a little

00:56:39   side, a computer within the computer makes sense, but only in the sense that it's a peripheral

00:56:44   in terms of actually using it to run apps. I don't think that that makes sense. I think

00:56:48   Apple will switch to ARM.

00:56:49   I think they are absolutely full steam ahead working on it.

00:56:53   I agree with the ATP guys

00:56:54   that it could happen as soon as 2020.

00:56:56   I really don't think it could happen next year.

00:56:58   I think 2019 is probably too soon.

00:57:00   If I had to guess, my guess would be

00:57:04   that they might announce it next year at WWDC

00:57:09   to get developers on board

00:57:10   with recompiling their apps for ARM,

00:57:12   which shouldn't be too big of a problem, hopefully,

00:57:17   'cause hopefully developers have seen this coming

00:57:18   and haven't been doing anything Intel specific

00:57:21   for years now, but who knows?

00:57:24   But that's what they did when they switched

00:57:26   from PowerPC to Intel is they announced it at WWDC,

00:57:30   said it would start shipping next year.

00:57:34   And early the next year, I think in like February,

00:57:36   they came out with the MacBook Pro.

00:57:39   They started with the MacBook Pro, but it just switched.

00:57:42   And I think that's what they'll do again.

00:57:43   It's not gonna be that you have an Intel processor

00:57:46   and an ARM processor that's powerful enough to really run apps. There's no reason really

00:57:54   for Marzipan to need an ARM processor. I really don't think there's anything, you know, there's

00:58:03   it runs just fine on the Mojave beta, you know, running on Intel, the power savings that you might

00:58:14   get from theoretically running marzipan apps

00:58:16   on an ARM processor while everything else runs on Intel,

00:58:21   I think is far outweighed by the cost that you'd incur

00:58:25   by including both a premium ARM processor

00:58:28   and an Intel processor in the same machine.

00:58:31   That's just wasteful.

00:58:32   And that's just not how transitions work.

00:58:34   Transitions work by ripping off the Band-Aid.

00:58:36   It's just, here you go, here's a new MacBook

00:58:39   that instead of having an Intel CPU

00:58:40   uses an Apple A series ARM CPU.

00:58:44   That's how it works.

00:58:45   And before you say it, yes, I remember,

00:58:49   I think there was some kind of weird thing

00:58:51   where you could get like a 68K coprocessor back

00:58:54   when the PowerPC Max first shipped, I don't remember.

00:58:58   But for the most part,

00:59:00   once when Apple switched from 68K to PowerPC,

00:59:02   it was just here's PowerPC Max.

00:59:04   Everything is running either natively as PowerPC code

00:59:08   or emulated 68K.

00:59:09   when they switched from PowerPC to Intel,

00:59:11   it was here's, this machine is now Intel-based,

00:59:13   not PowerPC-based.

00:59:15   And I think they'll do the same thing with Arm.

00:59:18   Daniel Alm, ALM, he's the developer

00:59:21   of the excellent timing app for Mac,

00:59:24   just sponsored during Fireball recently, actually.

00:59:26   It's a great app, it's sort of like,

00:59:28   helps you keep track of what apps you're using

00:59:31   and what you're working on without doing any kind of work.

00:59:35   You don't have to log in, it's a great app, check it out.

00:59:38   He asks, "Theory, next Mac Mini will essentially

00:59:42   "be a rebranded Apple TV 4K with an A11 or A12 processor.

00:59:46   "What do you think?"

00:59:47   In theory, that sounds great, because the Apple TV,

00:59:54   as it ships today, the Apple TV 4K is,

00:59:57   is when you run, when you try to run benchmarks on it,

01:00:02   very, if not faster than the currently shipping Mac Mini,

01:00:05   which is ridiculously old.

01:00:06   that's faster or as fast, and it's way smaller.

01:00:10   So in theory, that would be great

01:00:13   'cause it would be cheaper, it would be smaller.

01:00:16   The performance is definitely there.

01:00:18   But I kind of hope not.

01:00:22   'Cause I really feel like the Mac Mini

01:00:25   is so ridiculously outdated at this point

01:00:27   that I really, really hope that they come out

01:00:30   with a new one this fall.

01:00:32   Not just faster, but it has to be smaller

01:00:35   because as I've written on Daring Fireball recently,

01:00:37   the Mac Mini isn't even mini anymore

01:00:39   compared to these Intel NUC computers.

01:00:43   I don't know if they pronounce them NUC or what,

01:00:45   but there are Intel-based mini computers

01:00:50   that are the size of an Apple TV or smaller.

01:00:52   It's ridiculous that Apple is still selling the Mac Mini

01:00:56   and calling it mini when it's way bigger

01:00:58   than these things, ridiculously outdated.

01:01:01   So my hope is that Apple ships a new Mac Mini this year

01:01:04   in the fall. And if they do, as I said a couple of questions ago, there's no, I don't think

01:01:08   that, you know, there's no way that they're going to switch to arm this year. So it would

01:01:12   have to be Intel based. Peter Zignigo, Zignigo perhaps asks the discussion of Fortnite not

01:01:24   being supported on Intel integrated graphics with Marco Arment is the fact that it runs

01:01:29   "is great on modern iOS hardware,

01:01:31   "evidence of Apple's lead in mobile graphics

01:01:34   "and/or Epic's willingness to put in extra effort

01:01:36   "for that market."

01:01:38   I think indisputably, I don't think there's any question

01:01:41   that the fact that Epic put the work in

01:01:44   to get Fortnite running well on iPhones and iPads

01:01:48   and doesn't have it, doesn't really,

01:01:51   I think it might run on integrated graphics,

01:01:54   but they definitely tell you that it's not great.

01:01:58   and it isn't great.

01:02:00   It certainly doesn't run anywhere near as well

01:02:02   as it does on iOS hardware.

01:02:04   Of course that's proof that,

01:02:06   it's proof of the importance of the iOS market.

01:02:10   And the iOS market is so big and so important

01:02:13   that developers like Epic are willing

01:02:15   to target it specifically.

01:02:19   And the Metal APIs are only used on Apple platforms.

01:02:24   It's not a cross-platform set of graphic APIs.

01:02:28   And it's worth it for developers to support it,

01:02:33   even though it's specific to Apple's platforms,

01:02:35   because the iOS market is so big.

01:02:38   And the Mac market has famously, infamously,

01:02:42   I mean, I'm not gonna go on at length about this,

01:02:44   but the Mac has never been known for gaming.

01:02:48   It's always been behind PCs and gaming,

01:02:50   and perhaps it's further behind

01:02:52   than it ever has been at this point.

01:02:54   You know, 'cause there's this whole concept,

01:02:57   well, I talked about it on the last episode,

01:02:59   where my son wants to get a gaming PC.

01:03:01   The phrase gaming PC is now,

01:03:04   it's just like a whole category.

01:03:06   And it wasn't years ago.

01:03:08   I mean, PCs were known to be better for gaming.

01:03:11   People who were serious gamers did buy PCs

01:03:13   that they'd configure specifically for gaming.

01:03:16   But now it's just like an entire product category.

01:03:20   There's no question about it that the Mac is not really relevant. And you know, the bigger tell to me

01:03:25   isn't the fact that it doesn't run well on integrated graphics. The bigger tell to me

01:03:29   is that bug that I talked about on the last episode with Marco, where when you run Fortnite on,

01:03:34   I don't know if it's every Mac, but certainly on the 15 inch MacBook Pro, the first time you try

01:03:40   to join a game, it literally takes, there's a bug where it takes 10 minutes before you get in. And

01:03:45   and it just sits there saying loading dot dot dot.

01:03:48   And the solution is to literally just sit there

01:03:51   and wait 10 minutes and it lets you in

01:03:53   and then subsequently you can join games

01:03:55   with a regular amount of weight.

01:04:00   A couple of people wrote to me

01:04:01   and thanked me for mentioning that

01:04:02   because they ran into the same thing

01:04:04   and made the same assumption that my son and I made

01:04:07   at first, which was that it was a never ending bug.

01:04:10   Once you wait two, three, four minutes to join a game,

01:04:12   it's a pretty safe assumption

01:04:14   that you should just force quit the app and try again,

01:04:16   and if you run into it, just give up.

01:04:19   But this is actually, truthfully,

01:04:20   a thing where you have to wait 10 minutes and let you in.

01:04:23   So a couple people wrote to thank me for mentioning that

01:04:25   because they run into it and just gave up.

01:04:28   But the fact that that bug has been around

01:04:30   at least since April,

01:04:31   which is the first time I saw it mentioned on a forum,

01:04:33   and they still haven't fixed it at the end of July,

01:04:36   is ridiculous.

01:04:36   I mean, if the PC version had a bug like that,

01:04:38   they'd fix it the next, as soon as they possibly could.

01:04:41   And the fact that they've let this languish on their Mac

01:04:43   tells you everything you need to know

01:04:45   about how important Epic sees the Mac

01:04:47   as a platform for Fortnite.

01:04:49   Mumper asks, "Do you have a preference

01:04:56   "on minimizing Windows versus using the close button?

01:04:59   "If so, why?

01:05:00   "I still struggle to see the difference

01:05:01   "or any reasoning to use one over the other."

01:05:04   This is a crazy question to me.

01:05:05   I personally don't use minimize at all.

01:05:10   I think by default, when you minimize Windows on Mac OS X,

01:05:12   it sticks the window into the dock

01:05:14   as a separate little icon.

01:05:16   The window itself becomes an icon in the dock.

01:05:18   And then there's a preference you can turn on

01:05:19   in the dock settings to have minimized windows

01:05:22   effectively go into the app they belong to.

01:05:25   So let's just say you're using TextEdit

01:05:28   and you minimize a window if you have that preference on.

01:05:31   It goes into, the animation shows it

01:05:34   going into the TextEdit app icon on the dock

01:05:36   and then to get back to that window,

01:05:40   you click on the app in the dock to get the menu

01:05:44   and you can choose it from there.

01:05:47   I don't minimize Windows, almost never.

01:05:52   I just don't find it useful either way.

01:05:55   So I either have the window open

01:05:58   and if I'm done with it, I close it.

01:06:00   I don't minimize.

01:06:01   The minimize feature could be totally broken

01:06:07   and I wouldn't notice for weeks or months

01:06:10   because I just never use it.

01:06:11   Back in the day, in the classic macOS era,

01:06:16   I thought that instead of minimizing what you could do,

01:06:20   they called it window shade, and you could double-click.

01:06:23   There was a button you could click

01:06:24   in the top right corner of the window,

01:06:26   or you could just double-click in the dead space

01:06:28   anywhere in the title bar of a window,

01:06:30   and the whole window would effectively window shade.

01:06:35   The window would go up,

01:06:36   and all you'd be left with is the title bar,

01:06:40   and it was a really convenient way to get at something

01:06:43   behind the window you were currently in.

01:06:45   And one of the things that made it cool

01:06:47   was because the title bar didn't move,

01:06:49   you could double click the title bar

01:06:50   to window shade the window and either look behind the window

01:06:53   or drag something behind the window.

01:06:54   But if you just wanted to look behind the window,

01:06:57   the title bar was still there,

01:06:59   still underneath the mouse pointer.

01:07:00   So you could just double click again to open it back up.

01:07:04   Part of what, to me, what makes the Mac OS X model

01:07:08   of minimizing, which has been here ever since Mac OS 10.0

01:07:13   back in 2001 or 2002, whenever the hell it shipped,

01:07:15   is that you can't undo, you can't un-minimize a window

01:07:21   without moving the mouse over to the dock,

01:07:24   whereas the classic Mac OS window shade feature,

01:07:27   you could double click, look behind, double click again,

01:07:30   and undo what you've just done without moving the mouse.

01:07:36   That was huge, huge, one of the many thousand paper cuts

01:07:40   of ways that Mac OS X to me remains inferior

01:07:45   to the classic Mac OS and UI design.

01:07:48   But that's a can of worms, we can't get into here

01:07:52   if we wanna finish any reasonable amount of time.

01:07:55   Next question, Steven Fosket asks,

01:08:01   do you think Apple really has an insanely great idea

01:08:04   for the new Mac Pro, if so, what will it look like?

01:08:07   First part of the, first question, yes,

01:08:09   I do think they have a great idea,

01:08:10   or at least they think they have a great idea,

01:08:12   because I also think they thought

01:08:13   the Trashcan Mac Pro was a great idea.

01:08:15   But based on what they've told us publicly,

01:08:18   they seem pretty clear that they see that it was a mistake,

01:08:25   that the Trashcan Mac Pro was not designed

01:08:29   around what's now obvious, the importance,

01:08:33   growing importance of multiple GPUs and having a thermal envelope that could take significantly

01:08:44   hotter GPUs than the trashcan is designed to take. So I think they've got their, I think

01:08:49   they've recalibrated and now have their focus on where the highest of high-end performance

01:08:55   computing is going in 2018, 2019. What will it look like? I have no idea. None. I don't

01:09:02   I don't have any little birdies

01:09:04   who've spilled anything about it.

01:09:06   Apple's lips seem to be sealed on this.

01:09:08   I haven't seen even any rumors

01:09:09   about what it's going to look like.

01:09:11   I have no idea.

01:09:12   But I do expect it to be super high performance.

01:09:18   I mean, to me, the most intriguing thing

01:09:21   is given the super high performance,

01:09:23   universally hailed, of the iMac Pro,

01:09:26   what exactly, how much faster could the Mac Pro,

01:09:31   to justify its existence has to be a lot faster than that.

01:09:34   And that's pretty interesting

01:09:35   'cause the iMac Pro is very fast.

01:09:36   Bruce Wager, Wagger asks,

01:09:43   "Is it believable that Apple can't make a good Mac

01:09:46   "for less than $1,000?

01:09:48   "Seems like their choice, not a question of ability."

01:09:51   Of course, there's no question

01:09:52   that they could make a cheaper Mac.

01:09:55   I think that's always been true though.

01:09:56   It's been true for 25 years or 30 years,

01:10:01   however long the Mac is, what, '94, 2004.

01:10:05   Yeah, 35 years, 34 years of Mac.

01:10:10   Maybe back in 1984, they couldn't make a cheaper Mac.

01:10:16   But certainly for the last 25 years,

01:10:19   they could have if they wanted to.

01:10:21   It's a marketing decision that they don't.

01:10:23   And the fact that they make iPads

01:10:26   that are performance compatible,

01:10:28   certainly as performant enough

01:10:30   that they could run Mac OS X if Apple so wanted,

01:10:33   and they sell them for as low as $300

01:10:36   with a very nice display,

01:10:39   is proof positive that they could make a cheaper Mac

01:10:41   if they wanted to, but they choose not to

01:10:42   for whatever reasons.

01:10:44   Vikram Nair asks, "How ridiculous is it of Apple

01:10:52   "to sell the Mac Mini or Mac Pro

01:10:53   "at anywhere near the full price as when it came out.

01:10:57   "What is Apple doing here and why?"

01:11:00   That's a good question, and I think it's often misunderstood.

01:11:03   I think that Apple's pricing scheme for Macs,

01:11:07   and the fact that the Mac Mini is years and years old,

01:11:11   the Mac Pro is five years old or something like that,

01:11:14   and they still sell them at the same prices

01:11:16   as when they came out.

01:11:17   That's because Apple sees the price

01:11:22   as part of the branding and marketing of its devices.

01:11:27   And it really only works if they update them regularly.

01:11:35   When they don't update them regularly,

01:11:37   it starts to get absurd.

01:11:39   And in theory, absolutely,

01:11:40   if they're gonna continue to sell years old Mac Minis

01:11:45   and Mac Pros, the prices should be significantly lower today

01:11:48   than they were when they came out.

01:11:50   But they don't because they want to effectively

01:11:54   protect those price points so that when new Mac Pros

01:11:57   do come out or new Mac Minis do come out,

01:11:59   they can keep them at the price that they want them to be at

01:12:02   and not have it seem like a price hike.

01:12:06   So let's just say if they had started,

01:12:08   in an alternate universe where they had still,

01:12:13   the Mac Mini was just as old today as it is in our universe,

01:12:17   but they had lowered the price by $100 every year

01:12:21   that it went un-updated.

01:12:23   And then they come out with a new Mac Mini this fall

01:12:26   and it goes back to the original price,

01:12:28   it would seem like this huge price hike

01:12:30   and they wanna avoid that.

01:12:31   I don't think there's any magic to that.

01:12:39   It is a bit stubborn and it is something that Apple

01:12:43   and possibly only Apple can get away with

01:12:46   in the PC industry because Apple's brand

01:12:51   and user allegiance allows them to.

01:12:54   But they just don't, their computers aren't commodities

01:12:56   in a way that Dell computers are,

01:12:59   and that raise and lower by fluctuate

01:13:02   as component prices go up and down.

01:13:04   They come out with a price,

01:13:05   and the price is part of the brand of the device,

01:13:08   and it stays the same even when it gets a bit ridiculous,

01:13:11   as is the case with the Mac Mini and Mac Pro.

01:13:15   Jackson Kernian asks, "Do we know any more about how and why

01:13:20   "Apple got App Store skeptical Mac developers

01:13:23   "back into the store as announced at WWDC?"

01:13:25   I don't think there's any secret to it.

01:13:27   I don't think there's anything that's on the record.

01:13:30   But apps like BB Edit, which had been out of the store,

01:13:34   now coming back, Panix,

01:13:35   I believe it's Coda, not Transit, Transmit?

01:13:41   I forget, I don't know which of Panix apps

01:13:44   is definitely coming back to the store.

01:13:46   I think it's Coda.

01:13:47   And I know Rich Segal at Barebones,

01:13:52   I know the guys at Panic,

01:13:54   and I don't think there's any secret to it.

01:13:58   It's just good old-fashioned developer relations.

01:14:01   And I know there's a whole bunch of other apps

01:14:03   that this is the case for,

01:14:04   but I honestly think there's no secret to it.

01:14:07   It's people at Apple who work in developer relations

01:14:11   on a one-on-one personal basis,

01:14:12   reaching out to Mac developers whose apps

01:14:16   either were in the store and were pulled

01:14:18   or were never in the store,

01:14:19   and saying, "What do you need from us, from Apple?

01:14:23   "What can we do differently?

01:14:24   "What APIs can we change?

01:14:25   "What can we change with sandboxing?

01:14:26   "What can we improve?

01:14:27   "What would make the App Store,

01:14:29   "what would make you get back in the App Store?"

01:14:32   Listening and then doing what needs to be done.

01:14:36   Just good old-fashioned developer relations.

01:14:39   And it's, to me, a great sign of Apple's belief and support of third-party Mac developers

01:14:48   and a great sign for the platform going forward.

01:14:56   Next question.

01:14:58   Dave Swallow asks, "Do you think Apple will ever release a Mac mini, a new Mac mini to

01:15:05   compete with an Intel and you see a small Mac that can be a home server. Well, I hope

01:15:10   so. I honestly don't know what to think at this point, though. The Mac Mini is so

01:15:14   old that I really hope they come out with a new one, and if they come out with a new

01:15:18   one, I certainly hope it's a lot smaller, possibly cheaper. But at this point, I wouldn't

01:15:26   be surprised if they never updated either. I don't know why they continued to sell

01:15:29   it, though, if that's their goal. But look at what they did with AirPort hardware, where

01:15:33   kind of stopped updating it years ago and continued to sell it long after they'd seemingly

01:15:39   internally decided to no longer create new hardware.

01:15:46   Next question, Kevin Van Harren asks, "Since you just found out Migration Assistant is

01:15:52   decent, do you keep your documents/desktop in iCloud?"

01:15:57   I do not, but it's not because I think it's very different.

01:16:02   Assistant, I really underestimated. I really just figured based on old experience from

01:16:08   the early 2000s, at least when it didn't really do a good job of moving everything I wanted

01:16:14   from an old machine to a new machine and I found it to be less work to just start from

01:16:17   scratch and add it by hand. I really underestimated the modern migration assistant. I think I

01:16:23   understand exactly what when you when you decide to share your documents folder. In

01:16:28   In other words, the documents folder

01:16:30   at the root level of your home folder

01:16:32   and your desktop in iCloud.

01:16:33   I know exactly what it's supposed to do

01:16:36   and whether it works seamlessly or not, I don't want it.

01:16:39   I don't want my desktop, the files on my desktop

01:16:42   on my various Macs to be shared between them

01:16:44   and I don't want my documents folder

01:16:47   to be shared between Macs.

01:16:49   I have Dropbox.

01:16:50   I also use iCloud storage within apps like Numbers

01:16:55   within apps like Numbers, the iWork suite,

01:16:58   what's it called, iCloud Drive.

01:17:05   I use iCloud Drive, I use Dropbox,

01:17:07   Dropbox, both of those.

01:17:10   At this point, I don't know if I could do without either.

01:17:14   And if I want a file to be synced between machines,

01:17:19   I will either store it in Dropbox

01:17:20   or store it in iCloud Drive.

01:17:23   I like having a documents folder in my home folder

01:17:28   on each Mac that is local to that Mac

01:17:30   for when I do have files that I don't want to sync

01:17:33   for whatever reason between machines.

01:17:35   So no, I don't use that.

01:17:37   And to me, syncing the desktop in particular

01:17:39   just seemed, would just seem weird.

01:17:41   The desktop clearly to me is supposed to be

01:17:44   conceptually local to the machine.

01:17:46   It would be very strange, I would find it very undesirable

01:17:49   to have my document or my desktop sync between machines.

01:17:52   Next question, trying to wrap these Mac questions up here.

01:17:57   Michael Rockwell asks, do you expect Apple to transition

01:18:04   the iMac to SSDs as the default option?

01:18:07   It's a great question.

01:18:08   I think that this is possibly a sign of the difference

01:18:13   between the Tim Cook Apple and Steve Jobs' Apple.

01:18:18   I think if Steve Jobs were still around,

01:18:19   the iMac maybe already would be SSD by default, or SSD only. And the iMac Pro is SSD only.

01:18:32   The advantages of SSD over spinning hard drives in every single regard other than cost, that

01:18:38   you can get more storage for significantly less money with a spinning hard drive than

01:18:43   than SSD. But the other advantages of SSD are so great in terms of reliability and performance

01:18:51   and even the fact that they're dead silent are so great. And to me, that's what Apple

01:18:57   computers, Apple products are supposed to be is great. They're so great that it's worth

01:19:02   the premium you have to pay. If you really need more storage and you want to pay spinning

01:19:08   hard disk prices, then you should have to—I think Apple should make you use an external

01:19:14   drive. I believe Apple—the iMac should be SSD only at this point. So I definitely think

01:19:20   it will be at some point, but I think the more interesting thing is that, to me, I think

01:19:24   it should be already, and I think it would be if Steve Jobs were still CEO.

01:19:30   Derek Martin asks, "Do you think it's possible that Apple could release Macs primarily

01:19:34   powered by an Apple ARM chip, but which also contain an x86 chip for backward compatibility."

01:19:40   I kind of answered this before. That's not how transitions work. I don't think they'll do that.

01:19:43   I think that once they switch to ARM, it'll be all ARM and possibly with some kind of

01:19:49   emulation layer so that un-updated apps that are x86 can still run even through an emulator.

01:20:01   Saint Chris asks, "Were you a fan of tabbed folders in Mac OS 9 where you could pin a

01:20:05   folder to the screen edge as just a title bar tab?" It was the central organizing principle of

01:20:12   my workflow. I haven't found anything that can replicate it in Mac OS 10. I was a huge fan.

01:20:16   I wouldn't call it the central organizing principle of my workflow back then, but it was

01:20:20   a great feature. And yet again, especially with the Finder, just a terrific example of how the

01:20:27   The Classic Finder was a just vastly, infinitely better design than the Mac OS X Finder ever

01:20:33   was or probably will be.

01:20:35   The idea was you could just drag a window, take the title bar, drag it down to the bottom

01:20:39   of the screen, and when it got to the bottom, it would change from a window into a tab,

01:20:44   and the tab would stay anchored at the bottom.

01:20:47   And while it was there, you could click the tab and it would pop up, and you could access

01:20:53   the stuff in it and then click it again and it would go back down to a tab. Super convenient

01:20:59   for your current project, if your current project is organized in a single folder in the Finder,

01:21:05   or frequently accessed folders. It was just terrific. Great feature. And again, I miss it.

01:21:14   Ryan Jones asks, "How do you feel about the decline of exquisite attention to detail in Apple

01:21:22   products, specifically software, such as more inconsistencies or fewer subtle delights?"

01:21:28   That's a good question, and I definitely think he's right. I would go so far as to say it only

01:21:33   pertains to software. To me, Apple's attention to detail and hardware is greater than ever. I think

01:21:39   that their hardware is more refined, more closer to the perfection than it's ever been. Not to go

01:21:48   to go off on a tangent, but just one example is the hinge

01:21:51   on the current MacBook Pros, the hinge between the display

01:21:55   and the main body.

01:21:58   It works with so little effort, yet it stays

01:22:03   in whatever position you put it in with,

01:22:06   you can get it exactly at the angle you want it to

01:22:08   with less effort.

01:22:10   The hinge even looks good.

01:22:11   It's almost like it's not there.

01:22:12   You hardly even see anything.

01:22:14   It looks good, it feels good, it is super reliable.

01:22:17   It's just exquisite attention to detail.

01:22:21   Say what you want about the new keyboard,

01:22:24   but the fact that it has this,

01:22:27   about what do you think about the low travel.

01:22:31   But the way that the keys on these butterfly switches

01:22:34   move all at once up and down is such a,

01:22:39   it's so nice and it really is something

01:22:41   that when I go back to my old keyboard,

01:22:43   it really does feel a little junky.

01:22:45   The hardware attention to detail is terrific.

01:22:48   And I could go on and on about the hardware of the iPhone,

01:22:51   which is just terrific.

01:22:55   The software, definitely, there's no doubt in my mind

01:22:57   that there is less attention to detail in Apple software

01:23:02   than in the old days.

01:23:05   In the old days, and I would say especially

01:23:07   like in the classic Mac era,

01:23:13   It was very hard to find any user interface mistakes

01:23:16   in Apple's own software.

01:23:18   It was just in terms of just little details.

01:23:24   There's things now, and it's been this way

01:23:26   in Mac OS X forever.

01:23:27   I forget exactly where.

01:23:28   I think, let's see if I can find it here.

01:23:35   There's things in system preferences

01:23:36   where there's a little sheet that comes down

01:23:40   and system preferences where there's an okay

01:23:42   and cancel button and the okay button,

01:23:45   rather than being the same width as the cancel button,

01:23:48   it's only wide enough for the word okay, which is wrong.

01:23:53   It's clearly a user interface mistake.

01:23:57   It's wrong according to the HIG and it's wrong

01:24:00   according to just my native UI instincts.

01:24:05   I can't believe that Apple employs somebody

01:24:09   who would make such a mistake

01:24:12   while laying out a dialog box.

01:24:15   And furthermore, I cannot believe even more

01:24:18   that even given the existence of some engineer

01:24:22   who isn't aware of that UI convention

01:24:25   that an OK and a cancel button should be the same width

01:24:28   even if the word OK has to float

01:24:30   in a lot of horizontal white space.

01:24:32   I can't believe that it got approved.

01:24:37   And furthermore, Cana can't believe that it's been there for years and Apple still hasn't

01:24:42   fixed it. There's all sorts of little things like that in Mac OS X. You know, it is what

01:24:51   it is, but I just feel like and I think part of it is just that Apple has had to, you know,

01:24:58   they've expanded and they have so many engineers that they can't only hire engineers who are

01:25:05   familiar forward and backward with every single UI convention of the Mac. I do find it a little

01:25:12   depressing. Let's keep going here. Next question. Got to wrap this up soon. I'm running out

01:25:21   of steam. It's surprisingly hard to do this without a guest. Let's see here. Do I think

01:25:30   touch will ever come to the Mac?

01:25:32   This is a question from Jamie Halmick.

01:25:34   Not like the touch bar,

01:25:38   but real touch interaction on the screen.

01:25:40   Conversely, do you think mouse support

01:25:42   will ever come to the iPad?

01:25:43   A couple other people asked about this.

01:25:45   Touch support for macOS, just a matter of time,

01:25:47   never going to happen, Walford East wrote.

01:25:50   I certainly think it never should come to the Mac.

01:25:55   I really do believe, I firmly believe

01:25:58   the Apple party line on touchscreen Macs,

01:26:00   that the Mac is designed, fundamentally designed

01:26:04   from a user interface perspective to be used

01:26:07   with your hands on a desk or table, palms down,

01:26:11   on a keyboard, on a mouse, on a trackpad,

01:26:15   and that ergonomically reaching up and touching a screen

01:26:18   is suboptimal, and that the Mac has user interface controls.

01:26:28   Everything from the red, yellow, green buttons to the menu bar

01:26:31   to the way menu bar items are arranged

01:26:33   to how small items in the dock can

01:26:36   get when you're running a bunch of applications.

01:26:38   They have all sorts of controls throughout the UI.

01:26:40   Just think about the main palette in Photoshop and apps

01:26:43   like Photoshop, how small the buttons are.

01:26:46   With a precision pointer using a trackpad or mouse,

01:26:49   you can pack controls that are very small and close

01:26:53   to each other, and they remain totally functional.

01:26:56   and on a touchscreen, they need to be bigger

01:26:58   and further apart to accommodate the fact

01:27:00   that your finger touching a screen is imprecise.

01:27:04   So the Mac UI as it is, things are too close, too small

01:27:11   to be touch friendly.

01:27:13   And if Apple were to issue touchscreen Macs

01:27:16   and an edict that everything should be redesigned

01:27:20   to be touch friendly, then you'd be wasting

01:27:22   all this screen real estate

01:27:23   when you do use a mouse and trackpad.

01:27:25   I really think it's a bad idea.

01:27:28   I really do, and I don't think it's ever going to come.

01:27:31   Would I be shocked if it did come?

01:27:33   I don't know, because people seem to be clamoring for it,

01:27:36   but I think that they're wrong,

01:27:37   and I think Apple should and will stick to its guns.

01:27:40   I really don't think a touchscreen Mac is a good idea.

01:27:43   When, oh, let's see here, next question.

01:27:50   I've lost my train of thought here in these questions.

01:27:53   Oh, here's a good one.

01:27:54   Ryan Humphrey asks, "If you were starting a business today where long-term success was

01:27:59   going to be dependent on heavily investing in either Apple or Microsoft's commitment

01:28:02   to desktop/professional hardware, would you be comfortable locking yourself into Apple?"

01:28:06   Absolutely. I don't think there's any reason to doubt Apple's commitment to the Mac as

01:28:11   a platform going forward. I think these two statements can both be true. Apple is as committed

01:28:16   to the Mac as you could want the company to be today. And Apple is primarily—the primary

01:28:27   focus of the company, the single most important product is the iPhone. I think both of those

01:28:31   things can be true. That yes, the iPhone is Apple's most important product. It's the most successful.

01:28:35   The one with the most users generates by far the most money and therefore justifies being the

01:28:40   the company's prime focus of attention,

01:28:43   but that the company remains totally committed to the Mac.

01:28:46   I think both of those things can be true and are true.

01:28:49   NBA asks, same question asked on ATP this week,

01:28:56   "When do you expect to see the first ARM Mac?"

01:28:58   It's sort of a repeat question, sorry about that.

01:29:00   I'm gonna say 2020, and if not 2020, 2021 at the latest.

01:29:09   P. Krishna asks, "Which keyboard are you going to use

01:29:11   "if your Apple Extended Keyboard 2 broke?"

01:29:13   I would just take out one of my Mint condition

01:29:16   unopened Apple Extended Keyboard 2s that I have in storage

01:29:19   and use one of those if my current one broke.

01:29:22   But I guess that's sort of a non-answer.

01:29:25   I think what you're really asking is what if,

01:29:27   at a technical level, the ADB to USB adapter I used

01:29:31   to do it stopped working with Mac OS X?

01:29:34   I guess I would buy some sort of mechanical keyboard.

01:29:36   I'd probably talk to Jason Snell and see.

01:29:39   I've still never found a mechanical keyboard

01:29:41   that I would be satisfied with,

01:29:42   but I'm sure I could find something

01:29:44   that I would like better than anything else.

01:29:47   Phil Swenson asks, "Heard anything about the Apple monitor

01:29:54   "promised last year?

01:29:55   "Seems like a reasonably priced for Apple at least,

01:29:57   "monitor with more ports would migrate,

01:30:00   "mitigate port issues, and no one wants the LG."

01:30:06   I haven't heard anything. I just presume, and I think this is pretty obvious, that whenever

01:30:10   Apple's Mac Pro is ready to, the new Mac Pro is ready to come out, it will debut alongside

01:30:16   the Apple branded 5K or perhaps even 8K monitor that Apple talked about last year. And I would

01:30:23   certainly hope that it includes a bunch of ports so that people with like a MacBook Pro

01:30:29   who plug into the new monitor could get things like extra USB ports and stuff like that.

01:30:38   But I haven't heard anything about it and presume it won't come before and won't come

01:30:42   after it'll cut debut alongside the new Mac Pro. Richard Martin asks, "Would a MacBook

01:30:48   with a massive glass keyboard touchpad/Apple Pencil abstracted interface area in lieu of

01:30:54   the current keyboard touchpad area be a good product?

01:30:57   I'm gonna say no, it would be a terrible product.

01:31:00   Absolutely terrible.

01:31:01   To me, and it runs into this with these low travel keys,

01:31:06   and particularly with the lack of an inverted

01:31:12   arrow key arrangement, inverted T arrow key arrangement,

01:31:17   which Marco and I talked about last week,

01:31:19   it would be terrible.

01:31:23   because the thing about it,

01:31:24   it's not even what it would be like

01:31:25   once you look at the key and get your fingers on,

01:31:28   let's just say it would be like an iPad, right?

01:31:30   Like you have an iPad keyboard on a glass surface

01:31:33   of the top of the,

01:31:34   where the hardware keyboard on a MacBook is now.

01:31:37   Put aside what it would be like to actually type

01:31:42   on that keyboard once your fingers are in the right place,

01:31:46   which I think clearly would be inferior,

01:31:49   no travel keys, even with some sort of haptic feedback

01:31:52   along the lines of the way that the current track pads

01:31:57   don't really click but have haptic feedback instead.

01:32:00   Put aside what that would be like typing,

01:32:04   which I think would be inferior,

01:32:06   but the big problem is that you have to look to do it.

01:32:09   Like the whole, one of the huge advantages

01:32:12   that a hardware keyboard on a laptop has

01:32:16   that's irreplaceable is the fact

01:32:17   that you can get your fingers,

01:32:19   you get your hands in the right place simply by touch alone.

01:32:22   And there is absolutely nothing that a glass keyboard

01:32:26   could do to replicate that.

01:32:28   I guess in theory, they could put little nubbins

01:32:33   where the J and F keys are on the glass

01:32:36   and there'd be permanent nubbins on the glass

01:32:38   and you could kind of get your fingers in the right space,

01:32:40   but I don't see, I just don't see how it could ever be good.

01:32:43   I think it would be terrible, just a terrible product.

01:32:46   I think so much of the appeal of,

01:32:50   who knows how many times a day,

01:32:52   like in a full day of work on a MacBook

01:32:54   or a laptop of any kind,

01:32:55   how many times a day does an experienced user

01:32:59   put their hands on the keyboard and get their,

01:33:03   which also puts your thumb in a position

01:33:05   to use the trackpad without looking.

01:33:07   Hundreds, maybe.

01:33:09   I mean, just hundreds of times a day.

01:33:11   And to have to look every single time

01:33:13   would be such an enormous step backward,

01:33:15   I think it would be a disaster.

01:33:16   So hopefully Apple has no plans to do that.

01:33:19   And I say hopeful because, you know,

01:33:22   Apple's, you know, as I've said,

01:33:27   MacBooks get thinner and thinner as years go on,

01:33:30   and the keyboards get thinner and thinner along with them,

01:33:32   and the ultimate in keyboard thinness would be

01:33:35   a keyboard that has no travel whatsoever.

01:33:37   So hopefully that's not on our radar,

01:33:40   because I think it would be a terrible step backward

01:33:43   that they'd never recover from,

01:33:44   or that the experience would never recover from at least.

01:33:47   A related question from Saint Chris,

01:33:51   who I think had a question earlier.

01:33:53   Do you wish Apple would move the quote tactile nubs

01:33:57   from the index fingers back to the middle fingers

01:34:00   on the home row of their keyboards?

01:34:02   Now, for those of you who don't remember,

01:34:04   now think about this on a US QWERTY keyboard,

01:34:07   he's talking about these,

01:34:08   the little things on the F and J keys,

01:34:10   the ones that you put your index finger on,

01:34:11   there's little tactile nubs, whatever you want to call them.

01:34:16   Back in the day,

01:34:18   including on my beloved Apple Extended Keyboard 2,

01:34:21   Apple Keyboard put those nubbins on the middle finger keys,

01:34:24   which in the US would be the D and K keys.

01:34:27   And I have to admit, I prefer that.

01:34:30   I don't know why.

01:34:31   I don't really think there's any logic to it.

01:34:34   I don't know how much variation there was

01:34:38   between various computer manufacturers back in the '80s.

01:34:41   But Apple, like the Apple extended, or the Apple IIs, I say,

01:34:46   had those nubbins on the D and K key,

01:34:48   and then early Mac keyboards stuck with the Apple II design

01:34:52   of putting them on the index finger.

01:34:54   I can't justify it rationally,

01:34:55   other than that it just always has felt right to me.

01:34:58   And I don't think it's just because my first computers

01:35:01   that I used were Apple's.

01:35:03   I think that to me there is something intuitive

01:35:05   about the fact that your longest finger,

01:35:08   your middle finger, is the one

01:35:10   that reaches the keyboard first

01:35:11   and therefore finds those nubbins.

01:35:13   So me personally, I do wish that Apple

01:35:16   would move them back to the middle finger,

01:35:18   but I think that that chip has sailed.

01:35:21   The rest of the, you know, Apple has used this,

01:35:23   you know, moved them to the index fingers

01:35:26   at least 20 years ago, all right, 20, 25 years ago.

01:35:29   The whole, everybody, every keyboard I've seen

01:35:32   for 20, 20 some years has them on the F and J key,

01:35:35   so I don't think Apple could move this

01:35:36   without seeming like they'd lost their corporate mind.

01:35:39   But for me personally, do I wish that I could,

01:35:43   for example, custom order,

01:35:45   if I custom order a MacBook and as a preference

01:35:51   could get the nubbins on the D and K keys,

01:35:53   I would do it in a heartbeat.

01:35:55   I really do like that.

01:35:57   I thought this was a pretty interesting question.

01:35:59   All right, last Mac question,

01:36:02   and I guess it's gonna be the last question of the episode.

01:36:08   What is a voice or perspective about tech

01:36:10   that Apple isn't listening to

01:36:12   that could turn into a major problem?

01:36:13   Examples, but not my answer.

01:36:16   India, where Apple is sort of missing the boat on mobile.

01:36:20   Gamers, teenagers, artists, iOS only people, et cetera.

01:36:27   This is a question from Jason Becker.

01:36:30   I am going to say that the single,

01:36:33   I don't think that Apple's missing or isn't listening to.

01:36:37   So maybe I'm not answering the question.

01:36:40   But I think the biggest problem that Apple faces

01:36:43   that might really be a problem is the growing,

01:36:46   the growing rise of non-native web-based apps,

01:36:55   these things that are based on Electron and stuff like that,

01:36:59   that don't use native, and it's a Mac-specific problem.

01:37:04   It's not an iOS problem, at least not yet,

01:37:06   although it might be for the iPad as time goes on.

01:37:09   The only reason the Mac can justify its existence

01:37:14   is the fact that Mac software, for some people,

01:37:17   is vastly superior to anything else.

01:37:20   It's the superiority of Mac software

01:37:22   that justifies the existence of the Mac

01:37:24   alongside Windows and whatever else you could use

01:37:27   on a desktop computer.

01:37:28   And as it's never, I don't think we've ever seen a case,

01:37:33   back in the day with Java, there were cross-platform apps

01:37:36   and there was Flash and there's always been

01:37:39   cross-platform solutions, but none of them

01:37:41   have ever really taken off in a way

01:37:43   that these Electron-type things have.

01:37:45   And they're A, terrible, B, they're no better

01:37:49   on the Mac than they are on any other platform.

01:37:51   So if all you use are Electron-based apps,

01:37:54   there's really no reason for you to have

01:37:58   any allegiance to the Mac.

01:37:59   It doesn't really matter what you use.

01:38:04   I think it's a problem.

01:38:05   I think Apple sees it as a problem,

01:38:07   and that's partly why they're going with this Marzipan thing,

01:38:09   where if companies aren't going to do the work

01:38:12   of doing a first-class native Mac client,

01:38:15   but they do wanna have a quote-unquote Mac app,

01:38:20   it would be better if they used their iOS app code base

01:38:25   to get something running on the Mac,

01:38:27   even if it's not optimal,

01:38:28   than it would be to shoehorn a stupid web app

01:38:31   into a web app shell like Electron.

01:38:33   But I feel like that's a concession to the point that the true solution for most of these

01:38:40   apps would be to just do a real Mac app. And I think it's a bit of a problem. All right,

01:38:48   that's it for the Mac questions. There's a whole bunch of other topics. I guess I'll

01:38:51   have to do another one of these shows. Hopefully people like this. I don't know how interesting

01:38:54   it is. I want to thank the two sponsors for this episode, Squarespace and Casper. And

01:39:01   I wanna thank everybody out there who sent these questions

01:39:03   and it's been a lot of fun.

01:39:05   I can't believe that I only got through

01:39:06   two out of six categories.

01:39:08   [BLANK_AUDIO]