0:00:00So the rewards of procrastination never, never cease to end. We were,
0:00:05we were all set to record yesterday when I got wind that Apple was going to
0:00:10issue a statement on, uh, or more than a statement really,
0:00:13which we'll get into in a moment on the battery thing. So we,
0:00:16we narrowly avoided having an entirely moot,
0:00:21just moot point discussion on the iPhone battery thing, uh,
0:00:26in the can and instead here we are recording on Friday the 29th of January and we've got
0:00:32it all all laid out in front of us. It's the future and it's still December still 17. Let's
0:00:38get right into it. The the the story has got to be the iPhone. It's funny because it's
0:00:46it's even just summarizing it. It's complicated enough. Like I've had trouble writing headlines
0:00:50because I keep wanting to just use the word iPhone battery throttling, but they're not
0:00:55throttling the battery they're throttling the CPU but they're not
0:00:59actually just throttling the CPU they're throttling all sorts of things they're
0:01:03throttling yeah even the speakers they're quieting the speakers they're
0:01:09dimming the the screen they're doing did you see Apollo 13 you see them yes I
0:01:15actually just rewatched it recently okay there is a great so one of the dramas in
0:01:20Apollo 13, and I swear this actually ties in perfectly with this story, is given after
0:01:27the explosion and they're trying to figure out how to turn everything on when they get
0:01:30back to Earth so that they can re-enter the atmosphere and splash down and survive. And
0:01:37they've been going for days with almost everything shut off because otherwise they wouldn't have
0:01:43enough resources to get back. So they've shut off a bunch of stuff, but they have to turn
0:01:46it back on. They have to turn on the main module, the command module, in order to land.
0:01:53And what they do is Gary Sinise, who isn't in the ship even though he was supposed to
0:01:59be, is back in Houston. And what they do, and it's a very dramatic part of the movie,
0:02:04is they're trying to figure out a startup sequence. It's literally what do we turn on
0:02:08and in what order, because they know how much power they can get out of the battery. And
0:02:14If it goes above a certain number, the needle kind of pins and everybody in the control
0:02:19room goes, "Oh, no, that failed."
0:02:22And Gary Sinise basically says, "All right, let's try it again.
0:02:25Let's try another one."
0:02:26And they keep going through that.
0:02:27And I kept thinking about that scene this week because it's basically the same where
0:02:32Apple's engineers were looking at a battery and the limits of a taxed battery, an older
0:02:39battery and asking themselves, "What can we shut off? What can we turn down the power
0:02:46on in order to stay below that moment where the system looks at the battery and realizes
0:02:54it cannot get enough voltage?" and goes, "I'm shutting down," which is what this is all
0:03:00trying to avoid is a different annoyance, which as it used to be, it would just hit
0:03:04that hit that number where the the battery couldn't supply enough juice and
0:03:08the phone would be like it jig is up I'm out of here and and but it is it's just
0:03:13like Gary Sinise flipping switches in the in the Apollo command module it's
0:03:16like how do we get under the limit and it speaks to the complexity of what
0:03:25these batteries do in these devices that it I I think I'm as guilty of it as
0:03:33anybody that I tend to just think of it as effectively as like the graphic
0:03:40representation of the battery on screen that it's like a tank of energy you know
0:03:45it's a it's a cylinder of energy and you can assign it a percentage in terms of
0:03:50how full it is and when there's plenty of energy it runs and when it gets low
0:03:56you can optionally go into the low power mode where the battery goes from green
0:04:02to yellow and certain things are turned off like animations are tuned down to a lower
0:04:08frame rate. Who knows what else they do? I don't know. Among other things, they haven't
0:04:14fully documented. I'm not quite sure they fully documented exactly what low power mode
0:04:18does. And then it goes to red when you're in critical danger and then when it runs out
0:04:22of energy, the device turns off. But it's really more complicated than that. And the
0:04:27thing that that this whole saga seems to be about is that when certain things are happening
0:04:35on the iPhone that need more energy, like the CPU is performing at a peak level for
0:04:42a sustained amount of time, it needs to draw more energy from the battery than it does
0:04:48when it's doing something idle. And older batteries that are depleted, it's not just
0:04:55that they you get less that like the easy way to think about it is that I have an older
0:04:58iPhone the batteries depleted I get less battery I have to charge more throughout the day to
0:05:03keep it going but it's not as simple as that it it's no longer able to provide a peak sustained
0:05:10level of energy like a fresh battery could yeah the the term I think the key to all of
0:05:18this actually and I talked to somebody who understands these issues and not a little
0:05:26birdie but I did talk to somebody who understands electrical stuff and batteries and who said
0:05:29it's about it's all about impedance and if you look at the tech note which Apple posted
0:05:35it gets into the nitty-gritty the word impedance is never mentioned in the letter to customers
0:05:39right but in the tech note it says one attribute that affects instantaneous power delivery
0:05:45is the battery's impedance, which is basically like how hard it is to get electrons out of
0:05:50the battery. And the older a battery is, also the colder a battery is, or if it's got a
0:05:57low charge, the impedance is less, which means that the electrons flow slower, and when you
0:06:05need to pull power from it, the voltage drops like that, just because, just by definition,
0:06:14power can't flow out as quickly. And that's what this is all about is in an older battery,
0:06:20but also in a cold battery if you're in someplace where it's, you know, minus 10. If you've
0:06:25ever had to deal with battery-operated stuff in the extreme cold, it's the same thing,
0:06:30which is that that's like your battery's acting like it's old, whether it is or not. And that's
0:06:35what this is all about. Batteries get older, the impedance rises, and it becomes harder
0:06:40to maintain a higher voltage and that totally goes against the metaphor that we've all kind
0:06:45of I think I don't want to blame us for this because it's the makers of electronic devices
0:06:50have sold us this metaphor because this metaphor is easy to understand for people who are not
0:06:56electrical engineers like Apple Apple wants everything to be a black box right Apple wants
0:07:01everything to be magic but the blackest black box of all I think is maybe the battery where
0:07:05like we all just want to think, "Oh, it's at 83% or it's at 21%." And that works great
0:07:13sometimes. Like there's a story about how the iPhone when it gets to 100%, you know,
0:07:17you can't keep charging a battery that's not, that's full. And if you keep trying to charge
0:07:23it, it's bad for the battery. So Apple like fudges on what your battery percentage is
0:07:29at a high degree. Like when it gets to 100%, it stops charging and there's a certain amount
0:07:33it's allowed to drop before it starts charging it again, but it always says it's 100%. And
0:07:39that's because if it said if you left your phone overnight and you unplugged it and it
0:07:43said 94%, you'd be like, "What the hell, Apple?" But they're doing that in the background because
0:07:48of battery health issues. So this is a little bit like that. And up until this point, the
0:07:55biggest controversy about this, and I don't know if people in your family saw this, I
0:07:59it with people in my family a lot, which is on an older phone, you are at 40 percent and
0:08:07it shuts off. And you say, "What the hell? Why did it just shut off if I've got 40 percent?
0:08:12If the tank is 40 percent full, I should be able to use it." And the answer is, well,
0:08:17it's older, it's getting low on charge, and it reached a point where it couldn't provide
0:08:21enough power for the system, and so your phone shut down. And, you know, that's bad, right?
0:08:27So instead we get we get this and this is technically this is what Apple is trying to
0:08:32do to keep that phone from from shutting down by flipping all those all those switches.
0:08:37Yeah, I I definitely saw that I saw it personally once or twice. It was long enough ago and
0:08:48the fix that they shipped a year ago in 10 to 1 like all all of a sudden iOS 10.2.1 is
0:08:56is in the news. I think if I'm recalling correctly, it was my wife Amy who was seeing it more
0:09:07often and she was an adherent of the display, the percentage in the status bar alongside
0:09:15the icon and knew. And that's a popular feature. It's almost to me like it was always a curious
0:09:25thing to see people in my family who had that on as as just like I often say on the on the
0:09:33podcast that I'm an inveterate snoop at looking at people's screens like on airplanes you know
0:09:40like I don't like want to read their email I just like to see what they're doing and I one thing I
0:09:46would I always look at is like do typical people have that battery percentage on because a I think
0:09:51think it's an interesting feature. We can talk about it. But B, it's proof that typical
0:09:57people do turn on non default settings, you know, like there's a lot of people, and there
0:10:02are people who don't like typical users who just really never go into settings. But I
0:10:07think the iPhone has a couple of features that that make it obvious at a glance whether
0:10:10somebody has done something that battery percentage is one. The scaling factor is another I found
0:10:17I noticed that my mom who has a six, either six or success, I forget. But she has it set
0:10:23to the zoomed mode where it's running like the se sized user interface system wide, you
0:10:29know, and she's older, and it's obvious why. But I thought that was interesting, because
0:10:33that wasn't something I helped her set up. And the battery percentage is one. But anyway,
0:10:38that meant that when you hit this shot, as my long, long way of saying that, when people's
0:10:43phones would shut off, they often knew exactly what the percentage was before it shut down.
0:10:47And they knew that it was at like 40% or something like that. Exactly. And it just felt like
0:10:53it felt like they were robbed. And again, it completely breaks the metaphor of it's
0:10:58just a gas tank that I'm draining. Yeah, the gas tank metaphor really is it there's no
0:11:02better way of putting it that that's what we think of. And your car, a gas gasoline
0:11:09powered car runs exactly the same with a full tank of gas as it does with the last gasps
0:11:18of gas. Until you're literally using the last few drops of gasoline, your car goes
0:11:24the same speed with the same amount of energy in the pedal and the volume of the radio is
0:11:31exactly the same. The headlights are the same brightness. It is an easy metaphor, but it
0:11:39really is wrong. And I think the other factor that shows this with that when the iPhones
0:11:44were unexpectedly powering down, is that it, to my knowledge, it was never happening to
0:11:52people with like a full charge. It was always like, "Oh, I had like 50% left or 40% left."
0:12:00And it's it's what you mentioned before, which is that at that point, when the batteries
0:12:04at 40%, it's it's not just that it only has half the storage that you know, half the energy
0:12:09that it had at a full charge, it's that it's no longer able to provide as much energy and
0:12:14a burst as it used to.
0:12:15Right.
0:12:16And you get voltage droop, which is basically under load, it's trying to pull a lot of power
0:12:21from that battery.
0:12:22And the battery is voltage drops.
0:12:25And at that point, it's red alert for the system.
0:12:28I can't can't can't operate without voltage right it can't so what does it do it either shuts down or it reduces
0:12:35aggressively reduces power consumption, which is very clearly what the mandate was for the
0:12:39the electrical team at Apple on the iPhone
0:12:42And and if anything I think it's hard for people to get there to come to grips with this because
0:12:49If anything we think of gasoline powered cars as a messy
0:12:55literally, you know, it pollutes the air, a messy analog system. And we think of these digital
0:13:07devices as being so neat and clean, you know, that it's either providing energy or not the battery
0:13:15either has, you know, it's all binary, it's, it's, it is, you know, that there are no shades of gray,
0:13:20the battery either has a charger, it doesn't have a charge. And if it has a charge, it's on and
0:13:25everything runs and if it doesn't then everything nothing you know it needs to be charged that's it
0:13:31but that's not the truth it's actually really more of an analog ugly you know what does apple
0:13:39say in the tech note a couple times they use the word chemically chemically degraded is that what
0:13:45they say chemical chemical age happens a lot yeah like a high chemical age where it's just that's
0:13:54what we think of as it's an old battery. It's not as good. And these are rechargeable batteries,
0:13:59which is also different chemistry from back when we just used sort of like single-use batteries.
0:14:02So the chemistry is different. And even as people, you and I, who have been using Apple laptops for
0:14:09a while, the battery technology being used in them has changed over time. We used to be told
0:14:16every so often you needed to deplete your battery and then recharge it because otherwise it would
0:14:23would be like it would have a battery memory and it would and then at some point they're
0:14:28like no no no don't do that anymore. That's no longer the case right because they changed
0:14:32to a different method of storing energy, a different battery type and so you know this
0:14:37does change over time but in the end yeah would it I remember reading a story at some
0:14:42point where somebody was trying to make a fuel cell for mobile devices which I think
0:14:48never went anywhere but the idea there would be like literally you're putting hydrogen
0:14:53in your phone and then it uses it.
0:14:56And that would be like a gas tank, right?
0:14:59That would literally be like a gas tank.
0:15:01But, you know, right now these chemical batteries
0:15:05are the way that we get to have these light computers
0:15:09that we take with us everywhere.
0:15:11And like I said, we wanna think of their magic
0:15:15and the manufacturers encourage us to think
0:15:17that they're kind of magic and simple, but they're not.
0:15:21it's actually kind of messy and ugly underneath the surface.
0:15:24- Yeah, and I think that that is one of the traps
0:15:28that Apple fell into, which is,
0:15:31you know, my take on this from the outset
0:15:35has been that this is primarily a communication problem.
0:15:39And I actually think that even in Apple's letter
0:15:43to customers yesterday,
0:15:44that that's pretty much what they acknowledged.
0:15:46I mean, even, you know, the sentence,
0:15:48"We apologize," is in there.
0:15:50It is a genuine, I think, a genuine apology.
0:15:56But what they're apologizing for is not what the iPhone is doing and was programmed to
0:16:03do.
0:16:04It's for not communicating what was going on and why and leaving customers to be confused
0:16:15or think they're imagining things.
0:16:20such a perfect storm of things where there's been this trope for years that Apple purposefully,
0:16:27you know, as part of planned obsolescence when a new iPhone runs out, and it's, it's
0:16:32true because new versions of iOS tend to come out, always come out, the major new versions
0:16:37of iOS are tied to the release of new iPhones, iOS 12 will come out next September when new
0:16:42iPhones come out. I mean, you can pretty much, you know, make a pretty safe wager on that.
0:16:50But the theory, you know, is that app when new iPhones come out, Apple issues a software
0:16:55update that purposefully slows down two year old iPhones, so that owners of two year olds
0:17:01old iPhones think, well, I should go buy the new iPhone because my now my iPhone is slow.
0:17:06And, you know, I've been saying no, this isn't what they do or that, you know, I'm not denying
0:17:11that your phone might be slow after an update. If you know, I'm not, you know, you're the
0:17:15one with the phone, you say it's slow, it might be slow. But that's not why it's slow.
0:17:19For years, we you know, we in the Apple punditry industry have been saying no, Apple doesn't
0:17:25do this. And now the story comes out that here's this thing where iOS is slowing down
0:17:31your iPhone deliberately sounds an awful lot like the thing that everybody was paranoid
0:17:35about. And even though it's not quite the same thing, it sounds an awful lot like it.
0:17:39And, and I mean, Apple, okay, so I think there are two, so one side of this is, look, the
0:17:47chemistry is the reality here and voltage and something needed to be done because, you
0:17:52know, take your pick, sudden shutdowns or degraded performance.
0:17:56But Apple, Apple bears a lot of this blame for a few reasons.
0:18:00I want to take you back and I want to thank Nili Patel for finding this link yesterday
0:18:05and tweeting it out.
0:18:06I wrote a story at Macworld in 2007 where basically Greg Joswiak called me up to try
0:18:11and do some damage control over this story that was people, there was a story that had
0:18:17gone around that basically said after 400 times you plug in and unplug your iPhone to
0:18:24charge it, the battery won't work anymore. And of course this is when at the peak of
0:18:28like phones without removable batteries were new and terrifying and it was one of the knocks
0:18:34on the original iPhone. And they said, "Okay, it's like a complete cycle. It's very different."
0:18:40They said a lot of things that are completely accurate in the story from July 2007. You
0:18:43know, I say the iPhone, like every battery ever made, it's going to lose the ability
0:18:47to hold the charge over time. It won't necessarily evaporate in two years, but the fact is that
0:18:53sooner or later the iPhone's battery will die. And that's not wrong. But what Jaws said
0:18:59to me in that story and I quote him directly is, "Most iPhone users will realize, as most
0:19:05iPod customers realized, that they never needed to replace their batteries." And what he's
0:19:10really saying is, "You're going to be able to use this even two years from now and it'll
0:19:15be fine, but we will also offer a battery replacement program." And this is, I think,
0:19:20one of Apple's challenges is they didn't communicate what they were doing in degrading performance
0:19:23and why it was actually a good thing because it meant, "Congratulations, your phone's not
0:19:26going to automatically shut down. But I think Apple, with its design philosophy of trying
0:19:32to hit that battery number of a brand new phone, but be as thin and light as possible,
0:19:38maybe didn't give themselves enough headroom for batteries to age and still be able to
0:19:42kind of operate gracefully into a third year. I think Apple is guilty of thinking of how
0:19:49they have people at Apple use phones, which is that they get a new phone every year. I
0:19:54look at the performance problems people report in a two or three year old phone when they
0:19:59do an iOS update and I feel like I don't think Apple is intentionally sabotaging old phones,
0:20:04but I also don't think Apple makes it a priority to make sure that new iOS versions run well
0:20:09on old phones. Like they could do more. And so, you know, they made some decisions in
0:20:15terms of prioritization. And leaving aside Apple retail, which is absolutely has incentives
0:20:22to sell more phones rather than fix phones. And that's just, unless, I mean, it's just
0:20:26sort of natural. They would have to do a lot to kind of push away that basic incentive,
0:20:31which is there people at Apple retail, I mean, it's their job to sell products, right? And
0:20:35because they're also the manufacturer, that all gets mixed up. So I guess what I'm saying
0:20:39is Apple bears blame here in the short term because of, I think, how this was not communicated.
0:20:46But in the longer term, they made some prioritizations and they made some design decisions. And what
0:20:51we've ended up with is a world where a three-year-old iPhone, that third year you own an iPhone.
0:20:57I can say this because lots of people in my family use, I generally use a new iPhone or
0:21:02a one-year-old iPhone, but I got kids and even my wife will only buy a new phone maybe
0:21:07every three years, and I've seen the performance on a three-year-old iPhone and it's bad. Like
0:21:11the battery goes bad, the performance slows down, and Apple's decisions kind of have led
0:21:19to that point. So, you know, it's not just the communication issue, it's some priorities
0:21:24that Apple has had where they're not, you know, they're not sabotaging old phones, but
0:21:29they're not trying really hard to have that third and fourth year with an iPhone be a
0:21:32great experience either. Yeah, and it, I, the replay, replaceable user replaceable batteries
0:21:41used to be, there was no such thing as a phone that didn't have one. I mean, it was, it was
0:21:46always you know, you take off the back plate of the phone and there's a battery and that's
0:21:50where the SIM card holder would be. And it was a big deal that the iPhone was like an
0:21:58iPod iPods never had user replaceable batteries either. Totally. And again, the conspiracy
0:22:06theory is that Apple does this out of some sort of design spite that they don't, they
0:22:13find like the little access hatch for a battery to be ungainly. And they enjoy, they enjoy being able
0:22:21to, I mean, they can't prevent third party battery replacements. In fact, people, you know, do it
0:22:28every day. But by having it be sealed up, it certainly encourages people to only replace the
0:22:34battery through the Apple Store. And that the $79 charge that they were charging for it for years
0:22:41was that one of the reasons they seal it up is so that they can make $79 on replacements.
0:22:48Tim Cynova Yeah, and it makes it that easier to just upsell somebody to a new phone and
0:22:52here's a trade-in and we can get you in a new phone. If I was running an Apple store,
0:22:59that's what I would do, right? I'm much more inclined to sell a new phone than to
0:23:02sell even a $79 battery replacement.
0:23:05But the truth is that a big part, I think the primary part of it is that it makes it
0:23:11possible to design bigger batteries, smaller devices. And it's because if it's user replaceable,
0:23:20it has to be a somewhat regular shape, meaning some kind of rectangle, and there's contacts
0:23:27and the type of contacts that would connect the battery to the system are going to be,
0:23:34I think, you know, there has to and there has to be some slack so you know, you can get a finger
0:23:40in there to pop it out and stuff. Whereas if you seal it up, and you if you look just go to the
0:23:46iFixit teardowns for like the iPhone 10. And you can see the battery is like an L shape. It's not
0:23:51a regular shape because they, you know, figured out it's almost more like a liquid thinking of
0:23:58it as a liquid where they any air gaps in there is a possible space where they can put more battery.
0:24:04Famously, they even showed they had one of those nice 3d teardown fly throughs of I think it was
0:24:13a MacBook Air, but one of the MacBooks of recent years where they showed how they created this
0:24:20battery in almost like a theater like stair step design that right that's right literally
0:24:27it's it's molded around every every bit of open space that's left in the product in order
0:24:33to fill it up and so it's not a single module it's like a whole bunch of things in a stair
0:24:37step and I just I just replaced a battery on a MacBook Air because my my old 2010 MacBook
0:24:44Air that my son uses just had the expanding battery thing where he came to me and he's
0:24:48is like there's a huge bulge in my MacBook Air,
0:24:50what happened?
0:24:51- Wow.
0:24:52- And I popped it open and took it out.
0:24:54And I got a replacement for my Fixit, actually it was great.
0:24:58But in lifting that out from 2010,
0:25:02it's a plastic thing with like five
0:25:04differently shaped battery modules on it.
0:25:07This is why you can have a MacBook Air that's that thin,
0:25:13is that there's no place to slide in a big chunky battery
0:25:17like the old days.
0:25:17and the iPhone it's even even more like that. Yeah. And you know, batteries are better than
0:25:23they used to be. You know, like you spoke about the old days when there was like, almost
0:25:27like an exercise regimen for your MacBook or I guess, old enough, you know, your powerbook,
0:25:32our book, yeah, power book batteries where you you're supposed to deplete it every once
0:25:36in a while. And you I remember the other thing too, is you were you. And I ran into this,
0:25:43I ran into this with a power book that I kept mostly at my desk connected to it. It just
0:25:49was the, you know, I had a great power book. I almost never needed to take it away from
0:25:55the desk and it had a nice big display. So I was running it on power. And, and it actually
0:26:02wrecked the battery like by never running it on battery power. When I didn't then needed
0:26:07to, I got like an alert in the up in the system bar that, you know, up in the menu bar that
0:26:12It was like, "Hey, you need to get this battery replaced."
0:26:16And I was like, "Aw."
0:26:18- Well, and Apple has, and so what Apple has done
0:26:21to avoid stuff like that is, and other men,
0:26:23not just Apple, but software makers and hardware makers
0:26:26in general working on this stuff,
0:26:28what you have to do if you want to avoid that
0:26:32is lie to the user and risk putting them in a bad situation,
0:26:36but not kill their battery.
0:26:38So the right way to do it, and I think a lot of computers
0:26:40phones do this now, the right way to do that in your old time would be to surreptitiously
0:26:46take you off power and drain the battery and tell you everything's fine and you're plugged
0:26:52in but it's actually running on battery and draining the battery and it gets to the bottom
0:26:55and then it flips it back on and charges back up and you are none the wiser, which is great
0:27:00except for one scenario which is that moment where you need to unplug and take it. If it's
0:27:05down at 10%, you're going to be very angry, right? Even though it's doing it for good
0:27:11reasons. And that's always been a challenge with this kind of intelligent battery stuff
0:27:16in the background is users want to know what's up and if you lie to them and they notice,
0:27:23it can be bad. And it's a little bit like that with this, which is like we're trying
0:27:26to make it all seem easy, but there's actually, it's really complicated in the background.
0:27:32And you know, the fact is that if you're a user and you get surprised, that's not good,
0:27:36right? Like users don't like surprises of Oh, turns out 50% battery, I actually need
0:27:40to shut down now. Nobody wants to see that.
0:27:42All right, let me take a break here. I want to run nowhere near done with this. But there's
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0:30:23the talk show. So my thanks to fracture. So here's the point I spent this entire, that
0:30:28entire sponsor read with my iPhone in my hand to remember that where I wanted to go when
0:30:33I came back, which is that when we're talking about where Apple has to take the blame in
0:30:39this is in their pursuit of ever thinner phones and there's a reason why this is
0:30:49an iPhone issue and not an iOS device issue it as far as I know it does this
0:30:56does not seem to affect iPads I mean maybe there's there are iPads that are
0:31:00really old that have significantly degraded batteries but I would suspect
0:31:06that most iPads that might be that old aren't even eligible for iOS 10 because they have
0:31:14bigger batteries. I mean, obviously they have bigger batteries because they're much bigger
0:31:18devices. But because they're bigger devices, even when the battery has two years of decline,
0:31:27still has enough. It's still can provide, you know, the peak sustained energy that you
0:31:36need so that you don't, you know, the device doesn't shut down. And I think the conclusion
0:31:43and I don't know, I'm not an electrical engineer, but I think it seems obvious that if iPhones
0:31:49were to some degree thicker, and that thicker, thicker structure was used to put bigger batteries
0:31:56in the iPhone, this would be mitigated to some extent. Yeah, I mean, I think the way
0:32:03I think of it is Apple is obviously Apple has some very clear battery philosophy. Like
0:32:11the iPads quoted battery life has been 10 hours forever and iPhone. They clearly have
0:32:15like a window they're shooting for in terms of when you take this thing out of the box,
0:32:21how long can you use it on a charge like they have and they have user data to back that
0:32:25up. They know they've got some people who always leave their phone plugged in. There
0:32:27are other people who will leave in the morning and work a long day and are working it hard
0:32:31and want to run it all the way through. And they have some somewhere in there, they have
0:32:35a profile that they're trying to hit. It's very clear. They will try to hit it with every
0:32:39phone. Now new phones have a little bit more, but for a while there, they were really like
0:32:44they had a it was not not something you could use heavily all day and get through the day.
0:32:50But if you used it lightly, you could get through the day. And I think that was sort
0:32:53of what they were counting on. The so the more battery you put in the more weight there
0:32:58is and the more space it needs which means potentially the thicker it needs to be and
0:33:04I think you're right what the way I think of it is they were shooting to hit a minimum
0:33:10that served them well even though not great I think iPhone battery life always there could
0:33:15always be more but like well enough they wanted to optimize for thin thinness and lightness
0:33:21But when you get two and a half years out and the battery is fatigued,
0:33:25there's no headroom there. It's like an Apple Watch. I feel this way about my Apple Watch
0:33:31Series 3, which is I can use it all day and do a couple of workouts and do all sorts of things.
0:33:36It's like I can't kill that battery in a day. It takes me a day and a half to kill that battery.
0:33:41That's good because in three years that battery is not going to be as good, and I'm still going
0:33:44to be able to get through a day. And the iPhone hasn't had that kind of headroom. Very clearly,
0:33:48they're right on the edge where as soon as the battery starts to degrade after year two,
0:33:52it becomes a problem because there's just no room for for for uh you know for error. Yeah and I'm
0:34:00I've been thinking about this as this scandal I don't know if scandal is too strong a word but
0:34:06let's say scandal has has been uh erupting over the last two weeks and I the thing I one of the
0:34:14of the things I keep coming back to is that my simplistic gas tank analogy, it just trying
0:34:23to flush it from my brain because it doesn't work. And one of the ways is that and I think
0:34:29what Apple has run into here is it's not just that iPhones have gotten thinner in recent
0:34:35It's also that the CPUs have gotten more powerful.
0:34:40And it doesn't seem like this was a problem
0:34:46in the early years of the iPhone.
0:34:50Like the first few generations of iPhone
0:34:52didn't have this two year old model shuts down problem.
0:34:57And I think part of that is that
0:35:00the maximum sustained energy the CPU could use
0:35:04wasn't high enough that the battery didn't run into it.
0:35:08You know, like it--
0:35:09- Yeah, my gut feeling is that the dynamic range
0:35:11wasn't even that much in terms of power draw.
0:35:13Like there was only like a certain range.
0:35:16I get the impression modern smartphones have way more,
0:35:19they crank up the high performance cores
0:35:21and they also run the extra cores in the A11.
0:35:24And the range of power that thing can draw
0:35:27is pretty wide from sipping to completely killing it.
0:35:32And yeah, I get the feeling that early iPhones,
0:35:34and let's not forget the iPod,
0:35:35like JAWS used that example, right?
0:35:37Did the iPod battery get old and less effective?
0:35:40Absolutely, but I'm not sure the iPod battery draw,
0:35:44you know, it was either spinning the disc
0:35:47if you were using a classic iPod,
0:35:49that was a lot of power,
0:35:50but it would spin the disc, read a lot into memory,
0:35:53and then spin the disc down again.
0:35:55And on the SSDs, like,
0:35:57there could not have been much power usage range in there,
0:35:59maybe a little, but not a lot.
0:36:01But the modern phone, like,
0:36:02The A11 has what, three high performance cores and three efficiency cores and it can run
0:36:08all six if it needs to in the most stressful.
0:36:12And that's leaving aside driving the screen, you know, heavy graphics performance, having
0:36:20an LTE radio going, having Bluetooth going, having Wi-Fi going.
0:36:23There's a lot of power draw that can come out of that thing in extreme circumstances.
0:36:27My guess, and again, I'm not an electrical engineer, so I could be way wrong, but my
0:36:32guess is that with the iPods, that the only significant power drain was the color LCD
0:36:40once they went to a color LCD.
0:36:41That just having the display on was, my guess, it was the biggest power drain.
0:36:47But since they were primarily audio players, I mean, obviously, once they could play video,
0:36:52that would drain the battery.
0:36:55but I think it was the display being on that was taxing,
0:36:57not the video playing.
0:36:59Because the video and audio never taxed the CPUs
0:37:02because they always had custom chips to decode them.
0:37:06Right, it was never a CPU intensive device at any stage.
0:37:11So I just don't think there was ever that issue.
0:37:14Like I really do think the gas tank analogy
0:37:16held up with iPods where the only,
0:37:18if you had your trusty beloved five year old iPod,
0:37:22the only real difference from when it was new
0:37:24maybe that it just you got fewer hours of playback between charges you know I
0:37:29don't think there was and I think that's one of the reasons we all fell into this
0:37:33trap of thinking of the batteries as a gas tank because it used to work the
0:37:37analogy did work back then maybe not you know at the implementation level like
0:37:42the you know the engineers who were making the devices couldn't think of it
0:37:45that way obviously but as a user you could get away with it and never never
0:37:49be wrong. Right, and it's easier. It's a better metaphor. It's a good metaphor. People understand
0:37:57it. Apple and tech companies in general, they have to trade in metaphors because a lot of this stuff
0:38:04is way too complicated for people to understand who are just lay people. And they don't want to
0:38:10understand it. And so if you can find a good metaphor and you can hang your hat on it, then
0:38:15do it, right? The problem is that this phenomenon forces us to understand that that metaphor
0:38:23is broken.
0:38:25Yeah. Boy, did Apple take it on the chin from the press and continues to. Even the apology
0:38:36yesterday, you know, has generated some really interesting coverage from the mainstream media.
0:38:48Somebody on Twitter sent me a screenshot. This is a guy named Christopher who lives
0:38:53in Australia and on Australian TV. What do they call those banners at the bottom of the
0:38:59screen? There's like a word for it, like chyron. Like the little scrolling banner at the bottom
0:39:04of TV news had this headline, I swear to God, not making this up. US colon Apple apologizes
0:39:12for iPhone battery scam. Wow. That's the actual Chiron at the bottom of the TV. And again,
0:39:25I we I think we're being very adamant here, you and I that Apple is there are things you
0:39:31can fault Apple for in this whole saga. Communication and design choices. It is not a scam. Rightly
0:39:42or wrongly, whether you disagree with the decisions they made, I really do think that
0:39:46even if you disagree with the decisions they made and you think that they should have done
0:39:50X, Y, or Z different at a technical level, I do think that the intent was genuinely to
0:39:56actually, that's part of what I think frustrates the people at Apple is that their intent was
0:40:01actually the opposite of sabotaging an old iPhone. This was their genuine attempt to
0:40:06extend the useful lifespan of older iPhones.
0:40:09David Tompa Right. I think the thing to criticize Apple
0:40:12for here is, yes, a lack of communication, but also all of the decisions and corporate
0:40:17culture that led to the fact that a three year old iPhone would suddenly shut down with
0:40:2250% battery. But the solution, which was very clever, which was, boy, we need to do a better
0:40:28job of reducing power because this is a bad user experience. Like, that was a good engineering
0:40:34decision to solve a problem. We should debate the way they didn't communicate it and how
0:40:42they got in that position. Those are both, I think, fair places to criticize Apple. But
0:40:46like, this specific engineering challenge that they solved by throttling things so that
0:40:52your phone didn't die, that's absolutely done in the best interest of the users. They
0:40:57know that everybody was getting very upset with older phones that were just spontaneously
0:41:02shutting down. I can't tell you how many times my daughter and my wife, in the last year
0:41:08before they got newer phones, would be like, "My iPhone just shut down again." They're
0:41:12like furious about it. And people grouse about slow iPhones, and I don't want to make light
0:41:17of it because I've seen some impossible-to-use iPhones that were incredibly slow, but at
0:41:22least they're up and you can take a phone call and you can take a picture. And, you
0:41:27know, I did, I experienced this once where I was, we were skiing with my wife's family
0:41:34and I had my iPhone out and was taking pictures of, taking video, HD video, maybe even 4K
0:41:40video of my kids coming down the ski slope. And the phone just went, "Nope, I'm off. I'm
0:41:45turning myself off." And I think it was the cold that was doing it in that circumstance,
0:41:48But there's nothing worse than that. So, you know, full credit to Apple's electrical engineering
0:41:54and software power management teams for figuring out this problem that, you know, that's not
0:41:59it's not on them here, right? It's on how it was not communicated and why they had to
0:42:05do it in the first place.
0:42:06Yeah, there's a and I think there's a culture within Apple of never wanting to say anything
0:42:13negative about any of their products. And I think that's true for most companies. I
0:42:18mean, who, you know, you know, you go to a restaurant and how often does the waiter tell
0:42:23you, you know, the fish, you know,
0:42:28most what they'll say is, I know our fish didn't used to be good, but now it's good.
0:42:32That's when you admit, you admit the failure once it's done. And in the, in the rear view
0:42:36mirror,
0:42:37I funny story. One time I was in Denver, a great city. I was only there at one time,
0:42:41We had a dinner and it just happened to be
0:42:43it was during the development of Vesper and Dave whiskers lived there at the time and
0:42:51Forget even why but Brent and I both could make it and so we had like a weekend to work together
0:42:56We did a podcast and then there were some other friends in the area
0:42:58we had like six people go out to dinner and we went to some like a steak place and
0:43:02They had prime rib on the menu as well and I like prime rib
0:43:06but prime rib in my opinion is usually either excellent or it is terrible very tough and
0:43:13a waitress came by and somebody asked a question and she said that she recommended you know
0:43:17somebody's like which steak should I get and she was like I recommend the ribeye and then
0:43:21I said hey what about the prime rib is the prime rib good here and she said I recommend
0:43:25the ribeye I was like okay I'm gonna get a ribeye yeah but you know Apple takes it
0:43:32But, you know, Apple takes that to an extreme where they, in their prepared remarks for
0:43:40like a post-event product briefing, and it always amazes me how I think I've come up
0:43:46with, "Ooh, I'll bet nobody else thought of it. I've got a really good question and I'll
0:43:49bet nobody else has thought of it." And I ask the question and I get a response that
0:43:54is canned, you know, like they were ready for it. You know, like I've still never stumped
0:43:59anybody to my recollection.
0:44:05It's because you get the briefings a little earlier than I do. I will tell you
0:44:08they're a little more punchy at the end of the afternoon when
0:44:10you're at the last briefing and they just want to go. They loosen up a
0:44:14little bit. That's the trick. I usually go... I've started going
0:44:18early recently. I don't know. Somehow I got bumped up. But I used to go dead last.
0:44:22I used to be... Oh, well, that is the best time then. It was.
0:44:26It was like you got the most out of them you're ever going to get out of them.
0:44:28when it's when it's 445 and they really want to go away. Yeah, because it was a combination of
0:44:34them knowing that I'm not on deadline. And right. Be that I think that they, you know,
0:44:42sound self serving, but I think that they, you know, maybe like talking to me more than other
0:44:48some other people. And that if, you know, it could be more leisurely, like instead of getting,
0:44:54you know, having somebody tapping their watch at 20, 29 minutes in, it could go 35, 40,
0:45:0045 minutes and doesn't matter because there's nobody after. But anyway, yeah, I know exactly
0:45:03what you're, you're right. That's totally locked down. Like I've gotten answers that
0:45:07I thought were very, obviously they're going to be totally locked down. They know what
0:45:12they're going to say. They know how they're going to phrase things. They know how you're
0:45:15going to address it. I will try to ask a clever question. I'll get an answer. I'll be like,
0:45:18okay, that's interesting. I have heard that that's new. And then I will read somebody
0:45:22else's article like, you know, and it'll be you or or like neelay or you know, just somebody
0:45:27Matt hone and I don't know, I mean, whoever it is, and you'll see the exact same phrasing
0:45:32and you'll be like, God, that was on their talking points do they're very well trained
0:45:38and buttoned up.
0:45:41So I think, you know, this whole issue with batteries, you know, is industry wide, there
0:45:46is nothing worse about iPhones batteries than competing products and if anything I genuinely
0:45:52believe that Apple's battery life and the technology they use is better than most of
0:46:00the competing products on the market. So it's not like the problems inherent to lithium-ion
0:46:05batteries are specific to the iPhone. It's just the way it is but Apple doesn't like
0:46:09it's not within their character to talk about it like that this technical note that came
0:46:14out yesterday explaining all of the various ways that lithium ion batteries suck are just terrible.
0:46:22And surely, you know, this is one of those things where probably not next year, you know, but it's
0:46:28one of those things where like one or two years isn't going to make a difference. But at some
0:46:31point, you know, 1015 years from now, we're going to have a totally different technology powering
0:46:36these devices. And we're going to look back at lithium ion batteries. And, you know, it's going
0:46:41to seem anachronistic. It's going to seem ridiculous. Yeah, but it's not within their
0:46:47character to talk about these things. And it really, I really think it painted them
0:46:53in the corner on this and I, you know, I think they regret it now. But for example, in iOS,
0:46:59you go to settings app, go to the battery section at the top. If your battery iPhone
0:47:04battery is truly in dire condition, when you go there, it will say your battery may need
0:47:09to be serviced. Learn more and learn more, I think takes you to, you know, like a web
0:47:17page where there's information about how to, you know, more or less telling you to go take
0:47:22it to an Apple store or otherwise, some other authorized dealer. So I was tweeting about
0:47:26this, and somebody on Twitter was like, you keep mentioning this, but I've never heard
0:47:30anybody get this. And then somebody thankfully, because I hadn't seen it personally. And I'm
0:47:38And I'm very kind, as an aside, I'm conscious of the fact
0:47:40that me personally, I use a new,
0:47:42I buy a new iPhone every single year.
0:47:44And so I don't run into the problems
0:47:48that people run into with two or three year old iPhones.
0:47:50I am fully, I recognize that that is a position
0:47:54of absurd privilege in that, you know,
0:47:58it is a, you know, something that most people
0:48:02have the common sense not to do.
0:48:04It's a combination of me having enough money to do it
0:48:06and be lacking the common sense of putting my money in a...
0:48:11- And the Apple benefits from the fact
0:48:13that most of the people who write about their products
0:48:15don't use them after they're a year old.
0:48:18- Right. - Right?
0:48:19I mean, they don't, there are not a lot of tech writers
0:48:21out there rocking a three-year-old iPhone.
0:48:23There are some, but not a lot, and that benefits them.
0:48:26- Right, but somebody who had seen it,
0:48:28took a screenshot of it and posted it,
0:48:30and it was like, wow, you know,
0:48:32a couple people on Twitter are like, I've never seen that.
0:48:34And it's because that warning isn't tied to the threshold of where these throttling features
0:48:40kick in. It's truly, I don't know where it is, but like, you know, it, it, it seems like
0:48:45there's some kind of test that Apple can perform in the store and it gives Apple a number from
0:48:51like one to a hundred of the health of your battery and they won't, they will refuse to
0:48:56replace a battery that is at 80% or above on this test. So if you come in, you think
0:49:01your iPhone battery isn't good enough and they run this test and it says 81 they won't take your
0:49:06$79 and replace the battery. And I that's interesting. And I've had you know, there's a
0:49:12I've heard from a bunch of people during this whole saga, who said I you know, I'm so frustrated
0:49:18because it said 83 I know that the battery isn't as good as it used to be. I have the $80 I just
0:49:24want you to take it and have me come back in an hour and have right I just want to keep using this
0:49:29phone and I want the extra battery life you know what am I supposed to do go and
0:49:34and you know shoot 4k video continuously for two days to degrade the battery
0:49:39before I come back so I get that but that that warning in iOS only kicks in
0:49:49at something like I don't know let's just I'm pulling this out of my hat but
0:49:52like 20 you know like a battery that is seriously seriously problematic like
0:49:57- Right, and Apple said that they're gonna make an OS update
0:49:59to change that threshold,
0:50:00which is probably a really good idea, right?
0:50:05But it goes, this and the $79 charge,
0:50:08which is being reduced to $29,
0:50:10seemed to me like easy fixes in a way on Apple's part
0:50:14in terms of making this happen quickly.
0:50:18But it also says something like
0:50:19how this was really a cultural thing
0:50:21more than anything else.
0:50:22It's like these were reasons to dissuade you
0:50:24from ever thinking about replacing your battery.
0:50:27- Yeah.
0:50:29So one of the questions that I've seen
0:50:32and I didn't really have good answer to,
0:50:33somebody just asked me literally just like half an hour
0:50:36before we started recording on Twitter,
0:50:37like what's the story,
0:50:38what's the deal with Android phones and batteries?
0:50:41Do they throttle?
0:50:42Do they degrade over time?
0:50:45And I do think, I didn't have a chance to read it in detail,
0:50:50but I posted it in the note
0:50:53I'll put it in the show notes. There's an article on seeking alpha from someone who
0:51:00looked at in a non tech article, and it does seem like Android at a system level has built
0:51:06in throttling, where certain things just naturally, you know, like the CPU doesn't run at peak
0:51:12performance, you can't just run the CPU at peak performance for as long as you want until
0:51:16battery dies. It will kick in, like benchmarks show it. More or less, the answer is it's
0:51:25complicated. Android phones don't run on the battery like a tank of gas. There's all sorts
0:51:32of stuff going on in Android 2 to make these things work. But the thing I did find interesting
0:51:38too is—and I think I put it in the show notes—this link to a Reddit thread about this. And it's
0:51:45HTC and Motorola say they don't slow iPhones like Apple does.
0:51:50These companies are trying to make a bit of hay out of this,
0:51:54but they're saying they don't do exactly what Apple is doing. They're not saying that your phone
0:52:04doesn't throttle the CPU. Here's the statement from Motorola, "We do not throttle CPU performance
0:52:11based on older batteries, but they do throttle CPU performance. In general, it's they just
0:52:18have to. And on this Reddit thread, there's comments from a bunch of people. Like, here's
0:52:26somebody with a Nexus six p who says that it shuts down whenever it feels like so it
0:52:30seems like it runs into the problem iPhones had that it just shuts down. And then there's
0:52:34also a problem. I think iPhones can get into this too, with a bad enough battery. Where
0:52:40it's a never-ending boot loop where it's the boot loop of death where the battery is in
0:52:45such bad shape that as you power it on while it's starting up it hits the point where it
0:52:51needs to shut down because it's not getting enough energy from the battery and shuts down
0:52:54and you never you can't get out of it. Here's somebody who claims to be a Verizon employee.
0:53:03It is most definitely LG's fault. It's been happening on the G3, G4, G5 and V10 models.
0:53:09They all happened after their one-year warranty expired, but before their upgrade periods.
0:53:14The response has been horrendously shit, and we are currently dealing with their own class
0:53:18action lawsuit.
0:53:21Those who cry about their iPhones slowing down because their battery is starting to
0:53:24suck, at least your phone still works.
0:53:27Who knows?
0:53:28This is a random person on Reddit.
0:53:32But there's enough people in the thread with stories like this that the idea that this
0:53:36is specific to iPhones and that there aren't problems with Android and that it may or may
0:53:40not be worse with Android phones, you know, is all on the table.
0:53:44Yeah, it depends on what, you know, how much batteries in the phone and how power, what's
0:53:49the power draw. And like Apple has these incredibly fast processors now, but I imagine that, you
0:53:55know, they're already trying to regulate the power pretty severely. So it may come down
0:53:59to just like how big is your battery? And maybe Apple has been, my gut feeling is Apple
0:54:06maybe has been optimizing a little bit too aggressively.
0:54:09And I would say that maybe this is gonna be a reason
0:54:12to motivate them to do that a little less,
0:54:14but I feel like Apple has reached maybe the bottom
0:54:19in terms of like their attempts for super thinness
0:54:24on phones, especially since they've got the camera bump now.
0:54:27And they know the value of having more batteries.
0:54:30So I think, already with the iPhone 10, we've seen that,
0:54:33where they're kind of embracing having more battery and obviously the plus models. So,
0:54:39you know, maybe they are already turning this and stopping the like hyper aggressive, you
0:54:44know, let's do as little battery as we can and get away with it because we want to keep
0:54:48it thin and light.
0:54:49Well, I think the most telling thing is that the iPhone 10 is actually slightly thicker
0:54:54than the iPhone 8 and 7 and 6. It's, you know, it's just a few millimeters, I want to say,
0:55:03maybe one millimeter or something. It's not significant, but it certainly is significant
0:55:08enough that if you lay them down side by side on a table, you can see that it's thicker.
0:55:12So that's, you know, certainly it's a strong suggestion that Apple has gotten to a thin enough
0:55:21for now. Eventually, you know, we will laugh. Another thing, you know, on the 10-year
0:55:28timescale 10 years from now we will look back on the iPhone 10 and think my god wasn't that
0:55:34exciting when that phone shipped but look at how thick it is it's so heavy. Sure I mean there is a
0:55:39point where you're going to give yourself a paper cut with your phone if it gets super thin right
0:55:43it is you know you can get everything can get thinner at the exact same rate except with if
0:55:50you set your battery target at 14 hours instead of 10 hours right you know it's going to get thinner
0:55:55from a thicker starting point.
0:55:57And that's, I think that's the question here is just,
0:56:00you know, has Apple stopped being quite as aggressive
0:56:03with what battery it puts in?
0:56:05I mean, it still doesn't matter though.
0:56:06Still old batteries are still gonna suck though,
0:56:08that there's just, until there's new battery tech
0:56:11that does, that works more like a gas tank,
0:56:14but they don't have that yet.
0:56:16- All right, let me take a break
0:56:17and thank our next friend of the show.
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0:57:32right out the wazoo. And I'll give you an example. I just this week linked to a fantastic
0:57:40story by a guy named Jason Justin O'Byrne, who was a he's a cartographer. Oh, yeah, used
0:57:46to work. He used to work at Apple, and has a series, he's more or less writing a book.
0:57:53chapter by chapter on the web.
0:57:55I don't know how the book is gonna be though,
0:57:57because his examples are animated.
0:58:01Like he'll have a, here's an example of this block
0:58:04of this city at this scale in Google Maps.
0:58:07And here's the same block at the same scale in Apple Maps.
0:58:10And he uses animation so you can see them
0:58:13one after another and see the differences.
0:58:16It inherently, you know, it's sort of thing,
0:58:18you can't do animation in a printed book, at least not yet.
0:58:22maybe like with a flip book or something.
0:58:23But anyway, his website,
0:58:25in addition to being a fantastic article, fantastic.
0:58:28If you didn't read it, you really should.
0:58:30I will put it in the show notes, but it's a beautiful,
0:58:35it's just a beautiful, beautiful design too.
0:58:38And once you see it, you'll say, yeah,
0:58:40I can see why Gruber likes this design.
0:58:42It's just one column, beautiful type,
0:58:45some Futura bold for the headlines.
0:58:48So of course I got nosy and viewed source.
0:58:51guess what? Squarespace. He said it on Squarespace. So, uh, really, it's just a terrific example
0:58:58of something. And I can imagine why he did it is why he's using Squarespace is, is so
0:59:03much work and research goes into the article and when you see it and you think about it,
0:59:08and he's got examples from like years ago, uh, where he's been collecting these examples
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1:00:07check them out next time you need a website. Do you love that? You love that article from
1:00:12Justin O'Byrne, right?
1:00:13Yeah, I mean, I remember I've been following them, and I remember linking to them before
1:00:18because they are so detailed. And, you know, that requires commitment because he's taking
1:00:23screenshots over time of the same things so you can see the progress. I think it's really
1:00:29interesting. It led to a really interesting conversation I saw on Twitter, a lot of things
1:00:33going back and forth about, you know, there's a constant debate about like, what's the
1:00:38state of Apple Maps? And what's the state of Google Maps? And I think the latest post
1:00:41by Justin O'Byrne was interesting because he's pointing out he's pointing out features
1:00:45like Google is turning its machine learning onto satellite photos and drawing the shapes
1:00:49of buildings base basically automatically based on pictures of buildings from satellite
1:00:55photos which is cool. Although I saw somebody use it as an example of why Google Maps is
1:01:01way ahead of Apple Maps and I'm not quite sure that as cool as it is it's as it's a
1:01:07vital feature like that I would put into the hopper for like reasons why to choose one
1:01:12over the other is a is a the shape of a building especially since in my neighborhood they've
1:01:17got the shape of my my kids old elementary school from five years ago and they knocked
1:01:22that school down and built a new school and it hasn't been updated so it's not current
1:01:26shapes but you know but I appreciate that they've got them and that Apple doesn't I
1:01:29just I'm not sure if I was to say where in Apple Maps do I want Apple to invest more
1:01:34of its resources. I'm not sure I would say building shapes, but you know, but it is amazing
1:01:38to see the evolution and what Google pours into to maps from seemingly like all sorts
1:01:44of different parts of their their company and their set of technology. Well, one of
1:01:48the things that was interesting about his recent comparison was comparing what they're
1:01:54getting out of the satellite images versus Street View and Street View is inherently
1:02:01labor intensive. It's, you know, it requires actual humans for now, you know, again, that
1:02:08might change, you know, coming years with self driving cars. And certainly, the street
1:02:15view thing would be one of the first things that would get, you know, have the human removed
1:02:20from it, right? Like it. In Uber type situation, you can think of more scenarios where you
1:02:26you need human interaction with some kind of dilemma or a complicated route to take,
1:02:33or I need you to stop at three places, whereas Street View just set the car going and let
1:02:38it go. So even taking out the human labor, though, it's just you need a number of cars.
1:02:44The cars can only go so fast. So his example was a small town where he grew up that still
1:02:52hasn't been street viewed, but all the roads are mapped because the satellite images can
1:02:59be processed by computers, and computers keep getting faster and faster and faster. They
1:03:07show buildings on maps in new developments where the roads aren't even there yet because
1:03:11they haven't updated the roads, but they've already identified through machine learning
1:03:15the buildings and have the houses on the map, which is kind of crazy.
1:03:19- Right, right, absolutely.
1:03:21And I think maps as a design challenge
1:03:26are fundamentally interesting.
1:03:28I think they've been, are historically interesting.
1:03:30And so obviously, you could argue the cutting edge
1:03:33of cartography is these map services,
1:03:37is how Apple and Google,
1:03:39not just like the technology behind it,
1:03:40but like how they choose to depict all this information
1:03:43and how much is too much.
1:03:44One of the things that he's written about is like,
1:03:46at what point do you kind of hide the information
1:03:48or degrade it because it's overwhelming.
1:03:50How do you label neighborhoods,
1:03:52Google labels neighborhoods more aggressively
1:03:54than Apple does, it's all, it's fascinating stuff.
1:03:56- Yeah, but, and where it kicks in,
1:03:58and I, you know, this drives some people nuts, you know,
1:04:01that who, you know, but I use Apple Maps,
1:04:04I like Apple Maps, I find it good enough.
1:04:06And I like, one thing I like about Apple Maps
1:04:10more than Google Maps is I like the user interface
1:04:13of the app itself better.
1:04:15and the places I tend to go and where I need navigation to,
1:04:20Apple Maps does a terrific job of it,
1:04:22but I don't go many places.
1:04:25And I get it that there's more places,
1:04:26a lot of places throughout the world
1:04:27where Google Maps has better data
1:04:29or has data where Apple doesn't, et cetera.
1:04:31But I also fully acknowledge,
1:04:34and everything in his article about Google,
1:04:37Google being years ahead of Apple Maps,
1:04:40it's really interesting to me,
1:04:41as somebody who doesn't drive often,
1:04:43And when I do drive, I tend to just not go far and I don't need navigation.
1:04:48But I used navigation recently.
1:04:51Just like the most recent example I can think of is going to see the last Jedi
1:04:58because rather than go see it here in the city where the theaters,
1:05:00there's some good theaters here,
1:05:01but the best theaters in the area are in the suburbs outside Philadelphia.
1:05:06And so for a special movie like the last Jedi, I want to, you know,
1:05:09where I buy like a reserved seat and a place with reclining seats, like I go,
1:05:13outside the city. And I used Apple Maps just to, you know, route me around. I know how
1:05:20to get there, but just take me around traffic and stuff like that. And I think it's gotten
1:05:25so much better, so much obvious, Apple Maps has gotten so much obviously better in recent
1:05:30years about little things like telling you ahead of time which lane you want to get into
1:05:35for an exit and explaining the words that are used to tell you about like a complicated
1:05:43like an exit with like two exits, you're right, like, you can make the the sharper right to go
1:05:49one way, and a lesser sloping right hand turn to go a different way. It's described better than I
1:05:58just described it, you know, telling you which which one you want to take it, they're obviously
1:06:03improving Apple Maps terrifically. But it's also the case that Google Maps is being improved at
1:06:08at the same rate, if not more, and so is remaining ahead overall.
1:06:15I think -- -Right, because Google tends
1:06:17to have done lane guidance sooner and, you know, all of those things.
1:06:22I use Apple Maps most of the time, but I use Google Maps sometimes, too.
1:06:24And it's fun to watch because it is an arms race,
1:06:29but I agree that Google is ahead,
1:06:32but it's not true that Apple is not improving that service.
1:06:37they are improving it all the time.
1:06:39- I think that to tie it all together though,
1:06:41and again, I'm with you,
1:06:43putting the building shapes on the map.
1:06:45I think it's interesting, I am a very visual person
1:06:48and so I do tend to navigate by landmarks
1:06:52and I know a lot of people do
1:06:53and I think I do find it useful.
1:06:56I would find it useful to have
1:06:58a recognizable building shape on the map.
1:07:00Is it essential?
1:07:01Probably not.
1:07:02But I think where the magic would tie it together
1:07:05is with self-driving cars. And I know Neelai Patel has to mention him again, has mentioned
1:07:12this a lot of the times that it's like the biggest problem with like Uber and Lyft and
1:07:18other car companies is often getting the exact right spot to get picked up. And there's so
1:07:25many buildings like in New York where Neelai is and here in Philadelphia, where the address
1:07:31of the building you're in doesn't correspond exactly to where you are to get picked up.
1:07:37Maybe you're on a side street. And the example that Justin O'Byrne gets into is that combined
1:07:48with Street View, where the machine learning can pick up doors, you can combine this with
1:07:56the map data to not just know the address and the location of a building, but the location
1:08:00of the doors at a building. And that that's a huge that, you know, that that could really
1:08:06change things in the car service business, right?
1:08:11Right. I feel that way. I mean, Google has gotten much better about where businesses
1:08:17are in like, shopping malls and strip malls where if you've ever done that I do that sometimes
1:08:22when we're taking a long drive to LA or something and we're, we're getting dinner in way out
1:08:27in the extreme East Bay where we used to live. We don't live there anymore. And there's a
1:08:30there's a, you know, let's go to the burger place here on our way out. And, you know,
1:08:36map apps can are like, oh, it's in that center, right? But some of these places are huge.
1:08:41And that's the thing that I think I've noticed getting better, especially with Google. But
1:08:45Apple is catching up again is instead of just sort of sending you to the center and then
1:08:49saying good luck. Look for the sign that I've noticed now that these services are much better
1:08:55at like, no, it's in this corner.
1:08:57Like, you know exactly where to drive
1:08:59to get to the thing you wanna buy.
1:09:01And that didn't used to be the case.
1:09:02They used to just kind of use your street address
1:09:04and mark it on a map and then kick you out.
1:09:07And that isn't happening anymore.
1:09:09So it's all getting better.
1:09:10I think it's really exciting.
1:09:13And yeah, so people should read those articles
1:09:17and look at those animations.
1:09:18They're amazing.
1:09:18- Yeah, Apple's made a big push
1:09:20at mapping the interior of airports.
1:09:22And I know they just added a bunch more.
1:09:25Super useful. Very, very useful. Because again, knowing that there is a, you know, like a five
1:09:34guys in the airport and yeah, we everybody I'm with, yeah, we can all go for five guys, but where
1:09:41we know it's somewhere in the airport, but is it even vaguely near our terminal? You know,
1:09:46knowing stuff like that. You used to have to like find the airport website or like maybe your
1:09:51Airport app has the map and all of that and now Apple Maps and Google Maps have
1:09:56they generally have that stuff now where you can I both of them where you can
1:10:00look and be like oh that's where the that's where the burger place is we can
1:10:03just walk down there anything else on the iPhone battery issue there's I how
1:10:11about the $50 discount on battery replacement that's pretty interesting it
1:10:15It reminds me, I'm surprised by it, but now that I think about it, I'm not surprised because
1:10:22it's a typical Apple move when they actually recognize that they've made a mistake. Like,
1:10:28didn't they give out bumpers with the... Bumper cases during Antennagate. Yep, that
1:10:33was it. That's what it reminded me of too. Same thing, which is like, "Oh, right. Okay.
1:10:37We're sorry you feel bad." Of course, they only say it's 2018. I mean, let's see where
1:10:42this goes, I kind of feel like maybe they ought to do like a battery warranty or offer
1:10:47some sort of like extended battery replacement in general. But regardless, offering it for
1:10:54$29 instead of $79, this is the difference between sort of, "All right, if you really
1:10:58want a new battery, we'll put it in there," to saying, "Look, if you're having problems
1:11:02and we can check and see that your battery is aging, then, you know, and we agree, yes,
1:11:09$29 you get a new battery." That's good.
1:11:11You know what? The word that they used is consumable, that batteries are consumable
1:11:16components. And part of the communication problem up till now is that Apple has never
1:11:22said that before. And the entirely sealed design of the iPhone certainly suggests that
1:11:29it's not a consumable component. You know, your iPhone is sealed up, you can't get it
1:11:36anything in there. And so it's reasonable to expect that like the CPU, which doesn't,
1:11:41you know, wear out over time, or the RAM or the SSD storage or anything else that's in
1:11:50there, you know, you don't have to get your speakers replaced after two years, because
1:11:54they're at 50% capacity. Right, the battery is the odd consumable component. It, you know,
1:12:04reading it differently than other things, I think is justified in the replacement. I
1:12:10forget what it costs now to replace a screen, but screens are obviously something that needs
1:12:14to be replaced often because they're made out of glass, phones get dropped, and the
1:12:18screens crack. It's one of the top issues related to these devices industry-wide. Another
1:12:28one of those things that someday Scotty's going to come back from the future and invent
1:12:33clear aluminum for us and we're going to have some kind of display that doesn't crack
1:12:39and we're going to look back at the decades where cracking your phone was a common problem
1:12:46and think, "My God, we were living in caveman times." But for now, it's there. But people
1:12:53get that, right? And I think that the way—I think the price is around like $100 now for
1:12:58an authorized screen replacement?
1:13:00It varies based on what the device is. It's certainly a major reason why people
1:13:06get the extended warranty, they get the extended AppleCare on their phones because they either
1:13:10have first-hand experience breaking the screen and wanting to get it replaced as cheaply
1:13:15as possible or even if they haven't done it, they're just worried about it because they
1:13:19know it's an issue. I think the battery needs a different treatment because it wears out
1:13:26through you know if you drop your phone you at least know you've you're at fault well
1:13:29I dropped it I did you know I wish that it was made of different materials so it wouldn't
1:13:34break when I dropped it but I did drop it whereas the battery wears out if you treat
1:13:38the phone perfectly like you can do nothing wrong except use it and the battery will wear
1:13:44out 79 bucks isn't a lot but it's a big difference from 29 bucks 29 bucks is great I mean and
1:13:53And for an authorized battery replacement, I really, I think that's a great move on
1:13:57Apple's part. I can only guess that that's actually a bit of a loss for Apple. I mean,
1:14:02I don't know what the actual battery costs them component-wise. But the labor alone,
1:14:08if it takes, you know, however long it takes the tech person in the store to do it, 29
1:14:15bucks is pushing the limits on just what the labor alone would cost, I would think.
1:14:19Yeah, it's, I mean, maybe it's break even, maybe it's not, but I think there's this,
1:14:26I went back and forth with a bunch of people on Twitter and including Nile about this after
1:14:31he tweeted that link to my article, which did, I mean, to be fair, in 2007, in that
1:14:37interview, Greg Joswiak basically says they're not consumables. Don't think of them that
1:14:43way. Don't worry about it. And this is a shift in Apple saying, "All right, let's just be
1:14:47clear and not pretend. But anyway, in the Twitter back and forth, there was this question
1:14:52of like, you know, Apple wants to make money totally, they're a profit-making company,
1:14:57but what's the value of feeling like they're taking care of you and providing good customer
1:15:03service and looking out for their customers? And I firmly believe that at the highest levels
1:15:09inside Apple, they believe that taking care of that person who bought an iPhone three
1:15:15years ago is absolutely imperative and that what they don't want is anybody to Apple to
1:15:21have a reputation that if you, you know, use your phone for more than two years, it's going
1:15:25to be terrible because Apple hates you. Like they want that. They legitimately want that
1:15:29to be a good experience even if you're using an older phone. And I think, you know, that
1:15:33is so because of that, like saying, okay, it's going to be 29. It's going to be easier.
1:15:39going to that's the value of investing if this even if it is a loss or if it's a break-even
1:15:45in investing in your customers and making them feel happy because they're going to feel
1:15:49it's the miracle on 34th Street thing right it's like you the good customer service isn't
1:15:54always looking at to sell you your next thing it's to it's to make the customer feel like
1:15:59they're happy to be a customer of yours and that that builds loyalty so I think this is
1:16:04case where, you know, Apple retail not necessarily structured to see the forest for the trees,
1:16:12and it's like we can make a profit on this, and we can also drive people to new sales,
1:16:16which we want, and that's great. I mean, I don't want Apple to stop selling iPhones because
1:16:22everybody can use them for seven years. You know, people want new iPhones and want to
1:16:26push it forward, but I do think this is a case where, you know, Apple is pushing back
1:16:31a little bit and saying, "No, no, no. We should make it easy for people with a three-year-old
1:16:37phone to get their battery swapped out. We should not get in their way." And by lowering
1:16:42the price by 50 bucks, at least for 2018, that does that. And I also think this story
1:16:48just helps in the sense that it makes everybody understand that you can take your phone to
1:16:51an Apple store or an authorized or even unauthorized person and swap out your battery and get a
1:16:57a new battery, which I think a lot of people don't think about that. So this has educated
1:17:01people in that way, too.
1:17:05Another thing I wanted to bring up is that it seems like somehow in the course of this
1:17:13story, everybody with a slow iPhone—not everybody, but a lot of people with slow iPhones—are
1:17:18now convinced that this is the one and only reason that an iPhone can become slow.
1:17:23Right. Aha! This is it.
1:17:25right. Aha, I knew it was something and it's this deliberate scheme. And it's not it really
1:17:31isn't. And especially if you got a fully charged, your phone is fully charged, and you've just
1:17:37restarted it and you open it up and it takes five seconds for the camera app to go from
1:17:42when you tap the icon to when you actually get it. That is almost certainly not this
1:17:47throttling feature in the OS, you've something else is wrong with your phone. And I've linked
1:17:53to it on during fireball. It's just one anecdote. But I had tons of people on Twitter, I've
1:17:58said the same thing where somebody wrote a blog post and they went to the they saw that
1:18:03they have a slow iPhone success or six and they took it to the store because aha, it's
1:18:07the battery issue and the guy plugged it in and said, Nope, your batteries at like 85%.
1:18:11It's you know, well within normal range, nothing wrong with the battery. But his iPhone was
1:18:16truly slow and exasperated. He went home and erased it, you know, sit back to factory settings,
1:18:23restored from a backup and wow his phone was suddenly like it was he remembered when it
1:18:29was new it was fast again. I keep mentioning it because I just wanted it I think there's
1:18:37more people with slow iPhones for other reasons than this battery issue than there are who
1:18:41have the battery issue or at least it's as many and I almost think it's a problem you
1:18:47mentioned it before I almost think like the thing we're not talking about is the bigger
1:18:51problem is that iOS seems to have a systemic year after year problem of
1:18:59needing to be wiped and reinstalled you know which was always the knock against
1:19:04Windows as compared to Mac you know that max you can have you know just upgrade
1:19:11to new versions and keep going and you don't have to you know wipe and
1:19:15reinstall is not part of the normal lifespan of a Mac and it's not normal
1:19:21for iPhones either. I honest I've been thinking about it and I can't prove it
1:19:25but to my the best of my recollection the iPhone 10 in my right jeans pocket
1:19:31right now has a chain going back to the first iPhone that I bought it at the end
1:19:38of June July 2007 I believe that my personal iPhone has been upgraded every
1:19:46single year since then through multiple devices sometimes by you know putting a
1:19:50review unit in the mix before I bought my own phone. And there's nothing on, you know,
1:19:57if I thought my phone was running slow, I would certainly wipe and reinstall. But it's
1:20:01obviously not everybody. And, you know, my upgrade chain goes back to 2007. I'm almost
1:20:08certain. But obviously, some people it does. And that's, you know, I feel like and it's
1:20:15happened been that case for years that people and it's all over the place, too. I've heard
1:20:20people say, like, I've seen this too, where my wife's phone was running slow and she
1:20:25got a new phone and we were going to hand it down to my daughter and I, and I, but I
1:20:29was concerned about the slowness and I wiped it and restarted it and it was far more responsive.
1:20:36It was fine. And I had that moment like, well, that's weird. And I've heard from
1:20:40people who, well, that can happen, but if you, you know, if you wipe it, but don't
1:20:46restore, but I've also heard from people who, if you wipe and restore, it's fine.
1:20:49And I've also heard from people who say, "Well, it's fine for a while, and then maybe it slows
1:20:52down again."
1:20:53So I feel like there are bugs here, though.
1:20:55I feel like something is absolutely here.
1:21:00And this, combined with sort of the general trend, whenever you have a new operating system,
1:21:04to optimize it for the latest and greatest hardware and not worry so much about the old
1:21:08hardware, I feel like these are similar in the sense that, again, Apple's not sabotaging
1:21:14your phone, but I don't think enough attention is paid at Apple to issues with two or three
1:21:24year old hardware. Yeah, I think on iOS and it's been years it really is. And I do I think
1:21:32it actually works against Apple's own interests like Apple genuinely wants people to be running
1:21:39the latest version of iOS. I don't even see how anybody could say the contrary, given
1:21:47the way that within a few weeks of it coming out, everybody who hasn't upgraded gets a
1:21:52very prominent alert saying, "Hey, wouldn't you like to upgrade to the latest version
1:21:58of iOS? Just click this button and we'll do it overnight." It's very easy to almost accidentally
1:22:05agreed to upgrade to iOS, you know, iOS, whatever point of the new version. And right, I feel
1:22:14like there's a lot of people out there who at some point, a year ago, two, three, whatever
1:22:20years ago, had an iPhone that they thought was working great, and got a prompt to upgrade
1:22:26and said, Sure, why not? And then felt like their phone degraded significantly and thought,
1:22:33Well, I'm never doing that again.
1:22:35I really do.
1:22:36I mean, I hear from people.
1:22:37I think people who read "During Fireball"
1:22:39and read "Six Colors" and listen to the show
1:22:41are less likely to do that.
1:22:43I mean, but I feel like there's an awful lot
1:22:46of normal people out there who got burned once
1:22:48and then won't do it again.
1:22:49And I really do.
1:22:50- My mom, and I think a lot of people are like her,
1:22:56when iOS 7 happened,
1:22:57which was such a dramatic change in the interface.
1:23:00And she still feels burned by that.
1:23:03like to the point where she used to,
1:23:05I got her in the habit of,
1:23:06she would ask like, "Oh, there's an update."
1:23:07I'd say, "Yeah, just, you should always install the updates."
1:23:10And after that, not only didn't she not ask,
1:23:12until I visited her or she visited me,
1:23:16she would not upgrade.
1:23:17And then she'd say, "Well, while you're here,
1:23:18you can decide if you want to do this or not."
1:23:20And it was entirely because iOS 7
1:23:23was so dramatically different.
1:23:25And again, lots of good reasons why iOS 7 was different.
1:23:28But this is about taking something that seemed familiar
1:23:31and making it seem completely foreign
1:23:33and people felt burned.
1:23:35And so they're like, no, forget it.
1:23:36I don't trust Apple anymore with updates.
1:23:38And it's been years now.
1:23:40- And I don't think that took Apple by surprise.
1:23:42I think Apple knew that there's,
1:23:44some people would have that reaction to it.
1:23:46And it's one of those things that separates Apple
1:23:49from other companies.
1:23:50Like that's why most other companies
1:23:52never do something like that.
1:23:53Like issue a, this year's iPhone iOS
1:23:57looks entirely different.
1:23:59Like literally every single pixel,
1:24:01you encounter from the time the screen turns on to when you power it down will look different.
1:24:08That's why other companies don't do things like that because some people object to it.
1:24:15And you can't please everybody all the time, right? And so like the people who prefer the
1:24:20way iOS 7 looked to the way iOS 6 looked didn't know what iOS 7 looked like and therefore
1:24:26weren't complaining while iOS 6 was the current version because they hadn't seen
1:24:30it, right? It's the nature of human beings, that it's a lot more likely to complain
1:24:37about something that changed than to complain about something that hasn't changed. So
1:24:43I definitely think that's the case. And I think you're exactly spot on that there's
1:24:47something systemic in Apple where they're not looking at enough of what goes on when
1:24:52a phone gets updated under less than factory conditions.
1:24:58I sort of feel like what Apple should do, and maybe they are doing this, I don't know,
1:25:03but I feel like when people come in to the store with a fairly recent iPhone, like let's
1:25:09say an iPhone 6 or a 6s that should be running fine, and they can show the Genius Bar tech,
1:25:16"Look, this is really slow."
1:25:18And before you even plug it in and run any diagnostics, I feel like if you can, you know,
1:25:23like, "Yeah, if the camera app takes seven seconds to load, that's a problem."
1:25:26I feel like Apple should be collecting those phones as like evidence, sealing them in a
1:25:31bag, give the customer a replacement, eat the cost of just swapping it out with a different
1:25:39phone and sending that to Cupertino for like a dissection and figure out what the hell
1:25:46is making this phone slow.
1:25:49Or at least pull off like logs and diagnostics and things and see if you can do it.
1:25:53I would go one better and I know that they again they made they may have a team that
1:25:57does this but like when so obviously they're working on iOS 12 now that process is starting
1:26:03and they'll have a beta in six months and they'll ship it in nine months. They should
1:26:09have people on that team whose job it is to be worried and I'm sure they do about compatibility
1:26:15issues at some point people working on iOS 12 ought to be forced essentially to have
1:26:22their main phone be a 6 or a 6S?
1:26:24- Yes, I do.
1:26:25- For during the development period, right?
1:26:27And be like, your job, one of your jobs is to see
1:26:30what is wrong on this lower end hardware,
1:26:33not just sort of like abstractly or with a unit
1:26:35that you keep floating around the lab,
1:26:37but like our customers are gonna live with the 6 on iOS 12.
1:26:42You know, we need to make sure that experience is good.
1:26:44And if that means aggressively turning off features
1:26:46or muting features, reducing their effectiveness
1:26:49on older hardware like they do on the Mac, right?
1:26:52Where you can run High Sierra and on older Macs,
1:26:55you can't do AirDrop, right?
1:26:56I think maybe Apple needs to be more aggressive
1:26:58in doing that in older phones.
1:26:59'Cause the goal is they want for security reasons,
1:27:02they want them all on 12 for a long way back and great,
1:27:05bless them, fantastic.
1:27:07They're not gonna abandon them
1:27:08like a lot of Android phone users get abandoned.
1:27:11But the trade off there is if you want them
1:27:14to come along to iOS 12 next year,
1:27:17you gotta make it usable for them.
1:27:20Otherwise you shouldn't migrate them.
1:27:22- Yeah, the cutoff for what phones are eligible
1:27:27for iOS latest should correspond directly
1:27:30to which phones are capable of running it well.
1:27:33Like well enough that you, somebody at Apple
1:27:36who knows what it's like to use the newest iPhone
1:27:40can live with it for two weeks, you know.
1:27:42So I feel like there's two levels of it.
1:27:46Like the first level is when iOS is functioning perfectly
1:27:50on the device, like let's just say after a factory reset
1:27:54and you install iOS 12 beta one on it, is it fast?
1:27:59Is it fast enough?
1:28:00Is it as fast as iOS was when this phone was the new phone?
1:28:05And then the second level is the bugs
1:28:11that are obviously not intentional
1:28:13aren't going to show up after a factory reset that only seemed to occur after an upgrade
1:28:19from a previous version and identifying those bugs. Because it's two levels of complaint,
1:28:25right? And they're both legitimate. But the one is that even after a factory reset,
1:28:32these animations are clearly stuttering in a way that they weren't when I was running
1:28:37the previous version of iOS. And how can you not feel burned that your phone a week ago
1:28:43had smooth animations when you go back to the home screen and now you've taken Apple's advice
1:28:48and upgraded and now it's all stuttery and takes longer. That's a problem. But then these bugs,
1:28:55that's the thing that I find worrisome is that these bugs with major upgrades seem to have been
1:29:01around for, who knows, it could be 100 different bugs and different bugs every year. But still,
1:29:08I really feel like there's way too many instances every single year of people who follow me on
1:29:14Twitter saying, "Oh, man, I just upgraded my two-year-old iPhone and everything sucks."
1:29:19Yeah, and the thing that really mystifies me is that when it is solvable by wiping and restoring
1:29:28from an iCloud backup or an iTunes backup, when that solves it, then it's like, "Okay."
1:29:35So it's not any of the files that got backed up.
1:29:38It's something else that's getting reset
1:29:40and not being backed up that is apparently causing this.
1:29:43And again, I'm sure there are people at Apple,
1:29:46I'm sure there are radars,
1:29:47I'm sure people have filed bugs on this,
1:29:49I'm sure there are people at Apple
1:29:49who have investigated this stuff.
1:29:51And they may know some of the details and they may not,
1:29:55but I have to ask, has it ever really been a high priority?
1:30:00Because that's one of those things where Apple,
1:30:02I believe Apple that it cares about the users of its products, even the old ones, but I
1:30:07also believe that maybe the new hardware gets prioritized and the old hardware just kind
1:30:13of comes along and they don't worry about it too much. They don't sweat the details
1:30:17on if you've got a 6 or a 6s.
1:30:19Right, whatever the minimum hardware is for iPhone 12 or iOS 12, Phil Schiller should
1:30:24be able to use that phone running iOS 12 for a week and not call the engineering team up
1:30:30and scream at them.
1:30:32- Right, I mean, it doesn't have to be the best.
1:30:34It's not gonna be an iPhone 10, but it should be usable.
1:30:37Like it should be usable.
1:30:38And I've seen like my wife's phone before we wiped it
1:30:43and gave it to my daughter.
1:30:45It was amazing.
1:30:47Like I would tap apps and then it just was like molasses.
1:30:52Just like, it was not usable.
1:30:56It was really bad.
1:30:58And it just, you know, wipe and it was fine.
1:31:01And it just, I don't know, you know,
1:31:02there's obviously something there anyway.
1:31:04- Yeah. - We've said enough,
1:31:05but Apple should fix it.
1:31:06Anything else, what else do we have on this battery issue?
1:31:09Have we expanded everything? - I don't know.
1:31:12- I think it's pretty close.
1:31:14- I feel like it.
1:31:16I mean, this is one of the challenges with the internet
1:31:18is that there's a lot of nuance to this story
1:31:20and it can be ironed out to be
1:31:22the Australian battery scam. - Right.
1:31:26- If you wanna flatten it to that,
1:31:27but it's way more complicated.
1:31:29Apple is complicit in some things, but not the things people think they are. And so,
1:31:34you know, you get accused of sort of like whitewashing and forgiving Apple. And it's
1:31:37like, no, Apple made a lot of mistakes at various points in this. It's just not necessarily
1:31:41the mistakes that they're being accused of. So yeah, it's the internet. Everything gets
1:31:46flattened down to the battery scam.
1:31:48All right, let me take a break here and thank our third and final sponsor of the show. Our
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1:35:51show. What else is going on this week, Jason?
1:35:58I got my iMac Pro. Oh, interesting. So I did I have not ordered I am not going to get one.
1:36:07So what did you order?
1:36:08Well, I had to talk myself into getting one because I had the first 5k iMac. So it's three
1:36:14years old and I thought they made a lot of progress since then. I'm doing a lot more
1:36:19kind of audio processing for podcasts and stuff like that. I could really use the faster
1:36:24and more processor cores of the iMac Pro, but I could only remotely justify the base
1:36:29model. So I have the base model that arrived on Boxing Day. So a little late Christmas
1:36:37present I guess. So it's $8, $8, $8, $8, 32 gigabytes of RAM. Yeah, and one terabyte SSD.
1:36:46As I, you know, sat there, I'm not getting one. I'm not Marco Arman. I don't just say I'm not
1:36:52going to get something and not get one. I've still got the 2014, the original 5k iMac. Yeah,
1:37:00which is right behind me. That's the one that I'm replacing. Yeah. And I and it's an i7 I built,
1:37:05like I got the higher processor. It's a really great computer. I'm gonna sell it. It'll sell
1:37:10well. It's a great computer. As I configured the imaginary iMac Pro that I would get,
1:37:16I thought, well, I never get a Mac with base RAM. I always, for the last few years, I've maxed
1:37:22whatever my MacBook Pro has the most RAM I could possibly put in it, which is 16 gigabytes. And my
1:37:27iMac has the most RAM I could put in it, which is 16 gigabytes at the time. I believe the 5K iMac
1:37:33right now you can get 32. But I have never I don't think I've ever bought base RAM on
1:37:39any Mac ever. And so I was configuring it like well, I'm not going to get the base RAM
1:37:42I'm gonna and then all of a sudden I have got like an $11,000 thing. Yeah. And I'm like,
1:37:47I never get the low I never get the base. I always get like a middle config. But with
1:37:51this I got the base and I feel I feel like I'm pushing it but I tried to configure you
1:37:55know what I did I tried to configure the 5k iMac with terabyte SSD 32 gigs of RAM and like
1:38:03the i7 and you know, it was like $1,000 away
1:38:07from the iMac Pro and I thought,
1:38:09all right, I'm just gonna get the iMac Pro.
1:38:10- I did the same thing.
1:38:11I configured a brand new, whatever the, you know,
1:38:13the 5K regular iMac, the silver iMac.
1:38:16And when I got it the way I liked it,
1:38:18it was like $4,100 or $4,200.
1:38:20So it was within spitting distance
1:38:22of the $5,000 base config.
1:38:25The thing I had to bang into my head
1:38:26is that the base config iMac Pro
1:38:29is nothing like a base config regular iMac.
1:38:32It's already a seriously pro machine.
1:38:37- Yeah, it's not, I actually wonder about the Mac Pro.
1:38:41This is something that, I think I wrote a piece about this
1:38:44the other day that I wonder where the Mac Pro will start.
1:38:49'Cause my guess is that the Mac Pro will start
1:38:51below the iMac Pro and maybe even be less capable,
1:38:55but will scale up to be way more capable.
1:38:57And whereas with the iMac Pro, like, yeah, this is,
1:39:01There's the 5K iMac is already basically a pro system.
1:39:06It doesn't have a Xeon in it, but it's so powerful
1:39:10that they didn't need to go lower with the iMac Pro.
1:39:14Like this is any lower than this
1:39:17and they're basically scraping the top of the iMac line,
1:39:20which why would you do that?
1:39:21So I felt like the base model here was pretty good.
1:39:25It is dangerous to listen to people like Marco though,
1:39:27because you end up in a situation where it sounds like
1:39:30if your budget is a little bit larger than mine,
1:39:33that the 10 core model is sort of a sweet spot
1:39:37in terms of single and multi-core performance.
1:39:39And then of course, if you're a monster
1:39:41who just devours computer processing power,
1:39:44you can scale it up from there to 14 cores
1:39:47or whatever you wanna do.
1:39:48But for me, it was like, I was either,
1:39:50I made a deal with myself.
1:39:51It's like, if I do this, it's gonna be the base model
1:39:53or not at all, because my old 5K iMac had 16 gigs of RAM
1:39:58and it had a 512 SSD, right?
1:40:01So I, and so for me, it was like all of the base config stuff
1:40:05is still way better than the computer that I have.
1:40:09So let's just, and so I did, the only accessory I bought
1:40:11was I like to have my iMac on a, on an arm
1:40:15instead of sitting on the desk.
1:40:17And this one is adaptable to that,
1:40:20but you have to buy out like a $79 Visa mount adapter
1:40:25that is coming tomorrow, I guess.
1:40:27and then it'll be floating above my desk as it should be.
1:40:31- The thing that made me laugh
1:40:32as I was configuring my imaginary iMac Pro was that,
1:40:35and as I upped the RAM to 64,
1:40:38'cause I don't want base RAM,
1:40:39is I realized that I'm not buying this
1:40:41because my current three-year-old iMac is fast enough.
1:40:46Really, truly, I don't feel like there's anything I do
1:40:49on it that's slow.
1:40:51- Yeah.
1:40:52- And it has 16 gigs of RAM.
1:40:53So obviously 32 gigs of RAM,
1:40:56it would actually clearly be quote unquote enough for me.
1:40:59I really did have to laugh at that.
1:41:03And the other thing I would like to--
1:41:04- I wrote something the other day where I said like,
1:41:06look, as a writer, I can use a PowerBook 160
1:41:09with right now running OS 8, like Mac OS 8.
1:41:13Putting letters into a computer
1:41:16does not require a lot of processor power.
1:41:18That is not a reason.
1:41:19As a writer, you don't, I mean,
1:41:21you start giving graphics and things like that,
1:41:22but as just putting words on a page,
1:41:25You know, we don't need this stuff.
1:41:27It's the only reason I went here
1:41:28is because I'm doing more audio and video stuff.
1:41:30And that's where having a computer that's twice as fast,
1:41:33and I measured on multi-core stuff,
1:41:36it's almost twice as fast as the old model.
1:41:38It's like, okay, for video encodes
1:41:42and audio denoise processing and things like that,
1:41:45it's gonna make a big difference.
1:41:46That's why I bought it.
1:41:48- Yeah, and I think for anybody, I don't edit my podcast,
1:41:52good friend Caleb Sexton does typically 99% of episodes. But I don't think I don't know
1:42:00if everybody who listens to podcasts realizes how CPU intensive the export process is. Like
1:42:08it's not just like hitting command s and now you've got a mp3 that saved like, you know,
1:42:14when you hit command s and a text editor or something like that, or like in QuickTime,
1:42:18if you open up an audio file in QuickTime and trim and you can just hit Command-S and
1:42:24it saves instantly as a file. The export process for a podcast is pretty intensive. You've
1:42:30got multiple tracks and it's long.
1:42:33And probably applying plug-ins to them and they're long and it adds up. Yeah, I have
1:42:39these occasionally. I'll have a three-hour recording session and it's got five people
1:42:44on it and three of them have like their heater going in the background or their laptop fan
1:42:49has spun up and so there's white noise behind them and you know denoising and there's there's
1:42:55software there's this amazing software called isotope RX6 that can take out room noise and
1:43:01it takes out echoes in rooms it's amazing when it works it is like magic but that stuff
1:43:07is super processor intense so if you can imagine denoising a three hour audio file and then
1:43:14and de-echoing it on top of that.
1:43:16Like, that takes a long time.
1:43:17And if you've got eight of those,
1:43:19this is why I bought an iMac Pro.
1:43:21It's like, you know what?
1:43:22I'm gonna spend the extra money
1:43:23and I'm not gonna have to sit there
1:43:25while I watch this stuff render or denoise or whatever.
1:43:30Yeah. - Right.
1:43:31And it's the sort of thing,
1:43:32it's just fun having used computers for so long
1:43:37where you can remember like 25 years ago
1:43:41where you could maybe read an article
1:43:43and somebody could have like a theoretical,
1:43:44like, you know, in theory,
1:43:45you could take the noise out of an audio recording,
1:43:48you know, here's like a layman's explanation
1:43:51for the algorithm and you're like,
1:43:53oh, that would be pretty clever.
1:43:54And it would be like, yeah, it would take, you know,
1:43:56take 10 years.
1:43:59- Our fastest supercomputers could do it
1:44:01in less than a month.
1:44:03Like, great, that's wonderful.
1:44:05iZotope came in for a demo back when I worked at Macworld.
1:44:07So it was a long time ago now.
1:44:08And when they had just released their D Reverb feature
1:44:11And the way they do it is they sell a bundle for like $1,000 and another one for $300 and
1:44:16another one for $50.
1:44:18And like the older stuff goes in the $50 one and it slowly comes down.
1:44:22And the D Reverb is now in the $300 one, which I have, but when they announced it and when
1:44:26they were demoing it for me, it was in the like $1,000 package.
1:44:28And it was hilarious because they're like, "Well, we have people who are really good
1:44:32at math and they built this algorithm that like detects the reflections with the delays
1:44:39the sound bouncing off of the walls and does a transform. And they told me this whole story
1:44:44about how it works. And it's true. It can do some amazing things, but the amount of
1:44:53processing that is required to do that is incredibly intense. It's amazing that a computer
1:44:57sitting on a desk or on the end of an arm, in my case, can do that at all in our homes.
1:45:04But it can now, it's just super processor intense and fortunately also parallelized
1:45:11so that they can send it to all those different processor cores because that makes a difference.
1:45:14I'll tell you the big difference between this one and the iMac when I was testing it, my
1:45:185K iMac is when I do heavy processor stuff on the iMac, and you'll know this too if you've
1:45:23ever done like a video in code, like the fan turns on and you can hear the fan, the fan
1:45:28starts to blow.
1:45:29And as far as I can tell on the iMac Pro, the fan's always blowing, but it's incredibly
1:45:34quiet. You have to be listening for it and you kind of have to turn the iMac around and
1:45:37stick your ear down there and then you can hear it. And when I started an intense encode
1:45:42or denoise, what happens is I don't hear any change to the fan sound. It just the air blowing
1:45:49out is hotter. That's it. It's pretty cool. I was really impressed at the hands-on thing
1:45:54at Apple when they in New York a couple weeks ago where they were running these high intensity
1:46:00demos over and over and over again, you know, it was, you know, sort of around round robin,
1:46:06you know, you go from one demo 10 minutes, next one 10 minutes, next one 10 minutes,
1:46:10and they're just doing the same thing over and over again. And after every one, I'd put
1:46:13my hand back there and and get my ear closer to see if I could hear and I know what my
1:46:17iMac sounds like when in my iMac is generally very, very I would, you know, maybe Syracuse
1:46:23who would obviously disagree, but I would define it as silent to my ears most of the
1:46:28time, but I know what it sounds like when it's taxed. In a perfectly silent room and you listen
1:46:34very carefully, you can hear something, but it has to be like that. Like most of the work I do,
1:46:40I could work with music playing and when my iMac, 5k iMac fan blew on, it was like, even with the
1:46:49music playing, it's like very clearly, "Oh, there goes the fan. Now it's really working hard." And
1:46:54just that level of background noise or having the door open to the to the dining room in the
1:46:59kitchen here, forget it. Like, forget it. I had to lay my head down on the desk with my ear sticking
1:47:05kind of like back behind to get any hint that that noise was going on. And so that's that's pretty
1:47:11impressive. And that's because it knows, I mean, this thing is engineered for for all the thermal
1:47:17dynamics of these of this powerful GPU and the powerful processor. And so and it's got to work
1:47:22work for a 14 core, right? So my little 8 core thing, it's not a problem. It just gets
1:47:28warmer, but it's a good fan, a good quiet fan. So I really prefer it. I much prefer
1:47:35to have that than the, "Oh, there goes the fan. Now everybody can hear the fan." And
1:47:41I, you know, ironically, as a podcast denoiser, I mean, that's what I'm doing that makes
1:47:48my fan go is I'm taking out everybody else's computer fans because that's like one of the
1:47:52noisiest thing on a podcast is people are right next to their computer and they're running
1:47:57they're on a laptop and after like 20 minutes the laptops like okay I gotta turn on the
1:48:01fan now and then there's fan noise for the rest of the recording. There's sort of a beautiful
1:48:05symmetry to that. That's right. Using a quiet computer to computationally ex-denoise noise
1:48:14created by other noisy computers slower noisier computers yeah I'll take it on
1:48:19you do have it set up you're already are you using it right now are you like
1:48:22talking to me I am using it I am talking to you through it right now I have
1:48:26migrated I migrated on the day are you do you use the trackpad or did you have
1:48:31the mouse which one did you get both I got I got I should have gotten both
1:48:35because I could have sold them both I know I didn't I just got the trackpad I
1:48:39And apparently Casey Liss is buying my keyboard
1:48:43'cause I have no need for that keyboard for many reasons.
1:48:46The Magic Keyboard's okay,
1:48:47but it's also the one with the number pad.
1:48:48And like, I do not want that.
1:48:51I've got my mechanical keyboard here.
1:48:52I can go down a path that'll terrify people.
1:48:55But I do love the Magic Trackpad.
1:48:57And so I'm keeping that.
1:48:58I think the Magic Trackpad is great.
1:49:00- Yeah, I've got a Magic.
1:49:01That's the only modern Apple input thing I use.
1:49:04I still have got my extended keyboard too.
1:49:06I've got my old 1999 Logitech mouse with a ball in it that I use as my mouse.
1:49:12Oh yeah.
1:49:13I used to use that.
1:49:14So that's exactly what I used to use was a trackball, but I finally did convert it to
1:49:18use a trackball.
1:49:19No, not a trackball.
1:49:20I have a mouse.
1:49:21The mouse has a ball in it.
1:49:22Oh, you've got the old school mouse.
1:49:24Yeah.
1:49:25Wow.
1:49:26Because it, for some reason, every time I've tried one with a laser, I have it set and
1:49:29I have a third party mouse driver to run my mouse at super speed for RSI issues.
1:49:34So I really only just put my fingers.
1:49:35- That makes sense.
1:49:37- And the ball actually seems to work better
1:49:40at the insane mouse speed that I use.
1:49:43- That's cool.
1:49:44- And it just--
1:49:45- All right, so you're as old school
1:49:46as it gets for input devices.
1:49:48- Except that I have the magic track pad,
1:49:49which I do love for various things.
1:49:52- Yeah.
1:49:53- I don't know, I don't have any other questions
1:49:56about the Mac though.
1:49:57- I mean, it's a really fast iMac.
1:50:01I mean, that's the thing.
1:50:01I said on Twitter when I got it, I'm like, yeah, it's fast.
1:50:05and people are like, oh boy, you know,
1:50:07that's really great, thanks for the first impression.
1:50:09But like, if you know what a 5K iMac is,
1:50:12you know what this thing is.
1:50:13It's just darker and faster.
1:50:17But like, it's the screen, it's got the beautiful screen.
1:50:20It's got, I haven't had a computer with Thunderbolt 3
1:50:24USB-C ports on the back, and I've got those now.
1:50:27And I had to, I took my first trip to Dongle Town
1:50:30as part of the migration, 'cause I had to dig out,
1:50:32I did have one, I had to dig out a Thunderbolt 2
1:50:34Thunderbolt 3 adapter so that I could put my old iMac in target mode and copy the data
1:50:41over to the new iMac. So I had to get a dongle out for that one.
1:50:46What do you use? Here's a question. I've been reevaluating my external drives recently because
1:50:51it's gotten to the point where external USB 3 SSDs are at the price that I would consider
1:51:00paying for for just like my super duper clone of my startup drive. So like I'm it's like
1:51:06I've I don't use it. I haven't used a computer with a spinning hard disk as like the startup
1:51:10disk for a couple of years now ever since my iMac I guess I got the iMac in this MacBook
1:51:17Pro both in 2014 I think and they both have SSDs. But you can get I think you can get
1:51:25a one terabyte USB 3 SSD for like $500? I forget, but it's a reasonable price.
1:51:34I have a Samsung USB SSD, I think it's a 512, and it's impossibly small. And I use that
1:51:42sometimes for offloading things, although now my internal storage is twice as much,
1:51:46so I won't have to do that as much. I have a Mac mini server that has a RAID hanging
1:51:54off of it. And it's, you know, I've got like nine terabytes of stuff on there. I've got
1:52:02a bunch of podcast archives and it's a Plex server, so I got movies and TV shows on there
1:52:07that I've read from Blu-rays. I like it. I love having that space. I am starting to think
1:52:15Like at what point could I move to SSD for that?
1:52:20Because I don't like spinning disks, right?
1:52:25I mean, they're unreliable, they're hot, they're loud.
1:52:29- They're so loud.
1:52:30- I really would like to kill them.
1:52:31But at the same time, I really like having,
1:52:35I mean, I have seven terabytes free.
1:52:37I like having 16 and a half terabytes of storage
1:52:40kind of on my gigabit ethernet network
1:52:43over, you know, around the corner where I can just dump big files when I'm done with
1:52:46them and keep the one terabyte on my iMac relatively lighter back in the day, the 512.
1:52:52And so I don't know, I'm, I'm, we're, we're getting there, we're getting close. But the
1:52:56fact that Apple still makes the iMac where by default you get a spinning disk drive.
1:53:03Yeah, it's, I think it's not even by default you get a fusion drive by default. You just
1:53:07get a spinning disk drive that shows you how much more expensive SSDs are and on products
1:53:14where Apple wants to make the price as low as possible within their margins. You know,
1:53:21I guess what I'm saying is I really want the iMac to be redesigned like the iMac Pro was
1:53:24to remove the option of a spinning disk, but I understand why they haven't done it because
1:53:29it is way cheaper. It's just it's so much worse technology in so many different ways.
1:53:35So I hope one of these days I can move my outboard storage, but as it is, I've got sort
1:53:40of like five feet away from me in a little sort of in a drawer of some old IKEA furniture
1:53:47is a raid that ticks along.
1:53:51I can hear it ticking every now and then when the time machine backup goes on, but I'm willing
1:53:55to deal with that because I just having all that storage is too good.
1:53:59There's like a life hack that I've never followed, but I understand the logic of it,
1:54:05but I've heard numerous times over the years that some people say what you should do is
1:54:09throw out all of your socks and buy like 10 pairs of the exact same sock, like a dark
1:54:20gray sock that you could wear in all situations, and then once a year throw them all out again
1:54:26and buy however many more you need.
1:54:28And then you never have to pair socks.
1:54:30You could just throw all your socks in a sock drawer
1:54:33and just take them out.
1:54:34I do the same thing sort of with my external drives
1:54:38where I tend to buy, like, if I feel like I need
1:54:40like four external drives for various things,
1:54:43like a super duper clone and an external storage
1:54:46for media that I can't fit on my,
1:54:49or don't want to fit on the internal drive on my iMac.
1:54:53But I tend to buy like four of the exact same drive
1:54:56or the same drive from the same company,
1:54:59but maybe with different capacities.
1:55:01Just so that I don't know why.
1:55:06I don't really, it's a little illogical, I guess,
1:55:08but I kinda like the idea that if I know
1:55:10they're all have the same thing
1:55:11and they use the same technology to connect,
1:55:15like going back decades, FireWire or whatever,
1:55:20that I know they're all gonna work with this Mac.
1:55:23because it seems like that's one of the little things
1:55:25that still changes every couple of years.
1:55:27Like you said, you had to get a Thunderbolt 2
1:55:29to Thunderbolt 3 adapter.
1:55:30It's like one of those things where like these,
1:55:33the drives last so much longer than they used to,
1:55:35especially SSDs, SSDs, you know.
1:55:37But I've run into the situation where it's like,
1:55:41I've got like something, you know,
1:55:43a bunch of old movies or something on a hard drive
1:55:45and I can no longer connect it to my Mac
1:55:47because the adapters have changed so much.
1:55:49So I've gone and bought-- - Yeah, I just--
1:55:51I bought these Samsung T fives there. I just looked up the prices. So one terabyte Samsung
1:55:56T five portable SSD is only 350 bucks and the two terabyte is $700. So you don't even
1:56:02pay any kind of premium. You know, it's exactly the same dollar per terabyte USB 3.1.
1:56:08Yeah, I've got I've got one of those here. I think mine's a 512 but it's a T three. And
1:56:16And it's, you know, it's kind of a joke how, how small it is like on with the with the
1:56:21visa mounting bracket on the back of my iMac. I was actually able to just stick the drive
1:56:27in the little kind of Ridge of the mounting brackets, because there's enough room for
1:56:32the for the SSD to just sit there. Like, it's just it's nothing.
1:56:36Trenton Larkin It actually it's so small that my biggest
1:56:39complaint about it is that it's I can't really get it to lay flat on my desk.
1:56:43It's like the tension of the cable will lift it or rocket. Yeah, it's it's yeah. So I have
1:56:50a vision of that of having like a at some point being able to have like a raid that
1:56:55is just like 10 terabytes of SSD but that right now would cost a lot of money that would
1:57:02be that would be thousands of dollars but we'll get there.
1:57:05Yeah, it's like I've never used an SSD for time machine. But now it's like I want to
1:57:12SSD only. So that's why I bought one of these one terabyte things to replace my time machine
1:57:17drive with USB. The only thing that's a little—like, I've got enough slots on my—or USB ports,
1:57:24I should say, not slots, but ports that I can plug these things in. And it's like,
1:57:28I'm never quite sure what's okay to put through a hub. You know, like, my keyboard
1:57:33and mouse, I go through a USB hub because it's obviously not super—you know, you
1:57:37You don't need high-speed performance, but I feel like an SSD you want plugged right into the computer. Maybe that's not logical
1:57:44I guess I could benchmark it
1:57:46But one thing about these modern like the USB 3 drives is that you can't daisy chain them
1:57:53You know like in the old days with firewire and with Thunderbolt
1:57:56You could like use one port on your computer and have like a drive
1:58:00Plugged into it and then a next drive gets plugged into the first drive and a third drive could go in the second drive
1:58:07Right. That's not a thing anymore. Yeah, I mean, at one point I bought a bunch of
1:58:16thunderbolts or maybe they were Firewire 800. Yeah, I think that was at Drives and they were
1:58:22like terabyte drives and I could chain them and they all had external power bricks and it was
1:58:26awful, but at least they were all, like you said, all of the same kind. But that was, you know,
1:58:32And so that was that was something I had to do and now you're right
1:58:35I mean one of the things I always hated about having a local time machine
1:58:39Drive is that then you have your computer attached to this drive that is big and hot and has a power brick and all that
1:58:45And one of these Samsung SSD is you're absolutely right you could you just plug it in there
1:58:49And I mean you could basically tape it to the back of your computer and never see it and it would just sit there
1:58:54Yeah
1:58:55I almost feel like I would almost have rather have it like have the USB thing connected to it and just plug it in the
1:59:00USB port is a dongle in the back, you know, just have the whole drive sticking out back
1:59:04there. Anyway, that's my advice to everybody is get rid of your spinning disks and get
1:59:08these SSDs.
1:59:09If you can afford it, get off the spinning disks.
1:59:12Yeah, the only really, it's, I don't know, it just feels good. I feel safer getting
1:59:18my, getting them out of there, even if they're backup drives. One last thing I've definitely
1:59:23wanted to talk about is you and I had a Twitter conversation a few weeks ago, speaking of
1:59:27I forget how it started, but we were talking about—somehow on Twitter we got into a conversation
1:59:33about that in iOS they've added a files app to iOS 11, and it's really useful in
1:59:39many ways, but it's entirely cloud-based. So you can get your Dropbox in there or your
1:59:47Box account, and your iCloud Drive, of course, shows up in there. But if you plug an SD card
1:59:55into your iOS device using the adapter that Apple itself sells to connect an SD card to
2:00:02a lightning port. The SD card does not show up as a destination in the Files app, and
2:00:09that seems like madness to me.
2:00:12Yeah, it's in fact, it's something, so you linked, you did a link list or do a thing
2:00:17I did on Six Colors about this gadget, this Kensington Mobile Lite thing that was—there
2:00:28is what I use now when I'm traveling with an iOS device and I want to use like a portable
2:00:32flash recorder to record audio and then edit it. And how do I do that? I can edit it on
2:00:38my iPad, but how do I get the files back? And even with Apple's SD card reading dongle,
2:00:43it'll do is launch the photos app and say, would you like to import any videos or photos
2:00:49on that card? So it will iOS will access an SD card, but only two file types. And that
2:00:55dates back to I mean, it's a camera thing. It's like just thinking of it as as for camera
2:00:59imports. And I thought when files came, it would be like the moment where Apple's like,
2:01:03all right, you want to attach an SD card or USB hard drive or connect to a an SMB server?
2:01:11fine. If you want to do that, the Files app will do that, go ahead. And it just hasn't
2:01:18done it. And it kind of baffles me. And I got a lot of pushback. You saw some of it
2:01:23where people are like, no, no, no, but the future is wireless and cloud and all those
2:01:27things. And I just keep coming back to, you know, that's all true. But if you're somewhere
2:01:31where you can't sync a file up and then back down from the cloud with slow internet or
2:01:35no internet, if the iPad Pro is meant for business users and somebody's got a PowerPoint
2:01:40on a keychain drive and they hand it to you and you have your iPad. It's like you can't
2:01:45get that file. You can't. Not even with any adapter in the world, you can't do it. It turns
2:01:50out there are adapters that do it, but they're like special adapters with third-party apps
2:01:54on iOS that talk to the card and then you move it into the app and then the app can
2:01:59send it to other things. It's just like this thing, which is a Wi-Fi base station basically
2:02:04you plug your SD card into and then connect to the Wi-Fi and transfer it using its third
2:02:10party. It's fast, which is why I use it. And there are other ones. There are little weird
2:02:15adapters too. It just seems silly that it's a legacy of Apple kind of putting file systems
2:02:21at arm's length in iOS, but they've kind of gotten over that. And yet, when I think about
2:02:26the iPad Pro especially, it just seems a little bit silly that, you know, they're not forcing
2:02:34the files app in people's faces. It's for people who need to access files. Why wouldn't
2:02:38you kind of broaden it a little bit? Because the fact is, yeah, in the future, cloud, unlimited
2:02:45internet everywhere at full speed. Like, I get it. But the reality of the present day
2:02:52is it's gonna take a long time for, like, my audio recorder doesn't have wireless in
2:02:58it. It's not gonna it can't auto upload to Dropbox and and like I recorded a podcast
2:03:03out in the middle of the Nevada desert after the solar eclipse and like I didn't have good
2:03:08internet there to upload that file. I, I, uh, you know, I just ran, ran it on my recorder.
2:03:13And then when I got to wifi somewhere, I wanted to upload the final version and, and that
2:03:18was not something I could do without a weird third party app. So it's just one of the strange,
2:03:23strange gaps in iOS that still exists. It's just so super frustrating if you've got your,
2:03:28You got it right there in your hand.
2:03:30In your right hand is like an iPad or an iPhone, and in your left hand is an SD card with a
2:03:38four gigabyte video on it or something.
2:03:43If it's a video, that's the most frustrating thing.
2:03:46You've got an SD card plugged into an Apple adapter or a USB stick plugged into an Apple
2:03:51adapter and it's looking at that SD card or that stick and it sees all the photos and
2:03:58all of the videos on it. But you know there's a PowerPoint file or a Word file or an audio
2:04:03file on there. An MP3. And it's just like, forget it. It's just like literally the OS
2:04:12doesn't want to know about it. And I don't know. I mean, I understand how we got here
2:04:17and I understand why people had this tendency to say, well, you know, the future, like I
2:04:22I get that too, but the practical present of this and I also I'm always amused when
2:04:29people kind of come to Apple's defense for a missing feature by explaining how Apple
2:04:35just can't do it. It's just too hard an engineering challenge, too hard a UI challenge. I'm like,
2:04:41really? I have a great confidence in Apple to solve these relative like the implementation
2:04:47details of this in order to they're already reading an SD card. They're already reading
2:04:52USB media. They just don't want to show it.
2:04:54Right. It's, yeah, there are security implications. I realize, you know, like if you talk to like
2:04:59people who really know their, their stuff with security that, you know, USB sticks are
2:05:04dangerous. They can be, you know, that there's, you know, there's reasons you shouldn't stick
2:05:11a unknown USB stick into your, you know, laptop. But on iOS in particular, you know, it's up
2:05:19to Apple to do it. It's not like I'm asking for any app to be able to read and write to
2:05:25the file system, you know, and the way that files the files app works is very careful.
2:05:31You know, it's not like you've got real access to the full directory structure of the the
2:05:39startup disk in your iOS device. You know, they've they have even with the files app
2:05:44maintain a difference between the file system that the actual system is running on and the
2:05:50files that are exposed to the user. There's no reason they couldn't continue to do that,
2:05:58take that approach to something like an SD card and that you can move it from the SD
2:06:02card to some other safe location, not like willy-nilly, you can put it at the root level
2:06:06of the startup drive.
2:06:07Exactly, because it's already in a sandbox somewhere. And that's, you know, it's a, I
2:06:13know it's a little thing too, but when I try to think, I, yeah, and I do hit this myself,
2:06:18which is why I write about it. And whenever I write about it, I hear from people who are
2:06:22like, "Oh, wow, I've also struggled with this for this reason." Or, "I bought this other
2:06:26weird gadget with another really awful," because all these third-party apps for these things
2:06:30are terrible. But they have to write them because it's the only way the product will
2:06:35work because there's no system level stuff to do it. So obviously some people out there
2:06:40are trying it. I think when Apple turned the corner to make the case with the iPad Pro
2:06:44that like it's a device for getting work done, that's when these scenarios start to occur
2:06:50to me which is like you know again I had this happen when I was in Yosemite where the internet
2:06:54is terrible and somebody wanted to give me a file and I couldn't load it on my iPad and
2:06:58we had to figure out whether we could get it on some other device that could maybe do
2:07:01airdrop, but it got really complicated and it didn't need to be. And I've been on airplanes
2:07:08and stuff too where it's like I'm not going to sync all of this data to Dropbox over the
2:07:13internet from an airplane and then sync it back to the other device. It's just not going
2:07:18to happen. And it's a little detail, but it's one of those things that when people get angry
2:07:24when I talk about this, what blows their mind is the next thing I say which is I think maybe
2:07:28the iPad Pro at some point should have USB-C instead of lightning because if it's a real
2:07:33computer, maybe you should just embrace it. And maybe that's a bridge too far, but I think
2:07:39it's worth asking the question like, "Why are there still roadblocks?" I think Apple's
2:07:45iOS development, at least as far as the iPad concerned, should all be about like eliminating
2:07:49those last roadblocks that people talk about when they're like, "I really want to use the
2:07:53the iPad to do this but this thing and they've and they've eliminated so many
2:07:59of them now that the ones that are still there really just kind of a stick out
2:08:02that's that's one of them I know it's not ideal it's the same way I feel about
2:08:05having to side load files onto the iPad using my Mac I because they're big files
2:08:12their audio files and the people are like oh you can air drop them you could
2:08:15use iCloud drive it's like but they would be so slow it's so much faster for
2:08:19me to connect it with a cable but all of those file transfers have to go through
2:08:22iTunes. That's stupid. It should just show up as a disk on my Mac. It doesn't have to
2:08:27be a real disk. It could be a fake disk. But I should just be able to drag those files
2:08:30in without launching iTunes. But I know why we're here, but it would be nice if somebody
2:08:35at Apple could be like, "Okay, that's bad. Let's eliminate that roadblock now."
2:08:41- Right. It's obviously exposed in some way because you can get to it through iTunes,
2:08:45but doing it through iTunes is ridiculous.
2:08:47- Yeah, you have to click on it. And especially now that we don't sync our devices very much,
2:08:52if at all, in iTunes anymore. It's like my one obligatory trip to the iTunes device area.
2:08:57I use iTunes all the time for music, but it's that moment of like, I plug in my iPad,
2:09:01click on the iPad, click on apps, scroll to the bottom of the window, click on the right app,
2:09:06and now I can drag files in like it's the Finder, except it's the worst Finder replacement ever.
2:09:12Say what you want about the Finder, and we could do a whole two-hour podcast with Syracuse,
2:09:17and we could do a four-hour podcast with Syracuse about nothing about gripes about the Finder.
2:09:21today in 2017. But at least the Finder is primarily designed, the intent of the app
2:09:29ever since 1984 has been to expose files and make it useful to move files and do things
2:09:36like rename files and move them from here to there. That's what the app is meant for.
2:09:41And you have that app and then you've got this other app that was designed primarily
2:09:44to play music. And you've got to use that app to move files around. It's crazy.
2:09:51And it's great you can do it, don't get me wrong. The moment when I discovered that there's
2:09:54a secret place in iTunes in the apps tab down at the bottom where you can literally just,
2:10:00you can delete files and you can drag files in and it totally works. It's amazing, but
2:10:05it is so stupid that that's where it is. There's probably a lot of people listening to this
2:10:08who are like, "What? You can do what?" And they're going to plug their iPhone into their
2:10:11Mac and then go to iTunes, yeah, and navigate to the devices and then go down to the bottom
2:10:18and see this and they're gonna be like, "What?"
2:10:22You can't believe it.
2:10:23- Yeah, just, I mean, and again,
2:10:26why do you need to do that?
2:10:27It's only if you have like a big file,
2:10:29otherwise if a little file on iCloud Drive
2:10:31or something like that, it's not gonna be a problem.
2:10:33But, you know, I sometimes have like big files
2:10:37that I wanna put on my iPad.
2:10:39And doing it by wire is way better
2:10:42than like putting a giant file in iCloud Drive
2:10:44and waiting for iCloud Drive to sync it all the way up.
2:10:47and then immediately on the other device turn around and sync it all the way back down.
2:10:51That's sort of silly. And if I've got unlimited time, I can do it that way. But it's silly
2:10:57that that's the only way I can do it.
2:10:59Last but not least, the other thing I wanted to talk to you about, because I know you'd
2:11:03appreciate it. Did you see that thing I linked to the other day that this guy Dan Liu wrote
2:11:07about computer latency from 1977 to 2017?
2:11:11Yeah.
2:11:12So he like took like a high speed camera and with a bunch of different computers running a bunch of
2:11:18different operating systems from a bunch of different eras measured the time from when you
2:11:23the high speed camera captures the key moving on a keyboard and the letter pressed appearing
2:11:30on screen in the terminal app on that device. And the fastest performing lowest latency computer he
2:11:38he tested was the Apple IIe, which is, it makes me laugh, but it's funny the way he
2:11:47phrases it, where he just had this vague notion that computers are slower than they were when
2:11:51he was a kid and wanted to actually measure it because, you know, human memory and, you
2:11:58know, is funny like that, that you might be very, you know, could have tested it and found
2:12:02out he was very wrong. And then he has a terrific, he's an electrical engineer by training, and
2:12:06a terrific explanation for why this is so and actually pretty reasonable, given what
2:12:13modern computers are doing. But the other thing that cracks me up is that it always
2:12:18comes down to like, the TI-99-4A or whatever it was called, performed pretty well, too.
2:12:25It was like second place, but not as fast as the Apple IIe. And it always comes down
2:12:29to "Waz was a genius." Right? There's all sorts of crazy optimizations where there's
2:12:37like, you know, it's like the whole level of abstraction between the key being pressed
2:12:43and it being sent as a signal is gone because of the clever design of the key switches in
2:12:47the Apple II.
2:12:48But that actually, I started reading this article. A couple people said, "Gruber,
2:12:52you're going to love this." And I did love it. But as soon as I read it, I thought,
2:12:55You know, I always think the same thing. It seems to me, it always seemed to me that the
2:13:01input on like an Apple II was super fast. And it doesn't, like it's one of the things
2:13:08about like running emulators that it's not just that the screen technology is so different
2:13:13that it looks different and doesn't feel the same. It does, no matter how fast your computer
2:13:18is, it never feels as fast.
2:13:21- Yeah, I mean, I talked about how I could do my job
2:13:26and you could do your job on a PowerBook 160
2:13:29running right now.
2:13:30- Right.
2:13:31- And it's a little bit like that.
2:13:33Every time there was an update, right,
2:13:36there gets more stuff in the way.
2:13:37They're like, "Oh, we've got a more powerful computer.
2:13:38We can put more stuff in the way."
2:13:40And whether that's graphics
2:13:42or whether it's subsystems or whatever,
2:13:44font support, whatever it is,
2:13:47because we've got the power to deal with it,
2:13:50which is true,
2:13:51but it also means there's more layers between you,
2:13:54you know, between the keyboard and the display.
2:13:56And latency is a place where it happens.
2:14:00I guess this is really good for like,
2:14:02what is it, George R. R. Martin?
2:14:03Writes all of his books on a,
2:14:07like a WordStar,
2:14:08- Running on like, - An online PC.
2:14:10- Like a 286, I think. (laughs)
2:14:12- Yeah, and it's just like, he's got the muscle memory.
2:14:15I totally get why he does that.
2:14:17And it's all like, not even a GUI,
2:14:19It's all command line kind of stuff.
2:14:21But his latency is super low.
2:14:23I'm gonna guarantee you that he types it there,
2:14:25it comes out there.
2:14:26And it's funny, I was just starting up,
2:14:29I have an Apple IIc and I'm gonna try to get
2:14:32some of my old files off of it.
2:14:34And I had that moment where I'm like,
2:14:35oh, this feels pretty good.
2:14:36I mean, like the keys really move
2:14:37and they make a nice kind of clacking sound.
2:14:40And yeah, there's something to be said
2:14:43for that old retro stuff.
2:14:44We prioritize different things now.
2:14:46And plus, displays, our displays are so much richer, and their refresh rates are not as
2:14:52high as the ones in the old days because they're so much richer. There are lots of good reasons
2:14:56why, but still.
2:14:57Yeah. The Apple IIc is one of my all-time favorite designs. Guy English and I both swear
2:15:04by it. And I think on Twitter, we were like, Guy and I were talking recently on Twitter
2:15:09about how like it could pass for like a in many ways pass for a modern computer and some
2:15:17people are like you guys are nuts that thing looks ancient I don't know I think I'll put
2:15:22a link to the show notes the 2C to me it was just I had a 2E I was a 2E guy but when I
2:15:28was buying one off of eBay because I sold my 2E sadly when I when I bought my first
2:15:34Mac I wish I had kept it but I know why I didn't I wanted the money right but so on
2:15:39eBay I bought a 2C and the reason I bought the 2C is yeah it has a lot of
2:15:43things that make it a lot more fuss-free than the 2E like the disk drive is in
2:15:50the computer which the 2E was not you the disk drive was external it's got you
2:15:55know it's got video on the back and an auxiliary video port if you want to do
2:15:58like higher quality video it looks like a laptop without a screen and a lot of
2:16:03its design language ended up being fed into. It's the same design language that they used
2:16:10when they built the first PowerBooks. It didn't have a screen, although I believe you could
2:16:15get an LCD screen for it that made it that much more portable. But the idea that it was
2:16:21all self-contained, it's got a huge power brick, but it's self-contained and it's got
2:16:25its own disk on the inside, that was a big step for Apple because the Apple IIs were
2:16:31all, you know, everything was outboard. And it was also more hobbyist, you know, I had
2:16:37slots, card slots that I could flip open in the Apple IIe. And the Apple IIc is a sealed
2:16:41container like a modern computer.
2:16:44Yeah, yeah, it's an interesting one to look at as where Apple was going. And, you know,
2:16:50and it was a machine that was, came out of the era while Steve Jobs was in exile at Next.
2:17:00No, I guess not. It says it was released here. 1984.
2:17:03- Well, it came out, and the 2C came out about the same time as the original Mac.
2:17:06- Huh, I didn't know that. I'm not involved. - But, you know, Steve was not around too much longer after that.
2:17:10And this was the last, I mean, I guess people like the 2GS, I guess.
2:17:14That was, for me, this is the heyday of the Mac. I actually—or of the Apple II.
2:17:19I bought my Apple IIe that I had through my first two years of college.
2:17:23I bought it right before I started high school, and it was 1984.
2:17:28And I realized this the other day that my Apple II, the Mac already existed when I bought the Apple II,
2:17:36which seems like that would have been a stupid move, but the fact was the Mac was so young at
2:17:39that point. And the Apple II was everywhere. It was in my elementary school, it was in my high
2:17:44school. All my friends who had computers had the Apple II. We could trade disks and stuff. And that
2:17:50was, and it gave me, it gave me six years or five and a half-ish years through high school and the
2:17:55the start of college. It served me really well. So Apple and the Apple II, Apple made
2:18:00huge amounts of money on the Apple II in the 80s. We think of it now as like then the Mac
2:18:05era began and that was the end of the Apple II. It's not true. Like the Mac took a long
2:18:08time to kind of get up and running and during that period the Apple II was what was fueling
2:18:13Apple's economic engine. Like to the point that I realized when I started as an intern
2:18:18at Mac User Magazine, elsewhere in the universe at that moment there was still an Apple II
2:18:24magazine. Like, even in 1993, they were still publishing like a plus insider magazine for
2:18:33the Apple two. So the Apple two lived a lot longer than that. I think like conventional
2:18:38wisdom has it now where it's sort of like, well, then the Mac happened and that was the
2:18:41end of the Apple two. It's not true. The eighties were like the Apple twos, a golden decade.
2:18:47There was really no upgrade path from the Apple two to the Mac. I mean, the, the, the
2:18:53- The 2GS had a finder, which was super weird
2:18:56because it just couldn't, I mean, they tried to make it,
2:18:59they tried to retrofit it to be Mac-like,
2:19:01but it really wasn't.
2:19:02- It was unnatural. - My big upgrade path was,
2:19:04I bought a 3.5 inch disc for the Apple II
2:19:07because there were Macs that I was using elsewhere
2:19:10at my college, but in my dorm room, I had the Apple II.
2:19:14So with the 3.5 inch disc drive,
2:19:17there was an app on the Mac called Apple II File Exchange,
2:19:21where basically you could stick an Apple II formatted disc in onto a Mac. And it looked
2:19:26like FontDAMover. It was one of these things, or like Transmit is today, where it was like,
2:19:30the files on the floppy are here on the left side, and the files on the Mac are over here
2:19:34on the right side. And you'd click and press the arrow button, and it would very slowly
2:19:38kind of grind. But that's how I ended up printing all of my papers my freshman and sophomore
2:19:43years in college, is I'd write them on the Apple II, put them on one of those floppies,
2:19:48it to a computer lab or the college newspaper office, migrate them over onto the Mac, open
2:19:54them up, format them, and print them on a laser printer. So that was the migration path.
2:20:00That's where all of the stuff that I brought when I bought a Mac was that. I would just
2:20:04put them on those floppies and then migrate them back out. But that was it. I guess there
2:20:09was an Apple II card for the Mac for a while where you could boot an Apple II inside of
2:20:12your Mac in a window, which is super weird.
2:20:15- Right, and it was all because there was no real upgrade path.
2:20:19Like, if a school had some sort of curriculum that was based on the Apple II,
2:20:23there was no way, you know, whatever. It just wasn't any way to run it on a Mac. So they literally
2:20:29put the Apple II on a card to put in a Mac so that you could just switch the device to be an Apple II.
2:20:36- The Apple II was so popular. An awful lot of people went from the Apple II to Windows or to
2:20:42DOS PC. The Apple II was incredibly popular for a long time, and a lot of those people
2:20:48didn't make the move to the Mac. In fact, I've talked to people who tell the story
2:20:52where they were on the Apple II and they loved it, and then they went to the PC, and it was
2:20:55only sort of in the 2000s with the iPod and the iMac and all of that that they came back
2:21:01to Apple, but that they actually had a previous Apple experience in the old days with the
2:21:06Apple II before they went to the dark side.
2:21:09Yeah, people, it's a lot of people who took a long time, you know, for some, some for
2:21:12reasonable reasons, some just because it's human nature, you don't like change. But people
2:21:16who got used to computers in the era, when you turned it on, and you had a cursor blinking
2:21:20on screen where you had to type something to continue, saw the fact that the Mac didn't
2:21:25have that and couldn't be configured to have that as a non starter, whereas you could get
2:21:30a Windows or a DOS PC. You know, I always laugh thinking about it. But like for years,
2:21:36way people, even when Windows was taking off and had millions of users, the way you got
2:21:41into Windows was to boot into DOS and you typed "win." And then you could exit Windows
2:21:48and go back to DOS and do your DOS stuff. And that was considered normal. I had jobs
2:21:55where that's what, you know, I never had, I had jobs where that's what I would do. And
2:22:01there were good reasons for it. It actually made sense that Windows didn't start automatically.
2:22:06Yeah, sometimes I felt, coming from the Apple II, sometimes I had those moments where I
2:22:10would, and even when I was a Mac user, where I would be like, "Can I go back to DOS?" I
2:22:15feel way more comfortable using a DOS command line than I do using Windows in that era.
2:22:20It's like I wanted to either use the Mac or I just wanted the command line. Just take
2:22:23me back to it. It's what it wants. It's what the machine wanted to use. Anyway, this has
2:22:28has been a great show. I hope you have a good new year. I hope you're having a good holiday
2:22:31break.
2:22:32Yeah, absolutely. Other than my boss being a mean jerk who wants me to work a lot. But
2:22:37yeah, no, it's been good. And likewise, and have a happy new year. I'm looking forward
2:22:41to 2018. I think there's going to be some good stuff in 2018.
2:22:44You got great stuff recently. There's so much good stuff at sixcolors.com. You can spell
2:22:49colors either way.
2:22:51Yeah, I got to redirect.
2:22:54can't even we don't have time to list all of your podcasts but upgrade is certainly the one that
2:22:59might be of most interest to uh to listeners of this show with you and uh mike hurley uh
2:23:05there's the comparable weekly pop culture podcast i hear uh john cercusa was on a recent episode
2:23:12yeah yeah he gets he's around he gets around that's he makes his pronouncements about movies
2:23:18and things on on the incomparable and the other podcast that maybe talk show listeners want to try
2:23:24out is relatively new, started in 2017 called Download. And that is I host that, but I try
2:23:30to get two or three interesting tech guests and take a broader tech view. So it's not
2:23:35just Apple stuff. It's sort of like what a broader like what happened in tech and what
2:23:40the issues are. Sometimes it's details about what what Microsoft or Apple or Google did.
2:23:44And sometimes like the most recent one, we talked about the ramifications of the Disney
2:23:50Fox deal with a reporter from The Hollywood Reporter and a writer from Polygon and like
2:23:58how the world streaming especially gets impacted by everything that Disney's doing and buying
2:24:03Fox and buying BAM Tech, the streaming company, and owning 60% of Hulu if this deal goes through.
2:24:09And it's been a fun podcast because it gets me out of my comfort zone a little bit and
2:24:13talking to a bunch of interesting people. So that's also at Relay FM. It's called
2:24:17Download.
2:24:18Alright Thank You Jason Happy New Year Happy New Year