0:00:00fashionably late as always it's pretty good for me yeah eight minutes you guys
0:00:09you guys do the live thing on ATP so you've got to be on time because people
0:00:12are sitting there and refresh on that on the website that's not why we're on time
0:00:19why are you on time self-respect I guess standards right we're East Coast people
0:00:27You're a East Coast person too. You're supposed to be representing for us instead. You're you going to Las Vegas mode. I
0:00:33Don't think it's that bad, but it is sort of a West Coast personality trait
0:00:38now the West Coast move which is also your move is like
0:00:42Nine o'clock rolls around or whatever time we're doing and you realize oh, I forgot about that and you immediately
0:00:48Petition for a 15 minute delay and then you have a five minute delay after the 15 minute delay
0:00:57It's all right
0:00:58Makes you endearing. Oh, you sound like you're in a good mood
0:01:01Yeah, sure. Sure. Why not busy week?
0:01:05So I finished listening to now probably an episode behind though because you guys probably recorded last night
0:01:13For context we are recording right now. It's Thursday, October 23rd
0:01:19You guys probably did an ATP last night, but it's not out yet
0:01:22so I might be behind but I did listen to last week's show where you talked about your
0:01:26Yosemite review. We talked more about it yesterday in yesterday's episode as well.
0:01:32Well I'll try not to, well if we venture into duplicating the same story
0:01:37territory you can just interrupt me and say you know what listen to ATP because
0:01:40I want to do you know it's no use wasting people's time. I'll say the same
0:01:44things twice I don't care like the thing with all podcasts is and you know this
0:01:48is kind of like it's like a first draft over your thoughts are and you just kind
0:01:52of on the spot and then you start thinking about it and you start talking
0:01:55about it, and you know, at least I do. I kind of ramble, and it's like, given time to think
0:01:59about that, like, I think I could say that again better, and then obviously the ultimate
0:02:03is you're like, oh, if I'm actually going to write it, I've got to actually figure out
0:02:05what I really think. But just sort of, you know, anyway, duplication I don't mind. Give
0:02:10me a second chance to get it right.
0:02:12Yeah, totally. In a big picture, I was thinking about this. I don't know why, because I guess
0:02:17it's just the way the human mind works. But somehow 10.10 feels like a milestone, you
0:02:23it's like 10 even though it's not you know it's actually the 11th major
0:02:28version and it's the 12th I guess that you've reviewed because you did the
0:02:31public beta how many how many Mac OS 10 reviews have you done so so I did
0:02:36developer preview to developer preview 3 developer preview for public beta and
0:02:40then all the releases and it was also one or two thrown in there they weren't
0:02:44really reviews they were just like random like hey I just went to Mac world
0:02:47and here's some more stuff you might want to know about aqua and you know but
0:02:51If you wanted to go buy the releases I started a DP - because uh yeah, and I don't remember what I think
0:02:57I played with DB one, but I definitely didn't write it up
0:02:59So I've been thinking about this and you mentioned this on ATP
0:03:04I don't want to get all maudlin
0:03:05But there's a chance you're thinking that maybe this last one that you just published last week might be the last one you're gonna
0:03:09Do you may not do next year's?
0:03:11Yeah, I
0:03:14You know we can get into that a little bit later
0:03:15But you know just thinking and this nice even round ten number
0:03:19I do think the podcasts in general and you having been doing one regularly either ATP or
0:03:27What was your old show called hypercritical
0:03:32It seems like forever but it's not like when did hypercritical start I think like 2011
0:03:42Yeah, so it's only a handful of years
0:03:43But to me there's this huge difference as you know
0:03:47And you and I got to know each other know when we first started emailing
0:03:50But it's a long time before we met but we are at least his email before daring fireball started
0:03:55Because you were working at you were still working. I've told this story in ATP you gave me my first
0:03:59Copy of BB edit or whatever the current version
0:04:03It was out then like it previously I had I had convinced work to buy it for my work
0:04:06But you worked at bare-bones said here you go. Here's a free copy of BB. I was like, oh awesome
0:04:11No wonder I lasted there so long
0:04:14He's given away their software
0:04:16to surefire customers. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, we've known each other since before
0:04:23there was even Daring Fireball. And it's, you know, our interests are common first name,
0:04:31are, you know, the fact that we're, I think we're exactly the same age, even 1973.
0:04:35DEE SMITH Close. You're a year older.
0:04:37DAVE SMITH I don't look older, though. But I feel like
0:04:43the universe was destined for us to know each other somehow. It just seems like it. It just
0:04:48seems like no matter how the dice had been rolled somewhere in the intervening years,
0:04:54we were going to get to know each other.
0:04:55It was a small world back then. For the Mac nerds on the web, it was just like we were
0:05:01all using IE5 and experimenting with CSS and reading Zeldman and hoping Apple doesn't go
0:05:07out of business. Before that, we were all reading Mac Week, which you talked about on
0:05:12the last podcast and Mac user and Mac world.
0:05:15It was such a small world.
0:05:17If we had both gone to the same Mac world conference,
0:05:20we probably would have bumped into it.
0:05:20- Yeah, I think that's almost certain
0:05:22'cause they were small back then.
0:05:25Or it was, you would inevitably meet everybody.
0:05:28You wouldn't have that.
0:05:29- Yeah, you would see the same people year after year.
0:05:32- It's not like WWDC where now it's so crazy
0:05:35and you go and it's like some of your best friends,
0:05:38you don't even see them.
0:05:38You're like, "Hey, I didn't even run into so-and-so."
0:05:41And it's just a very different world.
0:05:45But as someone who's always been a huge fan of your work
0:05:48at ours, these massive book-length reviews,
0:05:52it's such a profound change now that you're podcasting.
0:05:57Because it used to be that John Siracusa as a brand
0:06:01was something you got sporadically, almost
0:06:06on an annual schedule.
0:06:07You had to wait a year in between.
0:06:08But when you did, it would be like a massive mainline dose.
0:06:14How different it is now that you have a weekly outlet and we all get plenty of John Saracusa.
0:06:21It's so different and it's hard to imagine going back to that.
0:06:25Yeah, I had for a while at ours when they were doing like staff blogs or whatever, there
0:06:29was a period and I'm always surprised when I go back and look at it.
0:06:32Like there was a period where I was blogging as if you want to call it that, pretty regularly
0:06:38on the staff blog. Like I'm amazed at the number of things I wrote there. I forget what
0:06:41I even wrote. It's like, you know, it's not the volume that you put out on a regular basis,
0:06:45but you know how it is where you can't even remember what the hell you wrote because it's
0:06:47just too much, right? And I, of course I remember all my reviews because those are big punctuated
0:06:52things and there's a few special stories in between there and retrospectives and I did
0:06:55like a game review and it's all sorts of crap, you know, but I can remember those. But then
0:06:59there was just like, at one point I was doing one or two pagers every couple of weeks for
0:07:04ours and I look back on that body of work and I'm happy with it and I like it, it's
0:07:08just that like it was never, it was neither fish nor fowl, it wasn't what I do now which
0:07:15is just sort of ramble on a weekly basis where it's just off the cuff or whatever and it
0:07:18certainly wasn't the big long lead up to a giant review, it was kind of in betweeny and
0:07:25I guess podcasting has totally filled that role now because I don't have, you know, Twitter
0:07:29and plus podcasting have destroyed my ability to blog. Not that I had much of an ability
0:07:34to do it to begin with, but I may get back into it if I don't do these big reviews anymore.
0:07:38Yeah, I'm not sure that you're meant for it. I don't know. I feel like you've found your
0:07:44thing that is more... I always say to me, in everything in life, in the general world,
0:07:51it's the extremes where things are most interesting. To me, at Daring Fireball, the best posts
0:07:55or my linkless ones where I think of just one word to add,
0:07:59or two words, you know, good luck with that,
0:08:01or something like that.
0:08:02Or the big long ones, the thousand, multi-thousand
0:08:07word pieces.
0:08:07It's when I have a post that's like 300 words,
0:08:12then I know I'm in trouble.
0:08:13That I've, you know, I either should be able to make
0:08:16this point much more succinctly, or I'm being lazy
0:08:19and I need to go deeper.
0:08:21And I feel like with you, it's, you know,
0:08:24you found your, I'm not gonna spend a lot of time
0:08:28on this format and it's podcasting.
0:08:30- It's not even that I'm not gonna spend all the time,
0:08:33but it's just sort of more like less prepared.
0:08:35It's like more thinking out loud
0:08:37and going back and forth.
0:08:38And the blog format, like if I didn't have an actual
0:08:41regular day job that took my time,
0:08:43I think the thing I like about that is not so much
0:08:45that any individual post is anything special,
0:08:48but that you sort of build up a body of work
0:08:50with like little reference points.
0:08:52Like very frequently I find myself thinking back to,
0:08:56you know, I wish I had something
0:08:59that I could point to about this.
0:09:00And podcasting, as you know, it's harder to like,
0:09:02it's harder to ask people to go,
0:09:04oh, go back to this thing.
0:09:05And like, you have to give them a timestamp
0:09:07and you have to look it up
0:09:07and find out where everything is.
0:09:08Whereas if I could just point to a blog post,
0:09:10oh, I talked about this specific issue in a one pager
0:09:13and you can get my take on it there.
0:09:14And individual one pagers, not a big deal,
0:09:17one or two pagers, but now that there's, you know,
0:09:19I have a few of them on hypercritical.co.
0:09:21I refer to them frequently and a lot of times I wish the things I had said and worked out on a podcast
0:09:26I mean you do the same thing and so does Marco depend, you know, you either
0:09:29write about it first and talk about it on a podcast or talk about it first and that becomes a post for your website and
0:09:35I find it frustrating that I can't
0:09:38Point that like that podcasts are so invisible like they're they're ephemeral and you can't like point people into them
0:09:45It seems like asking more than just having them read a paragraph or two on a web page that you send them
0:09:50So I do wish I had more time to blog who knows if I even well
0:09:54I don't know like I'm not not forcing myself to do it or whatever, but I think a lot of the reason that
0:09:59You know this is kind of where the blog entailed off once that the OS 10 releases started coming out yearly
0:10:04At first it was like there would just be a quiet period where I wouldn't write anything because I'm just doing the review and then
0:10:10That quiet period expanded to like fill the whole year and so it's like well
0:10:12I guess all I'm doing now is Twitter and worrying about writing my reviews
0:10:19Well said
0:10:21How do you have you how many words was your Yosemite review I think I asked you this last or two
0:10:29It's like the same you didn't read my about post because you follow too many people on Twitter
0:10:34It's like the same like this it was last year. I can't look at the number. It's on like 26 K 27 K
0:10:40Something like that hyper is that a hyper critical
0:10:42Yeah, is that a co co the calm guy wants too much money?
0:10:47Oh, man.
0:10:50Well, that's what we got for the Vesper.
0:10:51We got the .co.
0:10:52Somehow it reads right.
0:10:55Somehow top level domains are such a weird thing.
0:10:58Because A, the whole thing is so gross
0:11:00and never should have been exposed to end users anyway.
0:11:03It's like file name extensions.
0:11:05But they've become part of the world we live in.
0:11:11.com is just invisible.
0:11:13Somebody has whatever .com, and it's like the nothing domain.
0:11:17Even though getting a dot com is incredibly difficult,
0:11:21because everything was taken by the end of the 90s,
0:11:23let alone in the intervening years.
0:11:26Something about dot co, which is,
0:11:28for people who don't know, it's the nation,
0:11:31Columbia's top level domain.
0:11:33It reads like dot com.
0:11:35And it's like, you notice it, I always notice it.
0:11:37I always, you know, but it has that same effect
0:11:40of like, you just accept it.
0:11:42Like, that's why I couldn't even remember
0:11:43the hypercritical TLD.
0:11:45It's kind of like a, you know, web 2.0E like Flickr,
0:11:48where you leave off the R kind of like com
0:11:50where you leave off the M kind of a twee sort of precious.
0:11:55It's that version.
0:11:56Maybe it really, I just got it because, you know,
0:11:58all the other extensions for worse.
0:12:00I'm gonna get .us, you know, .business, .plumbing, whatever.
0:12:08- They're so bad.
0:12:09I just, I can't believe some of those.
0:12:14So anyway, if you went to the site, you'll see that this, it's my, like, the format I've
0:12:18done for the past three years.
0:12:19It's just like a template and I just changed the numbers like mad libs.
0:12:22And at the bottom, there's stats.
0:12:23Right.
0:12:24So 27,000 words.
0:12:26What's the, I think that it's like the average size of a novel is somewhere around 60,000
0:12:31words, give or take.
0:12:32So it's, you know, it's truly book length.
0:12:35And yeah, the weird thing to me is that my review settled in around this 25, 27K size
0:12:42for the past like three or four not through any conscious effort of my own
0:12:45but it's just that's how it worked out you know right it's you know it's like
0:12:48that's about how much work they can do on an annual basis on Mac OS X and it's
0:12:55like it's more like that's how much I feel like I can or should write because
0:12:59there's more I could write about and every time I always feel like I
0:13:02basically ran out of time and I would like to have whole giant sections but I
0:13:05always like I prioritize them I say well yeah I'm interested in that and I think
0:13:10I think I could write another few thousand words about it,
0:13:13but would the value it adds to the review
0:13:15and the interest it adds to review
0:13:16be worth the time I put in,
0:13:18and how much time I've got scheduled for this?
0:13:20Because really, even though I have so much lead up time
0:13:22to it, it still kind of compresses at the end,
0:13:24because there's only so much you can write about
0:13:25when things don't work and they're broken in a beta
0:13:28and Apple hasn't made final decisions.
0:13:29You gotta, the final bits have to come down
0:13:31and then you have to scramble.
0:13:38So if we added them all together, what is it?
0:13:42And I know that the sizes are different
0:13:44from some of the old ones,
0:13:45but it's about 15 reviews, right?
0:13:48If we're talking about,
0:13:48this is the 11th numbered version,
0:13:50and you said you did DP2, DP3, DP4, so it's 14 or 15.
0:13:55It's an enormous body of work.
0:13:58It really, truly is.
0:13:59And I know that it's not one single piece of work
0:14:02that if you read them all back to back,
0:14:04there's some sort of repetition that would be going on
0:14:07because they follow a certain formula.
0:14:09But I do think, I think it's such an interesting testimony
0:14:15to have and that like 20 years from now
0:14:17when the youngins take over,
0:14:19that they'll be out there for them to look at
0:14:22and remember where things are.
0:14:25- That's what old people like to think,
0:14:26but young people won't give a damn.
0:14:28They already don't.
0:14:29They'll look back on our great works and tremble.
0:14:33- How often would we refer to a similarly detailed review
0:14:37of System 2 from 1985.
0:14:39- Right, or the Apple 2 OSs or anything like that.
0:14:44- Somewhere somebody would need it though.
0:14:46- The thing that's brutal for me though,
0:14:47is if I ever go back and look at those old ones,
0:14:49I just, I can't stand it.
0:14:50Just like, it's terrible.
0:14:51I mean, I don't know if you feel the same way,
0:14:53but like I go look at my early writing,
0:14:54I'm like, holy cow, this is bad.
0:14:56Like just isn't bad in all ways.
0:14:58Like, I guess I knew, like it was,
0:15:00it was certainly more casual back then,
0:15:02and I was a worse writer,
0:15:03and the combination of the two was just,
0:15:06And really, I don't know.
0:15:08Like, you didn't know what was important and what wasn't.
0:15:10The things I focused on are just seem inane.
0:15:12And I have a lot of difficult,
0:15:14a lot of people ask like, oh, you're gonna go back
0:15:16and collect all these together into one big thing.
0:15:17The most painful part of it would be that
0:15:19if I was to do that and you start reading it,
0:15:21you're gonna start reading stuff I wrote in 1999
0:15:23that I think is not good.
0:15:25It's just not good.
0:15:26I mean, like, I hope I always feel that way.
0:15:30I kind of, you know, I kind of feel that way.
0:15:32Like, you know, you get to a certain point
0:15:34And I just think everything I write is crap as soon as I write it.
0:15:37And I just make it as good as I can.
0:15:38At the time allotted, I didn't move on.
0:15:40But it's like programming.
0:15:41Like, if I don't look back at the code I'm writing this year,
0:15:44like 10 years from now, if I don't look back at the code
0:15:45I'm writing this year and think it sucks, that means I'm not improving.
0:15:47Right.
0:15:48I can totally see that.
0:15:51I look back.
0:15:52I did learn this.
0:15:53And there's a-- I'm going to get it wrong.
0:15:56I think it was one of the great titans of modern computer science,
0:16:01either Kernighan or Richie or one of those Bell Labs guys who said something about that
0:16:06debugging is twice as hard as programming.
0:16:09So if you write code as cleverly as you possibly can, you'll never be able to debug it because
0:16:16you need an intellect twice as great.
0:16:20You need to write your own code like you're a halfwit so that when you debug it or when
0:16:25you've...
0:16:26For me personally, it's when I return to it that I can understand what the hell is going
0:16:30on.
0:16:31I know that saying, and I understand the sentiment behind it, but the logic and the saying makes
0:16:34no sense, and it's mostly BS in the details. But in broad strokes, trying to say the idea is that
0:16:40later you will come back to your own code and not understand it, and that is entirely true. And so
0:16:46what he's trying to say is to mitigate that. Don't make your life harder by doing things that are
0:16:52difficult to understand even now when you're in the midst of it.
0:16:55Right. And it totally informed my use of comments. Is my comments, I used to only write, of course,
0:17:04because I was a teenager and early 20s. And so, of course, I didn't want to write any comments at all.
0:17:10And I only did it because when my CS professors, you had to. If you submitted your work without
0:17:16comments, it was something you automatically lose like 10 points. So, the comments were stupid. I
0:17:23I would just write the smart ass teenager's comments,
0:17:27which is just restating the logic of each line.
0:17:30- Add one to all. - Right, exactly.
0:17:33Whereas the light that went on,
0:17:35even though I don't write much code anymore,
0:17:37but the light that went on eventually was
0:17:41comments are like time travel.
0:17:43You're talking to your future self
0:17:45who is utterly confused as to why you would do this seeming,
0:17:49this doesn't seem like it's necessary.
0:17:52Tell your future self, here's why you're doing this
0:17:54and why you wanna keep doing it.
0:17:56And it's made my code, at least for my own self-maintenance,
0:17:59it's made it all the difference in the world.
0:18:01- Yeah, there's a couple phases of that.
0:18:03Like the early phases, everyone thinks I don't need comments
0:18:05'cause I'm writing this now and I understand it
0:18:07and I'll understand it in the future.
0:18:08And the second phase is realizing that's not the case
0:18:11and you start trying to write comments
0:18:12but you don't know what good comments are.
0:18:13And I think the third phase is finally realizing
0:18:16that if you write the code in a sensible way,
0:18:19you only need comments on the tricky parts
0:18:20and you should minimize that.
0:18:21And when you do need a comment on the tricky part,
0:18:24you'll know how to write it in a way that will be illuminating
0:18:27rather than stupid.
0:18:27Yeah, either the tricky part where
0:18:29you're doing something pretty clever
0:18:30and a month goes by, it's going to be out of your head
0:18:34how you pulled that off because you're in the zone.
0:18:36Or for me, a lot of times, it's the you're
0:18:40working around something stupid.
0:18:42And the workaround makes-- if you
0:18:43didn't know about the stupid thing,
0:18:45the workaround looks like it's why would you ever do this?
0:18:49This is dumb.
0:18:49Just don't do that.
0:18:52- And writing for your future self
0:18:53is easier than writing for other people
0:18:55because if you're in an organization
0:18:56where you're programming, there's lots of other programmers,
0:18:58at the very least, when you're writing for yourself,
0:19:00you can retrace your steps
0:19:03and you will arrive at the same conclusion again,
0:19:05but other people won't do that
0:19:06because they react differently
0:19:08to the same stimulus, basically.
0:19:10So for other people, what you're trying to do is,
0:19:13yours is the one where you put the whys,
0:19:14but also what is the broader context of this whole thing?
0:19:17What is even going on here?
0:19:19Are there any assumptions that are unstated because you assume they're obvious to everybody,
0:19:23but won't be obvious to someone a year from now?
0:19:28Writing comments is just basically writing.
0:19:30It's the same, you have to communicate to people in plain language with reduced ambiguity.
0:19:34It's a different goal, a different purpose, a different audience, but it is writing, and
0:19:37that's why programmers are so bad at it, because those skill sets tend to not cluster frequently
0:19:42where people who are happy and comfortable programming are not happy and comfortable
0:19:46writing prose.
0:19:47Yeah, I guess it's true that a lot of times they're not.
0:19:50But there seems to be... I know...
0:19:52Because we hang out with Mac nerds. We're at the intersection of liberal arts.
0:19:56We know all the programmers who are good writers.
0:19:59Like Brent's a great example. Rich...
0:20:02Yeah, no, I know. I mean, we know people because we read their blogs. That's how we know.
0:20:06Rich Segal is another great example. Man, when he... he doesn't write much, but when he does,
0:20:10it is so succinct and to the point and it's exquisite.
0:20:15exquisite like I I often refer back I have a copy of the the BB edit 2.2
0:20:20manual like the first public version of BB edit and it's it's just like a model
0:20:27of clarity it is such a good piece of technical writing did he write that one
0:20:32pretty well I know he wrote parts in there was a couple of other credits up
0:20:36front but there's a and there's like a little what would you would call a blog
0:20:39Post now I sort of like why does BB edit exist? Why why why on the Mac would you you know want a programmer's text editor?
0:20:47Who would ever want to edit more than 32 K of text?
0:20:51It's more it's a more of like a personal statement like a mission statement for BB edit and
0:20:57It's just terrific I should actually see if he'd let me maybe I'd see if I can
0:21:04Rerun it or something. I think it would be an interesting especially now that BB at 11th out. Maybe I should
0:21:08See about getting it on the internet somewhere because I think it stands up
0:21:12Low these yeah, oh these many years in
0:21:16operating systems later
0:21:19All the stuff he writes if you've met him
0:21:21You can't help but read it always because very
0:21:25Such a person the mannerisms and the pacing of the way he would say those things it comes through in the writing
0:21:30I just saw somebody tweeted tweeted tweeted that the other day
0:21:33I don't know if it was to both me and you but to a couple of us where they were like now that we all have
0:21:37Podcasts they can't help but read everything we write in our own voices
0:21:41And I always hear that and I it's kind of nice because it means they're like listening to a lot of our podcast
0:21:46But I also kind of cringe because it's like God writing is where I get to be better
0:21:49How I speak I want to sound way smarter when I write because I got all this runway, and I could you know
0:21:54Speaking who knows what the hell comes out, but writing like that's my chance right and so it's almost a shame
0:22:00that they know, you know, the stumbling idiots that are behind the words. Like, writing is a secret
0:22:05weapon. I got all the time in the world to figure out what this sentence is going to be.
0:22:07Yeah, and there's no wasted words and no stupid...
0:22:10Well, ideally, I mean, obviously, like, again, that's the thing with long reviews. At a certain
0:22:14point, that's got to be like... That's the thing about these long reviews and all this stuff, like,
0:22:17early on and still to this day in my OS X reviews, I'm a slave to getting out whatever idea it is in
0:22:26in my head. I have a point to make or something to say about something and I
0:22:30have like 17 points to make and 17 things to say about it and I want to get
0:22:34them all out and I sacrifice the quality of the writing many times because I'm
0:22:39like this this could be said more elegantly in a different way but it
0:22:43wouldn't have this one extra little bit of nuance and I talked to myself like
0:22:47what do you care that that one like this point is sufficient you don't need to go
0:22:51into this other detail it's like no I want it and so I make some awkward
0:22:54sentence and I put that other point in there and it's I hate myself for doing
0:22:58it but a lot of times it's like the overriding thing is say what I wanted to
0:23:03say and then secondarily try to say it in a reasonable way and that's not
0:23:07that's not the way to make good writing but that's a lot of times what I do in
0:23:11my OS 10 reviews let's take a break I am going to thank our first sponsor back
0:23:17for a second time it's our good friends at Casper now you guys might remember
0:23:21from a few episodes ago. I think it was the one with the Chalkenberry, but Casper
0:23:28was a sponsor and had a great response. Craziest idea. When I first heard this
0:23:33craziest idea in the world. It's you go online. It's high quality mattresses like
0:23:38the ones you put on your bed at really really good prices. Seems like a crazy
0:23:42thing to buy on the internet like but in terms eventually we're gonna buy
0:23:46everything on the internet. We're gonna buy cars on the internet. You go there
0:23:51They have it's it's two technologies. They call it just the right sink just the right bounce
0:23:56It's two different technologies latex foam and memory foam that they put together. It's like a special combination
0:24:02That they've done just right. You don't have to sit there
0:24:06There's not a whole bunch of different things you have to choose from they they they did it for us
0:24:10They're the mattress experts. They've designed a really good mattress
0:24:13I've had regular I've tried not I don't own one
0:24:17But I've tried a regular memory foam mattress before and I found them way too like weird the way that they they make an indentation
0:24:23Perfect for your body. It feels like I'm making a crime scene or something
0:24:27Their mattress isn't like that at all is just enough of that memory stuff that it's comfortable
0:24:31But it doesn't you don't feel like you're sinking into it
0:24:34It's it's crazy
0:24:37Did you get one of these John or did was it Casey who got it for ATP?
0:24:41Casey got what we were thinking of getting one just because we need a mattress peer
0:24:44So they sent me one this is what they do when they sponsor a show they send one to you and it's like well
0:24:49How does a mattress show up? Well, it shows up in like a little dorm room fridge style box very small
0:24:55You can't believe it but it's because it's like two kinds of foam
0:24:59They like vacuum seal the mattress and it ships in what is still decidedly a very large package
0:25:05it is way smaller than a
0:25:10Mattress so put it in the room when you're gonna sleep in it then open the box
0:25:14They've got instructions that tell you exactly how to do it and let let it let it expand but it works. It is absolutely amazing
0:25:20It works. It's
0:25:22Feels like a great mattress. I really like it
0:25:24And the prices are so much less than the prices you pay for
0:25:30Mattresses out in the real world. It's ridiculous because the whole mattress industry is
0:25:35It's just that it's just like the Warby Park your story all over again where it's like it's like a cartel that come
0:25:41You know controls the whole industry
0:25:43They deliberately make it very very difficult to comparison shop across stores because each store even if it's from the same brand like Sealy
0:25:51They have like six different Sealy's the next store you go to has six different Sealy's and they all have different names
0:25:56even though they're technically the same mattress because they do this to make it really hard for you to
0:26:01comparison shop and know whether you're paying a good price or not.
0:26:05Casper cuts out all that crap and they just sell you great mattresses at a good price.
0:26:11Typical price for a new mattress is well over $1,500.
0:26:14Casper mattresses cost between $500, that's the twin size, and $950 for a king size mattress.
0:26:21$950 under $1,000 for a top tier mattress.
0:26:25You save hundreds and hundreds of dollars and it's completely risk free.
0:26:30have free delivery and returns within a hundred day period so three months to
0:26:37sleep on the thing and if you don't like it they'll pay to send it back no idea
0:26:42how that works I kept mine I'm not quite sure how how sending the full-size
0:26:47mattress works but they take care of it for you and I believe it risk-free oh and
0:26:55the last point I want to make I think this is great made in America made in
0:26:58American mattresses so where do you go to find out more apparently a whole
0:27:02bunch of you guys bought mattresses the last time their sponsorship brand
0:27:05totally encourage you if you need a new mattress check them out go to www.casper
0:27:11Casper sleep.com Casper sleep.com slash talk show now use that code that talk
0:27:22show code and you will save 50 bucks off there are already low prices on any
0:27:28mattress that you buy. So you'll save an extra 50 bucks and they're going to
0:27:33donate 50 bucks to a charity of my choice and that's I'll do the same
0:27:38charity I did the last time the food and allergy and flags network that my son
0:27:44and wife raised a lot of money for food allergies for kids great charity that's
0:27:49all on them great mattresses go check them out at
0:27:53caspersleep.com/talkshow.
0:27:59Mattresses on the internet.
0:28:00What the hell is next?
0:28:02You know what else?
0:28:03People are already buying cars on the internet.
0:28:05Yeah, I guess so.
0:28:06You can't buy new cars on the internet, though, can you?
0:28:09I think so.
0:28:10I don't know.
0:28:12Speaking of big boxes showing up, my iMac showed up today.
0:28:15So I started-- I ordered it day one.
0:28:19So it must have been a week ago.
0:28:21Of course, I got a bill to order.
0:28:24And it said three to five days.
0:28:27And it had a target ship date of October 24 to 28.
0:28:31And I think it was a wide range because it was over a weekend.
0:28:36I did pay, I think it was like $30 for expedited shipping.
0:28:39So I checked last night before I went to bed.
0:28:41And it said, I got a notice that my iMac was ready.
0:28:45And it was in China.
0:28:48And then at 10 o'clock in the morning,
0:28:49Today, my doorbell rang and it was here.
0:28:52So from when I went to bed last night, it was in China,
0:28:54and at 10 a.m., it was at my door, which is crazy.
0:28:58- The magic of air travel.
0:29:01- I can't help but think that when they told me
0:29:03it was in China, it was already really over the Pacific,
0:29:05but still, it's kind of astounding.
0:29:09- Yeah, a lot of people have been getting there.
0:29:09I've been seeing everybody tweeting pictures
0:29:11of their boxes arriving, so the first batch came quickly.
0:29:14- Everybody wants to know, I guess I could talk about it.
0:29:19I guess I'll write a review eventually but I don't buy Macs very often and then you even mention this on ATP like I just
0:29:27just now replaced a 2008 MacBook Pro that I had
0:29:31Upgraded to an SSD at some point which which gave it a couple more years of life, but it was really really
0:29:37aging
0:29:40And my desktop display as you know, it's it's it's like a 2004 20 inch cinema display
0:29:48Yeah, this is a serious, you know for as reckless as I am buying a new iPhone every single year
0:29:54I'm the opposite with max
0:29:55I'd I like to get one max it out and then use it until it's until it's ridiculously old
0:30:02Now you're gonna find out if you have any glare in that room because I'm looking at the 23 inch version of that and it's matte
0:30:07And you know, but you don't know if you have any serious glare issues if you've been using a matte screen for the past
0:30:12However, many years you'll find out now if you see your face when you sit down in front of you right now
0:30:17Mac yeah that was that's one of those things where I think they've gotten
0:30:20better at it and I know that it's and it's the sort of thing you can write
0:30:24about and they can advertise but you really have to see it the anti glare the
0:30:27thing that they've done with the new iPad air is pretty interesting but I
0:30:31want to know why didn't they do it to the new iMac - yeah it's not it's not
0:30:35laminated well I think I think the reason that in laminate is you know I
0:30:38assume is maybe it's just too hard to laminate something I think but you know
0:30:41you know how it is you take the glass off and then the screen is behind it if
0:30:44they laminated them together I guess you would like take the screen off when you
0:30:48opened it up and then you'd have to like disconnect the ribbon cables or whatever
0:30:51it just maybe you'd make it weird to disassemble I don't know but anyway yeah
0:30:54and it's definitely not laminated together and so you've got that air gap
0:30:57which increases the glare and also that's where the dust gets caught if you
0:31:00ever have to bring another thing to get service yeah those are two of two two pet
0:31:04peeves that you and I share together I do not like glare on my displays and I
0:31:08do not like machine noise. So I'm pretty satisfied. I'm pretty sure that it's going to be... I
0:31:16didn't take it out of the box yet. I had too much to do today, so I wasn't even ready for
0:31:20it. But I'm pretty excited that it's not going to be noisy. I'm a little worried about the
0:31:25glare.
0:31:26I've kind of made my peace with the glare because I have the Apple 24-inch display at
0:31:31work. The first one that was kind of like the iMac type screen where it's... It looks
0:31:36like the Thunderbolt display but 24 inches and it was it predates it but
0:31:40it's got the same thing air gap and the screen and I'm in an office with you
0:31:44know fluorescent lights and also other things and there are reflection things
0:31:47but the compared to all my co-workers displays which are like these Dell or
0:31:51Viewsonic things or even like their their laptop displays and stuff just the
0:31:57brightness and viewing angle like that the ridiculous brightness that these
0:31:59things have the LED backlit screens you never crank them up to the brightness in
0:32:03regular house but in an office setting where just you know the fluorescent
0:32:06lights are everywhere and it's all super bright the ability to crank your screen
0:32:09up can really power through any other sort of glare and it's just it's so much
0:32:14easier to see things in my screen than anybody who is around me I look at their
0:32:17screens and you can't see a thing because I mean because the viewing
0:32:20angles are bad because everything is so dim and muddy so there are advantages to
0:32:25this this type of design where it's just crystal clear piece of glass and a super
0:32:29bright screen behind it worst case you can just crank it up again of course my
0:32:33My wife has a Thunderbolt display right behind me and I look at that all the time.
0:32:36That looks really nice too.
0:32:37So I think I'm going to be okay with a screen like the one you've got on your iMac if I
0:32:41ever get it.
0:32:42Yeah, and the other thing that makes me feel pretty good about it is I'm okay with the
0:32:45glare on the current MacBooks.
0:32:48Like at least the retina one that I have now.
0:32:50Those are laminated too though, aren't they?
0:32:51Oh, I didn't think so.
0:32:52The most recent retina.
0:32:53I don't know.
0:32:54Maybe they are.
0:32:55Oh.
0:32:56I think they are.
0:32:57I think that my first impression when they first had the retina 15-inch like back at
0:33:01WWC and we're looking to Jason snails or whatever it was like the colors were like up on the surface of the screen the same
0:33:06Type of thing you got with the iPhone 4 right? Yeah, that's my guess. Maybe that's how they keep the
0:33:11whole lid so thin
0:33:13Because it's you know, seriously seriously thin
0:33:17Well, I still feel like that though
0:33:19I I remember when it was sort of a I don't know how many years it was
0:33:23I would say maybe in my mind it was around a three or four year period where
0:33:28there was like this great divide between, for laptops at least, glossy and matte displays.
0:33:38And Apple stuck with matte, and the whole PC industry went glossy. And every time I go,
0:33:44like in a Starbucks or something, and I'd see people using, you know, Windows PCs,
0:33:48I would just be flabbergasted at how like reflective their displays are. And then Apple
0:33:55Started offering it was like a choice
0:33:57What do you think it was about a you maybe the two or three years where we you when you'd buy a new?
0:34:02You know it's probably the power book era
0:34:04I guess there wasn't even Mac books yet, but you'd get a choice between matte and glossy
0:34:09And that's one of those things where I never hesitated for a second. It was of course. I want matte I
0:34:14Think I question can remember this I know what the PC people did for their glossy ones is they didn't do what Apple?
0:34:21has come to do now which is have a
0:34:23clear piece of glass
0:34:25on top of an LCD screen.
0:34:28I think maybe Apple's first glossy screens, but certainly also the PC glossy screens that sort of kicked off the thing,
0:34:34were plastic-y, but it was like super shiny plastic. I don't know if it was polycarbonate or something like that, but
0:34:40it had kind of like a sticky, wavy kind of look instead of what you get from a piece of glass, which is, you know, dead flat and like stiff, you know what I mean?
0:34:49And that made the screens look not only shiny, but also cheap.
0:34:53And I seem to recall Apple's first glossy displays being like that too, and that's why it was like,
0:34:57"Who in the world would ever want that? It just looks awful."
0:35:00When they switched to the big piece of glass, a big heavy piece of glass, and it made the lids heavier,
0:35:05and it wasn't great, and it was a huge air gap, at least that looked a little bit classier to me,
0:35:10like more, Johnny Ive would say, more honest materials, you know?
0:35:13Like, when they finally sort of honed in, "Oh yeah, aluminum and glass, we're gonna do that for a few years,"
0:35:19that settled things down a little bit.
0:35:20But but even then and a lot of people who got the matte display just just for reflection reasons
0:35:25Yeah, I totally did
0:35:28It's just funny though
0:35:30That's that that used to be a thing and I'm still you know because my display my desktop display is so ancient
0:35:36I think it's literally 10 years old
0:35:38If I didn't buy it in 2004 it was soon after
0:35:42It's you know it's like a relic I
0:35:46Have to say it was money well spent
0:35:49I don't know how you stayed with 20 inch resolution for all because I I feel myself
0:35:55Just I wish I could get out of this 23 inch like 1920 by 1200
0:35:59I that's just like barely big enough to contain me, but I feel boxed in the I always I thought it was too small the whole time
0:36:05But eventually I got used to it and it you know
0:36:11It I don't know
0:36:15Did you pare down like your work environment where you like you don't have as many windows open as you would normally have and just
0:36:20Kind of try to go into like I'm just gonna have one central window with a text editor and then off to the sidewalk
0:36:24You know web browser with a bunch of tabs and that's now I you know effectively I wrote it's with a 20 inch display
0:36:29It's a lot like using just a supersized like the lunch tray
0:36:32MacBook, you know the seven so do you like to full screen? No, not full screen, but for the most part everything
0:36:39I'm working on is just in a stack of windows and I have to command tab between them
0:36:42It's not big enough to do a lot of side by side.
0:36:45So I'm really looking forward to that with the 27 inch.
0:36:48- Yeah, now I have over the many years honed
0:36:50by sort of like layering and positioning system
0:36:53for my windows, which other people look at
0:36:54and can't make heads or tails of.
0:36:55But when I'm constrained and I start to have
0:36:57a lot of windows, I start running out of places
0:37:00for the corners to poke out.
0:37:01Like that's, you know, the system is like,
0:37:02I've got things in corners and windows sized and shaped
0:37:06so that I can find a clickable region.
0:37:08That's just the way I work with Macs, you know,
0:37:11starting from the 80s
0:37:12But when I just have too many damn windows I run out of places to have clickable stuff
0:37:17And if I ever find myself I can do command tilde not command tab
0:37:20But command tilde within an app to cycle through the windows
0:37:22I feel like I've been defeated by the lack of space so I really I really can't wait to get a 27 inch
0:37:28equivalent point resolution screen
0:37:31So I can't review it yet
0:37:33I literally didn't even take it out of the box
0:37:35But having seen it at first hand last week
0:37:37And I know a lot, they're in the stores now too, and I've seen a lot of people who are at least going in to look at them.
0:37:42It's gorgeous, it really is. I don't rush into it. Like I said, I'm replacing at my desk at least a six-year-old computer and a ten-year-old display.
0:37:53But I didn't hesitate to buy it on day one.
0:37:57And I know you guys talked on ATP that it's risky because there's a lot of times first-generation stuff from Apple has kinks to be worked out.
0:38:05to be worked out.
0:38:06Image retention, of course, is a huge question mark at this point.
0:38:10I think Jason said, Jason Snell did Marco's little image retention test and said that
0:38:15his iMac, which he got already, as well, passed with flying colors.
0:38:19So it seems clear on that front, unless they're using two manufacturers and he got the…
0:38:22Right.
0:38:23And it's in theory that's possible because Snell's is a review unit and they, you know,
0:38:28I'm almost, I don't know for a fact, but I'm 99.99% sure that they sanity checked
0:38:34the review unit, you know, that they,
0:38:36they're not like factory sealed, you know,
0:38:38that there's a white glove guy who makes sure
0:38:40that this is a good, you know, there's no--
0:38:42- Yours aren't factory sealed?
0:38:43'Cause I just got, for the first time,
0:38:46I got a bunch of loaner Apple hardware
0:38:48for the Yosemite review, and it looked pretty darn
0:38:50factory sealed right down to the little static link stuff.
0:38:52- I think they re-wrapped them back up.
0:38:54- Can you do that? - Yeah.
0:38:56- Like that was a game, you know, again,
0:38:59it's a novelty for me to be getting review hardware.
0:39:01And part of the game I played was,
0:39:03I'm going to rewrap these things so they look like I didn't take them out
0:39:05So I saved all the static cling stuff and I put it back on and putting it back on is super hard
0:39:09Like you can't get it lined up right now. Can you wrap a gift?
0:39:13Not great it doesn't look it looks when I wrap a gift it looks like dad wrote wrapped it
0:39:20It does not look like nice and even no matter how much I try I can't I know how to do it now
0:39:27Now I've reached the age where I know what I need to do to make it look good
0:39:30But at a certain point I just don't care anymore and like it all comes down to having the right length overhangs
0:39:34Yeah
0:39:34If you don't have the right length overhangs no amount of skill and folding is gonna save you and then you realize you don't have
0:39:39The right overhangs and you try to like trim it while it's wrapped around the thing to make the oh
0:39:42And then that just gets a ragged edge and you just like you know what screw it fold fold fold, right?
0:39:45Good there comes a point where you're you set out to make it like I want to wrap one as good as my wife can
0:39:51Wrap a present but eventually I run into that situation and I think wait
0:39:55This is just gonna be garbage ten seconds after I give it
0:39:59Yeah, you don't try to think don't try to think about it while you're doing it
0:40:02It's like what am I doing here?
0:40:04Especially when you're wrapping something and it's like a gift for your wife and she already knows what it is
0:40:07It's like what have we even doing here? But like you just got it's gonna plow ahead bravely
0:40:11I should just wrap it in the receipt
0:40:13Remember wrapping things in the funny pages that come yeah, that was some newspaper was a huge thing when we were kids
0:40:21Nobody does that anymore probably because no one gets newspapers
0:40:24They would like leave it would leave newsprint all over everything and it was like who does it?
0:40:28I guess it was just like our parents saving money on wrapping paper. Yeah, I guess or maybe you know
0:40:33Maybe a little bit of column a saving money and a little bit column B where all of a sudden it's Saturday
0:40:40I forgot I forgot it was the bird
0:40:42Yeah, it's well it's Saturday morning and the party is at noon and you remember you have the gift you bought the gift
0:40:49Did you know target the other day?
0:40:50But you didn't buy wrapping paper because you thought you still had a closet full of it and you don't and well
0:40:55We'll just use the Sunday paper
0:40:57Yeah, but that was definitely I would I would say when I was a kid like lower grade school
0:41:03I would say probably about a third of all the gifts that I got were wrapped in the Sunday paper Sunday
0:41:08Well, I I wonder how long we have to go with the school books being wrapped in
0:41:13Grocery bags. Oh, I remember that for the covers, right?
0:41:17so I think they still do that but now the big thing and all of the you know, the
0:41:24Fancy stores like Whole Foods and everything is to have cloth reusable cloth bags
0:41:27You don't make all that paper waste so I wonder how long those things will be around yeah
0:41:31How long can you get a paper bag?
0:41:33Whole Foods gives out paper bags because oh yeah
0:41:35If you don't if you don't have the little cloth bag because you forgot to put them in the trunk of your car
0:41:39They give you a dirty look and they put your stuff in a paper bag
0:41:41Hell yeah, there's like a passive-aggressive. Oh you didn't bring a bag oh
0:41:46You don't care about the penguins who are gonna choke to death on the bag
0:41:51I'm gonna put your stuff in well enjoy your $5 avocados
0:41:54Organic I've heard that if I've heard that if you eat organic produce you cannot get Ebola
0:42:02Yeah, so there finally is an advantage there's a reason to buy the 89 cents a pound organic bananas instead of the 69 cents a
0:42:11Pound regular bananas because it'll yeah, it'll immunize you against Ebola
0:42:15And they all they come with organic fruit flies that will invade your house if you leave them on your counter - they're adorable
0:42:21They're absolutely adorable fruit flies
0:42:29Might as well take a break and I'll do a second sponsor because it seems like a good a good time to break
0:42:34But then we'll go back. I want to talk about next last week's event a little bit too before we get into Yosemite
0:42:40But I want to take a break and thank
0:42:45One well, I love all sponsors, but I love I love this one a little more than most are good friends at back blaze
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0:43:07So there must be a bunch of you out here who are listening to me right now
0:43:10And you've heard me talk about back blaze before and you've thought that sounds good. I should get that
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0:43:42And you have you know I don't know three terabyte external drive, and it's all filled up
0:43:46It might take a while for that first backup to get everything up there
0:43:50Depending on your internet connection at home, but just wait it will
0:43:53And once it is then from that point forward everything on that Mac stays in sync backed up to their servers
0:44:02They have over 100 petabytes of total data backed up
0:44:07And the users have just crossed the six billion files restored mark
0:44:12so when you restore let's say a catastrophe hits and
0:44:16You lose your whole startup drive and you don't have a backup near local. You don't have a local backup
0:44:23Well, how you gonna get your whole, you know?
0:44:26One terabyte drive back what you can just tell them they'll put it on a USB drive for you and then
0:44:32FedEx the drive to you and then ding-dong the UPS guy is there and you've got a hard drive from them
0:44:38With all of your stuff on it
0:44:40Let's say you just need one file
0:44:42Well, you can log in on the web go to your backup go, you know through the hierarchy find that file and restore it
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0:45:16works great with Yosemite -
0:45:18So last week's event I
0:45:24I thought it was a little weird.
0:45:28You guys touched on this on ATP with Phil Schiller.
0:45:32Was he flat or not?
0:45:34And I got a bunch of emails and tweets from people who were like, "Hey, what's up with
0:45:37Phil?
0:45:38Was he like..."
0:45:39You know, something seemed wrong with Phil.
0:45:40You seem distracted is the word I use.
0:45:45I didn't notice this during the event.
0:45:47I thought Phil was just Phil.
0:45:49It's sort of downbeat Phil.
0:45:53like this is not a big deal Phil and I think it was very deliberate I think it
0:45:59was sort of low-key maybe I would say I wouldn't say distracted well but he's
0:46:04always like that to some degree right he's the pace of his speaking and his
0:46:09presenting style is always a little bit weird like that maybe he was up next to
0:46:15people who are doing more fake enthusiasm about things or being but I
0:46:19just he occasionally does seem distracted about stuff sometimes I feel
0:46:22he's distracted because he's thinking about the next thing he's gonna present, even though
0:46:25he's been doing this for so long, like that he's thinking about the next thing he's gonna
0:46:29present, trying to remember the things he's gonna do in the demo or whatever, and he'll
0:46:33get inside his own head about that, and like, forget to fake enthusiasm about something
0:46:39that he's seen a million times before.
0:46:41But it did not stick out to me much, like I mostly just thought it was just, you know,
0:46:47Phil's a Loki kind of guy and this is the way he presents, and if you've seen it so
0:46:49much that kind of fades into the wallpaper, but I always occasionally see him kind of
0:46:54be distracted. I forget if the timing of the thing, was this before or after the road trip
0:47:01typo thing? No, the demo of the guys who did a typo during the thing and they fixed it
0:47:06in post, remember that? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Who made the video editing thing? I forget
0:47:14if the time, if it was after that, it's like he could have been thinking about that, but
0:47:17He's like, God, we rehearsed this so many times.
0:47:18How did we screw up this demo?
0:47:20But if it was before that, I don't have an explanation.
0:47:23Yeah, what was the deal with that?
0:47:24I didn't know that they fixed it in post.
0:47:26I remember I didn't notice it during the event,
0:47:28and a lot of people pointed it out.
0:47:29Was it a Federighi demo where he mistyped road trip?
0:47:32No, it was like people who--
0:47:34third-party software developers.
0:47:36I forget who they are.
0:47:37And they were showing off their video and they were--
0:47:39Yeah, and they were not native English speakers.
0:47:42The guy who was running the demo machine,
0:47:44he fell victim to autocorrect.
0:47:47I think it could auto-corrected Utah to its instead of Utah road trip. It was its road trip
0:47:51And the guy shook his head and was pissed at himself for like falling victim to autocorrect and then just plowed forward with the demo
0:47:58but then in post they they have somewhat a good YouTube clip of an out analyzing this in post they
0:48:03rescreen captured the screen image and
0:48:06Froze his image of himself
0:48:08Before he does the head shake and then transitioned him at post head shake
0:48:12It was pretty good at it like this
0:48:14it's side by side you see the person you see the screen and they more or less seamlessly
0:48:17made it seem like that did not happen but just fine like okay that's pretty cool it
0:48:21is shows you that apple sweats the detail oh yeah no like they rehearse it so many times
0:48:26it's like you could see the autocorrect bubble like we all know autocorrect don't hit spacebar
0:48:31it's going to complete the it's my favorite little detail i i'm actually it's like to
0:48:38get the ipad review out i had to shelve it but i still want to write my write a daring
0:48:42Fireball piece on my thoughts on last week's event.
0:48:46My favorite little thing, and I'm not surprised, and you won't be surprised, but I had to double
0:48:51check is that image that they used a couple of times showing a watch, a phone, an iPad,
0:48:59a Mac, a book, and now the iMac.
0:49:04I thought clearly an homage to that evolution image, even though it sort of goes the other
0:49:10way where the Mac was first and these other products you know came later it's
0:49:14sort of left to right newest to oldest but I thought that was a really telling
0:49:19image I thought it was especially telling that they used it multiple times
0:49:23early on with Tim Cook and then like in the wrap-up but I checked and of course
0:49:28they made two versions of it the first one was with an iPad air original iPad
0:49:35Air and the one they used at the end when Tim Cook closed the iPad is thinner
0:49:40And it's no yeah, if you look at him side by side
0:49:42It's very noticeable that they made a second version with a thinner iPad even though they're only showing them from the side and it
0:49:48At any given moment it was it was impossible to tell which generation iPad it was because it was from the side
0:49:53Did they make the iPad the iMac external case proportions change at all?
0:49:58With the retina
0:50:01Yeah, I can't tell it because that's the one I would look for replacement
0:50:05But if they're exactly the same you'll be able to tell like from the side
0:50:07Yeah, like if they had slimmed it down or maybe you can't tell from that angle. But yeah
0:50:11They were obviously very proud of that thing. Although when it first came up, I read it as like I
0:50:16Knew they weren't trying to make it text
0:50:19But but it kind of looked like I guess Elo had been on my mind that weird social network thing or whatever
0:50:23It's like this kind of looks like it could be letters
0:50:25They could spell things out with that if they wanted but that's not what it was
0:50:27The evolution thing is much closer analogy because it's from you have a hunch thing to the standing up things
0:50:33You got to put the tallest one on the right even if it's you know, yeah
0:50:36Yeah, I'm looking at him now side by side it
0:50:38they changed the lighting on the iMac in the between the two slides and it makes the
0:50:44App the the after one it looks a little thinner
0:50:47but I it looks to me though that it's just that they that they change the lighting and there's
0:50:52Less of it and more of it's in shadow
0:50:55It's just a different product like that
0:50:57It's a different product shot like you know when they when they brought up the new iMac to take a shot of it the lighting
0:51:01Wasn't the same as when they have that older iMac take a shot of it
0:51:03so it shows up differently.
0:51:05I think you linked to a few people talking about this,
0:51:07and I mostly agree with whatever person you linked to
0:51:09that was saying like, this is cute and all,
0:51:12but it doesn't communicate to people
0:51:14who aren't already on board much of anything
0:51:16because regular people might not even understand
0:51:19what they're looking at, let alone which device is which.
0:51:22Like Apple was clearly excited and proud of it
0:51:25and we Apple followers and nerds thought it was clever
0:51:27and interesting and novel because you have to find
0:51:29some interesting way to show these things
0:51:31instead of just like, here's all the screens
0:51:32with black borders that Apple makes.
0:51:34They come in different sizes, right?
0:51:35And you know, one of them has a little stand at the end.
0:51:37So coming up with new and interesting ways
0:51:39to photograph Apple's product line is a challenge
0:51:42that is mostly relevant to people who either work at Apple
0:51:46or who have been following Apple for a long time.
0:51:48Whereas if you throw that image up
0:51:50in front of regular people,
0:51:51I'm not sure how well it will communicate anything
0:51:53or read to them at all.
0:51:54But I, you know, the audience for this Apple event,
0:51:56anyone, this is not the iPhone event.
0:51:58This is the lesser event in, what was it,
0:52:01in a town hall or whatever?
0:52:02small room mostly of interest to Apple follower so it was the appropriate venue
0:52:08for that image but I'm not sure how well it reads there yeah I don't think it
0:52:11that's why I found it interesting because there's two parts to the to the
0:52:16Apple presentations not necessarily two halves but there's two types of messages
0:52:21they seek to convey some are for the mass market and they sometimes even
0:52:25showed that actual commercials that they're going to put on real TV they'll
0:52:28just show the commercial right there. So it's exactly what they're going to be
0:52:33pushing in their marketing to hundreds of millions of real people through
0:52:38advertising. But then other parts are the as close as Apple will get to inside
0:52:43baseball. And that's meant for like us in the media who are then going to you know
0:52:52it's it's it's like they're playing a bank shot. They're trying to get us to
0:52:56Understand them so that when we write about them to the mass market that we're going to have it
0:53:03Right that we we see what Apple is seen
0:53:05Yeah, they're gonna emphasize the parts that they think will tickle our the fancy of the Apple fans
0:53:12Like they're going to show you the video about the manufacturing process and emphasize the beauty of one particular physical feature
0:53:17So that in the hopes that when you write you review that feature that you might have overlooked you'll say well
0:53:22I just they showed this whole five-minute video of a factory and Johnny I've in his white world talking about it and
0:53:27Suddenly that's more prominent in your mind. It's just basically basic, you know talking to the press type of things
0:53:32But they will they're never going to show that video of the Mac Pro factory to regular people
0:53:37They don't care about the macro at all period and and certainly not how or where it's built
0:53:41They're all the things they did about the unibody or whatever
0:53:43Like they can say it's unibody and they can give the thing out or whatever
0:53:46But they're gonna show those
0:53:47those computer controlled milling machines
0:53:49with the water going over them
0:53:51and just talk about it forever.
0:53:52Like when they came out with the MacBook Air
0:53:53and then to the subsequent unit bodies,
0:53:55they really hammered on that
0:53:56to try to get the message across to the press
0:53:58who would then get the message across that,
0:54:00hey, I know you understand what unit body is
0:54:02and I know you're gonna see it's one piece and blah, blah,
0:54:04blah, but it actually makes a difference
0:54:06and it's a big deal.
0:54:07And that's the bank shot,
0:54:09five minute video on CNC milling machines.
0:54:12And that hopefully translates to a little bit extra emphasis
0:54:15when the first unit body product
0:54:16not in the consumer facing product reviews.
0:54:21Another I just I love this image and I think another answer somebody compared it somebody
0:54:24on Twitter compared it to one from one of the recent events that Microsoft had for like
0:54:31the surface probably the surface pro 3 event and they had a table lined up in their hands
0:54:36on area with Nokia phones and surface pros and some of them on the table and some of
0:54:44them in a laptop stand and desktop computers and laptop computers, you know, up to the,
0:54:49you know, whatever the HP equivalent of an iMac is.
0:54:53All of them running exactly the same start screen, you know, this blue, you know, blue
0:54:59colored, whatever they, whatever they renamed Metro interface, you know, and that what a
0:55:04country, you know, it's a philosophical contrast where, you know, Microsoft went in this direction
0:55:09where you get the exact same interface across phone from phone to you know 30
0:55:14inch desktop display and Apple you know when it ends is you know reiterated this
0:55:21year you know that each each of these devices gets an interface that is just
0:55:25for that form factor and include you know making them very different and you
0:55:31know we can even talk about when we still move get into your Yosemite
0:55:34review the way that Yosemite is clearly inspired by the direction that iOS 7
0:55:39went but it's it even at a glance just if you've been tuned out for six months
0:55:45and still haven't even seen Yosemite and you took a look at it right now you
0:55:48wouldn't think oh they copied iOS 7 that it's you know the exact same thing it's
0:55:53different it's a family resemblance but it's like a brother or cousin it is not
0:55:58an identical twin. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, like a sibling, not a twin. And I think showing
0:56:05these devices in this promotional image for us, you know, this press image where you don't
0:56:08even see the display, is in a strange way emphasizes that what you would see on the
0:56:15displays are very different across them. And also think, and I think this is always interesting
0:56:21to me and I try to think about it, is what are the things that Apple is trying to convey
0:56:26to us that they can't bring themselves to say for various reasons because it's
0:56:32you know they just couldn't say that and to me this one of the things with this
0:56:36image in a way that they spoke about it is that they don't expect or even want
0:56:44everybody to buy everything you're not supposed to have an iMac and a MacBook
0:56:48and an iPad and an iPad mini and you know a phone and a watch if you do great
0:56:55You know, you're a great customer, but if you just have two of them, that's great
0:57:00You know, maybe you have this, you know, like the iPhone 6 plus and because it's a huge phone
0:57:06you feel like now I don't need an iPad and
0:57:08Your only other product is a MacBook and you just use that MacBook everywhere use it at your desk
0:57:14You use it when you travel and that's it. You're a that's a perfect you're a perfectly
0:57:21Encourage that's that's that's absolutely encouraged, but they can't say that they can't say it's okay if you don't buy this
0:57:27You know what I mean?
0:57:28It's you you can't get on stage and say you know this cool new iMac that we just showed you it
0:57:32It's totally fine
0:57:33If you don't buy it and just use a MacBook
0:57:35Yeah, we talked about this on an ATP a little while ago about how they even just within the iOS device range
0:57:40But anyway, you need all them if you see them head-on or whatever again
0:57:42They all just look like a black border around a color LCD screen of various sizes
0:57:48But now they really fleshed out the range especially with the watch being a little tiny thing and then you have all the different various sizes
0:57:54of iPhones and the big one and then the biggest one gets close to the mini and then you have that you know, like it's a
0:57:59Pretty smooth scale up of rectangular color screens that you can buy from Apple all up to the big giant retina one that you bought
0:58:06But and as the physical form factors have started to form the smooth scale that they're kind of showing in this image here
0:58:14There's still discontinuities because what is the difference between an iPhone 6 plus and an iPad one runs iPad apps and one runs?
0:58:23Phone apps and the line between them, you know
0:58:27we're saying an ATP is probably going to go away sometime in the near future because that distinction like
0:58:31If you were to get an iPhone 6 plus go to the App Store and be like, oh I totally want this game
0:58:37Or this app and they're like, oh sorry you can't this iPad only it's like what do you mean?
0:58:41I've had only like the iPad isn't that much bigger than the screen. I'm holding my hand
0:58:44What is it about the thing I'm holding in my hand that means it can't run a quote unquote iPad app
0:58:48That distinction seems like it's gonna go away
0:58:50But this the other gap of like you get the you know
0:58:52The iPad air or if they were coming with like an iPad Pro and then to a MacBook Air which presumably go right into
0:58:57Why are these so different like well is easier to explain one as a keyboard but they run totally different OS is one is touch
0:59:03one is not touch
0:59:04like
0:59:06They Apple is expecting you to pick your spot in their product line where you feel comfortable because there are
0:59:11Discontinuity still and I they're never gonna paper over them to the degree that Microsoft does like Oh one OS everywhere
0:59:16Cuz that's not what Apple believes in but in any kind of
0:59:19Transition like there's another discontinuity when you go from the phone to the watch because it just has to be it can't work the same
0:59:23Way, it's just too small or whatever
0:59:25So these little gaps like if they were to space it out would be like watch
0:59:28Big gap phone phone phone tiny gap iPad bigger gap laptop even bigger gap
0:59:34I'm at you know, and you're supposed to pick in that range of like
0:59:38you know like a Chinese food menu one from column a one from column B like and
0:59:42Make up the suite of devices that that fill out your life
0:59:46and I
0:59:46by having this range
0:59:48I think obviously someone's not just gonna buy the watch and not have a PC and not have a cell phone like there you're gonna have
0:59:53Something in this range just which ones do you think you need no one needs to fill in all the gaps
0:59:56Yeah, and then they but they can't say it that in that way, right and I well
1:00:03They say it in the way like we have something for every yeah
1:00:05You know like they just say look at this range like look at the richest of this range
1:00:08There's surely there is something that fits your needs like we you know
1:00:12They're fleshing it out like diversifying the iPhone line for the longest time like the iPhone was the iPhone and everybody wanted like
1:00:17Even now you said is room for diversification of like, you know, make one thicker and have longer battery life or something
1:00:22But like they've diversified their line to say
1:00:24Something for everybody and the same way they don't expect you to buy two iPhones like the big one in the small one or your night
1:00:29Phone or your day phone?
1:00:31It's the same thing that they don't say that because they think it's obvious but
1:00:35Just like they're not going to say if you if you buy you know a MacBook Pro
1:00:39We probably don't expect you to buy an iMac because the mac or pro is a completely fully capable awesome machine
1:00:45You can do everything on but if you're the kind of person who wants a desktop we will offer one of those two
1:00:50Yeah
1:00:53Mac Pro it I some people wrote to me
1:01:02After the iMac announcement and they're sort of I have obviously they've bought a Mac Pro in the last ten months
1:01:08And they're angry that the Marco right now Marco, you know did not get angry. He just went out and bought an iMac
1:01:16But to me that's so totally not surprising
1:01:22You know that that even though the Mac Pro is a very expensive
1:01:25Machine and it in theory should always be at the leading edge of technology and it is in a lot of ways
1:01:32That it didn't go retina first
1:01:35Or at least simultaneously and probably not even close like I know I have Marco's logic of why he doesn't think a standalone 5k
1:01:43display is gonna ship from Apple until
1:01:452016 is pretty sound because it there's a lot of I think he's I think it probably does need
1:01:51DisplayPort slash Thunderbolt, you know 1.3 slash Thunderbolt 3
1:01:56Because they're not gonna do that. They're not gonna have you run two cables to drive it
1:02:00Just yeah, I mean that was always obvious that there's an advantage of an all-in-one
1:02:05The advantage the all-in-one has is they can use whatever the hell interconnect they want inside that box, right?
1:02:09It doesn't need to conform to any specification
1:02:11It doesn't need to they could just do what do what you got to do to make it work
1:02:15It all happens inside the box
1:02:16and so you're always going to have an advantage for that thing if it happened that a
1:02:20Standardized external interconnect existed for retina displays in the same time frame as the Mac Pro the Mac Pro would have had it first
1:02:27Yeah
1:02:27but it just so happened that it didn't what and then you're like, okay, well, we need to get written out there somehow and
1:02:33because the Mac Pro uses the the Xeon parts and because they're generation behind and because we don't have the external internet Apple just did
1:02:41Whatever the hell it took to get it done inside this iMac box and don't worry about what goes on behind the curtain, right?
1:02:45But it does create this weird and in in the historical time, you know, five six seven years from now
1:02:51We're gonna look back on it and it'll just be compressed and we'll just remember that the iMac was first and everything
1:02:57you know, the standalone displays for a second.
1:03:00In the interim though, it is weird that the iMac
1:03:03is gonna have these super amazing retina displays
1:03:05and the Mac Pro, no matter how much money you spend on it,
1:03:07won't, unless, you know.
1:03:09- Well, I mean, you can get a 4K display,
1:03:11not from Apple. - Right.
1:03:12- For your Mac, and then you'd buy one of those,
1:03:14like, special, you know, ones for photography
1:03:16that has a bigger color gamut and has better accuracy
1:03:19and, you know, buy it from NEC.
1:03:20It's like the people who are buying Mac Pros
1:03:23might already have these super high-res monitors
1:03:264K video editing that conform to different standards than this consumer iMac screen does.
1:03:32So it's not...
1:03:33The people who might be complaining are people who had bought a Mac Pro but didn't really
1:03:38need one and just wanted to have a king of the machine now they don't.
1:03:40Right.
1:03:41That's...
1:03:42Because I do think that's what irks them is that now until there's a 5K standalone display,
1:03:50and when that comes out, it won't run on the...
1:03:52You're gonna have to get a new Mac Pro anyway.
1:03:53Yeah.
1:03:54All right.
1:03:55One of the many reasons that I didn't buy one is like well if I was waiting for retina
1:03:59This Mac Pro is not the machine because we know what it's capable of we know Apple didn't even offer any monitors
1:04:04I didn't want a third-party modern if I did have a third-party, and I didn't want it to be 4k
1:04:08I wanted what Apple made here. I wanted 27 inch the resolution of my wife's 27 inch Thunderbolt display
1:04:13It just doubled the the number of pixels vertically and horizontally there's that that's the thing that really blew me away at first
1:04:20I was like
1:04:21waiting for the, well there's gotta be a catch.
1:04:24And then I thought about like with the iPhone 6 Plus,
1:04:27where it's not really 3x retina, it's 2.8 retina or 2.6,
1:04:32and they just use scaling to make it work.
1:04:35And it looks pretty good, but it's still not the same.
1:04:38I thought, ah, maybe it's like a scaling thing.
1:04:40And then they gave the pixel dimensions,
1:04:42and I'm like dividing in my head, and I'm like,
1:04:44ooh, that sounds like actual 2x retina, and it is.
1:04:48- Yeah, now Dell had announced a monitor
1:04:51with similar specs.
1:04:52So as soon as Dell announced it, you're like,
1:04:53"Okay, well this must be technically possible now
1:04:56"if Dell is gonna offer one."
1:04:57So once it's technically possible,
1:04:58then it's just like,
1:04:59when does Apple have a product that this could,
1:05:01I mean, if the iMac didn't exist,
1:05:03and Dell comes out with this monitor,
1:05:05that the current Mac Pros can't drive with a single cable,
1:05:08and might not be able to drive with two,
1:05:10depending on how they did it,
1:05:11then we just would've all been waiting,
1:05:12and we'd be like,
1:05:13"Well, Dell's got these monitors, but we can't have them."
1:05:15But the iMac does exist,
1:05:16and it gave Apple an opportunity to,
1:05:19we can get, as soon as those displays are available,
1:05:22we gotta get one into one of our machines
1:05:23and the iMac is the way to make that happen.
1:05:25- So fame is, knock on wood,
1:05:27let's wait until I actually take it out
1:05:29and set it up and use it, but on paper at least,
1:05:32and from what I've seen in person,
1:05:33this is the Mac I've been waiting for close to 10 years.
1:05:37- It's gonna be a big upgrade for you.
1:05:40- Oh, huge upgrade.
1:05:41Ever since, I remember when they first started talking
1:05:44about it at WWDC in maybe 2006, 2007,
1:05:48but they called it, what did they call it?
1:05:52Before they had the word retina.
1:05:53- High DPI, resolution independence.
1:05:56Scalable UI, lots of things.
1:05:57- Resolution independence was the thing.
1:06:00And I remember, 'cause, and I mention this too,
1:06:02like my fellow obsessive on resolution independence
1:06:05is Cable Sasser at Panic.
1:06:07And I remember going to the session at WWDC with him
1:06:11and we came out so excited and he was like,
1:06:14we're gonna redo all the graphics
1:06:16and all of our apps as PDFs.
1:06:18And they did, in fact.
1:06:19Panic started shipping apps with scalable PDF icons
1:06:24and stuff like that inside for toolbars
1:06:26and stuff like that years ago.
1:06:28Because Cable and I both convinced ourselves,
1:06:32I don't even know what we were thinking.
1:06:33I mean, it--
1:06:34- Well, it's not just you.
1:06:35Like, if you go back through my old OS X reviews,
1:06:37Apple made promises.
1:06:39They're like, by 2008, our whole product line
1:06:41will be resolution independent, so get ready.
1:06:43That was like 2006 when they said that, right?
1:06:45They gave a year and a date,
1:06:47And like every year like there used to be a section in my OS X reviews is like
1:06:50You know resolution independence
1:06:52How's that going along and I would take a little screenshot of text edit in like 2x mode or 1.5x mode
1:06:57You see what a train wreck it is, you know, like and that's why this is still not a user facing picture
1:07:01See you next year. We just convinced ourselves that the like retina IMAX we're gonna be coming out in like 2008 and
1:07:08We were so excited. We wanted to get in line to buy one then
1:07:11And it took until now
1:07:14Just I mean it was so much easier to make the iPhone 4 screen. It's way smaller
1:07:17It's fewer pixels, and it's just so hard to make it that density
1:07:21You know so we had to wait a long time before it was economically feasible to make a screen this massive
1:07:26I mean that was the whole thing with the retina
1:07:27It's like well
1:07:28Maybe they could do this earlier if like maybe they'll just do it for the 21 inch
1:07:31I Mac right because they could have gone that they could have probably made that one retina sooner
1:07:35It would have been like 4k ish or 3k ish type resolution, but no they went for the whole enchilada
1:07:40Yeah, and it's really as far as I can tell no compromise
1:07:43It's you know in terms of the number of pixels the way they're doing it. You know that there's
1:07:48No, no cheapening out on it. It's super bright
1:07:51It's amazing to me because that was the other thing too during the the event last week
1:07:56after you know Phil gave the specs and the size and
1:08:01You know, I I thought well, you know what it's gonna be power
1:08:06It's kind of this thing it's because that's you know, it's a huge problem all these pixels lighting it up
1:08:09Is this thing gonna get super hot and instead it takes less power, which is crazy
1:08:15Yeah, that that's the thing that made me feel good about the machine that like
1:08:20That it's not gonna be just at the ragged edge of what's possible to wedge into this thing, right?
1:08:25You know with the cooling and everything so they you know
1:08:27The GPU is hotter but they made up for it by actually making a screen consume less
1:08:31Yeah, my hope is that it's what bite by not compromising and clearly like you said they could have shipped something sooner
1:08:38whether it was like the go 21 inch first or make it a 27 inch 4k display and use scaling to make
1:08:45the onscreen elements a reasonable size as opposed to making everything cartoonishly large.
1:08:50They could have done any number of those things within the last few years and didn't. And I think
1:08:57hopefully it's almost like they're shipping like a 2.0 version of it. That they waited until they
1:09:03could get everything just right. This is what people who have one sitting in their house tell
1:09:08themselves to make themselves feel better about first generation Apple products. This
1:09:12is practically a 2.0. I mean, so far so good. There was a little bit scary moment this morning
1:09:21when Marco and I had a few people tweeting at us that like, look at this stuttery, like
1:09:26someone was swiping through spaces on their new Retina 5K iMac and it was like super slow
1:09:31and stuttery and it was like, uh oh. But then a million other people tweeted and showed
1:09:35the exact same thing on their 13-inch MacBook Pros.
1:09:38It's just some weird Yosemite bug.
1:09:41And then hopefully they'll work out in 1010, which will hopefully come out soon.
1:09:45Because I had no reproductions at home.
1:09:48Even on my pre-Unibody MacBook Pro, smooth, doing all that stuff, but then on my Mac at
1:09:53work that had been on for days that's running Yosemite, I enabled activated mission control,
1:09:58which I never do otherwise, and it was stuttery.
1:10:00So I'm like, "Oh, this has got to be Yosemite bug," because we get reports like, "It doesn't
1:10:03happen all the time and
1:10:05The best I can tell is that it's some kind of issue that happens when your Mac is on for a really long time
1:10:09But anyway, there are bugs and that was the only scare so far about the 5k IMAX turns out to be a false alarm
1:10:16Yeah, I never know how far I can push it in the hands-on areas after these events like
1:10:22and there's others who are
1:10:24Bolder than I am who will do it download geek bench and try to yeah, see I wouldn't do that
1:10:30Yeah, because then they'd stop you there's everyone
1:10:33It was what's the point like if people gonna get loaner hardware anyway?
1:10:36Then you can test it for all you want like it's not that thing to do with the hands-on area
1:10:40Well and I could see how the people that aren't getting review units would be more tempted to do something like that and see if
1:10:48They can get away with getting yeah
1:10:50Like the iOS devices like you want to find out if it's three cores in that iPad, right?
1:10:54So I you know quickly go to some I don't know
1:10:58Exploit some crazy jailbreak thing to quickly get some little executable to run. Yeah, they they're I think they'll generally cut you off before you
1:11:04Get that far
1:11:06But it's funny talking to them because the people who staff the hands-on areas
1:11:11I think are all I know most of them are but I think all of them work under Schiller in the product marketing
1:11:18division at Apple and
1:11:21They're it's easy to think of them
1:11:24You know
1:11:24They all wear t-shirts like like they're working in an Apple store or something like that
1:11:27but they're all like in my experience super super informed about the stuff that you were
1:11:33That you're talking about like if I'd ask them
1:11:37Hey, is this three core and is that how it went from two two billion transistors to three?
1:11:43They would know the answer but they'd also know that they're not allowed to tell me like they're super super important
1:11:48Yeah, no, they're totally brief. They'd have they have their talking points. They know what they will talk to you about they know
1:11:53Specific phrasing for you know, if you ask them a question about something and they're gonna tell you something about they're gonna
1:11:57They're all gonna use the same sentence in the same words. It's it's talking
1:12:00Well, yeah that they are professional
1:12:02Yeah, and that's all it's very evident like if you know anybody was there at their first, you know
1:12:06The first time you get invited to an Apple event you go to the hands-on area
1:12:09It's very clear that they have a script and they have talking points
1:12:12but the other thing though, is that they
1:12:15their full-time jobs
1:12:18363 other days a year are
1:12:21working in Apple's product marketing, being hyper informed about all of the technical details of all of Apple's products like these people
1:12:29Know they know their shit. They know the stuff that's not on the script and it's you know
1:12:36And they're not going to be fooled by somebody trying to download geekbench or something like that
1:12:40maybe I could see getting away with it and in the early parts of the hands-on areas because it's so crazy and crowded and
1:12:47It's everybody wants to get their hands on them at once and maybe you can get away with it
1:12:52But not for long. My thing was I I they were showing
1:12:55Photos of course
1:12:59Big images
1:13:01Because it you know, it just shows off the thing they commissioned a guy with like one of those
1:13:06I think they're called hassle bods hassle pads
1:13:08but you know like this camera that shoots like I
1:13:12Don't know 50 50 megapixel digital images and like a cityscape
1:13:17and you can see these details and you can just zoom in and you read like the license plate number on the car and then
1:13:24Zoom back out and it's you know, you can actually see that it's still being rendered in individual pixels on screen
1:13:29But I closed that and went to like the finder and opened up like a safari window and then tried to drag it around
1:13:35The window as fast as I could like that was my benchmark in the hands-on area
1:13:39Like if I drag a window around as fast as I can does it does it shear?
1:13:43Yeah, like I think yeah, that was a good thing to test and also, you know
1:13:47If you think about the the first 15 inch right now MacBook Pro is like scrolling at the maximum resolution
1:13:52At the one that was bigger than the native screen, you know that that one had a little bit of issues find out
1:13:57you know probably but the scaling and not with the compositing because compositing has always been fast compositing is
1:14:02Pretty easy to do that
1:14:03What you're looking for shearing is because you know
1:14:05They have to be driving it was like essentially to display port
1:14:081.2 connections or the equivalent behind the scenes and like you would look at like the driving the left half of the screen
1:14:12I right at the screen differently but like I mean that's the type of thing Apple would not ship if you could if you could get
1:14:17Tearing while dragging windows around I mean Apple never shipped that even when it meant that dragging windows around was slow as molasses
1:14:24You still didn't get any tearing. That's like I would have been I would have been shocked
1:14:28But it's like something I had to see to believe. Yeah, I had but that was the extent that I tested it in advance
1:14:34Yeah, and scrolling I put I positioned a window right in the middle
1:14:38So if there was a you know if it was some kind of two screens glued together trickery that I
1:14:43Tried to figure that out and of course, it's not
1:14:46Anything else from the event last week, I guess there's the iPad to iPad air - which is kind of interesting I
1:14:56Think the way that they've gone with the air with the iPads is
1:15:04Try to write about it this week that it's there's no real annual pattern to it and I don't think it means that it's directionless
1:15:10I just feel like
1:15:12the
1:15:14Engineering wins that they can pull off each year while maintaining their profit margins are very very different as compared to the iPhone
1:15:22Which to me seems much more predictable?
1:15:24The thing with the top-end iPad and the reason I'm still totally in favor on iPad Pro is like
1:15:32While no one is really paying much attention. They are pushing up the the highest end iOS device
1:15:39Pushing up really close to PC class in terms of power
1:15:43Yeah, not in terms of interface like it still doesn't have a keyboard still it's still touch or whatever
1:15:47But you know and it doesn't seem like a big deal like oh so what I run my iOS apps faster
1:15:52And maybe like a game will look nicer or something like that. But it's like it's one of those things where
1:15:57when we have all the steps in between
1:16:01It doesn't seem so impressive like it's not as impressive as you know
1:16:04iPhone 3gs to iPhone 4 where they go ready like wow, they just doubled everything. It's amazing, right?
1:16:09But through a series of small steps
1:16:12There's gonna come a point where new classes of applications are possible on an iPad merely because they've been pressing it forward
1:16:19And there was a little stall there
1:16:21I think a lot of it did with like just having one gigabyte of RAM for a long time
1:16:23But now and and having two cores for how long we had two cores
1:16:26Like everyone else has gone quad core and like the Android space and everything like that
1:16:29So now they're pressing again two gigs of RAM three cores
1:16:33I don't think it makes new categories of stuff available to you, but maybe a generation or two from now
1:16:38We're gonna wake up and say there are things that the iPad can do that the iPhone can't quite dream of doing yet
1:16:45I mean right now it's like you just need an extra power to run this bigger screen and the iPhone
1:16:49You know is reasonable but like I think you had just have so much more headroom in the bigger form factor so far
1:16:55They haven't really been willing to do with that much. This is the first year
1:16:57I feel like they're pulling away by giving it double the RAM and everything
1:17:01But you know there is room. I think there is room for for more sophisticated applications
1:17:07To be on a an even larger and even more powerful iPad. We're just like right now
1:17:12It's kind of like we're inching towards that it just seems like man a faster bigger iPad well
1:17:17I think the two demos they chose art were really good
1:17:20I think they were such great demos the pixel pixel mature and replay
1:17:24Did you see the Schiller mispronounced it?
1:17:27It's been listening to YouTube much.
1:17:29Yeah. So Schiller called it Pixelmator. But those are good demos because in theory,
1:17:37if they've already got the iOS app working for the iPad, they could come out with,
1:17:42maybe they will even. Maybe when Pixelmator for iOS ships, it will be universal and it'll run on
1:17:48your iPhone too. But clearly editing photos is better. The bigger the screen, the better.
1:17:55and on a phone screen you're seriously constrained you know and for like the exact thing that they
1:18:00did where they're making like an advertisement for you know this big image and they want to
1:18:05superimpose text and um you know having a laptop size screen like the full size ipad
1:18:12even though that might be small for a laptop it's still certainly you know nobody you know
1:18:18know, the small iPad, the mini is vaguely giant size phone size, right? It would be
1:18:25the biggest phone ever, but it's, you know, you could imagine somebody making an
1:18:29Android phone that's the size of an iPad mini, but not an iPad. And for photo
1:18:34editing, it's, you know, size matters. And then I think with those replay guys, I
1:18:37thought that was an interesting, "Boy, you could never do that on a PC" demo, because
1:18:46to me the big part of that is that you've already got you it's the device you use to
1:18:51ship shoot the clips it's all one thing it's the camera it's the editing system it's the
1:18:56playback system right and you don't have that with a laptop like where you might shoot a
1:19:02bunch of video on your phone and then you can connect your phone with the lightning
1:19:07adapter to your macbook and suck all the video over and open and then you might airplay it
1:19:12onto your tv so people can see it or put it back on your phone because it unless people
1:19:16gathered around your screen.
1:19:17Yeah.
1:19:18I mean, it's certainly a that's beyond the technical acumen of a lot of typical people
1:19:23and B it's not something you want to do when you're on vacation, like in the demo that
1:19:27they, because it gives you that year.
1:19:29It's like, it's the type of thing where when you're on vacation, you tell yourself that
1:19:31when you get back home, boy, you're going to spend a day and take all of your stuff
1:19:34and put it onto your computer and make a nice video and send it out to people.
1:19:37But you won't because you get back from vacation and you're rushing around and you're back
1:19:40to your regular life.
1:19:41And there's when you're on vacation, you got the iPad with you.
1:19:44You can do it when you go back to your hotel room or whatever.
1:19:46Or while you're waiting for your table at dinner
1:19:48and just suck these clips in and push a button
1:19:51and have a finished video pop out that you could post--
1:19:55Share right there and then say, hey, guys,
1:19:57this is what we're doing on our vacation.
1:19:59And the other thing that's lurking for the iPad, which
1:20:01we still haven't seen but people have poked around,
1:20:03like the whole split screen multitasking, which we know
1:20:05is lurking the code for splitting multiple apps
1:20:08into thirds and quarters.
1:20:09It's there, and obviously it's not baked yet
1:20:11and they're not ready for it.
1:20:12And maybe you need a bigger iPad or whatever.
1:20:13but that's what I'm talking about of like pressing
1:20:17the limits of what can be done on a touch device.
1:20:19- I can't help but think that going to two gigs of RAM
1:20:22is a sign that if there's an iPad Pro
1:20:26in like five months from now,
1:20:28'cause that's the rumor is maybe like February or March,
1:20:32they're gonna have an iPad Pro,
1:20:3412 or 13 inches or something like that,
1:20:38and it'll have split screen.
1:20:39My guess is that this iPad, if that's true,
1:20:42this iPad Air 2 will get the split screen too,
1:20:45but no other iPad will because--
1:20:47- Yeah, 'cause there's just not enough room
1:20:48on the smaller one.
1:20:49- Yeah, I think it's not like they've promised it,
1:20:51but in fact, I guess they still sell the,
1:20:54I think the original mini, which they're selling for 249
1:20:57is only 512 megs of RAM.
1:21:01And you guys talked about ATP,
1:21:03but the frustration with the growing range
1:21:07from bottom high end to low end
1:21:09is that developers don't have the ability to say,
1:21:12this app only runs on the iPad Air 2
1:21:15because it's so graphically intense.
1:21:16You can't do that.
1:21:17Your iPad app has to run on at least launch on all iPads.
1:21:22- Yeah, but that's something Apple has the flexibility
1:21:24to change at any time though.
1:21:25It's just an app store rule.
1:21:26They can change the rule at any time.
1:21:28They can give you a little API and a point update
1:21:30to definitively say, you know,
1:21:31because they keep bragging about, as Marco pointed out,
1:21:34that big chart that shows the GPU speed
1:21:38that goes up like a big hockey stick.
1:21:39Look how far we've come.
1:21:40the eight X's its GPU is so incredibly powerful. And yet
1:21:44they're still shipping the second dot on the graph, the
1:21:46second lowest one, right? And it's like, well, it doesn't help
1:21:48me because if I got to make a game that runs in that second
1:21:50dot, I don't it's actually frustrating to me. The eight X
1:21:54is out there because now I got to make a game that like scales
1:21:57from all the way out at the I can't believe we used to live
1:22:00like animals like that end of the hockey stick curve. Like
1:22:03what? What does remove texture mapping in that version? It'll
1:22:05just be flat shading.
1:22:06But I do think that there's a general you know, the gist of it
1:22:10is if you're an iPad app or a modern iPhone app,
1:22:13you can more or less assume that you have access
1:22:16to about a gig of memory if you need it.
1:22:18So I feel like this, I feel like the iPad Air 2 getting two
1:22:22is a sign that if there's split screen,
1:22:26that it'll get it and I don't think the other ones will.
1:22:29- Yeah, and it's just time for two gigs.
1:22:32Like it's kind of sad that the iPhone doesn't have it,
1:22:34but at the very least, you can make some kind
1:22:35of battery life excuse for the phone, right?
1:22:38- Yeah, definitely.
1:22:39I mean maybe like it's like it's borderline they made it a half a millimeter thicker and they gave it two gigs of RAM
1:22:46It would be a different device, but you'd have more. Yeah, and there's a there's a Quora post
1:22:51I haven't linked to it from daring fireball because I feel like it's a little I
1:22:54Don't I can't verify it myself and it seems a little bit too rah rah Apple even when they
1:23:01Even when they don't even when they don't put enough RAM in the phone
1:23:05It's it's all good, but the expert if somebody asked on Quora
1:23:08Why why did the new iPhone 6 only still only have one gigabyte of RAM?
1:23:12when a lot of the top top shelf competitors on Android have to
1:23:16and like the top-ranked answer was somebody saying that it's
1:23:20there's probably a whole bunch of other reasons too, but a big one is that a garbage collected system like
1:23:28Java needs double the RAM of a non garbage collected system like iOS and that they've linked to like an academic
1:23:35paper that showed how
1:23:37You know if you can give a garbage collected system enough RAM
1:23:42it all just works out but when a garbage collected system gets RAM constrained it goes to hell and
1:23:48Everything gets gummed up waiting for memory
1:23:54And I think there's something to that. I do think that you know that iOS because it's not garbage collected can get by on one gig
1:24:01longer than it will then like Android could have but I
1:24:04Still yeah, it's it's still irritating every time I go back to Safari and my tabs have all been flushed
1:24:10Yeah, and that's that kind of that's the real luxury of buying the top-end iPad air - is gonna get you it's like oh
1:24:18Thank God and go back to Safari a Safari is still running itself and be the tabs that are in Safari
1:24:23I I just had I noticed with my review unit my first right before about an hour before the show. I was flipping through your your
1:24:30Yosemite review and
1:24:33It had finally gotten flushed from memory, but I hadn't been in Safari for a while
1:24:37I had been doing a lot of other stuff
1:24:39But yeah those big giant reading images that are in that review can yeah can do that to you
1:24:44Yeah, that that was the first one that had gotten flushed and it was definitely noticeable
1:24:48I think it's super interesting too that they've gone
1:24:51They've so out now
1:24:53I don't wanna say outclass
1:24:55But it's it's so noticeably faster than the iPhone 6 in any kind of benchmark because it has you know
1:25:00It's it's a faster faster at single core and it has a third core
1:25:04Yep, and the GPU is more powerful because it has to push more pixels and I think it may I haven't looked at the specs
1:25:10Closely enough, but I think they may be like it
1:25:13PowerPoint where it's not just like the same speed is the iPhone 6's GPU, but it just has to push more pixels
1:25:19It's like it can push the more pixels and then some yeah
1:25:22And I got to talk to I just happened to be my seat in the event last week was right behind
1:25:29The was like front towards the front like fifth row on the left and the demo guys were all in front of me like right
1:25:35in front of me where the the replay guys and
1:25:37Two rows in front of me where the pixel mater guys
1:25:41And I know the pixel made up guys because they've sponsored I think they've sponsored the show
1:25:44But I know they sponsored during fireball many times and I've emailed them, you know ever since the 1.0 came out
1:25:50It was like wow somebody actually used you know
1:25:52Core image and all these other cool Apple technologies to do the thing
1:25:56We've been talking about for 15 years and have an indie rival to Photoshop
1:26:00So I've known him by email, you know since forever first time we ever met in person
1:26:04I've was awesome to be able to congratulate them in person because what do you know what a moment?
1:26:09You know you get to be on stage at an Apple event and demo your app
1:26:13And it ends up I know the replay guys a little bit, too
1:26:17I didn't recognize their names when they first got called up, but they've sent me
1:26:20You know just eat. You know as the guy writes during fireball. They've sent me emails on various things over the years
1:26:25And you know we were right there in town hall
1:26:28We had a couple minutes before they were gonna kick us out, and then you know they're not gonna
1:26:31Give me any kind of state secrets about what what life was like the last couple of weeks while they were working on this
1:26:37But they you know they could speak a little bit and both of them like the replay guy said that he thinks if anything
1:26:43Apple has completely under sold the graphics performance of the a8x that that when they you know from what they were doing
1:26:52The last couple weeks getting the demo together for replay that it was way faster than what Apple is saying
1:26:57compared to like the iPhone 6
1:27:00That's the thing about the power in these like they're putting so much power into his iPad and building up to the next
1:27:06Sort of the next sort of big leap like that we're gonna have to we're gonna be able to get a different class of applications
1:27:12but especially for graphics performance the the different class of application that you can get is a
1:27:18Extremely graphically sophisticated game and you're never gonna really have one of those on the iPad air, too
1:27:26Because it's the same reason like when you know when like watchdogs or you know
1:27:32What like you know shadow of Mordor I guess is bad example because cross-platform
1:27:36But any like modern console game that's on the current generation consoles
1:27:40There's no Wii port of those because the Wii is standard definition and incredibly weak and there is no way to scale a modern
1:27:47PlayStation 4 game that all the way down to
1:27:50Something that's that darn old like there's not you can't well
1:27:53We'll just use fewer vertexes and lower resolution textures in the game will run fine. It's just not possible, right?
1:27:58You cannot take a game and scale that so any game that takes full advantage of the 8x
1:28:03I don't know if you can make a version of that game that also runs on the two hundred and forty nine dollar iPad mini with
1:28:09an a5 and five I'd like there's nothing you can do to the game to make it run on that and so
1:28:13Like you're kind of stuck you can never make you can never make an app
1:28:17They can really take advantage of that GPU because really have to think either games or like
1:28:21Scientific imaging are the only two things that you could do really use the GPU like that
1:28:26So it's kind of it's kind of a shame that that you know
1:28:28I mean
1:28:28I guess you can do core image effects really really fast and the you know
1:28:33The a5 can do core image effects the same ones just much slower
1:28:36And that's how you can get away with doing something like pixelmator on both platforms, but games
1:28:40I feel like people are stuck there that that and also if you those type of games that
1:28:45Graphical sophistication cost so much money to make you have to sell a lot of them and I'm not sure
1:28:50that the touch interface is
1:28:52Sufficient to you know be it, you know to sell a game like a 500 million dollar game like destiny for the iPad
1:28:59I I don't know if you could you could sell that with if people are gonna be swiping on this
1:29:02This is great because now that I have a 10 year old son
1:29:05I actually am familiar with just about every title that you've mentioned including destiny. Do you have did you end up getting a ps4?
1:29:12No, you know we have you got the free Xbox Xbox
1:29:16And it's I don't know what to do about it because I kind of feel like the PlayStation 4 looks like the better
1:29:20The more time goes on looks like it's the better platform. Well, so do you have destiny? Yeah, we have it on the Xbox
1:29:27Yeah, so there you go. Yeah, pretty good game. Have you played it? Uh, just just a toy around a little bit
1:29:34I it's you know, I'm total like the old man learning to play games
1:29:38But it's you know, it's really really graphically. You should you can Xbox you should check Xbox Live arcade
1:29:44I think there was a version of crystal quest
1:29:46Tell you kid about son. Let me tell you I was a kid
1:29:51This is what we played. Although you can't play crystal quest at the friggin thumbstick. It doesn't know but anyway, you need a mouse
1:29:55Do they really have it and yeah, I believe maybe not on the Xbox one
1:30:02But way back when I'm either on the original Xbox or the 360
1:30:05Cassidy and green I think it was the actual real company made part of crystal quest for Xbox
1:30:10I do think I do think though that this is it games in particular. I do think that they're really pushing
1:30:17Apple to open up the App Store to to hardware limit that the app somehow, you know if they already let you
1:30:25limit it by OS I just can't see why it's getting to be untenable as they extend
1:30:33the life of these you know these devices and that's the thing that the as Alan
1:30:39Pike called it the zombie iMac that $249 retina not retina iPad mini the original
1:30:48iPad mini which is from two years ago is really from four years ago because the
1:30:55a5 system on a chip and the 512 megabytes of RAM and everything is
1:31:00really it's the iPad to shrunken down like the I'll say it the iPhone 4s right
1:31:05wasn't the same generation is that yeah it must have been around the forest a5
1:31:08yeah no I know my iPod touch is the same thing 512 mics of RAM a5 processor so
1:31:13So they've actually, it's just in a weird way, like they've actually, the lineup I think
1:31:19only has a, it goes A5 at 249, but then there is no A6 iPad left.
1:31:28They're already gone.
1:31:30So it's like a year behind, an extra year behind the next step up.
1:31:37It's a really old piece of technology.
1:31:39Yeah, I don't know, like, and again, we keep saying this every time, you know, when Metal
1:31:46came out and now the 8x, or it's like, and the Apple TV, playing video games on your
1:31:52television through an Apple device is like just sitting there in front of Apple for years.
1:31:56Like they've got every single freaking piece of the puzzle, they just don't have the desire
1:32:00to do it, which is fine, like you can't be in every business, maybe they don't feel like
1:32:03they want to enter that fray, but as they accumulate the pieces, especially with Metal,
1:32:08the Apple TV and like building their own ARM chips with these crazy GPUs in them.
1:32:12Like I don't necessarily recommend that they go for it because I don't think
1:32:16they're really equipped to compete in that space but it's just so weird to see
1:32:18them. It's kind of like when it was back at the e-book, the dawning of the e-book
1:32:23era around 2001-2002 and I was like Apple's got these iPods and they've got
1:32:27a way to sell things digitally online with the iTunes store and like they have
1:32:32all the pieces to dominate the e-book space like they basically you know this
1:32:35I think this maybe even before the Kindle came out it's like or maybe
1:32:37around the same time, but the Kindle was e-ink, it wasn't quite the same thing. It's like,
1:32:40why is Apple not, you know, the e-book market is there for the taking for Apple. They have
1:32:44all the pieces, they have the momentum, they could do it, they're just not interested.
1:32:49And eventually they're kind of like, yeah, I guess we'll do e-books too. By then it was
1:32:51too late, Amazon was the dominant player and iBooks also ran. And the gaming space obviously
1:32:56has been heavily populated for years and years, but here's Apple just dutifully working to
1:33:00essentially build the ingredients of a world-class gaming console platform and then just not
1:33:06doing that. Yeah, it's it like you said it's laying right in front of them
1:33:09because the A8X I think the A8 is probably pretty good and you could make
1:33:14it reasonable gaming console out of it especially with metal which you know
1:33:23again talking to you know developers you know it did Apple calling it ten times
1:33:27faster than OpenGL seems fair it seems like in you know real world. That's a BS
1:33:33- Well. - Because it's 10X
1:33:35and like, you know, if you do something stupid
1:33:37and you were just measuring draw calls,
1:33:38it's a micro benchmark.
1:33:40But like, but the thing is that type of low level API,
1:33:43every game console has something like that on it.
1:33:44Like Apple has its own something like that.
1:33:46- But that's the advantage Apple, modern Apple today has
1:33:51is that they have enough developer support
1:33:53and so many customers that they can get developers
1:33:55to use their thing.
1:33:58- To port, like to port all their game engines,
1:33:59you know, the Unity and Unreal 4 engine and everything like,
1:34:02will make a port solely for, you know, so they can sell iOS games, right?
1:34:05Because that's a big market, they make a lot of money off that.
1:34:07So all those engines are saying, "Yeah, hell yeah, we'll make a port of our engine to Metal,
1:34:11and then everybody who builds games on our engine will be able to take advantage of it."
1:34:14And like, to build a full-fledged console,
1:34:17you'd have to do something like wimpy like the, not wimpy, but like lower-powered like the PlayStation TV or something,
1:34:22because the A8X is not going to compete in power with the PlayStation 4.
1:34:26But there's no reason that Apple couldn't build a device that competes with the PlayStation 4.
1:34:31It would not be just an A8X in a box, but like, by making the A8X and Metal and having a store
1:34:37and talking to game developers and getting the engines ported to their technology shows that if they wanted to,
1:34:43they could make a product like this that is of similar power to the PlayStation 4,
1:34:46or whatever the next generation is, and decide to compete in that space.
1:34:49I don't—they just don't want to, which is fine.
1:34:51Like, it's all about what do you say yes to, what do you say no to.
1:34:53like that recent Tim Cook interview where he keeps saying like, "There's plenty of things
1:34:57we could do. We have plenty of great ideas, and we don't not do them because we're not
1:35:01capable of them. They just choose what they want to do, and thus far they have not made
1:35:05this choice." Just like for all those years they chose not to enter the e-book market.
1:35:08So...
1:35:09Well, or even honestly, even chose not to enter the phone market. I mean, people were
1:35:13clamoring for an Apple phone ever since cell phones became consumer-priced items.
1:35:19items.
1:35:20Yeah, well that's because they hadn't figured out what they wanted to do for a phone yet.
1:35:24They had all those different competing internal projects and everything.
1:35:26Whereas the game console, the reason you don't do it is like, "Well, we're just going to
1:35:29make another game console like everybody else."
1:35:31Like they don't want to enter the space until they feel like they have something significant
1:35:34to add.
1:35:35And with the iPhone, they didn't enter the phone space.
1:35:36Like they did the Motorola Rocker and all that silliness, but they didn't field their
1:35:39own phone that was just like a candy bar phone.
1:35:41They didn't enter the space until they had something.
1:35:44Even though their candy bar phone would have been the best candy bar phone, they just didn't
1:35:47do it.
1:35:48Right.
1:35:49them because that would have made introducing the iPhone harder because then you got to
1:35:52transition people. What about my old Apple phone I liked it? What is this new thing,
1:35:56blah, blah, blah, whereas if the iPhone is your first phone, no problem.
1:35:59And lastly, the performance thing. And again, I don't often go to benchmarks when I write
1:36:05reviews but I really just think it's so fascinating how quickly the high-end iPad is gaining on
1:36:12the low-end MacBook Airs. And again, it's not apples to apples because OS X and iOS
1:36:19so many different interface things and just rules about multitasking and how much stuff
1:36:23can be going on in the background.
1:36:25And how much RAM you can get like a MacBook Air with like 16.
1:36:28Exactly, which can have an enormous performance, especially not even benchmark, but just real
1:36:35world advantages because when you're switching between these things, they're all still in
1:36:41memory.
1:36:42And I would have to think the SSD storage in the Air is also fast.
1:36:45I think this is the first generation of iOS products to use PCI Express for the the SSD connections
1:36:50I had heard that as a vague thing. I haven't seen like an iFixit teardown
1:36:53So that's the case but like but they've been doing that on MacBook Airs for a while
1:36:56But but yeah, like I heard that I saw a thing on Twitter last night again not verified
1:37:00It's I didn't it's not like somebody showed pictures of it. But yeah, somebody seemingly reliable said it's PCI Express
1:37:06Which is you know, it's desktop, you know, and they say desktop class performance
1:37:12They're they're actually they're not hyping it
1:37:14They're they're being serious
1:37:16And that's what it like that the gates that type of stuff the more boring stuff if you're not playing a game the thing that gates
1:37:21Your performance on just using your iOS device is a matter of memory you have and how fast the storages because what do you think?
1:37:28It's done when you're launching an app and quitting an app and launching this app, but like
1:37:31It's not the CPU is mostly spending its time waiting for I/O during during those times when you're waiting well
1:37:36yeah, which is exactly why I splurged and got the
1:37:41SSD storage for the iMac I feel like my last spinning hard risk that I've ever bought, you know is in the past. I
1:37:48Would like mine to be in the past, but they're not getting well
1:37:52Other than external drives that I would use for like backup or something like that where I'm not going to be waiting on it as a
1:37:58user
1:37:59Even then like at work
1:38:01My machine has SSDs for all the stuff that I use but my super duper clone is spinning and it's just so painful
1:38:06like how long a super duper clone takes just
1:38:10You know, it's just like read from the SSD and then just like go get a coffee. Oh you thought the spinning hard disk wrote?
1:38:16Okay, I'll read one more thing from the SSD like you just see super do it. So it's so asymmetrical
1:38:19So I would love to be all SSD, but unfortunately
1:38:23I keep accumulating stuff and SSDs set up for the read hit the reset button
1:38:27Unlike storage used to be scaling with my with my digital hoarding and then SSDs were like up
1:38:33No, actually set you back shrunk everything way back. That's just now barely catching up again with one terabyte SSD, right?
1:38:38All right, let me take a third break here and thank our last sponsor, another longtime
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1:41:52So let's talk Yosemite for the rest of the show.
1:41:55Sure, 140 in, let's start.
1:41:59My son calls it "Yozomite."
1:42:01Yep.
1:42:02A lot of nicknames.
1:42:04"Yozomite," I think he says.
1:42:07This is exactly as funny.
1:42:08I didn't think about kids, but that was exactly like what people said coming out of WWDC's
1:42:12keynote is, "People don't know how to spell Yosemite.
1:42:15People don't know what Yosemite is."
1:42:16And then when my son started talking about "Yozomite," I was like, "Huh.
1:42:21Well, it doesn't really matter."
1:42:25free. It's not like they need to sell it to people.
1:42:27I think the visual thing, if it is anything that maybe I thought you underplayed was talking
1:42:33about the visual redesign. Because I know you care, but it's also a hard thing to talk
1:42:40about.
1:42:41You think I underplayed it? I spent a lot of words on that. That's like the longest
1:42:45section in the review.
1:42:46It could have been longer, in my opinion. Because you know what? I guess the other thing
1:42:53to is that you know that they're not, we're going to have something, they're going to
1:42:59improve it and next year's will look a little better and it'll look a little better. But
1:43:02I think this is basically what we're looking at for the next, at least probably a decade
1:43:09on the Mac.
1:43:11Yeah, probably. I forget what I put in my review and what I cut, but one of the things
1:43:17I mentioned in the most recent ATP is like, there's this thing that Apple does when they
1:43:22they have a new fancy design that they like.
1:43:26They did it with iOS 7, they did it with the original Aqua
1:43:29and 10, they did it with the various looks in between
1:43:32like brush metal.
1:43:33They tend to err on the side of going too far with a look.
1:43:38And then they back it off later in response to complaints.
1:43:41And so like iOS 7 was the most recent memory
1:43:43where they have a super thin fonts, right?
1:43:46And everything was just maybe a little bit too precious
1:43:49the parallax effect and the zoom in and everything and so you add the thing to reduce motion you thicken up the font a little
1:43:55Bit and you make adjustments and that was mostly done before release with with aqua
1:43:59original version of 10 10 was just crazy pinstripes everywhere super glossy and lickable all
1:44:05Faded and soft lighting like everything was shot with Vaseline on the lens and they backed that off over years hardening up the edges
1:44:12Towing down the pinstripes and then brushed metal came in and everything was freaking metal and the version of toning that down was getting rid
1:44:18of it, but like going too far and then backing off is preferable to them it seems than not
1:44:23going far enough, like being timid. So Yosemite is, and I kind of bemoan that in the review
1:44:29or the part that I cut from the review that, I don't remember what's in there anymore,
1:44:33is saying like, wouldn't it be nice if we could skip that part where they go too far
1:44:38and just go right to the part where they tone it down a little bit and maybe they feel like
1:44:41they don't know where they need to tone it down. Like remember the checkbox to make the
1:44:44menu bar not translucent because the translucent menu bar, the original one in Leopard which
1:44:48just crazy translucent and made everything unreadable.
1:44:50- Yeah, totally unreadable.
1:44:51- And now they feel like they have the confidence
1:44:53that like, well, this menu bar won't be unreadable
1:44:55'cause we have this crazy algorithm
1:44:56that will like blur everything together
1:44:58and is aware of contrast and it will just look muddy
1:45:00and indistinct, but it won't be unreadable.
1:45:01So no more checkbox to disable that.
1:45:03And it's like, you know,
1:45:05there are places where they went too far in this
1:45:09and there are a bunch of adjustments that are already there,
1:45:11but none of them sort of,
1:45:13none of them tune it to be the way we hope it's gonna be
1:45:16in the next two revisions.
1:45:17Yeah, that's it. I a few hours before the show started. I linked to koi VIN's
1:45:21Review of Yosemite, you know most focusing solely on the appearance. I know you hurt my feelings said it was your favorite
1:45:28Well, I thought that yours doesn't even count. I mean yours is
1:45:32Anyway, yeah. No, I read this thing when he originally posted but yeah, but I mean it's a similar sentiment
1:45:38Yeah, it always 10 Balboa and OS 10 palisades are gonna look great. And I think that is totally true. I'm I'm
1:45:45basically on board completely with the basic style,
1:45:50but there's definitely some toning back
1:45:51that I think needs to be done.
1:45:53- Also my big complaint that I just complained about ATP
1:45:56is like the transparency effect.
1:45:58Like I spent a lot of time explaining
1:46:01what the different kinds of transparency are,
1:46:02how they work, and then here's how they're deployed
1:46:05in the OS, right?
1:46:06And all the stuff about the rearrangements
1:46:08of the UI and stuff like that.
1:46:08And then I had this whole section called philosophy,
1:46:10which is I kind of tried to isolate the part
1:46:12where I'm gonna like try to unpack this.
1:46:14Like, here's what it is, here's what it's looked like,
1:46:16here's where they use it, and then it's like, why?
1:46:18Why is this there at all?
1:46:20What is it about what's behind my menu bar
1:46:22that adds to my life, right?
1:46:24And you know, why do I need to see that?
1:46:26Why do I need to see any of that, right?
1:46:29What is, you know, like,
1:46:30because there's always some kind of philosophy behind it.
1:46:32Like the original Aqua, it was like,
1:46:35transient elements were translucent.
1:46:37So sheets just appear briefly and go away.
1:46:40Dropdown menus appear briefly and go away.
1:46:42Those are translucent, it's a temporary.
1:46:45- And yeah, there's a logic to it.
1:46:48- Right, but then on the other hand,
1:46:49the dock which was always there was also translucent.
1:46:51So it's just like, well, F-you,
1:46:52translucency is cool, right?
1:46:54And here, several times I've asked Apple about the effects
1:46:58and during the different keynotes,
1:47:00they've said, here's why we do it.
1:47:01And they have reasons behind them.
1:47:02And I have to look at those reasons and say,
1:47:05is this a reason for you to pollute all of my sidebars
1:47:08with the color of the desktop background?
1:47:12Sometimes the justification can work out,
1:47:14but other times I don't buy it.
1:47:15Like the whole thing of making the temperature
1:47:19and mood of your desktop background
1:47:20influence the look of your OS.
1:47:22Sounds like, I mean, it's a thing that happens.
1:47:24It works.
1:47:25Like if you have a super orange desktop background,
1:47:28all of your behind the window blending translucent regions
1:47:32are gonna have a tinge of orange in them.
1:47:34Your menu bar is gonna be tinged orange.
1:47:35All the menus you pulled down
1:47:37are gonna be tinged orange, right?
1:47:39But like, I don't, you know, that aspect of personalization,
1:47:44like it maybe just flies in the face of tradition
1:47:48or whatever, like if I have a desktop picture that I want,
1:47:50I want my gleaming beautiful interface to be on top of it.
1:47:52I don't want the desktop picture.
1:47:54Like I may like it because it's a nice picture, I like it.
1:47:56But what I don't like is its contribution
1:47:59to the sidebar of my email client
1:48:01that now looks like a muddy, rusty, tinged orange thing.
1:48:04Whereas before it was crisp text on top of
1:48:07a background color that the app designer had shown.
1:48:08Yeah, it changes what it means to pick a desktop picture because before it was, "Okay, what
1:48:13do I want to see when I've got nothing open? Like, I'm done." Like, let's say, like, as
1:48:16you complete what you have to do today, you keep closing windows and you're closing tabs
1:48:21and you can quit your email because I'm not going to check it again. And now I've got
1:48:25nothing and I'm looking at my desktop and this is a picture that makes me happy. That's
1:48:30all you had to do when you chose your desktop.
1:48:34Now you've got to pick something that's going to make, like you said, like make the sidebar
1:48:37and your email client look good when you don't even see the desktop and then this
1:48:41is a point I have to have to put it in ATP terms I have to do some follow-up
1:48:45because when guy was on last week I English and we talked about this we
1:48:48clearly confused the hell out of a lot of people in because we were talking
1:48:53about the way that if you have like a stack of white windows just like text
1:48:58edit documents and then you have like mail in front of them and the sidebar of
1:49:03of mail behind it is just a white window. It still takes a tint from the desktop. That's
1:49:09what Guy and I were talking about. And that does in terms of not merely making any kind
1:49:13of logical sense in the world of physics. We weren't, what everybody seemed to think
1:49:18we said was that it doesn't take any cues from what's right behind it. So if you...
1:49:22It's mostly what's behind it with a touch of the desktop.
1:49:26It's mostly what's behind it, directly in the window behind it. So if you have like
1:49:29a real vibrant purple image, you know, grimace from McDonald's is in the window behind you,
1:49:38and your mail is in front of it, you're going to have a purple sidebar.
1:49:41But I end up a lot of times with a lot of white windows, you know, I have editing documents and
1:49:47stuff like that, or a mail client or eye chatters.
1:49:50Yeah, but God forbid you have like a safari window with like a dark black blob and then
1:49:55some white stuff, then the black blob starts showing.
1:49:58- Right, and if it's not like an entirely black window
1:50:01where it just makes the whole thing look gray,
1:50:02if it's just right in the middle,
1:50:04looks like there's a smudge.
1:50:06I see it in the messages app every day
1:50:08when I have transparency on,
1:50:10because there's, my blue messages are always on the side,
1:50:15and so up at the top right, there's this blue blur
1:50:18about it ranging from like an inch or two
1:50:21that doesn't extend across the whole bar,
1:50:22and it bothers the hell out of me.
1:50:25Yeah, here's the analogy I used on ATP last night,
1:50:28which I probably should have also put in the review,
1:50:30but didn't.
1:50:32So there's this whole section on extensions.
1:50:34And I go through a little bit about the old days
1:50:37of extensions where they would just invade the memory space
1:50:40of either the OS or other applications.
1:50:42And even into the OS 10 days of just like,
1:50:43every app that launches loads a scripting edition,
1:50:46which just like runs wild in its memory space
1:50:48and does some crazy hack to enable window shade
1:50:50or whatever it's gonna do, right?
1:50:52And the idea that you would write a program as an application developer,
1:50:57and then you would test it and debug it and make sure it works correctly,
1:51:01and then hand it to somebody, and then someone else who you never met
1:51:04would write a program that invades your program
1:51:06and changes the way it works and causes a bug in your program,
1:51:08and then you get a support ticket, or you're like,
1:51:10"Hey, your text editor has a bug."
1:51:12And it's like, "Well, no, I totally test that. It doesn't."
1:51:14It's like, "Oh, well, I'm running this extension,
1:51:16and this thing written by someone you never met invades your application
1:51:19and changes the way it behaves, and now it's buggy.
1:51:21You got to fix it. It's an untenable way to develop software because how can you it's like the halting problem
1:51:27How can I know what's gonna happen when some program I've never seen before invades my program and changes the way it's behaved
1:51:32It's impossible for me to write a quote-unquote correct bug-free program in this environment
1:51:36The develop the designer equivalent of that is I'm gonna make an application
1:51:41I'll make it look as good as I want
1:51:42But I have no control over what windows are behind it or what color the person desktop background is
1:51:46I just got a trust Apple to try to make this into something readable and then I get back to the you know
1:51:50Why why is it? What is it about the sidebar like I could I can I can buy pull down menus
1:51:55I can buy sheets I can buy
1:51:57You know transient things that are floating in but the sidebar seems so a part of the content of the application
1:52:02Like maybe if it was a slide-out drawer like the old style ones that I could say it was transient
1:52:07And maybe it should be translucent, but there is nothing about sidebars that says to me
1:52:10Please show me what's behind you right like they're filled with text like their source lists their text that has to be readable
1:52:17I do not want to be distracted by the other stuff there and so I
1:52:20I mean, I don't know, there's no option to turn that off except to turn it off everywhere.
1:52:24And I pretty much at this point, I feel like I'm on board with the way they use translucency,
1:52:29even with the stupid tinging and all the drop them, I use everywhere except for sidebars,
1:52:33because it just seems like a bridge too far.
1:52:35The other thing that I don't get, I don't get the other use of it. I don't get the in-window
1:52:38transparency, you know, like in Safari, where all the Chrome at the top of the Safari window
1:52:42picks up.
1:52:43Yeah, there's a little bit more justification that of their own doing. As I said, I'm pretty
1:52:47I'm pretty sure I said this in the review. Once they made scrollbars invisible, the only way you have any indication that there's stuff above or below is if you see something truncated or if you kind of see this dim, you know, wavy image of things that are above or below.
1:52:59And that bothers me less because toolbars tend to have stronger boundaries, like the toolbar buttons themselves don't let stuff show through on them, so they're gonna be, you know, light, dark markings on light backgrounds, well-defined.
1:53:11Well-defined there's nothing in the toolbar itself that I need to read that's going to become illegible and uh
1:53:17Like just scrolling through the review
1:53:20Like you can kind of see the reason they did this and it's one of the one of the justifications
1:53:23The philosophy section is that this looks nice like that
1:53:26It's fashion that it's aesthetics and if you scroll through my yosemite review and when I look at some of these screenshots
1:53:32I think some of them are really pretty like
1:53:34The the multiple docs with the different backgrounds or even when i'm trying to show
1:53:39something that I think is a negative like the same Safari window where they just change tabs and it radically changes what the entire interface
1:53:44Looks like because the pages are half scrolled up behind the scroll bar. That is a little bit crazy, but the image is beautiful
1:53:50I think like this has the most interesting screenshots because of the all you know
1:53:54I I purposely tried to show things in both the best and the worst light like get it to be most
1:53:59Aesthetically pleasing but show what the extremes are. I
1:54:02Think it is a really interesting thing to do and but I can only excuse it as
1:54:07Long as it doesn't start impinging on usability when it doesn't pinch on usability
1:54:11You better have a good reason other than in some scenarios looks really good. I know in your scenario
1:54:16It's ugly and you can't turn it off, but in some scenarios. It looks good right and that that
1:54:20Yeah, well and I just I guess I like the in window transparency a little bit more than the behind window transparency
1:54:29Because there's a little bit more like you said with the scrolling and a sense of hey there's stuff up there
1:54:34There's some kind of logic to it. Whereas the sidebar transparency. It just just seems mindless to me. So I think and I've been
1:54:41as I've gone full-time Yosemite, I think I'm probably going to run with the
1:54:47the reduced transparency option
1:54:51And yeah, and that bothers me because that I think I mean it does as I pointed out in the review
1:54:56It it does look okay like that like it still looks handsome
1:54:59It shows that this is a sturdy design that does not rely on
1:55:02Transparency parlor tricks to look nice because it looks it looks perfectly nice and it's solid especially on retina screens with sort of fine
1:55:08Hair lines about things that contrast is still a little bit low
1:55:10But otherwise it shows that there's there are you know, there are sturdy bones underneath this design
1:55:15But it's a shame to give up all the transparency
1:55:17Effects that I like just to save that one that I don't like and the other thing that bothers me about reduced transparency is those
1:55:23Are in the accessibility preference paint, right?
1:55:24And those things are there to help make the interface more usable for people who need that
1:55:30But I feel like designers are not sweating as much over what things look like with that turned on both third-party and Apple designers
1:55:37Like that it that it looks clunkier that it looks more like like and that's the way that Windows is like
1:55:41Well, we'll just do this and I'm sure to look fine and you look at it and there's like details
1:55:45All right, they're sweating over what it looks like in the default mode
1:55:47I don't think people are sweating over how any application looks with reduced transparency on like right down to like the overlays for volume changing
1:55:53With it where the little corners don't have transparency in some situations. Have you seen that? I don't think so
1:55:58Let me see.
1:56:00- I should have told you about that because--
1:56:01- Yep.
1:56:02- So now can you leave that option on?
1:56:04Like it's totally counter to the super Apple nerd aesthetic.
1:56:07Everything has to be beautiful and elegant.
1:56:08Like stuff like that is around
1:56:10if you know where to look for it.
1:56:11- That's horrible.
1:56:12- Because accessibility is not meant to be like,
1:56:15it's first and foremost is supposed to make it more usable
1:56:17at the expense of, you know, perfect aesthetic beauty.
1:56:21So there is one of your expenses.
1:56:22Maybe you'll think more about that option.
1:56:23- Yeah, so when you change the volume and you get that,
1:56:26what is that like a HUD?
1:56:27What would you call it?
1:56:28the temporary overlay, the rounded corners
1:56:31are just filled in with black.
1:56:32- 'Cause it's the transparent part of whatever that thing.
1:56:36- I gotta call that, I bet that's a bug that they'll fix,
1:56:39but it's a definite sign.
1:56:41- But that type of thing,
1:56:42like if you were to file that as a bug,
1:56:43hey, when I enable this accessibility option,
1:56:45this thing doesn't look as nice.
1:56:47They're gonna be like, yeah, but it's, you know,
1:56:49it's more, it's easier to see, right?
1:56:52Stuff doesn't show through, right?
1:56:53That's the point of the accessibility feature.
1:56:55Feel free to file that bug,
1:56:56see if they close it as behaves correctly.
1:56:58- I will, I will.
1:56:59I thought, and like you said,
1:57:01I would love to be able to pick and choose
1:57:03and just turn it off on the sidebars,
1:57:04'cause I like the transparency on the menus.
1:57:06I think it makes, it looks good,
1:57:09and it makes sense to me that it's temper, you know,
1:57:11it's just a little thing that,
1:57:14while I choose this menu command,
1:57:15it's floating over my thing,
1:57:17and now that they're solid,
1:57:18I just checked it right here in front of me.
1:57:20It doesn't look as nice.
1:57:22- The text rendering changes, especially on non-retina,
1:57:24the text rendering changes when you go solid on the menus as well.
1:57:28And the thing that bothers me about the menu is the tinge of the desktop.
1:57:32I like the overlays, like the volume changer when transparency is on, the sort of iOS 7
1:57:36overlay when you pull up control center from the bottom.
1:57:39It doesn't pull any colors from your desktop background, it's just simply, I am white,
1:57:43slightly translucent with that cool blur effect.
1:57:45I wish the menus were like that, because all of my desktop pictures are making my pull
1:57:50down menus uglier.
1:57:51Like I'm gonna have to change them even though I love the pictures that are there
1:57:54Just to pick one that has a different dominant color so that dominant color I can you know
1:57:59Stomach the side of in all of my pull down menus. Did you turn on?
1:58:02increase contrast
1:58:05To play I haven't used it like that. I have to obviously I turned it on for screen. I feel like that one
1:58:09I know what you're saying that it looks like system six
1:58:12But it looks like system six made by someone with not a lot of attention to detail as things collide with each other and there's
1:58:17No spaces between things, because they just sort of draw with a magic marker over the edges and don't read they don't change the metrics
1:58:23So it's like crowded. There's a whole bunch of things that I think look better
1:58:26And a whole bunch of things that clearly look worse just in terms of whether it's pleasing to me
1:58:32And I realize like you said this is it is
1:58:34Under accessibility for a reason I can actually see clearly how it is an accessibility feature for some people
1:58:40But I actually like some of the the details of it, but there's others that you know
1:58:45I can't I don't know why I could rock it full time
1:58:47It's and and the low contrast that like it's basically the default where everything is super low contrast doesn't it remind you speaking of ie5
1:58:54Like the days when we were all using bitmap fonts and everything was like well
1:58:57You're still doing it like a light gray text on a dark gray background
1:59:00And you know in in ten point for Dana pixel fonts and every like everything was super low
1:59:06And you could just make it so precious and beautiful
1:59:08But then when you when you move back from the screen it just faded into a uniform gray haze
1:59:12And you don't notice it so much in Yosemite until you turn on
1:59:15Increase contrast you're like whoa those hairlines now jump out at me
1:59:19And now there's clear delineations and like the toolbar buttons don't fade into the toolbar as much as they used to like
1:59:23It goes too far on the other direction, but you only notice the low contrast of Yosemite
1:59:28When you turn on the high current and then turn it back off you're like whoa
1:59:32No
1:59:32I feel like I just my night vision went out and now everything's fading into one big blur again
1:59:36One of the things that most surprised me about Yosemite when they unveiled it at WWDC was that
1:59:42the general control I call it a control panel system press panel where you
1:59:47control the basic appearance stuff you know graphite and blue highlight color
1:59:51and stuff like that I I had my gut feeling was that they were gonna get rid
1:59:56of all that just as you know go more like iOS like you don't get to pick a
2:00:00highlight color in iOS you're gonna get blue and you're gonna like it or the app
2:00:04is going to override it you don't get to pick whether you get blue or gray as a
2:00:08is a highlight color.
2:00:10You don't get to pick the color that get--
2:00:12when you select text, what color is the highlight of the text?
2:00:15That's the other thing about increased contrast.
2:00:16It changes your highlight color too.
2:00:18Yeah.
2:00:19It's something that I seemingly can't quite figure out
2:00:22what the rules are for.
2:00:24I thought they were going to get rid of all that, because I
2:00:27thought that was sort of-- that's
2:00:28such an old school consumer feature.
2:00:33You know, that you get,
2:00:40like the way Windows used to let you pick everything.
2:00:42You know, you could totally design,
2:00:44you know, blue with white trim,
2:00:46or you could make Windows look just truly god awful,
2:00:49but they'd let you do it.
2:00:51- But the thing they have in there,
2:00:52the things they have in there are there
2:00:54for reasons that haven't changed.
2:00:56Like the whole reason Graphite is there
2:00:58Because like they're essentially bowing to pressure from graphic designers who felt like the candy colors were throwing off their color sense and they
2:01:05You know as I think I pointed out the review
2:01:07Such a multi-year big fu to all those designers who were like you've got to get these candy colored aqua
2:01:14We just out of our face. It's totally destroying my ability to you know because colors look different in the next to other colors
2:01:19I need something that's neutral or whatever so Apple said fine. Here's graphite, and they gave they made everything a blue tinged gray
2:01:24Which was it would just worse
2:01:26I feel like we're throwing off color balance because if you if your mind believes that it's actually neutral gray
2:01:31But it's not there's more blue in it. It's gonna screw you up way worse than primary colors red green and yellow
2:01:35We're gonna but I know now the gray is more. I loved it though
2:01:38It was almost as though they let me pick like a blue tinted gray. It was like right down my alley
2:01:43Yeah, no
2:01:44But like it doesn't it's not really what they asked for and somehow now with graphite is now now much more neutral gray
2:01:50And it's totally boring. But if for people who want something with neutral, it's fine
2:01:53but like no they went in the other direction like I said, okay, we've got blue and graphite and
2:01:57Also, by the way, you can you can do this crazy dark mode that we sort of half-heartedly did to match our pro apps
2:02:03like again, you know that I asked about that and they're like
2:02:05They gave a bunch of different reasons for it
2:02:09but like the one that has the most weight is like
2:02:11Pro customers wanted this to match their pro applications that are also dark because they're like they're looking at video all day and they don't
2:02:16Want the white menu bar and dock staring them in the face. So here's a dark mode
2:02:19I but I thought as and you you must have stayed up to date with the betas over a summer
2:02:25I thought that they actually called it a dark mode and it seemed like a hint like when they unveiled it on stage at
2:02:31WWDC that it would be almost like everything Windows that all sorts of stuff was gonna go dark
2:02:38Well, so there's a couple of reasons why they didn't do that like early on in the in the betas in the general control panel
2:02:46Like the same control was there but instead of being a checkbox. It was a theme pop-up menu
2:02:51So it was like I forgot what the words were like whatever word is next to the graphite aqua picker
2:02:55And then there was another picker that it was a pop-up menu of like theme and it was like regular and dark
2:03:00Right and that became a checkmark which is kind of demotes it from like oh, this is not theming. This is not OS theming
2:03:05This is just a checkmark option that tweaks how certain things look and you can't go full dark
2:03:11I think for the same reason even just making the menu bar dark was a problem because now you have all these
2:03:15third party and you know Apple's own in the beginning menu bar icons that draw incorrectly
2:03:20when when they you know because they drew draw black on top of black and you couldn't
2:03:25see anything and Apple's own had to be updated and the third party ones had to be updated
2:03:29multiply that problem by about a bazillion if you tried to change the entire interface
2:03:32to dark how many applications draw with black and if you put them on a black background
2:03:35everything's invisible so that was just not going to happen like the appearance manager
2:03:39in those days you had ways to you know if everyone was using the appearance manager
2:03:45You could make sure that your app looked good on any possible crazy kaleidoscope, right?
2:03:48Because you didn't you if you embrace the appearance manager, you never pick you never said draw black text
2:03:52You said you always drew with like a theme brush or whatever the right
2:03:55Yeah, you would say give me the text color and now draw in text color and you didn't have to know what text color was
2:03:59Whereas now you see a lot, you know
2:04:01There's clearly a lot of apps that like yeah
2:04:04I mean cocoa was like cocoa was not made with that in mind and you know
2:04:08Certainly when jobs came back the theme stuff was canned even though the API's were still there
2:04:11And so like, you know, as I talked about,
2:04:13there was this brief period where it was explosion
2:04:15of theming on the Mac community,
2:04:16but like even though that tech was there
2:04:18and people took advantage of it,
2:04:19Jobs was against it, pretty much closed the door on that.
2:04:21And now you have an ecosystem of applications
2:04:24that are not prepared to be on a system
2:04:26where the system look changes in radical way.
2:04:28I mean, it's hard enough for Apple
2:04:29when they change the look to make sure like,
2:04:31you know, if you drew a custom control,
2:04:32now it looks wrong and everything.
2:04:34- And there's all sorts of other, I don't know,
2:04:36it's even after, even though that they've cut it down
2:04:38and it's just use dark menu bar and dock.
2:04:43It's like the selection, the highlight color
2:04:45for the menus in the dark mode, it's not right to me.
2:04:50- Yeah, that's another vibrancy attempt
2:04:54'cause it's got tinge with the desktop background,
2:04:57but also like a sort of inverted type thing.
2:04:59It's weird and sometimes it looks a little sickly sometimes.
2:05:03It doesn't have the pizzazz of like,
2:05:08Their big theme in the regular look is this very light gray,
2:05:12lighter than normal, not a lot of gradient to it,
2:05:14and this really powerful kind of like,
2:05:17it's like if Pepto Bismol was blue instead of pink,
2:05:20that's what the blue looks like, right?
2:05:21It's like really like chalky, thick, opaque blue,
2:05:25and that's your highlight color.
2:05:27Whereas when you go dark mode,
2:05:28it just kind of becomes this like pale moonlight
2:05:31that's shining on your selected element.
2:05:32It doesn't make as powerful a statement.
2:05:35- Yeah, and it doesn't even invert the color of the text.
2:05:38- So-- - I mean, and you're seeing that
2:05:40because you're running in graphite mode,
2:05:42that's what we're talking about here,
2:05:43in case people are confused.
2:05:44If you run in non, change your thing from non-graphite
2:05:46and change the dark mode and then pull down a menu,
2:05:48it looks much more, it looks much stronger in that mode.
2:05:50- Yeah, it looks horrible in graphite mode.
2:05:53It looks okay in blue mode.
2:05:55But it still doesn't change the color of the text, though.
2:05:58Like in regular mode, when you have,
2:06:00like you hover your mouse over the new, you know, file new,
2:06:04then new goes from being written in black
2:06:06to being written in white,
2:06:08because the blue is so vibrant.
2:06:09But in the dark mode, they don't change to like,
2:06:13they don't invert the text, it's just--
2:06:15- Yeah, 'cause it's too close.
2:06:16It's not clear that the background is so different
2:06:19that you now you have to invert, like it's too, yeah.
2:06:21And that's the whole thing with the vibrancy effect,
2:06:23they kept showing that WWDC, like they would show that,
2:06:26hey, if you draw text with like, again,
2:06:29the text color and everything,
2:06:30draw on a vibrant background,
2:06:32we will adjust the color of the text
2:06:35to make sure that every part of the text
2:06:36has enough contrast to be readable.
2:06:39And so the text color changes because like behind,
2:06:42what you can see behind the vibrant background
2:06:44is whatever the hell is behind it,
2:06:45whether it's a window or the desktop background.
2:06:47So you can't just pick one text color.
2:06:49You have to sort of adjust the text color as you go along
2:06:52in sync with the whatever is behind it
2:06:55to make sure that this letter
2:06:56on the right side of this sentence
2:06:58is a totally different color than this level
2:06:59on the left side because the thing
2:07:00that's behind it is different.
2:07:02And they're trying to finesse that.
2:07:03And again, I have to ask why what's the point with Texas supposed to be readable?
2:07:08Just put it on a background where you could wear the developer of the application
2:07:10Controlled the foreground in the background color and we can all read the friggin text. I don't need to see what's behind it. Why I
2:07:16Hear you I I'm surprised
2:07:21I'm still a little surprised that they even have all these options that they didn't just say, you know
2:07:25It's our way or the highway and you're gonna get well gonna get blue and you're gonna like it
2:07:29Yeah, so it took us from 10.0 to 10.5 for them to just like brush metal is gone
2:07:35Pinstripes are gone. There's one window style the buttons looking normal. Nothing is too transparent the menus
2:07:42I mean
2:07:42I remember they like the
2:07:43Transparency of pull down menus was so extreme in the beginning and then by the end like by a leopard and snow leopard timeframe
2:07:50It was practically opaque. It's like why even bother at that point? Like I can't see anything through this
2:07:54It's almost entirely opaque white, right? So
2:07:57You know it in ten point fifteen expect all this exuberance to have consolidated it into one
2:08:03more conservative
2:08:06Yet still recognizably Yosemite ish look
2:08:09Yeah, and there's a couple things they get right. I think the new doc is great, and I call that out
2:08:15Here's what you wrote in your review setting aside the particulars the Yosemite doc
2:08:19exudes a visual confidence that has been sorely missed in the last few releases of OS 10 like I
2:08:26To me the doc exemplifies what Yosemite is shooting for
2:08:30Yeah, as I said an ATP it's the ideal scenario for you to show off vibrancy
2:08:35Yeah
2:08:35Because the icons are so like you're not gonna lose them no matter what crazy crap is going on with the background
2:08:41Let me show the screenshot of like a look. It's look at how green it looks here
2:08:44Look at how blue looks here the icons stand so proud of that interface. They're not gonna get lost
2:08:49You're not trying to read a bunch of text
2:08:51And you have full freedom on that background where otherwise no information would be conveyed to show off
2:08:56Hey this cool effect that we've done this vibrancy thing where we blur and pull forward different colors and saturated. It looks beautiful
2:09:01It's interesting
2:09:03And it you know
2:09:05It conveys this is kind of a piece of glass or translucent thing laying over stuff like that is the ideal environment for this for
2:09:11this type of effect
2:09:12Because it doesn't impair anything at all really and even like the parts where you hover and you get the text
2:09:17Those they gave dedicated backgrounds that say okay. Well now it's time for you to read text. I'm not gonna mess around here
2:09:23I'm going to give you what is almost you know a fairly opaque light colored background with dark
2:09:27You know text on top of it or the reverse in dark mode to make sure you can read the text for the hovers and
2:09:32Everything like that, but the dock itself will just be like we finally figured it out no more ridges
2:09:37No more weird frills no down on an angle and shiny things on it. No reflections of the windows that are going above it like
2:09:44Yeah, it's been a long road for the dog
2:09:46I think the maverick stock is it's probably the best 3d doc because it kind of like that that you know
2:09:50Not brush metal look was I mean something else in the parlance of the Mac
2:09:55But like sort of a matte finish metal type of thing the 3d effects still just does not work and should never have been done
2:10:01But that one at least has the most class, but I was like we're done with that phase
2:10:04Here's what the doc looks like it looks the same vertical and horizontal. This is the doc
2:10:09They even got rid of pinning which is kind of a shame, but that was never a documented feature anyway
2:10:13What was pinning top and bottom?
2:10:15Yeah, instead of having the dock centered on the edge of the screen people love to pin it to the top or the bottom
2:10:20Suspect that maybe one thing that they reverse on if they get a lot of complaints about it because even though it was undocumented
2:10:24The people who have been doing it have been doing it since like, you know
2:10:28Whenever that whenever that undocumented feature was added whatever developer preview that's you could say it's undocumented
2:10:33But once you've been doing it for you know, yeah, it was like a 10-15 years. It was like a defaults, right thing
2:10:39Yeah, dude, just it didn't have to hack it. You just give it a preference
2:10:42It was you know a preference that you just put in into terminal and and then I'm gonna take it
2:10:46I remember that come calm that Apple doc pinning starter end or whatever. It was right. What's that app from the guy in Germany?
2:10:52That's just it's just like a front end to all the hidden preferences. I like secrets which is from the guy who made quicksilver
2:10:58Oh, right. Yes internet shared database of those type of things, but there's a million applications that will you know
2:11:03Either show you what those commands are or run them for it. I
2:11:09I think, and again, I shouldn't say it's underplayed,
2:11:13'cause I think it's obvious,
2:11:15but that this interface is so clearly designed retina first
2:11:20and how it looks on non-retina max is,
2:11:25we'll make the best of it,
2:11:27but it's so clearly a retina first design.
2:11:30And I guess, it should've been a sign,
2:11:35like when we saw it at WWDC,
2:11:37it should've been a sign that retina,
2:11:38Like this would be the year we're gonna get retina IMAX
2:11:41because I don't think it's a coincidence
2:11:43that they're debuting at the same time as an interface
2:11:47that so clearly is meant to be seen on a retina display.
2:11:52- But even if we weren't getting a retina desktop max
2:11:55this year, they still have to design it for retina.
2:11:57Like you have to be forward-looking.
2:11:58There's no sense in making a brand new look
2:12:00for the Mac at this point in time.
2:12:02Even if retina are working to be out for two years,
2:12:04you just have to, you just have to say like,
2:12:06you have to be forward-looking about this.
2:12:08Which is why I hope to gob whatever new file system Apple must surely be working on is made entirely with SSDs in mind like
2:12:14Screw spinning disks. I know they're still around
2:12:15I know people are gonna use them for years, but if you're doing something now you have to be forward-looking. Yeah, I totally agree
2:12:20Yeah, that's a good point that it would it would make sense
2:12:25Maybe even make it so that it doesn't even run on non s non SSDs
2:12:29And you know it still use a use HFS plus till the end of time on your spinning hard
2:12:33Yes, don't spook them. I just wanted to really something I
2:12:37I think that the choice of Helvetica, or as they say Helvetica Neue in particular, is
2:12:45the clearest sign that it's meant to be seen on retina first.
2:12:47Because as I look at Yosemite on a non-retina MacBook Air, it's the type that really annoys.
2:12:54**Matt Stauffer:** Yeah.
2:12:55People are upset that I didn't make more of that in my review.
2:12:58And the reason I didn't make more of it is because I truly believe most people will not
2:13:01even notice.
2:13:02I know that is inconceivable to those of us who are like type nerds.
2:13:05I'm not even that big of a type of word, but it bothers me because I have non-retina max
2:13:09And it's just not like and you might you might have non-retina max for a while
2:13:12Right, but but like but even I am not as bothered by it as you are in as many other people
2:13:18But I truly think regular people will just absolutely not notice the texture even if you put it side by side
2:13:24They wouldn't notice because people are just not sensitive to that
2:13:28Maybe if you had changed from like brush script to like, you know, Cairo people would notice but
2:13:33People just do not notice that you change from one sans-serif font to another right?
2:13:37Well, I can notice I noticed that it's not really Helvetica Noya. It's it's a system font
2:13:43I'm not I still haven't found where it lives. It must be somewhere in slash
2:13:46Library it used to be available in the font menu in the early betas when they took it out of there
2:13:51But yeah, it's hiding in there and it's it's the mutant one not for any reason that like makes
2:13:56Sense from like well, we wanted to make a readable system, but it's because they had to make the metrics match
2:14:00So it's kind of it's kind of perverted by the need right to match metric
2:14:04So I think it's basically uglier than it needs to be so it's the same with or close as possible
2:14:09Yeah, I think that's exactly it
2:14:12It's well and it works a little better and it's a little bit of a concession or not even a little bit
2:14:17I actually know that they spent an awful lot of time once they decide. Okay, we're gonna go to Helvetica and
2:14:21We've still got all of these non retina max that we're gonna support for years to come and in some cases
2:14:28They might even be selling for years to come right that that you know
2:14:31Who knows when the Mac Pro is going to be able to support Apple branded retina displays?
2:14:37MacBook Air rumors say is gonna go retina soon ish, but
2:14:42It's you know, it's got a support non retina for a long time
2:14:47they spent a lot of time tweaking the
2:14:51metrics not just to make it match Lucida, but also to
2:14:55Make sure that as you know that it fill at the sizes that it's used as a system font
2:15:01That it hits the pixel boundaries as often as possible
2:15:04Yeah
2:15:05Because otherwise you get ll and hello becomes just one big indistinct blurred looks like a really thick capital I or something right again
2:15:11My favorite example, so there's a lot of a lot of apps
2:15:13It's a standard menu and cocoa the format menu in the menu bar if you look at least on a retina display
2:15:20I don't know. I don't have a Yosemite non retina
2:15:23But on the retina display at least the R and the M there's clearly some space between them
2:15:29Whereas if you just open a text edit document set the font to a whole vedica noia
2:15:32it's like 16 or 18 or whatever it is and
2:15:35Type the word format the R and the M are gonna touch and it's gonna look you know
2:15:40It unless you know, you know, it's just one of those you just have to know the word
2:15:44You can't tell which ones the M and with you know, it just all looks like a bunch of humps next to each other
2:15:50It's not a ligature you don't think it's not just the kerning right?
2:15:53It's that the default kerning for Helvetica Neue is tight enough that the word format at that size
2:15:58Is yeah the R and the M are gonna blur together
2:16:01Which is one of those things that people who don't like Helvetica don't like about it
2:16:04What else like the word window even is sort of it
2:16:09Kearns differently if you use real Helvetica Neue
2:16:12And you know the way that the W that the slantiness of the W
2:16:16you know, has space next to it with the I, that the dot I isn't going to get lost in
2:16:21the W. It's very thoughtful.
2:16:24It makes me wonder why they don't use that.
2:16:27I guess it's because of the metrics.
2:16:28Why, like on iOS, they just use Helvetica Neue.
2:16:31There's no special version of it for the system fund, to my knowledge.
2:16:35Yeah, and the iOS line has, again, with the exception of the zombie iPad Mini, the iOS
2:16:41line has been in retina longer.
2:16:43It's more of a comfortable type of thing.
2:16:45And again, forward looking, like we're gonna make these devices, they're all gonna be redness
2:16:50soon enough because the screens are small enough, we know we can do it, design an interface,
2:16:54especially iOS 7, like design an interface that's aimed at a world where all the devices
2:16:59are red, because they're gonna be that way really soon.
2:17:02Yeah.
2:17:03One of your, we'll finish with a little bit of Swift, and then we'll call it a show, because
2:17:10it's been a long time.
2:17:11But from your review, from my notes here on page 16, you wrote, "Among a certain set
2:17:16of Mac enthusiasts, it was a point of pride to have many rows of icons filling the startup
2:17:22screen."
2:17:23Now, that's a reference to the classic Mac OS, where, you know, like when you...
2:17:26This is the whole section where you're talking about old-style extensions that just ran in
2:17:30the memory space of every app, or in the system space, you know, just system-wide.
2:17:35It was all the same.
2:17:36There was no system memory.
2:17:37Right.
2:17:38There was just one pull of memory.
2:17:39giant memory region carved up into pieces where you're supposed to stay in your little section.
2:17:43Right, and it made me laugh because I remember thinking about that, that like when I first
2:17:46started becoming a Mac nerd, it was absolutely a point of pride to have as many of those as
2:17:51possible. But there was like a... If you kept going and became more informed and a little bit
2:17:57more mature, it started becoming at the highest levels, it became more of a point of pride to have
2:18:02as few of those things as possible. Well, the pride in having a lot of them wasn't so much
2:18:07that your machine was so tricked out, but that you had figured out the correct load order and
2:18:11incompatibilities that you could actually run this many and they all worked. Because it was always
2:18:15like, "Oh, you got to load this first and this has to be there and these two are totally incompatible
2:18:19because if you enable this one, you have to disable these two. But this one you can still
2:18:22keep as long as you move it after that, like it's what Conflict Catcher was made for." Like,
2:18:25that not only that you had all this software installed, but that you had figured out how to
2:18:29make it into a stable system. And then, yeah, eventually you get sick of spending your time
2:18:33playing with Conflict Catcher and you're like, "Do I really need Adobe Type Manager? Do I really
2:18:37really needed how many fonts do I actually have and like you know something's got to go and Adobe's
2:18:41ad manager is big so ATM goes out the door but you know see I always had to run atm as I was doing
2:18:47I was doing design work but ATM was a good example where what was the character we had everybody I
2:18:52mean it shipped from Adobe with like I think the tilde character in front like the extension was
2:18:58tilt tilde ATM because on the old Mac OS tilde sorted alpha alphabetically first because it had
2:19:05had to load first or was it last?
2:19:07- Pretty much, yeah, I don't remember it.
2:19:09But yeah, but that was the, you know,
2:19:11that and putting funny characters in front of things
2:19:13in your Apple menu folder,
2:19:15Apple menu items folder to make space
2:19:17and stuff like that. - Right, to make them
2:19:18sort of a different order.
2:19:19- Yeah, but that was a very different world.
2:19:21And like, but that, if you live through that,
2:19:24you understand like, the whole thing with extensions is,
2:19:29for iOS it makes sense.
2:19:32Like iOS is so buttoned down the whole time, right?
2:19:34And we're all like, we want ways to extend the system,
2:19:37like keyboards or like having share panels
2:19:40include our stuff in it, all these things,
2:19:42it's like, come on, we need a way to do this.
2:19:43So it made a way to do it for iOS, right?
2:19:45But on the Mac, even in an OS X,
2:19:48we didn't have these memory patching extensions,
2:19:50but we had all sorts of,
2:19:51people had found ways to do things, symbol extensions,
2:19:53or the mock inject to get your code in there.
2:19:55Like, it's not like the Mac needed extensions.
2:19:57OS X has extensions.
2:19:59And the reason that Apple said,
2:20:01we're gonna make this extension system for iOS,
2:20:02it's gonna be safe and sandbox and all the things
2:20:05that we're doing.
2:20:06We're also gonna do it for the Mac,
2:20:08because this is part of the unification of the platform.
2:20:10Why should we not have this in Mac?
2:20:12And the excuse can't be,
2:20:14well, the Mac's already got ways to extend it.
2:20:16Yeah, it's a crappier way and it's kind of dangerous,
2:20:18but we don't need to bother with that.
2:20:20Not many people buy Macs anyway.
2:20:21The new Apple is, if we have an awesome way
2:20:24to make extensions, we're gonna deploy it everywhere.
2:20:26The Mac's gonna get it, the iOS is gonna get it.
2:20:28If there's a way to do it on the watch,
2:20:30that's gonna get it too.
2:20:31And that's a different philosophy.
2:20:33And if you live through the bad old days
2:20:34of these little rows of icons,
2:20:36you understand deep in your bones what is wrong
2:20:39with letting other people's software enter your memory space
2:20:41and screw with your applications.
2:20:43And so any type of extension missing
2:20:45is that avoids all those evils.
2:20:47Yes, please bring it to the Mac.
2:20:49Not because we can't get extensions now.
2:20:51We have all these weird extensions
2:20:52that can do weird things to your Mac, even in OS X.
2:20:55We just want better ones.
2:20:56We never want to be close to recreating
2:20:59that bad old world of those rows of icons.
2:21:01Yeah, we want the feature, but if you're technically informed at all, you don't want the buggy ramifications
2:21:11of it.
2:21:12Yeah, I've backed off.
2:21:13I used a lot more memory patching extensions in the early days of OS X, a lot of it, to
2:21:17backfill functionality that wasn't in the OS itself, and I've just slowly pared those
2:21:20things down.
2:21:22I ran Application Enhancer APE from the Unsanity guys.
2:21:25I ran that for years and years, but then at a certain point,
2:21:27it was like, enough is enough.
2:21:29I'm only using it for one or two things.
2:21:32I can live without them.
2:21:33Like window shape was the last one to go
2:21:34'cause I really truly love that
2:21:35and I wish I could get it back now.
2:21:37But clean hooks into the OS with real APIs
2:21:41that don't involve invading the memory space
2:21:43of another process.
2:21:44That's what we've always wanted the whole time
2:21:46and now Apple is finally providing that.
2:21:47So I hope every existing Apple mechanism,
2:21:51'cause there's still ones, Apple supported ones
2:21:52of like text input methods and all sorts of other things
2:21:55It actually will load you put something in a special folder you launch your application and the fret the cocoa frameworks will look in that
2:22:00folder for your thing and load it into the application and you're supposed to be well behaved and not do anything nasty and you know,
2:22:05but like not supposed to
2:22:07Implement something that changes what happens when you double click at the top of any window
2:22:12Yeah, but like once you're in there like that's why you know scripting editions were like a gateway into the thing or the symbol extensions
2:22:18like
2:22:19You know
2:22:20We have all those things but some of them are officially out even like the menu bar icons
2:22:24Someone was trying to crack me on this one. I'm pretty sure someone can send any correction to you if I'm wrong about this
2:22:29That if you write a badly behaved menu bar, you know icon type thing
2:22:33You can crisis crash system UI server because you're kind of in the mix there
2:22:37maybe maybe that's not the case now if you use NS data bar instead of the
2:22:40Ns-status item instead of the the menu extras thing that's supposed to be undocumented
2:22:45But anyway, there's still lots of officially supported Apple things where you can get your code into someone else's memory space
2:22:50And all those mechanisms, I would like them to make a officially supported, you know,
2:22:56separate process extension mechanism like all the, you know, the ones that are in Yosemite.
2:23:00Because I like all that functionality, I'll like it even better if you can make it safer
2:23:03so that a badly behaved extension can't crash my app.
2:23:07Yeah.
2:23:08The part of your review that I thought, I was a little surprised that you spent as much
2:23:12space on it was Swift.
2:23:16And after reading it, it made all the sense in the world.
2:23:18And I thought it was really, really good.
2:23:20I thought it was you know
2:23:21But that's why I like your reviews is your your you always surprised me with something
2:23:24Because I didn't anticipate you writing that much about Swift because I didn't see Swift as a Yosemite feature
2:23:29I just saw it as something that coincidentally was a 2014 thing that Apple did and you know
2:23:35IOS 8 and Yosemite just happened to be the first new OS is that you know that you can write
2:23:40Yeah, that's like I was mentioning on ATP
2:23:44Like I found myself at WWDC sitting in metal sessions and taking notes right like what am I doing?
2:23:50This isn't this isn't an OS X technology metal is for iOS only like why am I even bought but like it's because I was starting
2:23:56to view
2:23:57Everything that Apple did not as like oh, this is a Mac technology
2:24:00This is an iOS technology, but it's like these are Apple's platform technologies and even though metal isn't on the Mac now
2:24:05There's no reason it couldn't be in the future. And even though Swift is not specific to OS X
2:24:09It's just as applicable to OS X as it is to iOS, right?
2:24:11I mean the other reason of course I made such a big section out of this is two reasons one
2:24:17There's always something that I put in the review that I know almost nobody cares about but that I write a whole big like
2:24:22Disproportionate amount about it. Maybe not as much as Swift, but like, you know, I wrote a whole section on launch D at one point
2:24:27Right. No one no one freaking cares about launch D except for me
2:24:29So, you know like that it was interesting to me and I was like I give myself that right and the second thing is because I
2:24:35Have a personal history with like the whole clamoring for a new language and everything
2:24:39I was gonna have my say and I was gonna do it in my OS 10 review and people could just deal with it
2:24:43I think your take is interesting and it's the reaction that people at large have had to Swift is
2:24:48curious to me
2:24:51Because I see an awful ever since WWC and continuing until now. I see an awful lot of criticism
2:24:57from developers of
2:25:00About Swift that to me just seems uncalled for like it's it's the first version
2:25:07They just came out with it
2:25:08it's going to get better like all programming languages do.
2:25:13Like, the thing is though is that they're showing it to us
2:25:16by Apple standards extraordinarily early.
2:25:20And letting us, letting our, here's what we're thinking,
2:25:23you know, here's our idea for the next generation language
2:25:26for writing apps for our platforms in a very early stage.
2:25:30And then they've already incorporated a slew of feedback
2:25:34from the outside.
2:25:36It's, to me in a broad sense,
2:25:37It's exactly what we've, a lot of us have been hoping to see from Apple, not just regarding
2:25:41developer tools, but just Apple in general of don't be, and you've written about this
2:25:47numerous times, like don't just take seven smart people and put them aside and let them
2:25:51work for five years and come out with a thing because no matter how smart they are and how
2:25:55talented they are, they're gonna have, their own personal idiosyncrasies are gonna lead
2:26:00them to overlook certain things, you know, that they wouldn't if it was exposed to the
2:26:05world at large.
2:26:07But now they've finished it and they've given it to us and here it is.
2:26:11Like if they had been working on Swift for another two years and then came out with it
2:26:16but said this is it, it's final, it wouldn't have incorporated all sorts of things that
2:26:20they're incorporating.
2:26:22But they're getting flak for it, like the fact that it's changed so much just since
2:26:26WWDC.
2:26:27Well, I think you've kind of made their argument for them in some respects.
2:26:31There's two parts to this.
2:26:32is that a lot of things about Swift are fundamental to the philosophy embodied by the language,
2:26:38mostly having to do with how method calls are bound, like what implementation happens
2:26:44when I call this method, or basically method calls instead of message passing or whatever.
2:26:48Philosophically, late binding versus early binding. And Swift wants to have everything
2:26:52statically figured out. It needs to know what code, you type something here, it looks like
2:26:56a function call, what implementation does that actually run? Swift wants to know what
2:27:00compile time objective-c its runtime was like oh it's all dynamic dispatch I can
2:27:04figure out what it is you can do method swizzling you can form method names out
2:27:08of strings and call them that philosophical divide is not something
2:27:12that's going to be changed with a tweak to the language even though Swift can
2:27:15use the objective-c runtime as you if you subclass alvanis object and those
2:27:19all this stuff anyway that philosophical divide dynamic versus static that's
2:27:24that's just an honest difference between people who like that aspect of
2:27:28Objective-C and the people who designed Swift who are saying that type of
2:27:31dynamic aspect makes whole classes of optimization impossible for us because
2:27:35we can't see through the call boundary to understand how we can optimize across
2:27:38across that call because we don't even know what the hell it's gonna call and
2:27:42so that's a philosophical difference no amount of tweaking is gonna change that
2:27:46and the second thing is the idea that they're putting it out early and then
2:27:48doing doing these tweaks to like the minor details and stuff like that you
2:27:52know the complaint against that possibly by different people you know which is
2:27:56why Apple really can't win here,
2:27:58'cause you're not gonna please everybody,
2:27:59is that, hey, Swift is great and all,
2:28:01but it would have been,
2:28:02they think that it was basically,
2:28:05these guys went off and some smart guys
2:28:06came out with this thing.
2:28:07We really would have loved it
2:28:08if you had built a major application
2:28:10with this language first,
2:28:12and then presented it to us.
2:28:13Like if you had dog fooded it longer,
2:28:15because if you had dog fooded it,
2:28:17you would have found all the same exact things
2:28:18we're finding and like,
2:28:19how many times have they tweaked
2:28:20how it interacts with like core foundation
2:28:22and Objective-C APIs,
2:28:24like the various idioms of how,
2:28:26because they didn't write all new frameworks.
2:28:28They need this language to work with their existing frameworks
2:28:30and it's not quite an exact match.
2:28:31So they have to come up with conventions for like
2:28:33when you call one of these things, we're going to do this.
2:28:35And you're like all these different conventions of how to handle
2:28:38in/out error parameters and mapping between optionals
2:28:41which exists in Swift and like nil and you know,
2:28:44because there's no optionals like that in Objective-C
2:28:46and how do we cross those boundaries?
2:28:48If they had used Swift to write a major application
2:28:51that, so the argument goes, they would have figured
2:28:55a lot of this stuff out on their own,
2:28:56instead of bringing it out to us so early,
2:28:59it seems like this was kept really private
2:29:01to a small group of people,
2:29:02and now you're throwing it on top of us,
2:29:04and we're like, oh, it's not ready.
2:29:05Now, that's kind of self-contradictory.
2:29:07It's like, what do you want?
2:29:07Do you wanna see it early, or do you want it to be done?
2:29:09Or you want it to have feedback,
2:29:11but different people want different things.
2:29:13It's not like a single person is trying to ask Apple
2:29:16to do things that are completely contradictory.
2:29:18It's different groups of people
2:29:19want different things out of Apple.
2:29:20So yeah, I mean, I think of that too.
2:29:23I think what Objectives C looked like in 1989 or whatever,
2:29:25and what objectivity looks like now.
2:29:26And the pace of development of objectivity
2:29:29has accelerated so much in the past few years
2:29:32that I'm willing to give Swift a lot of leeway
2:29:35to get things right.
2:29:36But philosophically speaking,
2:29:38if you have a disagreement,
2:29:39like dynamic dispatch and everything like that,
2:29:42that I don't see,
2:29:44that's just gonna have to be in a disagreement
2:29:46because I don't think that's gonna change that much.
2:29:48'Cause it's like the idea is like,
2:29:50is it dynamic by default?
2:29:51Am I gonna tie it down or is it static by default?
2:29:53And you can make it dynamic.
2:29:54and Swift is very much in the camp of static by default,
2:29:57and you have the ability to make certain things dynamic,
2:29:59and other people are like, no, no,
2:30:00you got the defaults wrong, it should be the other way,
2:30:02but they're coming from different places.
2:30:04- Yeah, reading your review,
2:30:06and what you had to say about Swift,
2:30:08and I love it, to me it's the right way to have about this.
2:30:13You even admit that there's aspects of the language
2:30:16that you as a programmer aren't to your liking.
2:30:19You're not, you don't like having the--
2:30:24- Static typing. - Static typing.
2:30:25But you don't take that as therefore it's bad, right?
2:30:32Statically typed languages are bad.
2:30:33It is a perfect, you know, that's,
2:30:36so much of the internet is not being able to acknowledge,
2:30:40okay, I disagree with that, I dislike that,
2:30:43but that, I can acknowledge that that is a valid,
2:30:47a valid philosophy to have, right?
2:30:49- And especially since they stated their goals.
2:30:51Like we said, this is the type of language we wanna make,
2:30:53And you can evaluate Swift and how well does it achieve their own stated goals?
2:30:57And then you can also like like I said a lot of the arguments against Swift is like
2:31:00Maybe you disagree with the goals then fine
2:31:03Then what you could say is you should never have tried to make a language
2:31:05That is as convenient as a scripting language
2:31:08But you could write whole S's in it because you you make a crappy word is like a jack-of-all-trades master of none
2:31:12Like feel free to argue with the premises in the mission statement
2:31:15But that is a separate argument which you can have from if I accept this mission statement
2:31:20you know what how well does Swift fulfill that mission and
2:31:23What were the how did it do it?
2:31:26Like that's the most interesting thing to me because I think the mission is incredibly ambitious
2:31:29Like I said, it's a totally an Apple move
2:31:31Like it is very gutsy and very ambitious and not because it's not doing what everyone seemingly who's complaining about one
2:31:37Do like just make me a better nicer objective C. That's all I want
2:31:40Don't try to make some crazy language that you think you can use for everything like that
2:31:44You could you know because if you look at the software stack
2:31:46Like you have things that are written in C and even in C++
2:31:50And then you have things that are written in Objective-C and why are these three languages there? It's like well
2:31:53But they're really low-level stuff like the kernel and like it may be even like, you know
2:31:58Core Foundation and like then you have to use C and C++ for those things
2:32:01But then for like the higher level frameworks, those are in Objective-C and Swift is saying
2:32:05Why can't we have one language that spans that whole range?
2:32:07Why do we have one language and maybe we're not gonna write the kernel in it just yet
2:32:10But we could if we really wanted to because we wouldn't have to worry about a performance hit
2:32:14Right because it can be as fast as those low-level languages
2:32:17But it can go all the way up to hey
2:32:18You just want to type a bunch of stuff and you know you want to do you know?
2:32:21You know hash bang user bin Swift and just start typing
2:32:25Yeah, and you want to create you want to create a string just by typing?
2:32:28You know quotation mark here's the string another quotation like and all
2:32:34All the things we love about JavaScript or Perl or Ruby or Python and make one language that spans that whole range because and it's an
2:32:41ambitious goal and it would be great for Apple if they can pull it off because
2:32:43then it's like hey finally we don't have to hire C developers C++
2:32:46Objective-C developers and maintain a compiler that can compile all three of
2:32:51those languages that have different standards you got C99 C++11 and
2:32:54whatever the hell we're doing to Objective-C if we just make one language
2:32:57that we control everything about that it's our thing that spans the entire
2:33:00range of our things boy wouldn't that be amazing yeah and maybe they're biting
2:33:04off more than they can chew but I admire the ambition and my question is how the
2:33:07the hell you gonna do that? And so I wanted to delve into how do you make a
2:33:11language? It's easy to make the parts that you type like you can just say blah
2:33:14blah blah our language looks like this here's the keywords here's the syntax
2:33:17and then we'll just write a compiler that makes turns that into code that
2:33:20runs. It's like that's the hard part you know how do you how do you get from
2:33:23something that looks like JavaScript or Perl or Ruby or Python but is as fast as
2:33:28C and that's what I spent the entire second of this room delving into because
2:33:31I think it's interesting and definitely a change of pace from the way Apple has
2:33:37It's you know compiler software in the past and certainly a change of pace from the way
2:33:40JavaScript runtimes are implemented or Java runtimes or certainly Ruby Python for all that stuff
2:33:46Yeah, it's it's evident and it's funny because you know, so many Apple employees are just
2:33:52Never in public and never named
2:33:55And you know who knows how influential they are inside the company
2:34:00But you know because Chris Latner started the LLVM project outside Apple, you know
2:34:06And then they more or less it's weird because it wasn't a company
2:34:09It was an open-source project, but they effectively aqua hired him when they bought it
2:34:13All right, you know effectively bought the open-source project
2:34:17When they brought him in board, but he's you know, that's clearly to be you know
2:34:22It's very obvious like you said that that there have been in the rate of change of objective-c
2:34:26Improvements over the last few years has been impressive. Well, it coincides with the LLVM era
2:34:32Maybe they got the compote they took control of the compiler brought that you know
2:34:37What they should own and control the key technologies for that platform. The compiler is one of those technologies. Why are we using GCC?
2:34:42It's hampering our ability to extend the language is hampering our ability to optimize is hampering our ability to make our IDE
2:34:47They have this multi multi-year transition
2:34:50Slowly slowly getting away from GCC to be completely on an LVM based compiler and then like they're off to the race, right?
2:34:57And it's like you said you have to look back to what are the goals of the project GCC is a fantastic?
2:35:02project. It is one of the most successful computer science projects in history, but
2:35:09its stated goal is to be a universal compiler for any and all platforms. And
2:35:14the fact that it succeeded at that is why it was there for Next to use when
2:35:20they started bolting on Objective-C features to see back in the 80s. It's the
2:35:26fact that GCC was there and aimed to be universal was the reason that they could
2:35:33get it to work but then the fact that it's universal and it's you know is this
2:35:37apparently convoluted you know really really impenetrable code codebase
2:35:42eventually just really hampered their ability to move the language forward and
2:35:47it was also old like it's an old code base and and then anything you did it's
2:35:51kind of like doing anything with w3c you know all that even worse actually
2:35:54Anything you did, like it kinda has to be,
2:35:56your needs aren't the only needs here.
2:35:58There are other stakeholders,
2:35:59and you kinda have to get agreement
2:36:00from all parties involved
2:36:01that this is the thing that you wanna do
2:36:03because there's just one code base,
2:36:04whereas Apple doesn't need anyone's okay
2:36:05to do whatever the hell they want with their compiler.
2:36:08And it's not quite like that.
2:36:10There's Clang and that stuff.
2:36:11That's a C++ compiler.
2:36:12Those are open source.
2:36:14There are other people that are using them.
2:36:16Apple can't just do whatever the hell they want
2:36:17with that type of thing,
2:36:18'cause then they'd end up with a fork,
2:36:19'cause other people would be like,
2:36:20well, I don't want Apple's Clang.
2:36:21So they're sensitive to that there,
2:36:22But thus far Swift is not open source and not open. That's another issue people have with the language
2:36:27It's entirely theirs. I don't know if that will change in the future
2:36:31I know there are people inside Apple who want it to be open source
2:36:34But there are you know that is not high on their priority list apparently like right now
2:36:38They're just you know
2:36:38Yeah
2:36:39Yeah
2:36:39I'd always say it out the door get get Yosemite out the door get the language in shipshape and then revisit this issue in the future
2:36:46I don't think they're do anything like that until it settles down until you know Swift of
2:36:52of this year is nearly identical to Swift of last year.
2:36:56- Let's see, I don't think they need like,
2:36:58that is, I can understand that the desire to do that,
2:37:01like with the motivation, like what makes you feel like,
2:37:03let's just, you know, let's just table this
2:37:05until we get our stuff together, right?
2:37:07But compared to WebKit though, WebKit was like, you know,
2:37:11open because it came from KHTML, it was always open
2:37:14and did it, did it in pay, like, well, we don't wanna make,
2:37:16we don't wanna show WebKit to the world
2:37:17until it settles down.
2:37:18Well, they show WebKit to the world
2:37:19as soon as they announced Safari
2:37:20and it was definitely shaky and weird,
2:37:22and it doesn't seem to have hurt WebKit development.
2:37:24So I think it can be done.
2:37:25It's just a question of,
2:37:27it's like, it's a question of priorities.
2:37:28And Apple has never been the greatest open source citizen
2:37:31in terms of like, you have complete access to our repository,
2:37:34you can see our changes in real time.
2:37:35They just do dumps.
2:37:36Like they do their work, it's hidden away,
2:37:38and then they release the product based on it,
2:37:40and then there's an open source dump.
2:37:41And that is not really the way
2:37:44that everyone wants open source to work,
2:37:46but it's sure better than never giving the code at all.
2:37:49The gist of it is that the more I learn about Swift
2:37:53and get past the intro, chapter one
2:37:57of the Swift programming book,
2:37:58just hello world type programs,
2:38:00it's evident that it is exactly what you would think it is.
2:38:05It's a language designed by a compiler guy,
2:38:08which is interesting, right?
2:38:10- A compiler guy who likes C++ a little bit.
2:38:13- Yeah, it clearly comes through a little bit.
2:38:16- I mean, LLVM is written in C++,
2:38:18and LVM, you know, like, it's obviously everyone
2:38:21who uses C++, anyone who uses any language
2:38:25for a long period of time comes to hate that language,
2:38:28but also kind of like it.
2:38:30I mean, like the longer you use it,
2:38:32the more you're just like the parts that you hate
2:38:33just great on you, but you also kind of like it.
2:38:35So like Swift has a lot of the things in it.
2:38:38You're like, this person clearly hates a lot of features
2:38:40about C++, but also kind of thinks some of them
2:38:42are kind of okay and just like,
2:38:44just like, boy, I wish they had been done differently.
2:38:46- Yeah, but it's so obvious,
2:38:49and I think the details you delve into
2:38:50make a lot of these things clear,
2:38:51where it's never academically precocious.
2:38:56It's not, this is clever, this, you know,
2:38:59which is like when you and I were younger,
2:39:01a lot of the new languages were--
2:39:02- Like Dylan or Smalltalk or Lisp.
2:39:05- Yeah, exactly.
2:39:06- It's like mathematically pure Haskell these days.
2:39:08- Right, well, Lisp predates us.
2:39:10Lisp is from the '50s, but that whole derivative,
2:39:14that whole realm of languages.
2:39:16Dylan's a perfect example,
2:39:17'cause it was, I think it came up in the '90s.
2:39:19But it was academically interesting,
2:39:22but yeah, it was a purist viewpoint on something.
2:39:26- Yeah, how would you make Mac toolbox calls from Dylan?
2:39:29Whereas Swift is like, the whole purpose of this language
2:39:32is we have to be able to call into the,
2:39:35both, we have to call into the C, C++,
2:39:38and Objective-C frameworks that already exist.
2:39:40All right, so, and we have to be able to work
2:39:42like NSObject and the Objective-C runtime.
2:39:44And by the way, even though it's a memory-safe thing by default,
2:39:47we also have to wait to do unsafe pointers,
2:39:49because sometimes we need to do that.
2:39:51Totally pragmatic, because it can't afford to do anything else.
2:39:54The mission statement is, to be this language that spans this huge range,
2:39:57and it spans this huge range because, guess what?
2:40:00Apple has a bunch of existing code in that huge range,
2:40:03and if you want to interface with it or someday replace it,
2:40:05you have to span the same range, and they get to use three languages,
2:40:08or four languages, depending how you count.
2:40:10Like, you know C++, C, Objective-C, and then like shell scripting or Python or even AppleScript or whatever.
2:40:18You want to try to span that whole range? You're gonna have to be pragmatic about what you're willing to do to your beautiful language.
2:40:24And it's, you know, a lot of the languages that are popular were not designed by compiler guys. Larry Wall was not a compiler guy.
2:40:32guy. I mean, it's, you know, it was, he was, it was the replacement for like a bunch of
2:40:37shell scripts and, you know, TR and sed and awk. And, you know, as I would just, he, more
2:40:43or less it was, here's the syntax I'd like to be able to write to do these things. And
2:40:47then he made a thing that did them. And I think, you know, and like you said on ATP,
2:40:53then a lot of, for decades after there's been a lot of work of, well, how do we make this
2:40:56crazy language fast?
2:40:57Oh, not so much for Perl, but like JavaScript, for example, like, oh, this syntax looks kind
2:41:01I like Java, it's not really,
2:41:02and by the way, we'll make some way to run it.
2:41:04- Right, and it was no consideration to how to make it fast,
2:41:08and then the result was an interesting language
2:41:10that was pretty approachable for most people
2:41:12who can program, and it was dreadfully slow.
2:41:15And it's been, like you said, millions of dollars,
2:41:18and like three, four, five major generations
2:41:21of how are we actually going to run JavaScript
2:41:25to get to where we are today,
2:41:26where it runs at a reasonable speed,
2:41:27whereas Swift, being written by a compiler guy,
2:41:31Maybe the preeminent compiler guy in the world today
2:41:34has, it just reeks from top to bottom
2:41:36of this is going to be fast.
2:41:38- Yeah, C was written by compiler guys too.
2:41:41Like the languages that look like, you know,
2:41:43portable assembly, like where you can see where it maps.
2:41:45It's not that rare for language to be written
2:41:47by a compiler guy, but it's rare for a high level language.
2:41:50- Right, well that's exactly it.
2:41:51That's exactly it.
2:41:52Where in fact C looks like it's written by a compiler guy
2:41:54'cause it looks like compiler, you know, input.
2:41:58It looks like an intermediary format.
2:42:02- Yeah, you can squint at it
2:42:04and see the assembly code that corresponds to that.
2:42:06Especially with like CISC CPUs back in the day.
2:42:08- Yeah, and especially if you look at older C code
2:42:11from the '70s and '80s before some of the
2:42:14slightly higher level features that got added
2:42:16in later versions.
2:42:18Right, it's on its sleeve.
2:42:22This is made to be easy to compile.
2:42:25- You should read, you probably didn't
2:42:27because it's really gonna go too long,
2:42:28but one of the many, many, many things I linked in the review
2:42:31was a link to that awesome WebKit blog post
2:42:35about the fourth tier LLVM optimizer for JavaScript.
2:42:40Try actually reading that whole article
2:42:43'cause they take you through it.
2:42:45It's really, really well written
2:42:46and they lead you through it a piece at a time
2:42:48and you'll probably get like 50%, 60% through it
2:42:50and realize they haven't even gotten to the part
2:42:52that tells you the new thing they did.
2:42:53Everything they've just described so far
2:42:55that is blowing your mind
2:42:56is existing JavaScript optimization features.
2:42:58They haven't even gotten to the fourth tier part.
2:43:01Like the hoops they jumped through to make JavaScript fast,
2:43:04just make your head spin.
2:43:06Like every one of them seemed so incredibly dangerous
2:43:08that it would be advisable to try and seems impossible
2:43:11that it could ever be made to work.
2:43:12And yet that's where we're all running in our web browsers.
2:43:15- Right.
2:43:16And it's on every platform, every day, every, you know,
2:43:21and probably, I mean, I don't see any way out of it
2:43:24where for the rest of our life,
2:43:25JavaScript is gonna be a part of it.
2:43:27the rest of our life. I'm going to plan on living for a long time, but you got Google
2:43:30with Dart and everything. People take runs at it from time to time. If anybody ever gets
2:43:35like, it's like Bitcoin, if everyone ever gets more than 50% of the compute power, if
2:43:39anyone ever gets dominant market share and web browsers again, which doesn't look like
2:43:44it's going to happen, but hey, who knows?
2:43:45They could replace it.
2:43:48Someone could seize the moment and be like, "Google's tried with Dart. We have a popular
2:43:52browser. How about everyone write Dart and we can precompile it?" It's like JavaScript,
2:43:55able to be and everyone's like nope sorry you don't have that kind of you don't have that kind
2:43:59of pull we're just gonna keep writing javascript but i don't put it out like even like when i when
2:44:03i look at swift i made a few sly illusions in the thing of like oh there's no reason that apple
2:44:11couldn't say oh and by the way you can just like you can write dart and they'll run you know google
2:44:16chrome whatever you can put swift code and and if you load your in your web pages instead of
2:44:22JavaScript and when we load them we will compile that Swift code and keep the
2:44:26compiled version it'll be much faster than JavaScript because it's on that
2:44:29level of like it's not that much worse to use than JavaScript in the libraries
2:44:33are not up to snuff or whatever but or even just server-side web programming
2:44:37like the places where Swift can grow is not not constrained in the same way as
2:44:41Objective C or any of other apples other languages so if Apple ever wanted to
2:44:45make that move and say you know you can use JavaScript as your scripting
2:44:49language you wrote Paves or you can use Swift to do it like if you were gonna
2:44:53make like an iOS only web app where you knew the target platform could do that
2:44:57right with a built-in library that's in the in the browser you know with a bunch
2:45:01of niceties yeah and the compiler gets fast enough in the language like there
2:45:06are many things that are possible when this very new baby Swift starts getting
2:45:11mature like it if they succeed in their goal to make a language that spans this
2:45:14range and that is able to be fast and everything is all sorts of places with
2:45:17can go like even just down to like the stupid shell scripts and Perl scripts they have that
2:45:21are buried inside the installer packages install software on OS 10. Yeah. If if Swift had a
2:45:27file I/O library that was worth a damn instead of having to use cocoa for stuff like the
2:45:32language doesn't preclude that they could they could make change all those scripts like
2:45:35you could really make one big unified language or it could turn out the 10 years from now
2:45:39we turn out it was folly to try to span that range with one language and didn't work out
2:45:42but well and it makes me it's funny too and it makes me think it's one of those things
2:45:46where it was like, you know, in inside Apple, a lot of people don't know what was good.
2:45:50I mean, no, but almost nobody knew that Swift was going on. Everybody I talked to at Apple
2:45:54was surprised by Swift's announcement as we were.
2:45:57That's why working for Apple is exciting. You're like, what the, what?
2:46:00But it's, to me, it's an unfortunate coincidence that it also happened to be the year that
2:46:05the automation group added JavaScript support as an alternative to Apple script. Everywhere
2:46:11you could write Apple script. Now you can write JavaScript. It seems to me like a better
2:46:15idea might have been to hold off on that and wait until you can do it in Swift.
2:46:19Did you see the tweet someone had like with the JavaScript automation of the OSA script thing,
2:46:25you can use the JavaScript automation to call into an Objective-C library that loads Ruby and
2:46:31then you run Ruby code. It was like four languages in one command line, like showing like all the
2:46:36things. There's all these weird bridges, you know, because you can from JavaScript automation,
2:46:41you can load Objective-C libraries and from some Objective-C libraries, you can load the Ruby
2:46:45I guess from the Ruby cocoa thing or whatever. Yeah, it is quiet and then just a Swift into that mix, too
2:46:50They can interoperate with Objective C as well. Yeah
2:46:52I'll sort itself out. I guess I guess so, but it seems to me like the future of I mean
2:46:58I'm always happy when the automation stuff has any new features and
2:47:02because I'm always afraid that they're gonna should turn the lights out on on sales group, but
2:47:06So it's it's called the libraries. What's that? They got libraries last year. Yeah. No, they've been it
2:47:13- No, I don't-- - They got JavaScript.
2:47:15- Right, I only say that because I just know
2:47:17that at a high level Apple's interest isn't there.
2:47:19I'm not saying that the last couple of years
2:47:21haven't been good.
2:47:22I think the last couple of years have been great.
2:47:23Like script libraries have been great.
2:47:25There have been, you know,
2:47:26and I think adding JavaScript
2:47:27as a supported language is great.
2:47:29I just can't help but think though that in the long run,
2:47:32there'll be more scripts written in,
2:47:35automation scripts written in Swift
2:47:38than AppleScript or JavaScript.
2:47:40- For all of those things,
2:47:41and the reason you can have all these different languages,
2:47:43The problem is not the language, except maybe AppleScript, which is a gross language to
2:47:47people who want a regular programming language.
2:47:50The problem is the APIs you're talking to.
2:47:52That's the hard part.
2:47:53It's like, you've got to figure out, what is this dictionary support?
2:47:57Can I do what I need to do?
2:47:58Can I address this window in a way that is reliable?
2:48:01Can I get the element in this window?
2:48:04It's all down to how scriptable the application is.
2:48:06And the language is just a minor implementation detail at that point.
2:48:09the time you're fighting with the scripting dictionaries of the apps that
2:48:13will they even let you do what you want to do and what kind of weird hoops do
2:48:16you have to jump through well I'm just thinking though that if they if they can
2:48:19eventually get it to be Swift it would be easier to call into like if you
2:48:23wanted to put like a nib or a zip however you pronounce the how you
2:48:27pronounce the X I B version and zip sounds good a zip file with your script
2:48:31that it's you know it would be a lot more you know just like it since Coco
2:48:36already uses it it would be easier to call it from the scripting side too if
2:48:39if it was the same language.
2:48:40- Yeah, but then you're kind of doing
2:48:41actual real application development.
2:48:43Like you're not gonna be able to call,
2:48:45you still have to send Apple events, right?
2:48:47- I guess so, I don't know.
2:48:48I mean, you do now, I don't know.
2:48:50- Right, it's not like they're gonna let you call natively
2:48:51into the, you know, like, I don't know.
2:48:54The automation story has always been a little bit weird.
2:48:57I think it's been making progress in recent years,
2:48:59so I'm kind of optimistic about it.
2:49:01I like the idea that like,
2:49:02when they renamed Apple Script Editor to Script Editor,
2:49:05and now actually when you launch it,
2:49:07you can pick which language you want to be your default
2:49:09and each window has a little pop-up menu that says,
2:49:11it's a script editor, do you wanna write AppleScript
2:49:14or JavaScript or SwiftScript, not quite yet,
2:49:17but like it's poised to, you know,
2:49:19OSA was always supposed to be multi-language,
2:49:21but for the longest time, it was like multi-language
2:49:23in theory, and now it's finally multi-language
2:49:25and actuality again, so.
2:49:27- Yeah, finally.
2:49:28It is finally, that's an actual non-ironic, non-ironic,
2:49:34finally.
2:49:35- Yeah, there's probably, I'm trying to think
2:49:36of what other languages that people have been using,
2:49:38like people won't use frontier anymore.
2:49:40- No, but that was one of them.
2:49:42Well, and there was JavaScript,
2:49:43Mark Aldret of Late Night Software,
2:49:46the guy behind Script Debugger,
2:49:48and he had Faceband for a while.
2:49:51He had a JavaScript OSA that was built,
2:49:54I'm gonna say Mozilla's JavaScript engine,
2:49:57that worked, but it never really took off,
2:50:01'cause I think it's the sort of thing
2:50:02where it had to come from Apple to really take off.
2:50:05And there were certain weirdnesses
2:50:08that using JavaScript instead of AppleScript, you ended up with tangled syntax that was
2:50:13like what? It would take Apple to fix it because it had to be fixed at the OSA level, not at
2:50:20the language level.
2:50:21Yeah, that's always been a little bit weird. The language is just so different. How can
2:50:27you call the same things? Especially when you're calling it other libraries. Again,
2:50:32JavaScript can import the Objective-C stuff and then you're making Objective-C calls with
2:50:36name parameters but JavaScript doesn't have name parameters. You got all these mangled
2:50:39things. It's just like the Python, Cocoa, bridges they've had and everything. All those
2:50:43cross language things are weird. But OSA is always going to be cross language because
2:50:46that's the whole point of it. It's open scripting architecture.
2:50:50It always comes back to AppleScript. Anyway, we've gone on long enough, I think. It's been
2:50:57a good show. I love your review. And ATP is my favorite show.
2:51:04Thank you.
2:51:05all because of you. I always know you're trying to make up for that at a coven post. Well,
2:51:09here's the thing. I like Casey, I like Marco, but one of the things that's interesting about
2:51:14the ATP is that you guys often disagree. Maybe even usually one of the three of you is going
2:51:18to disagree. And whenever there's an argument and I'm listening, and I know everybody out
2:51:22there, people often tell me this. It's like everybody who listens to podcasts knows this
2:51:25feeling where like somebody will say something and you want to jump in and either correct
2:51:29something they said was wrong or point out the logical conclusion of where this is going.
2:51:35I the thing that makes ATP my favorite show is that you're always there to do it and it's so satisfying like I'll think oh
2:51:41I got it
2:51:42I got to write to these guys and tell them that reminds me of something and
2:51:45As soon as you have a chump chance to jump in nine times out of ten you say exactly what it is that I was
2:51:50Hoping somebody would say yeah
2:51:52Cuts both ways. I was just complaining one of the after shows recently
2:51:55I think I tweeted you about it like when you're talking about the 16
2:51:58gigs of flash which we didn't get to talk about on the in the iOS devices and how that how this terrible like we
2:52:04recorded an ATP and I called that move like a punitive mood on Apple's part and
2:52:08and then you before we could post our show you either posted a blog post about
2:52:13it where you called it punitive or released a podcast about it where you
2:52:16called the punitive and it's like god damn it like it's very we both same
2:52:20thing but yours got out first but yeah I know I know the feel like again this way
2:52:25when I hear you on podcasts I think the same thing like we we tend to think and
2:52:30say the same things and then it's like half the time you're excited to hear the other
2:52:34person chiming in with what you would have said if you're there and the other half of
2:52:37the time you're like I was just thinking that. Don't get credit for that idea.
2:52:42We shouldn't go on long about it but we could talk about the 16 gig thing quickly but I
2:52:47think if you want to stop dancing around the elephant in the room I think the bottom line
2:52:52is and I think you guys even mentioned this what it all comes down to is a fear in the
2:52:56back of our heads that this is a Tim Cook thing because it really only makes
2:53:01sense I think it makes perfect sense it's if you're staring at a spreadsheet
2:53:04of component costs and profit margins and the combined net with a projection
2:53:14of how a 1664 128 spread would push X number of people to get 64 instead of
2:53:23the lower price model than in a 32-64-128 scenario.
2:53:28From a spreadsheet perspective, it makes perfect sense.
2:53:32I completely understand every aspect of it.
2:53:35But in every other way, it is, to me,
2:53:38it's a boneheaded mistake.
2:53:40- Tim Cook's the same guy going on all the talk shows
2:53:42and TV stations and talking about how Apple
2:53:44doesn't do moves that are short term,
2:53:46is not looking for short term stock market game,
2:53:48it's long term thinking or whatever.
2:53:49So he's saying all the right things,
2:53:51but sometimes people just make mistakes.
2:53:52Like I said when we were talking about this, this decision to go with the 1664, 128, like
2:53:57this decision was made a long time ago.
2:54:00And I think by now, when they're having the meetings about like iOS 8 adoption and storage
2:54:04space and stuff like that, like hopefully they're going to correct for it.
2:54:07Like they're not perfect, they make mistakes.
2:54:09I think they may be just miscalculated.
2:54:11Like they were dazzled by all the things that you mentioned.
2:54:14Like boy, look at how we can push people up to the product line.
2:54:16And in exchange, like do we think there are any downsides to the 16?
2:54:21And they were able to convince themselves that the downsides weren't that big of a deal.
2:54:25But that, still selling 16s and still selling the A5 with no way for developers to exclude
2:54:31it, I think the meetings they're having now, hopefully they're discussing these things
2:54:34and saying, going forward for the next set of things, let's not make this particular
2:54:37mistake again.
2:54:39Let's remedy this.
2:54:40There's a big lag time in this type of thing.
2:54:42You know, again, when they came out with that same range and when they came out with the
2:54:46iPads and it was the same range, it's not like they can learn that lesson between when
2:54:49I felt like it's just you know there is a long turnaround time this and I'm hoping that
2:54:53It's this is not like you know a like them being duplicitous about the philosophy
2:54:58But it merely a mistake that they will correct going forward
2:55:01I hope so because my fear is if they don't go to 32 next year
2:55:04Then they're already going to be too late with 32 and when they do go to 32
2:55:08It's already going to be 32 is too little yeah
2:55:11And the thing is it it's on them to get this right because they're there the company that does not add an SD card slot
2:55:16their you know iOS devices right so they really and you can't upgrade it and so
2:55:20like they really need they really need to get this right and they're doing
2:55:23things like making cameras that shoot yeah 1080p video like really credible
2:55:301080p video like really good like you're not gonna regret that you know this is
2:55:34this is your your footage of your you know son's first birthday you know and
2:55:39time-lapse and burst mode like there's so many ways you can fill up that
2:55:43And the panoram, 41 megapixel panoramic images.
2:55:47Which is great, but which are huge.
2:55:50Yeah, it's like count, it's just, yeah.
2:55:53I don't remember if this was the most recent episode of the one before, but it's like the,
2:55:57and you mentioned it when you were talking about how like this is the type of device where you have to give caveats when you tell people to buy it.
2:56:02It's like all of us told people who wanted to buy Macs back when Macs were first becoming popular,
2:56:07we'd just always tell them back in the day like, "You can go get a PowerBook, they're really awesome, but make sure you upgrade the RAM."
2:56:12the RAM. They say, "Really? Do I need to upgrade?" I'm like, "Trust me. By default, it comes with an
2:56:16amount of RAM that is ridiculous." And we also used to tell them to get third-party RAM because
2:56:19Apple used to charge you a ton for it. Those stupid caveats they used to tell us, "How many
2:56:23years did we spend telling people, 'Upgrade the RAM, don't buy Apple's RAM, buy third-party?'"
2:56:27It added a complication and a caveat to a recommendation that made it scarier for people.
2:56:32And now that type of thing is creeping back in. We're like, "Don't buy the 16s. You're going to
2:56:38regret it. If you're asking me advice on which one you should buy, you're the type of person
2:56:40Not by the 16 trust me save money for a couple more months and get the you know 64
2:56:46Yeah
2:56:47I just can't I don't know it just irks me that there's
2:56:50And it doesn't bother me quite as much that like the lower-end models that the old I you know iPad minis are
2:56:5716 but it really irks me that the new top-of-the-line one starts at 16
2:57:02Yeah, like there's no this there's an unsafe model to buy in the flagship iPhone 6 right like people who are only gonna spend
2:57:10$29 on their iPad are kind of I'm sure going into it with eyes wide open that they know they're not getting the best and that
2:57:16They're you know that there's gonna be some limit. Whereas anybody buying a new iPad air -
2:57:24Think that they should feel confident that no matter which one they get that it's it's a good it's you know
2:57:29Good better best not and and RAM is the same thing like when they used to sell Mac models with two little rounds like you're only
2:57:35Hurting your own image app because there was nothing worse than a Mac with a spinning disk and two little RAM
2:57:39Yeah, and it just didn't get better memory compression was the perhaps the only bump that actually made like the brand usage you get better
2:57:45Right, but every other thing like three OS versions from now that RAM is gonna be even worse
2:57:51At least you could upgrade the RAM until I started soldering it on and once they did start soldering around
2:57:54I was glad that they bumped everybody up to 16 minimum and everything like they're finally getting on the ball on that
2:57:59But now they just dropped the ball some yeah
2:58:00And it's it's like I've been writing that it's it's like a brand thing and it's you can't measure that on a spreadsheet
2:58:05But the RAM thing with max like and I know an ATP use like for four megabytes of RAM
2:58:10Which shows how old the problem I remember when for four megabytes of RAM was the baseline and it was
2:58:15Years past where any everybody else in the industry had gone to like 16
2:58:19But I think even to this day all the way from the era when when they were selling max with only four megabytes
2:58:29megabytes of RAM to today
2:58:32that helped fuel the image that so many people have that Apple price gouges people because
2:58:38Everybody was told you have to upgrade the RAM and don't buy from app
2:58:42Don't buy from Apple go to crucial or you know
2:58:45somebody like that and then get someone to install it or all and sort for you and
2:58:48Feel like you're breaking your brand new machine because you'd have to do this thing that made a snap, you know
2:58:54Yeah, it never felt good
2:58:56But when you know and you go and you'd say like go to crucial crucial has great RAM and you google some reviews
2:59:02and everybody would say yeah Crucial sells high quality RAM.
2:59:05This is good, these are good memory chips.
2:59:07And then you see that you are saving $600
2:59:10versus what Apple would charge you
2:59:11for the same amount of RAM.
2:59:13And it's actually, it was actually true
2:59:15that Apple was price gouging you.
2:59:17'Cause you know that Apple gets better prices
2:59:19on the RAM than you do, or that Crucial does.
2:59:21- And then they would be kind of jerks about it
2:59:24where like they wouldn't service your machine
2:59:26if it had third party RAM in it
2:59:28and all sorts of crap like that.
2:59:29Remember those days?
2:59:29- Yeah, you'd take it in and they would,
2:59:31you would have to, you yourself would have to take out
2:59:33your third party RAM and--
2:59:34- Hide it from them.
2:59:36- Right, keep it in your desk in an anti-static sleeve
2:59:39or something like that.
2:59:40And I get, and if you replaced all of the RAM,
2:59:43I guess you'd have to like go and find your old Apple chips
2:59:45that you replaced and put them back in.
2:59:48- Yeah.
2:59:49- And yeah.
2:59:49- And this is not a good product experience.
2:59:51It shouldn't be like that.
2:59:52And like they, anything like that, that just,
2:59:55you never wanna sell somebody something
2:59:57that you know three years from now
2:59:58they're gonna hate you for buying.
3:00:00- Right, you should not sell, the base model accord
3:00:04should not have trouble accelerating up a hill.
3:00:06You know, it may not go anywhere near as fast
3:00:09as the tricked out high-end model,
3:00:11but it's still, you shouldn't have trouble
3:00:13with common things like driving up a hill.
3:00:16- Yeah, it's just some baseline level,
3:00:18and you don't wanna skimp and things like that,
3:00:20especially the weird and esoteric,
3:00:21and that you know as someone who knows the technology,
3:00:24again, especially with spinning disk,
3:00:26can have such a dramatic effect on performance.
3:00:28There was nothing worse than early versions
3:00:29of OS X swapping.
3:00:31Like there was just nothing, it would just,
3:00:33your performance would go off a giant cliff
3:00:35and there was nothing you could do about it.
3:00:36And even if you told people like,
3:00:37we'll just run one application at a time or quit more apps,
3:00:40and it was just like, this is not the way it should work.
3:00:42And obviously you can't give all the RAM of the world
3:00:44to every machine, but the rest of the industry
3:00:46would slowly march up the minimum
3:00:48and Apple would stubbornly stay at whatever number
3:00:50they decided was the correct number
3:00:52for just years past when they should.
3:00:55- Yeah, and it's less excusable now than ever
3:00:57'cause you know that they're getting the economies of scale
3:01:00and that they can get the best prices.
3:01:02- They're using the same components,
3:01:04not like they have to get special RAM
3:01:05for their special PowerPC chips or anything.
3:01:07- Right, it's, you know, and like you even mentioned it
3:01:10on ATP that there was a story that Apple's consuming
3:01:13like 50% of the world's SSD storage.
3:01:16- Or 25% of the NAND or whatever it was.
3:01:19- Whatever it is, but it's, I'm sure that's true
3:01:22and it's impressive, but it doesn't, you know,
3:01:24they're not just buying it in an open market.
3:01:26It's not like they're going they are they are a huge input into that market. They they influence the market
3:01:31They're planning ahead of time for like they'll you know
3:01:33Here's a few billion dollars build a factory because we're gonna ask you to buy the stuff for us
3:01:37And you'll slowly pay off what we loan you for the fact like that's that's the way they do all their stuff, right?
3:01:41So if they wanted to tell people a year ago, hey, we want to buy X million 32 gigabyte
3:01:46Chips because that's what they were gonna put in the iPad air - they could have had it
3:01:52Every every 16 every 16 gigabyte chip that they have could be a 32 gigabyte one if they had wanted it to be
3:01:58Yeah, or maybe like two years ago
3:01:59He's gonna lead time to like, you know
3:02:01Tooling in fact or like but Apple again that type of thing Apple is in the position to do that and they do it all
3:02:06The time they will they will pay
3:02:08For the people to build the capacity that they're going to use to build their products and get the money back and so is it fine?
3:02:13They probably did it with Taiwan semiconductor to do the the a8
3:02:17I'm sure Apple was paying billions and millions of dollars to make that happen
3:02:21Yeah, I think that a lot of these decisions are made two years in advance
3:02:26But I think if they wanted to go 16 to 32 baseline, that's the type of change
3:02:31They could make a little bit because it's not that not that far
3:02:34You just look at the Android phones, right?
3:02:35A lot of Android phones sell a lot of them sell with you know this much flash and I'm like again, you know
3:02:41I discounted the SD card slots and everything like that
3:02:43It's not so far outside the realm that if anything would be outside the realm
3:02:46It would be like these crazy super retina
3:02:49iMac displays that are probably in short supply and that one you really can say look you know no matter how much you pay we're
3:02:54Just barely able to make these now
3:02:55But right 16 to 32 that is old tech
3:02:58Androids been shipping with it for years and years and lots of phones so is it within reach yeah
3:03:03Alright, let's call it a show
3:03:05Anybody I can't imagine that there's anybody who listened to this episode who has not already read your review
3:03:11But if or pretended to read it or pretended to read it, but if you haven't you should
3:03:16You can do it the right way. The right way is to read it on the website
3:03:20That's the canonical version, but I bought a copy for iBooks anyway, because I wanted it to be a bestseller
3:03:24Yeah, you got a long way to go to make up for how many shirts I bought from you
3:03:28My ebooks are cheap man, it's not $30 for one of these books
3:03:34Buy copies for your whole family. Great. Great Christmas gift idea, right? Don't don't use family sharing just buy a copy for everybody
3:03:41Kids will love it
3:03:44Always a pleasure. I don't know. It's funny because now we have a mini tradition of you coming on after your your
3:03:50You know, you'd never ask me on any other time. So now you're gonna have to
3:03:54Actually think of some other reasons to talk to me
3:03:56I'm gonna have to think of another reason you should have had me on the to argue with you about file name extensions
3:04:00So the other Canadian guy, oh god, well that we wouldn't had an argument
3:04:03Would we know but I would I felt like that was a case where I heard you were on my side of the debate
3:04:11And I felt like I could have done a better job. Yeah fending off that foreigner
3:04:14Yeah, anytime we get into an argument about metadata. I'm going to word it far less
3:04:21Eloquently as you there were some stronger arguments that you could have deployed anyway
3:04:25I'll be on the podcast with that Joker sometime. We'll have it out
3:04:28That's what you get I mean, that's what you get when you're from Canada