The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► You know, one thing I've noticed--

00:00:01 ◼   ► I have noticed, I thought about this last week--

00:00:03 ◼   ► that I'm better friends in general with programmers.

00:00:07 ◼   ► Programmers make for good people, in my opinion.

00:00:11 ◼   ► Better friends than what?

00:00:12 ◼   ► Like other journalists?

00:00:14 ◼   ► Well, you know, not that there's anything

00:00:16 ◼   ► wrong with other journalists.

00:00:17 ◼   ► But I don't know.

00:00:21 ◼   ► To me, there's something-- like the way that programmers' minds

00:00:24 ◼   ► work, something about it appeals to me.

00:00:30 ◼   ► Like, one thing I've noticed over the years-- and we very seldom do this, you and I, sometimes

00:00:34 ◼   ► once in a while, very occasionally while we're at a conference, we'll get together and have

00:00:38 ◼   ► a drink or something like that.

00:00:39 ◼   ► Yeah, you're a bit of a teetotaler.

00:00:42 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:00:43 ◼   ► In all seriousness, it's not like we get there and anybody really in general talks politics.

00:00:50 ◼   ► But I have noticed over the years that two programmers of different political allegiances

00:00:59 ◼   ► can have a reasonable discussion in a way that almost nobody else, if one is a conservative,

00:01:05 ◼   ► the other is a liberal, you know, a Republican, a Democrat, whatever you guys have up there

00:01:09 ◼   ► in Montreal.

00:01:10 ◼   ► But you could be on different sides.

00:01:13 ◼   ► And programmers can have, because their minds work in a very logical way, that they can

00:01:18 ◼   ► have a reasonable discourse about politics.

00:01:21 ◼   ► That's not to say one's going to agree with the other, but it doesn't devolve into ad

00:01:27 ◼   ► hominem arguments.

00:01:28 ◼   ► It's interesting you say that.

00:01:31 ◼   ► I agree, actually, yeah.

00:01:32 ◼   ► I've had a lot of discussions with people that I don't agree with politically, but it's

00:01:36 ◼   ► always remained pretty civil.

00:01:42 ◼   ► And I think you're right.

00:01:43 ◼   ► I think it's like an analytical point of view, where the other guy has a good point.

00:01:46 ◼   ► well okay you accept the point and you move on because if you're arguing about

00:01:51 ◼   ► design or something like that well that's always going to be subjective but

00:01:55 ◼   ► there's an awful lot of programming when you're collaborating with someone where

00:01:58 ◼   ► it's like math it either works or it doesn't work right I mean ultimately

00:02:02 ◼   ► your the feature either works or doesn't you know I mean you may have designed it

00:02:07 ◼   ► poorly but there's a very concrete like does it crash or does it actually

00:02:10 ◼   ► achieve the result that you want right are you getting 60 frames per second or

00:02:15 ◼   ► or you're not getting sixty frames per second industry

00:02:18 ◼   ► yesterday binary exactly

00:02:20 ◼   ► and i feel that it makes it in the same way that that works for technical

00:02:24 ◼   ► arguments emerge for political arguments just

00:02:27 ◼   ► to shoot an issue about movies it also makes for good conversation

00:02:33 ◼   ► idea and i could because he that i mean movies is a bit different is that

00:02:37 ◼   ► getting subjected to that one right like what's your

00:02:39 ◼   ► sixty frames per second for movie like what's your objective when you try to

00:02:42 ◼   ► achieve

00:02:44 ◼   ► It's kind of-- it's not obvious.

00:02:47 ◼   ► Still makes-- but it's that sort of mindset still

00:02:49 ◼   ► makes for good conversation.

00:02:51 ◼   ► It's why I do--

00:02:52 ◼   ► I just have-- once I get back and I catch up on sleep

00:02:56 ◼   ► a little bit, it always occurs to me that I just have--

00:02:58 ◼   ► I have a great time at WWDC.

00:03:01 ◼   ► Yeah, I have a blast, too.

00:03:03 ◼   ► But I mean, you've got a--

00:03:04 ◼   ► I mean, you're a very analytical kind of guy.

00:03:06 ◼   ► So I'm not surprised that you find that refreshing.

00:03:13 ◼   ► Right.

00:03:13 ◼   ► you know even the journalists who are on the same beat the guys who work at Mac

00:03:16 ◼   ► World and stuff like that I mean they're you know they may not be programmers but

00:03:20 ◼   ► they're closer to being programmers than most people who can you know say that

00:03:24 ◼   ► they're writers. I think they're very analytical, yeah it's like a lot of

00:03:29 ◼   ► analytical people. Right and I think that's why you know like Jason Snell's

00:03:33 ◼   ► podcast the the incomparable where they talk about movies and science fiction

00:03:37 ◼   ► and stuff like that that it's more interesting to me than than your you

00:03:41 ◼   ► know, a general purpose science fiction movie podcast would be because their approach to it is

00:03:47 ◼   ► is again analytical. Yeah, I agree. I'm a big fan of that show. And again, they dissect

00:03:55 ◼   ► the subject and lovingly, but they do like a really good job of sort of tearing it down,

00:04:00 ◼   ► breaking it apart and saying what they like and don't like about it. And when they disagree,

00:04:04 ◼   ► it is it's uh it's a good argument it's you know right

00:04:09 ◼   ► right

00:04:11 ◼   ► do we get any fights last week i don't remember uh

00:04:15 ◼   ► i don't know you had a black eye like tuesday morning i don't know what

00:04:18 ◼   ► happened is that amy could have been amy i don't

00:04:21 ◼   ► know maybe i know you know what she was very excited that you're going to be on

00:04:23 ◼   ► the show this week oh yeah yeah that's just

00:04:27 ◼   ► yeah she actually said that she might listen to it this time really

00:04:30 ◼   ► yeah it's that's high praise she didn't even listen to to cable so

00:04:34 ◼   ► She was...

00:04:36 ◼   ► That's true. You know, a couple people told me that.

00:04:39 ◼   ► That they were like, at the live show last week, they said that, you know, all that noise in the back of the room,

00:04:46 ◼   ► you know, that was your wife.

00:04:48 ◼   ► It was also, it was her who texted me that they'd closed the bar.

00:04:55 ◼   ► Oh, was it? I thought it was mine.

00:04:58 ◼   ► Oh, both of them did. I got two texts during the show.

00:05:01 ◼   ► That's awesome. I considered it and then it decided to be polite.

00:05:03 ◼   ► Right, from my wife and from the guy who owns the podcast network I'm on.

00:05:09 ◼   ► They're the two people who wanted the bar reopened rather than to listen to the show.

00:05:14 ◼   ► Well, I gotta tell you, once the bar opened, I stopped listening to your show.

00:05:20 ◼   ► Well, my thought was...

00:05:22 ◼   ► I listened after. I went back and listened to it again. Cable's awesome.

00:05:26 ◼   ► Oh, Cable is. It's unbelievable.

00:05:28 ◼   ► Very, very tough for active fellow.

00:05:29 ◼   ► I keep saying to people that with bringing them up there for the live shows. It's cheating. It's really like, you know

00:05:35 ◼   ► It's it's it's just cheating. So you show up for your neighborhood

00:05:39 ◼   ► three-on-three basketball game and you've you've brought Kareem Abdul-Jabbar with you and

00:05:45 ◼   ► Seven foot two and

00:05:48 ◼   ► Like personality wise it's cable. The cable sasser is like the the size of Hockenberry

00:05:55 ◼   ► Not that not that Hockenberry doesn't have a great personality, but I mean he's got like a just a towering

00:06:00 ◼   ► Immense uses he's a giant of a personality right so you know what's funny. I was trying to reach for a

00:06:07 ◼   ► Some kind of baseball metaphor to describe

00:06:10 ◼   ► Cable, but you went with the cream of dual jaguar once I was trying to play you a sports game

00:06:15 ◼   ► But you beat me to it. Well basketball is the rare sport where you can

00:06:23 ◼   ► You could bring in a guy who's seven foot two and then that's it. There's nothing anybody can do we're gonna

00:06:28 ◼   ► I mean, there's nothing in baseball that's quite like that

00:06:30 ◼   ► I mean you could have I guess a pickup game and if you brought in the top pitcher in the major leagues

00:06:35 ◼   ► Nobody's gonna hit the guy but it's not gonna be quite as obscene as you know, seven footer literally a giant, right?

00:06:42 ◼   ► Yeah, but I thought that the live show went well

00:06:48 ◼   ► Yeah, my snap judgment on that though the bar situation was and I couldn't really think about it or discuss it because cable

00:06:54 ◼   ► And I were in mid discussion

00:06:55 ◼   ► But I'm just and that's the way I think you make better

00:06:58 ◼   ► Decisions like that if you just have to make the decision instantly you make the right one and my thought was

00:07:03 ◼   ► Everybody if if we open the bar and it gets noisy in the back and people can't listen to the show

00:07:13 ◼   ► They can always listen to the download version the next day or next week whenever

00:07:18 ◼   ► Whereas if we keep the bar closed, they're never gonna get another chance to have that drink. I

00:07:22 ◼   ► Can't agree with you more that's what I did if they listen to the show like the next day or whenever it came out

00:07:31 ◼   ► walking around San Francisco

00:07:34 ◼   ► But yeah, that was a day so whatever I got a follow cable thanks a lot for that man

00:07:42 ◼   ► My guest this week, I should probably say, is Guy English.

00:07:46 ◼   ► Guy, thanks for being here.

00:07:48 ◼   ► No, it's a pleasure.

00:07:49 ◼   ► So Guy's background, I don't even know how to describe it. What do you do?

00:07:54 ◼   ► I'm a programmer.

00:07:57 ◼   ► But you specialize in graphics, more or less.

00:08:00 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, I worked in the PC game industry for years, and then I did some stuff on the consoles, like PSP stuff.

00:08:09 ◼   ► Then I left and joined Rogue Amoeba and I did a bunch of Mac software.

00:08:14 ◼   ► And then when the iPhone came out, I started contracting.

00:08:19 ◼   ► I've done a lot of work on games and graphics in particular.

00:08:22 ◼   ► But you're like a guy who's going to sweat the details on frames per second.

00:08:26 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:08:31 ◼   ► You're going to make something that's supposed to animate.

00:08:32 ◼   ► You're going to sweat the details to make it smooth.

00:08:35 ◼   ► Yes, that's pretty much what I do.

00:08:35 ◼   ► optimize stuff, you know, get the algorithms working, figure out the pipeline to make the

00:08:40 ◼   ► process work smoothly.

00:08:42 ◼   ► Right.

00:08:43 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:08:44 ◼   ► I still think, I think that there's some other WWDC news to talk about.

00:08:47 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:08:48 ◼   ► I think everybody has sort of talked the retina MacBook Pro more or less to death.

00:08:55 ◼   ► Right.

00:08:56 ◼   ► But there is something about that that I don't, I don't think I talked about this with cable

00:09:00 ◼   ► last week because I don't I don't think I'd had the machine long enough and you

00:09:07 ◼   ► you've seen it too and the thing that they got me and stop me if I did talk

00:09:12 ◼   ► about this with cable it's all a kind of a blur but that the pixels per inch is

00:09:19 ◼   ► lower than on the iPad than on the iPhone iPhone is like 300 and some that

00:09:24 ◼   ► iPad is 267 pixels per inch in that retina MacBook Pro is 220 pixels per

00:09:30 ◼   ► Right.

00:09:31 ◼   ► And so I kind of thought, well, you know, I knew it was going to look awesome, but I

00:09:35 ◼   ► kind of thought maybe it wouldn't look as awesome as the phone and iPad because it's

00:09:40 ◼   ► just not as many pixels per inch.

00:09:41 ◼   ► And I know that part of that is about expected viewing distance from the screen, and you

00:09:46 ◼   ► tend to be further away from a 15-inch laptop than you are from an iPad, and you tend to

00:09:51 ◼   ► hold an iPhone really close to your face.

00:09:55 ◼   ► But what I have found in the week now that I'm really using this machine is that text

00:10:00 ◼   ► looks way better than even the phone and the iPad.

00:10:06 ◼   ► It's blowing me away that it looks even better, that it actually makes me start to see the

00:10:12 ◼   ► pixels on the iPad and the iPhone retina displays.

00:10:14 ◼   ► I think I know what it is.

00:10:16 ◼   ► And it's the subpixel anti-aliasing, which is only on the Mac and not on iOS for various

00:10:24 ◼   ► reasons and I know some pixel anti-aliasing is still somewhat

00:10:29 ◼   ► controversial amongst those of us who really care about like anti aliasing

00:10:33 ◼   ► algorithms because I know like Mike Mattis had a tweet a couple weeks ago

00:10:37 ◼   ► he told everybody they should just turn it off that everything looks better if

00:10:40 ◼   ► you don't if you don't have it yeah and I guess I mean for anybody who doesn't

00:10:47 ◼   ► know the difference I mean I don't want this is one of those things where I

00:10:50 ◼   ► could take 20 minutes to explain it. But on the Mac, it defaults to, they call it best

00:10:57 ◼   ► for LCD. And the idea is that you use the red, green, and blue sub-pixels that comprise

00:11:07 ◼   ► each actual pixel on the screen. You use the physical location of them to do the anti-aliasing,

00:11:15 ◼   ► which if you zoom in, if you take a screenshot and zoom it way up, you actually get like

00:11:18 ◼   ► like these weird color fringes around the letters. So if you have black text on a white

00:11:24 ◼   ► background, traditional anti-aliasing, the anti-aliasing would be done with shades of

00:11:29 ◼   ► gray, which makes sense. Common sense would tell you that's how you would make these pixels

00:11:34 ◼   ► look smoother, the curves look smoother. With subpixel anti-aliasing, it's actually colors,

00:11:41 ◼   ► and it looks really weird if you zoom in. And some people, if the pixels on your display

00:11:45 ◼   ► big enough can see it with their naked eye and that bothers them and it also does some

00:11:49 ◼   ► weird things where it kind of makes I think on older displays with bigger pixels it makes

00:11:55 ◼   ► the fonts look thicker, chunkier.

00:11:59 ◼   ► Well chunkier than without any kind of anti-aliasing.

00:12:02 ◼   ► Right.

00:12:03 ◼   ► Because if you, yeah, if you still like…

00:12:05 ◼   ► But maybe chunkier than with traditional grayscale anti-aliasing, I think, that makes it look

00:12:10 ◼   ► like Bolt makes everything look a little bolder.

00:12:13 ◼   ► You don't think so?

00:12:14 ◼   ► I don't think so because I mean the traditional grayscale, all three of those pixels are going

00:12:20 ◼   ► to be lit up, like sub pixels are going to be lit up, right?

00:12:23 ◼   ► Right.

00:12:24 ◼   ► I don't know, maybe.

00:12:26 ◼   ► You know what, I'd have to see it side by side.

00:12:28 ◼   ► But either way, there's visual artifacts.

00:12:32 ◼   ► And I think that the idea was that if the pixels get small enough, you don't really

00:12:36 ◼   ► have to worry about sub pixel anti-aliasing, that regular anti-aliasing is good enough

00:12:40 ◼   ► because the pixels are so small.

00:12:41 ◼   ► But using the MacBook Pro for a week, there's no doubt in my mind that sub-pixel anti-aliasing

00:12:48 ◼   ► still makes a difference.

00:12:49 ◼   ► It makes everything look – it makes text look just impossibly good.

00:12:54 ◼   ► And you can see it because there are still parts in Mac OS 10.7, stuff that – you're

00:13:01 ◼   ► going to correct me.

00:13:02 ◼   ► This is one of the reasons I have you on the show is stuff that's drawn into a layer-backed

00:13:06 ◼   ► view – is that right?

00:13:07 ◼   ► is not, doesn't get the sub-pixel anti-aliasing.

00:13:13 ◼   ► That's correct on 10.7, yeah.

00:13:15 ◼   ► And so you can see this, the easy way that everybody can see it is with the transparent

00:13:19 ◼   ► menu bar that Apple introduced a couple of versions of Mac OS X where you can see, half

00:13:25 ◼   ► see your desktop through your menu bar.

00:13:28 ◼   ► The text in the menu bar therefore gets the non-sub-pixel anti-aliasing.

00:13:34 ◼   ► And on the MacBook Retina MacBook Pro, you can really see the difference.

00:13:38 ◼   ► I mean, it looks good.

00:13:39 ◼   ► It certainly looks better than any text on a non-Retina Mac, but it doesn't look as good

00:13:44 ◼   ► as the rest of the text throughout Mac OS X on that Retina display.

00:13:49 ◼   ► So you…

00:13:51 ◼   ► Okay.

00:13:52 ◼   ► Well, I mean, so I looked at, you know, I looked at your review and the MacWorld one,

00:13:59 ◼   ► and I loved it.

00:14:00 ◼   ► I mean, the text looked amazing, but I didn't…

00:14:03 ◼   ► you know i'd probably should done and it is indeed injected allowed but it didn't

00:14:06 ◼   ► bother uh...

00:14:08 ◼   ► do you find it great like now

00:14:11 ◼   ► because almost everything is a pixel and a list

00:14:15 ◼   ► so it's just you know it's like ed

00:14:17 ◼   ► it's it's not grading because it's like looking at

00:14:20 ◼   ► very very good text and insanely very good text

00:14:24 ◼   ► but you can see the difference you could see you can start

00:14:27 ◼   ► on the menu bar you can see pixels if you get close enough

00:14:30 ◼   ► When you're looking inside a safari window, forget it.

00:14:33 ◼   ► I mean, I can get as close as I want.

00:14:35 ◼   ► And it's really funny.

00:14:36 ◼   ► It's like, I've spent this week not really using it so much,

00:14:42 ◼   ► but just getting my nose up almost up against the screen

00:14:45 ◼   ► and trying to see the details.

00:14:47 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:14:48 ◼   ► That's what-- I think that's what everybody does.

00:14:50 ◼   ► First time they get one, they just

00:14:51 ◼   ► stick their face right up to it and basically try

00:14:54 ◼   ► to find pixel.

00:14:55 ◼   ► But it really does.

00:14:55 ◼   ► With text especially, it is--

00:14:58 ◼   ► to the naked eye, you get as close as you want,

00:15:00 ◼   ► and you just don't see pixels even the way you can when you get real close to the iPhone

00:15:04 ◼   ► 4 and stuff like that.

00:15:05 ◼   ► Right.

00:15:06 ◼   ► Well, I mean, so they don't do – I think you know this, but they don't do sub-pixel

00:15:10 ◼   ► anti-aliasing on the devices because you can change the orientation.

00:15:14 ◼   ► And when you change the orientation, you can't rely on the layout of the sub-pixels the same

00:15:19 ◼   ► way you can on a desktop.

00:15:21 ◼   ► That was so amazing because I swear to you that was my next question.

00:15:24 ◼   ► And I believe that we've – I've asked you this privately like an instant messenger

00:15:28 ◼   ► years ago. But you, you're my go-to guy for questions like that. That was my question.

00:15:33 ◼   ► So why don't they do subpixel anti-aliasing on…

00:15:37 ◼   ► Right. Okay.

00:15:39 ◼   ► So, and it's because it, so your answer is more or less because it actually relies

00:15:43 ◼   ► on the order RGB of the subpixels.

00:15:47 ◼   ► Exactly. It's a physical layout. So if you picture the, you know, going from left to

00:15:51 ◼   ► write on your screen, it's RGB, RGB, RGB, RGB.

00:15:56 ◼   ► And you can rely on that when you're drawing your shape, your letter shape.

00:16:01 ◼   ► But now flip that so that it's in vertical orientation, and it's no longer the same way, right?

00:16:06 ◼   ► It's like it's RGB going downwards rather than going across.

00:16:12 ◼   ► So the algorithm has to change and it's basically just, since you can't rely on the layout of where the sub-pixel is going to be,

00:16:19 ◼   ► you can't really use the same algorithm.

00:16:22 ◼   ► And since the phone is so high density, they just don't bother.

00:16:25 ◼   ► Even the original phone was high density.

00:16:28 ◼   ► So one of the changes in Mountain Lion, which references back

00:16:32 ◼   ► to what I was saying before, is one of the new things in Mountain Lion

00:16:35 ◼   ► is that text in layer-backed views now gets the subpixel anti-aliasing.

00:16:42 ◼   ► Yes.

00:16:43 ◼   ► And this has been a long time in the works.

00:16:45 ◼   ► Right.

00:16:46 ◼   ► Well, it's not an easy thing to do because a layer is--

00:16:53 ◼   ► I'm trying to figure out how to describe it.

00:16:55 ◼   ► But I mean, so if you think of onion paper,

00:16:59 ◼   ► when you draw on something and you

00:17:01 ◼   ► can overlay it on something else so you can see what's below it.

00:17:04 ◼   ► Basically, layers are like that.

00:17:05 ◼   ► You draw something on a layer, and then you

00:17:06 ◼   ► place it over something else so you can see what's below it.

00:17:09 ◼   ► And you composite the scene with a series

00:17:12 ◼   ► of these sort of transparent layers.

00:17:15 ◼   ► Now the issue with anti-aliasing text is that you need to anti-alias it against the background.

00:17:20 ◼   ► So if you're drawing text into a transparent layer,

00:17:26 ◼   ► as you're drawing the text, you don't know what the background is going to be.

00:17:30 ◼   ► And the background could be animated.

00:17:34 ◼   ► It could be animated, exactly.

00:17:36 ◼   ► It could be a lot of things.

00:17:38 ◼   ► So it's not obvious how to correctly anti-alias the text.

00:17:43 ◼   ► So they've fixed this in Mountain Lion.

00:17:48 ◼   ► They've changed the way that they handled venturing the text

00:17:50 ◼   ► so that it does actually manage to anti-alias

00:17:53 ◼   ► in a layer-back view.

00:17:57 ◼   ► Which is amazing because I think we'll talk about it later.

00:17:58 ◼   ► But I'm working on a Mac app,

00:18:03 ◼   ► and we had a plan to make anti-alias layer-back text work.

00:18:05 ◼   ► And it was going to be a huge pain in the ass to do.

00:18:11 ◼   ► But Mountain Lion just solves the problem for us,

00:18:10 ◼   ► So we don't need to worry about that.

00:18:12 ◼   ► We can come back to that later.

00:18:15 ◼   ► And so one of the things, and another thing that we're going to come back to later, but

00:18:19 ◼   ► while we're on the anti-aliasing, I should mention it, is with the Microsoft Surface

00:18:23 ◼   ► tablets, which they're saying with their displays, they're saying they have these clear type

00:18:28 ◼   ► HD and clear type full HD displays.

00:18:33 ◼   ► And clear type is Microsoft's name for their anti-aliasing algorithm.

00:18:38 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:18:39 ◼   ► Anybody who's a nerd and really sweats these details will know that if you look at anti-aliased

00:18:44 ◼   ► text on Mac and the same fonts, like on a web page, say, on Windows, it looks different

00:18:49 ◼   ► because they have a different anti-aliasing algorithm, which some people prefer, other

00:18:53 ◼   ► people don't, but they call it clear type.

00:18:55 ◼   ► Right.

00:18:56 ◼   ► It's the original sub-pixel anti-aliasing, actually.

00:18:59 ◼   ► I believe that is true.

00:19:01 ◼   ► Well, I think Woz did something on the Apple tier.

00:19:05 ◼   ► But that's one of the things that stuck out to me.

00:19:07 ◼   ► Was it everything for me? Exactly. One of the things that that struck me that with the

00:19:13 ◼   ► announcement was exactly what we just talked about was that that on iOS devices, you don't

00:19:20 ◼   ► get sub pixel anti aliasing because you're going to rotate the display and they can't

00:19:25 ◼   ► order it. So then they say these things have clear type displays. I wonder how they did

00:19:28 ◼   ► that. And I believe what were you gonna say? I just redefined the term. Yeah, that they're

00:19:35 ◼   ► they're not really doing, it has nothing to do with the old clear type. They're just reusing

00:19:39 ◼   ► the name in the same way that they're reusing surface, right, which used to mean this ban

00:19:44 ◼   ► you clear type just means a higher density display. That's my take on it. All right.

00:19:47 ◼   ► Do you ever see the old surface, the big tabletop thing? In person? No, I did once I saw one

00:19:53 ◼   ► up at Drexel University a couple of about a year ago, I think, or sometime in the last

00:19:58 ◼   ► year, I was up there to do a little talk and a guy ran a like a robotics engineering lab

00:20:04 ◼   ► but invited me to do a little talk here in Philadelphia.

00:20:08 ◼   ► And they had a Surface, and he let me play with it for a while.

00:20:11 ◼   ► And I could not believe how laggy it was.

00:20:13 ◼   ► And he was like, yeah, the latency is just dreadful.

00:20:16 ◼   ► They had it, and they were doing some cool stuff with it.

00:20:19 ◼   ► They were doing some really cool stuff with mapping with it,

00:20:24 ◼   ► like the grad students, but that they were just getting killed.

00:20:26 ◼   ► The latency was just deadly.

00:20:29 ◼   ► I think even pre-iPad, everybody would agree.

00:20:33 ◼   ► It was laggy by any standards, but compared to what everybody was used to, it was horrendous.

00:20:39 ◼   ► I don't know that it would have taken off regardless.

00:20:41 ◼   ► It was sort of—

00:20:42 ◼   ► Oh, it wasn't going to take off.

00:20:45 ◼   ► It was kind of expensive.

00:20:46 ◼   ► It was big and bulky and how many people need that kind of stuff.

00:20:48 ◼   ► I thought it was a cool idea.

00:20:49 ◼   ► It was pretty interesting.

00:20:50 ◼   ► But you know what?

00:20:51 ◼   ► That shipped the same year as the iPhone.

00:20:55 ◼   ► I cannot believe how ideal it was.

00:20:57 ◼   ► You know what, though?

00:20:58 ◼   ► I think long-term, though, somebody is going to make something like that.

00:21:01 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:21:02 ◼   ► Ten years from now, wouldn't Apple have something that size, running iOS?

00:21:07 ◼   ► Maybe. I think it's an interesting form factor. I think you can do things in a shared space

00:21:12 ◼   ► and collaborate with it in an interesting way.

00:21:17 ◼   ► I don't think they've nailed it, but I think they've got an idea that's pretty decent.

00:21:20 ◼   ► It would be to iOS what the Mac Pro is to Mac OS X.

00:21:25 ◼   ► Something for, you know, that they're only going to sell a very small sliver compared to the mass market,

00:21:29 ◼   ► but that you could charge a lot of money, and the people who need it really want it.

00:21:32 ◼   ► Right.

00:21:33 ◼   ► You know, I could see that kind of thing in a store.

00:21:36 ◼   ► Right.

00:21:37 ◼   ► Totally.

00:21:38 ◼   ► Or, you know, all sorts of retail-type situations, I think.

00:21:43 ◼   ► Or a classroom or something like that.

00:21:44 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:21:45 ◼   ► It's like a shared space.

00:21:46 ◼   ► It's a very flexible workspace.

00:21:49 ◼   ► Not to mention, it's actually flat, and you can put stuff on it.

00:21:52 ◼   ► Right.

00:21:53 ◼   ► Which is, you know, opens up a bunch of other interesting possibilities.

00:21:58 ◼   ► With the sub-pixel anti-aliasing, I know one way that everybody, I always see it, is when

00:22:02 ◼   ► people are dicking around with CSS and using transparent layers in CSS, then it instantly

00:22:10 ◼   ► ticks the text into the non-sub-pixel anti-aliased thing.

00:22:16 ◼   ► I wonder if that gets fixed automatically now on 10.8.

00:22:20 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:22:21 ◼   ► I have to look at that.

00:22:22 ◼   ► I bet the WebKit guys will make it work.

00:22:24 ◼   ► If the system supports it, I'll bet they do.

00:22:27 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:22:28 ◼   ► some pretty fancy stuff.

00:22:29 ◼   ► So yeah, that's interesting.

00:22:32 ◼   ► I mean, have you seen it?

00:22:33 ◼   ► Have you, oh yeah, you're not running 10.8 on that thing.

00:22:35 ◼   ► - You know what, but I'm thinking after,

00:22:38 ◼   ► I was thinking that I should though.

00:22:40 ◼   ► That's what I was thinking before I do finish my review.

00:22:42 ◼   ► I'm gonna, you know, I don't know.

00:22:44 ◼   ► I feel a little bad putting a beta on an Apple loaner,

00:22:48 ◼   ► but I feel like even if it goes bad,

00:22:50 ◼   ► I can always just reinstall the line on the thing.

00:22:52 ◼   ► - Well, I mean, if you got like a USB drive,

00:22:54 ◼   ► just boot off that and put it on that, you know?

00:22:57 ◼   ► Yeah, I guess so. I don't know. That might be… I don't know.

00:23:01 ◼   ► I don't think they're going to care that you put… I really don't think they're

00:23:05 ◼   ► going to give you…

00:23:06 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't think so either. But I do feel… I would feel a little guilty mailing

00:23:09 ◼   ► it back to them, like if it were bricked.

00:23:10 ◼   ► Like all buts done.

00:23:11 ◼   ► Yeah, it's like a brick door.

00:23:13 ◼   ► Exactly. Thanks. Thanks for the match.

00:23:17 ◼   ► I do. And I don't know. I, too… I try to take good care of all my stuff. I mean,

00:23:22 ◼   ► My knock on wood, my iPhone 4S is still in perfect shape.

00:23:27 ◼   ► But with the Apple review stuff, I take extra good care of it.

00:23:30 ◼   ► And I'm sure they actually don't care.

00:23:32 ◼   ► If you mailed it back and it was nicked up and had dings on it and stuff, what do they

00:23:36 ◼   ► care?

00:23:37 ◼   ► I mean, they give the things out like candy.

00:23:38 ◼   ► But I feel like, I don't know, it's like a sense of politeness.

00:23:44 ◼   ► When you're in somebody else's home, you're more careful, as careful as you are in your

00:23:49 ◼   ► own home not to put your shoes on the furniture, I'm twice as careful in somebody else's

00:23:54 ◼   ► home.

00:23:55 ◼   ► And that's what I feel like when I'm using the Apple refugium.

00:23:56 ◼   ► Right.

00:23:57 ◼   ► Well, I mean, if it makes you feel any better, I wouldn't trust anything that you mailed

00:24:01 ◼   ► me back that had been in your home for a while either.

00:24:03 ◼   ► I just, you know, things going right in the furnace.

00:24:06 ◼   ► Right.

00:24:07 ◼   ► I'm done with it.

00:24:09 ◼   ► That is true.

00:24:10 ◼   ► I bet that is what they do too, that I mail it back to them and they just like white gloves,

00:24:14 ◼   ► they just turn it upside down and put it into an incinerator.

00:24:18 ◼   ► I'll bet they do.

00:24:19 ◼   ► It's the only sensible thing to do.

00:24:21 ◼   ► Right.

00:24:22 ◼   ► Right into whatever they recycle the stuff.

00:24:26 ◼   ► Somebody said, "Do you know anything about this?"

00:24:28 ◼   ► I'm sort of jumping all over the place here.

00:24:30 ◼   ► There was a thing about the MacBook Pro not being upgradeable and that you can't get

00:24:36 ◼   ► into it and blah, blah, blah.

00:24:37 ◼   ► The iFixit guy, he also said that he talked to his pals in the recycling industry and

00:24:42 ◼   ► And that the way it's all glued together means that they don't know how it could be recycled.

00:24:48 ◼   ► I thought that was nonsense because I thought if you wanted to recycle an Apple product

00:24:51 ◼   ► that you're not using anymore, you just go into the Apple store and say, "Here, I'm done

00:24:54 ◼   ► with this thing."

00:24:55 ◼   ► And then they just take it.

00:24:56 ◼   ► It's their problem.

00:24:57 ◼   ► Yeah, I've done it.

00:24:58 ◼   ► Yeah, I haven't done it in a while.

00:25:00 ◼   ► I've sort of let a lot of my old Apple kit that I own pile up.

00:25:04 ◼   ► But I was thinking it actually reminded me that maybe I should bring some of this stuff

00:25:07 ◼   ► in.

00:25:08 ◼   ► Like, do I really need a PowerPC PowerBook anymore?

00:25:11 ◼   ► Probably not.

00:25:12 ◼   ► Maybe not.

00:25:13 ◼   ► Maybe it would get me to shut up and stop calling MacBook Pros "power books" if

00:25:18 ◼   ► I actually did.

00:25:19 ◼   ► But that's what I thought is it's not your problem.

00:25:21 ◼   ► You don't have to go.

00:25:22 ◼   ► It's not like you buy a MacBook Pro and then when you want to recycle it, you've

00:25:25 ◼   ► got to go and pry it apart with a screwdriver and separate the aluminum from the glass and

00:25:30 ◼   ► all that.

00:25:31 ◼   ► You just give it to Apple and it's their problem.

00:25:32 ◼   ► Yeah, no.

00:25:33 ◼   ► I mean, that guy had a beef.

00:25:34 ◼   ► He had a bone to grind.

00:25:36 ◼   ► And then, you know, it just takes one.

00:25:37 ◼   ► He calls up his recycling buddy and being like, "Hey, do you know how to recycle this?"

00:25:41 ◼   ► And the guy's like, no.

00:25:43 ◼   ► Well, it's not like you can't figure it out.

00:25:46 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

00:25:47 ◼   ► That's just silly.

00:25:48 ◼   ► That whole scandal is ridiculous to me.

00:25:51 ◼   ► I don't understand it at all.

00:25:53 ◼   ► Yeah, it's bizarre.

00:25:55 ◼   ► I mean, I used to build my own PCs and stuff.

00:25:57 ◼   ► And that's over.

00:25:59 ◼   ► It's done.

00:26:00 ◼   ► I get over it.

00:26:01 ◼   ► Move on.

00:26:02 ◼   ► I can't believe people--

00:26:03 ◼   ► the thing that gets me is that everybody acts each time

00:26:05 ◼   ► like it's a new story.

00:26:06 ◼   ► Right.

00:26:08 ◼   ► I remember you used to be able to buy--

00:26:10 ◼   ► even on a Mac, it wasn't even just a PC thing,

00:26:13 ◼   ► you could buy processor upgrades.

00:26:16 ◼   ► Like the magazines, Macworld was full of them.

00:26:19 ◼   ► It was a huge thing because your computer did cost,

00:26:21 ◼   ► it cost so much back then.

00:26:23 ◼   ► You'd buy a new Mac 2ci in 1991, and it was like five grand.

00:26:28 ◼   ► And then two years later, you could buy a CPU upgrade

00:26:35 ◼   ► for $900 rather than buy a new $4,000 computer.

00:26:39 ◼   ► Well, that was actually, you know, it's a pretty reasonable thing to do.

00:26:43 ◼   ► You know, I mean, I don't think I ever bought a processor upgrade, but it was always nice

00:26:47 ◼   ► to know that you could.

00:26:48 ◼   ► Jon Streeter Right.

00:26:50 ◼   ► And I think that sort of comfort is what some people are missing.

00:26:53 ◼   ► But I think he nailed it with the price.

00:26:57 ◼   ► When it's 5,000 bucks, that's a lot of money.

00:27:00 ◼   ► I'm going to keep it going, you know.

00:27:01 ◼   ► But when, like, what's this Vetnamac?

00:27:04 ◼   ► 2,200 something?

00:27:05 ◼   ► I think it starts at $2,200.

00:27:08 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:27:09 ◼   ► I mean, that's a chunk of change.

00:27:11 ◼   ► But it's less than half of what a good Mac used to cost you.

00:27:18 ◼   ► And it's going to last longer and it's a lot more usable.

00:27:21 ◼   ► Anyway, I just really don't understand it.

00:27:25 ◼   ► If you didn't see this coming after the iPod shipped without AA batteries, I don't

00:27:30 ◼   ► know what to say.

00:27:31 ◼   ► It's been like 10 years now.

00:27:34 ◼   ► And you do pay a little bit of a premium, but it's not anywhere near as much as it used

00:27:38 ◼   ► to be.

00:27:39 ◼   ► I forget who priced it out.

00:27:41 ◼   ► I think it was Marco's podcast last week, but I'm pretty sure it was Marco and Dan talking

00:27:49 ◼   ► about it.

00:27:50 ◼   ► Where if you upgrade, if you buy the old 15-inch MacBook Pro, the new old one, the non-retinal

00:28:02 ◼   ► And in the build to order upgrade to an SSD and instead of spinning hard drive

00:28:08 ◼   ► it it almost it comes out to like more than the price of the MacBook Pro with

00:28:13 ◼   ► retina display that has one built in and even if you like go to OWC or one of

00:28:19 ◼   ► those places and buy the SSD yourself so you're not paying the Apple premium for

00:28:24 ◼   ► it it still comes out about even like it's actually not that much of a premium

00:28:29 ◼   ► for it and that's you know obviously I think that they've got these things

00:28:32 ◼   ► packed in a way that you know it there really are engineering trade-offs for it

00:28:37 ◼   ► that's the other thing that gets me is the people who make this assumption that

00:28:39 ◼   ► Apple's doing this out of out of upgrade spite and that it's not about

00:28:44 ◼   ► engineering problems I mean I can't prove that it is I can't prove that

00:28:49 ◼   ► gluing the I forget what's glued something's glued in there but whatever

00:28:54 ◼   ► it is that's glued rather than using screws I think it might be the SSD I

00:28:58 ◼   ► I can't prove that that's an engineering thing and that they're solving a real problem and

00:29:03 ◼   ► that not having little screw mounts makes it even thinner than it could be.

00:29:08 ◼   ► That's what I would bet, that they're solving an engineering problem.

00:29:11 ◼   ► I'd bet that too.

00:29:14 ◼   ► I mean, why?

00:29:17 ◼   ► Why would they bother?

00:29:23 ◼   ► Apple thinks about the product.

00:29:26 ◼   ► I don't think they'd spent a lot of time thinking about how to screw random people that want

00:29:30 ◼   ► to upgrade their SSD.

00:29:31 ◼   ► Right.

00:29:32 ◼   ► Does it drive – you finish first.

00:29:36 ◼   ► You finish first.

00:29:37 ◼   ► What was I going to say?

00:29:38 ◼   ► Yeah, I think it's a byproduct that people can't mess with these things rather than

00:29:43 ◼   ► the – like an intent.

00:29:46 ◼   ► Right.

00:29:47 ◼   ► And I don't think it's any coincidence that as the devices get thinner and lighter,

00:29:53 ◼   ► that's when these tradeoffs are made.

00:29:55 ◼   ► Right.

00:29:56 ◼   ► It's the air that you can't replace that the RAM is soldered on the motherboard and that

00:30:03 ◼   ► it's on a 13-inch MacBook Pro, which still has the traditional form factor.

00:30:07 ◼   ► There's still a little screw panel you can take off and get it out.

00:30:10 ◼   ► And it's when the MacBook Pro went to this quarter-inch reduction in height that they

00:30:16 ◼   ► switched.

00:30:17 ◼   ► Right.

00:30:18 ◼   ► I mean, I think the reason they have the old new MacBook Pros and this one is this is basically

00:30:25 ◼   ► shipping, I don't want to say prototype, but it's the next breed.

00:30:30 ◼   ► It's the next generation of stuff. Like when they shipped the Air and it was just this one unique sort of thing.

00:30:36 ◼   ► It was a new approach. I think this Retina Mac Book Pro is the same kind of thing.

00:30:42 ◼   ► We're going to ship this product. We're going to basically, it's showing the way forward.

00:30:46 ◼   ► It's like, this is the way everything's going to go. We're going to ship this one. We're going to eventually bring this

00:30:54 ◼   ► sort of aesthetic and approach to the product across the entire line. Let me

00:31:02 ◼   ► take a break here and thank our first sponsor. Do you use FantasticAl guy?

00:31:08 ◼   ► I do actually. FantasticAl is our first sponsor and

00:31:15 ◼   ► the thing that always strikes me about FantasticAl is this in the old days I'm

00:31:20 ◼   ► I'm talking way back, like beginning of Mac OS X, I think.

00:31:25 ◼   ► But certainly in the Mac OS 9 era, Apple stayed away from making the apps that you use on

00:31:31 ◼   ► a daily basis.

00:31:33 ◼   ► Mac OS didn't even ship with an email client in the old days.

00:31:35 ◼   ► It didn't have a calendar.

00:31:36 ◼   ► It didn't even have an address book.

00:31:38 ◼   ► And eventually, I think that became untenable and they had to sort of everybody assume that

00:31:42 ◼   ► your system is going to come with stuff like that.

00:31:45 ◼   ► So the good news was, well, there's a system-wide calendar and address book.

00:31:48 ◼   ► The bad news is that meant that third-party address books and calendars really, really

00:31:53 ◼   ► – they sort of kind of got wiped out because they sort of – their business model was

00:31:58 ◼   ► based on the idea that there's an opportunity there and it was taken away.

00:32:03 ◼   ► Well, I think something funny has happened over the years, though, where with some of

00:32:08 ◼   ► these apps – and I think iCal is the first and foremost, and I think it's on everybody's

00:32:12 ◼   ► hit list – is one of the worst apps Apple makes.

00:32:14 ◼   ► It's a huge opportunity for third-party apps because it stinks.

00:32:20 ◼   ► I mean, I have never heard anybody and anybody get started in a rant about iCal.

00:32:24 ◼   ► I have never heard anybody stand up and defend it and say, "Boy, I really like iCal."

00:32:28 ◼   ► Fantastical is a calendar app for the Mac and instead of

00:32:33 ◼   ► trying to do the same thing as iCal but with a better interface, it is like a complete rethinking of how

00:32:40 ◼   ► you interact with a calendar on your Mac. It's a little thing that lives up in your menu bar and you click it or you have a little

00:32:47 ◼   ► you can assign a keyboard shortcut to drop it down.

00:32:51 ◼   ► Just a little skinny panel that drops down from your menu bar shows you this month's calendar

00:32:55 ◼   ► and it shows you in a little list today, tomorrow, the next day, next three days, three four days of your events.

00:33:03 ◼   ► So here's a here's a calendar for the month. Here's your events and

00:33:08 ◼   ► And this is the part that gets me, because this is the thing that's the worst about iCal,

00:33:12 ◼   ► is when you want to make a new event, you just type in a text field in plain language,

00:33:17 ◼   ► and it just parses it. And as it's parsing it, it uses this great interface to sort of show you

00:33:24 ◼   ► what it thinks you're typing. So if you just type "Talk show Thursday 1 p.m."

00:33:32 ◼   ► knows that the event name is talk show. Thursday it knows is this next Thursday and you type

00:33:38 ◼   ► one P and it knows you mean 1 p.m. And you hit return and boom there it is a new event

00:33:43 ◼   ► on your calendar. So instead of like the way iCal drives you nuts, it drives me nuts every

00:33:47 ◼   ► time where it's like you type the name and then you go over to the field and you pick

00:33:51 ◼   ► a month and you go over to the next field and you pick a day and every single thing

00:33:55 ◼   ► is like tab to a new field, tab to a new field. Just one field you type in plain text. It

00:34:01 ◼   ► It does an amazing job guessing what you're doing.

00:34:05 ◼   ► And visually, it's a beautiful app.

00:34:07 ◼   ► It is so convenient.

00:34:08 ◼   ► So it's great for two things that iCal is totally crap for.

00:34:13 ◼   ► One, what's going on?

00:34:14 ◼   ► What's on my schedule today, tomorrow, the next few days?

00:34:18 ◼   ► Easy obvious interface for it.

00:34:20 ◼   ► And for new event creation, you just can't beat it.

00:34:24 ◼   ► I would buy it even if it didn't even have a view.

00:34:26 ◼   ► I would buy Fantastic Cal just for the text field for creating new events.

00:34:32 ◼   ► I think you should have won an ADA and I think it didn't because it's an unconventional app

00:34:38 ◼   ► in that it sits in the menu bar rather than having a main window.

00:34:41 ◼   ► That's a good point.

00:34:42 ◼   ► I do think, and you know what, I think the other reason that I don't think it would win

00:34:46 ◼   ► an ADA is the internal politics of it is that it makes iCal look so bad.

00:34:50 ◼   ► Right, exactly.

00:34:51 ◼   ► No, it's a good point.

00:34:52 ◼   ► It's that caliber though, it really is.

00:34:55 ◼   ► it's got to give it a GDA. Right. And so there's other ones, you know, I'll just mention like

00:35:00 ◼   ► there's busy cow. Right. And I mentioned a competitor while talking about this week sponsor

00:35:05 ◼   ► because fantastical if you use busy cow as your ical replacement, fantastic cow integrates

00:35:11 ◼   ► great with it. The one good thing about the Apple system is that it's a system provided

00:35:15 ◼   ► calendar store like it works with your calendars that you've set up and I count the same way

00:35:19 ◼   ► that busy. So if you're a busy cow user, which I am, I don't use ical for anything if I need

00:35:24 ◼   ► a big full screen here's a you know take up the whole screen thing i use busycal

00:35:28 ◼   ► but fantastic out works great with busycal

00:35:32 ◼   ► uh... but i would buy it just for the the the uh...

00:35:36 ◼   ► the input

00:35:37 ◼   ► such a great app

00:35:38 ◼   ► and here's the best thing

00:35:40 ◼   ► best thing is they're having i'd been this uh... this is one thing about this

00:35:43 ◼   ► doesn't make any sense

00:35:44 ◼   ► they're having a back to school promotion now this i don't understand

00:35:47 ◼   ► it's it's

00:35:48 ◼   ► june my kid just got out of school last week

00:35:50 ◼   ► I don't know. Well, they don't know anything about dates those guys. Yeah, I don't know

00:35:56 ◼   ► that they're having to think they got the calendar all wrong. But they're having a back

00:36:00 ◼   ► to school promotion and it's 50% off. So everybody can get you can buy fantastic Cal for 999.

00:36:07 ◼   ► It's regularly 1999. You can get it now for 999. I think you're nuts if you don't have

00:36:12 ◼   ► this app. And you don't even have to take my word for it because they have a 14 day

00:36:16 ◼   ► free trial.

00:36:17 ◼   ► Oh, man, just do it. Yeah, just just honestly, it's worth 10 bucks just to check out like

00:36:24 ◼   ► if you have any interest in sort of AI or parsing or anything, just pay the 10 bucks,

00:36:30 ◼   ► type a few things into that field and see how good a job it is. It's terrific. Yeah,

00:36:34 ◼   ► so you can just Google fantastic. I'll go to the website or you can just go to flex

00:36:38 ◼   ► a bit, F-L-E-X-I-B-I-T-S dot com, and check it out. 14-day free trial, $9.99, back-to-school

00:36:46 ◼   ► promotion in the middle of June. It's a fantastic app. My thanks to them for sponsoring the

00:36:51 ◼   ► show this week. So back to WWDC.

00:36:55 ◼   ► Jonathon Leibbrandt Yeah.

00:36:56 ◼   ► Dave Asprey I have two more things I want to talk about

00:36:58 ◼   ► from WWDC.

00:36:59 ◼   ► Jonathon Leibbrandt I got a couple of things too.

00:37:00 ◼   ► Dave Asprey All right. Well, one of them is the pull to

00:37:03 ◼   ► refresh that they've added to iOS.

00:37:06 ◼   ► Jonathon Leibbrandt Yeah.

00:37:07 ◼   ► which is something I've been hoping they would do but wondering if they never would

00:37:11 ◼   ► right out of pride well two factors there's two factors there one is pride

00:37:18 ◼   ► well I would say three actually pride obviousness and patents right so pride is that it was not

00:37:32 ◼   ► invented by them. It was invented by Lauren Brikter for his, when, for Tweety, his, you know,

00:37:38 ◼   ► which is now – Brilliant. Brilliant app. Which is now dead. But – Right. But well, now it's the

00:37:45 ◼   ► official Twitter client. No, it's not the same. It's not, it's not Tweety. But he invented it

00:37:50 ◼   ► for Tweety. So Pride would be, well, he invented it, and it was different than anything Apple had

00:37:56 ◼   ► come up with. And so maybe they would, their pride would keep them from adopting something that came

00:38:02 ◼   ► from a third party. Obviousness is that, and this is the worst argument, and I don't

00:38:09 ◼   ► really think even Apple would go for it, is that iOS favors the visual over the implied.

00:38:17 ◼   ► And gestures in iOS are almost always for things that there's a visual way to do. So

00:38:24 ◼   ► like shortcuts that take gestures, there's usually a button that you could tap to do

00:38:29 ◼   ► do it too. But that doesn't really hold water because nobody's saying that they

00:38:33 ◼   ► should get rid of the reload button and only have pull to refresh. They should

00:38:38 ◼   ► just add it as something else and it doesn't take anything away. Well have you

00:38:42 ◼   ► seen what they did do? I haven't, but I don't have it in front of me right now.

00:38:47 ◼   ► They did exactly that. They got rid of the refresh button that only got pulled

00:38:51 ◼   ► to refresh in mail. I didn't notice that. Yeah, which I find weird. I would have

00:38:55 ◼   ► personally I would have kept a button. Yeah, yeah I would have kept the button

00:38:59 ◼   ► too. Because I don't think the button was hurting anybody.

00:39:04 ◼   ► No.

00:39:06 ◼   ► So I'm thinking that most,

00:39:09 ◼   ► I'm thinking that their line of thinking is that

00:39:12 ◼   ► most people have push email.

00:39:17 ◼   ► You don't actually need to refresh your email that much.

00:39:19 ◼   ► By default, it'll just come in.

00:39:22 ◼   ► So getting rid of the button's not that big a deal.

00:39:25 ◼   ► And if you want to pull to refresh, well, you've got it.

00:39:26 ◼   ► Right.

00:39:27 ◼   ► Because I've said this before, you know, and even now, because on my main phone I still

00:39:32 ◼   ► haven't upgraded to the 6 beta, but I, because I've pulled a refresh and how many other apps,

00:39:38 ◼   ► third party apps I use that have adopted it, I pulled a refresh in mail every time I'm

00:39:43 ◼   ► reading mail on my phone.

00:39:44 ◼   ► Every time.

00:39:45 ◼   ► I just do it.

00:39:46 ◼   ► I can't help but think that that's why they finally broke down and added it, is that they

00:39:49 ◼   ► were doing it too.

00:39:51 ◼   ► Probably.

00:39:52 ◼   ► It's just a good idea.

00:39:54 ◼   ► Just makes sense.

00:39:55 ◼   ► what they didn't just add it to mail it's actually added to the to the

00:39:58 ◼   ► underlying frameworks any table view you can have a pull to refresh now right

00:40:02 ◼   ► which is a big deal I think it's sort of a sick officially embraced it's not just

00:40:07 ◼   ► that they've added it to an app it's officially embraced yeah it's part of the

00:40:11 ◼   ► system now now they did it in a kind of a weird way there's that little

00:40:13 ◼   ► animation thing like it looks like a water droplet that you sort of pull

00:40:18 ◼   ► apart or like a maybe like a piece of putty that you're stretching and then

00:40:23 ◼   ► And you reach a breaking point.

00:40:28 ◼   ► And like you said with Cable last week,

00:40:31 ◼   ► it triggers when you break the putty,

00:40:35 ◼   ► rather than when you let go of the, which is a bit weird.

00:40:38 ◼   ► But the other thing I kind of find a bit weird

00:40:43 ◼   ► is that Lauren's implementation

00:40:45 ◼   ► and pretty much all the other ones

00:40:47 ◼   ► have some text telling you what's going to happen.

00:40:49 ◼   ► And the Apple one just has this putty.

00:40:49 ◼   ► It doesn't say like, "Pull to refresh," or it doesn't say what's going to happen.

00:40:55 ◼   ► It's not, you know.

00:40:56 ◼   ► Dave: Right.

00:40:57 ◼   ► They've actually made it less obvious.

00:40:58 ◼   ► Jonathon: Yeah.

00:40:59 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:41:00 ◼   ► It's not clear what's going to happen when you break that thing.

00:41:02 ◼   ► Dave Right.

00:41:03 ◼   ► With Lauren's, it was as soon as you pulled the view, you're at the top of the view,

00:41:07 ◼   ► and as soon as you pull it down a little bit, it would say like, "Hey, keep going.

00:41:11 ◼   ► You can pull to refresh."

00:41:12 ◼   ► Jonathon Right.

00:41:14 ◼   ► Dave I actually chatted briefly with Lauren about

00:41:18 ◼   ► it.

00:41:19 ◼   ► I thought – his reaction to it was exactly what I expected, but I just wanted to check

00:41:24 ◼   ► to make sure.

00:41:25 ◼   ► I wanted to say, "Hey, is it like a thrill?

00:41:28 ◼   ► Are you kind of honored or do you feel ripped off?"

00:41:30 ◼   ► He's like thrilled.

00:41:31 ◼   ► He thinks it's absolutely great that Apple is putting it in the system.

00:41:38 ◼   ► But like us, he doesn't think that the new – all you have to do is pull and not let

00:41:44 ◼   ► go.

00:41:45 ◼   ► He likes his implementation better.

00:41:47 ◼   ► Right, so I so this is a good discussion we had last week

00:41:51 ◼   ► I don't think you were there but it was a couple of us at a table in Moscone in between sessions. We're talking about

00:41:57 ◼   ► Did Apple make that change?

00:42:00 ◼   ► So that it happens only when you after only by pulling not by pulling and letting go did they do that out of?

00:42:08 ◼   ► Pride like like they've convinced themselves like now we you know, we didn't do it before but now we've come up with a way to

00:42:14 ◼   ► Make pull refresh, right?

00:42:16 ◼   ► Or is it a patent thing that the patent that Twitter has on pull to refresh?

00:42:21 ◼   ► Apple's implementation doesn't violate the letter of it

00:42:25 ◼   ► Yeah, who knows combination I don't know I to me and it might just be my general

00:42:33 ◼   ► Aversion like repulsed. I'm repulsed by software patents on silly things that I say no

00:42:40 ◼   ► It's not the patent thing, but I forget who it was

00:42:42 ◼   ► was, I think it was Matthew Panzareno was at the table. And I think he was reading,

00:42:47 ◼   ► he pulled up Twitter's patent application on it. And those patents, I mean, I just,

00:42:53 ◼   ► I get two sentences into them and I just fall asleep. I'm out. I'm just, it's like,

00:42:57 ◼   ► it's like a sedative. It just puts me right out because of the way they're written.

00:43:01 ◼   ► But he is reading it and his layman's reading of it was that the patent describes pull down

00:43:07 ◼   ► and let go.

00:43:08 ◼   ► And that if you-- you know, that Apple's actually on the good--

00:43:10 ◼   ► on the-- you know.

00:43:11 ◼   ► So if that's actually the case, that they had lawyers who said,

00:43:14 ◼   ► you know, you've got to do this, then I feel bad for the engineers who

00:43:18 ◼   ► did it.

00:43:19 ◼   ► If it's because they think that this is better,

00:43:21 ◼   ► and you're out there listening, please, please, please,

00:43:24 ◼   ► change it to more closely follow the Tweedy model before iOS 6 finishes.

00:43:29 ◼   ► I really think that this is not an improvement.

00:43:32 ◼   ► Well, because it's not just mail, right?

00:43:34 ◼   ► It's going to be app system-wide.

00:43:35 ◼   ► are going to be doing that.

00:43:37 ◼   ► So I mean, it could be the patents, but they have a lot of patent fights.

00:43:46 ◼   ► I don't think that they intentionally avoid doing what they think is right to avoid it.

00:43:54 ◼   ► To avoid a patent.

00:43:55 ◼   ► They're constantly having patent fights.

00:43:58 ◼   ► One thing that I think is irrelevant is Twitter's promise not to use software patents aggressively,

00:44:09 ◼   ► which is admirable.

00:44:10 ◼   ► I'm glad they did it.

00:44:11 ◼   ► It's certainly better.

00:44:12 ◼   ► It's better than nothing.

00:44:13 ◼   ► And it's an admirable stance for the company to take, but I think it's irrelevant because

00:44:17 ◼   ► there is zero chance that Apple's lawyers give two craps about what Twitter has "promised."

00:44:22 ◼   ► Jonathon

00:44:22 ◼   ► promised.

00:44:23 ◼   ► Adam: Exactly.

00:44:24 ◼   ► I mean, I believe them.

00:44:26 ◼   ► I think they're – but that doesn't mean anything.

00:44:29 ◼   ► It's not legally binding in any way.

00:44:31 ◼   ► So –

00:44:32 ◼   ► Dave: Exactly.

00:44:33 ◼   ► And who's just – if a new CEO comes into Twitter, he doesn't give two craps what

00:44:37 ◼   ► the old CEO said.

00:44:38 ◼   ► Adam; Right.

00:44:39 ◼   ► Well, exactly.

00:44:40 ◼   ► I mean, who's to say that Google doesn't buy Twitter and then use all the patents to

00:44:42 ◼   ► new Apple?

00:44:43 ◼   ► Dave; Exactly.

00:44:44 ◼   ► Adam; Whatever.

00:44:45 ◼   ► All right.

00:44:46 ◼   ► So –

00:44:47 ◼   ► Dave; What else do you have?

00:44:50 ◼   ► So I got a couple of things I just want to talk about.

00:44:55 ◼   ► So you had a bit regarding possible tall screen iPhone.

00:44:59 ◼   ► Yes.

00:45:04 ◼   ► And you supposed that they would pitch it at WWDC

00:45:06 ◼   ► by having the notifications sort of push down the view.

00:45:10 ◼   ► And they would encourage developers

00:45:17 ◼   ► to make their layout more flexible vertically.

00:45:17 ◼   ► Right.

00:45:22 ◼   ► So one thing they did add, which nobody's really talked about much, is they've added an auto-layout system to iOS

00:45:25 ◼   ► where you can describe the relationship between various controls and how they react to screen size changes.

00:45:35 ◼   ► So it's nice now that you can sort of say, "Well, this button should be at the end of this text field with eight pixels in between it."

00:45:45 ◼   ► and they should both be clamped to the right hand side of the screen.

00:45:47 ◼   ► So that when you change the orientation,

00:45:49 ◼   ► all of the controls sort of lay out nicely.

00:45:51 ◼   ► Right.

00:45:53 ◼   ► It's like a way of saying, these things should be at the bottom,

00:45:55 ◼   ► these things should be at the top,

00:45:57 ◼   ► and you don't have to define how wide the middle is.

00:45:59 ◼   ► Right, yeah, you just describe the relationships between the items and basically where they'd be pegged to.

00:46:07 ◼   ► The top, the bottom, the left, or the right, or whatever.

00:46:09 ◼   ► So that's in iOS 6 now, and that's like,

00:46:13 ◼   ► now.

00:46:14 ◼   ► And that's like – it seems like that would be kind of handy for – on a device with

00:46:20 ◼   ► a different shaped screen.

00:46:21 ◼   ► Right.

00:46:22 ◼   ► Or, yeah, or an app that doesn't know the size of the screen.

00:46:26 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:46:27 ◼   ► Because for – there are a hundred million iPhones out there with this size, the current

00:46:33 ◼   ► size screen, the one point – the three to two aspect ratio iPhone screen.

00:46:39 ◼   ► So even if it's true that the next iPhone has a wider, taller, however you want to describe

00:46:45 ◼   ► it screen, it's not like apps will switch to the new dimension.

00:46:50 ◼   ► They're going to have to support both.

00:46:51 ◼   ► Right.

00:46:52 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:46:53 ◼   ► And the auto layout stuff, that's one of those, that's a technology that started on Mac OS

00:46:58 ◼   ► 10.

00:46:59 ◼   ► That's not new.

00:47:00 ◼   ► It's new to iOS 6, but it's not new to Cocoa.

00:47:03 ◼   ► No, they added it in Lion.

00:47:05 ◼   ► Right.

00:47:06 ◼   ► know, and it's useful for the Mac, obviously, because Windows,

00:47:09 ◼   ► most windows are arbitrarily resizable. Right. Yeah. But it's

00:47:14 ◼   ► interesting that they're taking that like a technology designed

00:47:18 ◼   ► for arbitrarily sizable windows and bringing it to a device with

00:47:21 ◼   ► a fixed size screen. Right. Which, you know, makes me think

00:47:24 ◼   ► that at the very least, they're building in a system that will

00:47:29 ◼   ► be able to support various size screens at some point in the

00:47:32 ◼   ► future. Right. I don't I don't want to play games and be coy

00:47:35 ◼   ► with the NDA on session content.

00:47:40 ◼   ► But I will say, and I haven't seen it, I didn't see the auto layout sessions, but they're

00:47:44 ◼   ► at the top of my queue from the download list from the videos that came out yesterday, or

00:47:49 ◼   ► two days ago, actually.

00:47:50 ◼   ► But I noted that it wasn't just one, there was at least two.

00:47:53 ◼   ► It was like introduction to auto layout on iOS, and then there was an advanced auto layout

00:47:57 ◼   ► on iOS.

00:47:58 ◼   ► Jonathon

00:47:58 ◼   ► Right.

00:47:59 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:48:00 ◼   ► Actually checked, and it's the auto layout was mentioned in the keynote, so.

00:48:04 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:48:05 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:48:06 ◼   ► Well, and I think that I don't think that the session titles themselves, I mean, and

00:48:09 ◼   ► you know, I'm not going to avoid talking about session titles, but I don't think, I think

00:48:14 ◼   ► once the schedule came out, you can say what the schedules, you know, what the, you can

00:48:20 ◼   ► say what the sessions are.

00:48:21 ◼   ► I think the contents are under NDA, but I don't think that the titles of the sessions

00:48:25 ◼   ► are NDA.

00:48:26 ◼   ► Well, yeah.

00:48:27 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, I don't think anybody's going to raise too much of a stink.

00:48:32 ◼   ► Right.

00:48:35 ◼   ► So the other thing is kernel-level ASLR, which is address-space layout randomization.

00:48:37 ◼   ► So when different libraries get loaded into the kernel, they are placed in different locations in memory.

00:48:46 ◼   ► So that if you have an exploit code, you can't rely on a certain function being in a certain location.

00:48:54 ◼   ► you can't rely on like a certain function being in a certain place so it

00:48:57 ◼   ► makes it harder to exploit the kernel

00:49:00 ◼   ► so that has

00:49:01 ◼   ► you know that

00:49:02 ◼   ► it's a pretty big security step and I'm kinda interested to see how that

00:49:06 ◼   ► affects jailbreaking on iOS 6

00:49:08 ◼   ► I...I...

00:49:09 ◼   ► that's interesting and I really was wondering

00:49:12 ◼   ► long-term about that because Mac OS X has had that's another thing that came to

00:49:16 ◼   ► the Mac first

00:49:17 ◼   ► but I thought I saw and I just I don't follow jailbreaking that closely I

00:49:21 ◼   ► I thought I saw that somebody had already issued a jailbreak for iOS 6.

00:49:24 ◼   ► Was that a joke or is that not true?

00:49:26 ◼   ► I haven't seen, I don't know, I just thought it was an interesting thing to look into.

00:49:31 ◼   ► I mean, maybe you can still jailbreak if you get in early enough before this stuff happens,

00:49:36 ◼   ► but either way, this is a good security thing.

00:49:39 ◼   ► Yeah, it's very good.

00:49:41 ◼   ► I've never seen any, it always seems like whenever I see a guy like Charlie Miller,

00:49:50 ◼   ► of the absolute top Mac OS at third party security guys out there like what his advice

00:49:57 ◼   ► is all I SLR is that right ASLR address space layout random is at the top of his list of

00:50:06 ◼   ► things Apple could do to improve iOS right and so they did it which is cool because in

00:50:12 ◼   ► other in other words if you find an exploit a buffer overflow where you can inject code

00:50:16 ◼   ► you have no idea where it's going to go. Whereas before ASLR, it would go to the same place

00:50:21 ◼   ► every time. And you can build a plan from there.

00:50:24 ◼   ► Michael Scott Exactly. So this makes it a lot harder at

00:50:27 ◼   ► least to exploit a buffer overflow. Next up on my little list here is Facetime

00:50:35 ◼   ► over cellular. Which I haven't seen anybody talk about that. That is interesting.

00:50:41 ◼   ► That's what's on my list.

00:50:42 ◼   ► I don't know why people aren't talking about that.

00:50:44 ◼   ► There we go.

00:50:46 ◼   ► We've talked about it.

00:50:48 ◼   ► Why do you think it's 4S and iPad 3 only?

00:50:56 ◼   ► I think it's pretty obvious.

00:50:58 ◼   ► I think it's a marketing thing.

00:51:00 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:51:01 ◼   ► I think it's just to make the Dave-- and there's a complicated matrix of all of iOS 6 features

00:51:08 ◼   ► and what device gets what.

00:51:10 ◼   ► - Right, I don't really understand what they're doing there,

00:51:13 ◼   ► but yeah, I think it's probably a marketing thing.

00:51:16 ◼   ► Plus, you know what, it limits the number of devices

00:51:18 ◼   ► that can actually do it.

00:51:20 ◼   ► Which, you know, I would be really interested

00:51:23 ◼   ► to know if the carriers actually knew this was coming.

00:51:26 ◼   ► - I do too.

00:51:27 ◼   ► - They didn't know iMessage was coming.

00:51:29 ◼   ► - Right, and I knew that, I forget,

00:51:31 ◼   ► maybe it was 'cause of you. (laughs)

00:51:33 ◼   ► I forget, but I knew last year

00:51:35 ◼   ► when they announced iMessage,

00:51:36 ◼   ► I forget it. I forget who I talked to about that, but I got like it wasn't you it was somebody yet

00:51:41 ◼   ► No, it was I now I know who it was. It was it was a good source

00:51:46 ◼   ► they didn't know and

00:51:49 ◼   ► The carriers didn't know Apple just did it and I can't help but think it's the same here that they're not really giving

00:51:56 ◼   ► They're not really it's not really up to the carriers. Although we'll find out we will find out when it ships whether

00:52:03 ◼   ► You know like it's a thing like Verizon has it and AT&T doesn't

00:52:07 ◼   ► Right, but I mean I would have thought they'd said that yeah

00:52:13 ◼   ► I I don't know what I do know is it since day one it's worked over the cell network and we just turned it off

00:52:18 ◼   ► Right, you know and the the the counter example would be tethering

00:52:23 ◼   ► Which is definitely up to carriers and they can bill you for it

00:52:27 ◼   ► but I don't think so because I think the reason is that carrot that that's a

00:52:32 ◼   ► that tethering is like a known carrier feature

00:52:37 ◼   ► that they sell on other things.

00:52:38 ◼   ► And it was probably like, I don't know,

00:52:41 ◼   ► that they built, whereas I can't see AT&T

00:52:43 ◼   ► adding a new bill to your iPhone

00:52:46 ◼   ► so that you can do FaceTime.

00:52:47 ◼   ► - Right, it's like, you can almost see

00:52:50 ◼   ► their deals with Apple mentioning tethering.

00:52:52 ◼   ► And they've got like specific terms around it.

00:52:56 ◼   ► But then Apple just goes and invents something new.

00:52:58 ◼   ► It wasn't in the contract and the carriers

00:53:00 ◼   ► kind of get stiffed.

00:53:01 ◼   ► I'm curious to see how bandwidth intensive it is.

00:53:05 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:53:06 ◼   ► Right?

00:53:07 ◼   ► Because you can definitely run up against these, the bandwidth caps, you know, like

00:53:09 ◼   ► these, you know, two gigabytes is a lot for email and web surfing.

00:53:13 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:53:14 ◼   ► I mean, and I know there's somebody out there who listens to the show who's like,

00:53:17 ◼   ► all I do is email and web surfing and I run up against the two gigabyte thing every month.

00:53:20 ◼   ► Right.

00:53:21 ◼   ► I mean, you can do it, but it really takes, I think, streaming video to really kind of

00:53:26 ◼   ► rack up against that.

00:53:27 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:53:28 ◼   ► Well, we'll see, I guess.

00:53:29 ◼   ► Marco, do you listen to Marco's show Marco?

00:53:31 ◼   ► was at WWDC last weekend was using his iPad 3G or LTE instead of the hotel Wi-Fi and left

00:53:37 ◼   ► his Mac tethered overnight and it downloaded the Mad Men season finale, which is like two

00:53:46 ◼   ► gigabytes.

00:53:47 ◼   ► So, he blew his whole thing downloading it and the download didn't complete.

00:53:52 ◼   ► Oh, it didn't even get it.

00:53:54 ◼   ► No.

00:53:55 ◼   ► What a bastard.

00:53:56 ◼   ► That sucks.

00:53:57 ◼   ► Well, do you have anything else?

00:54:00 ◼   ► I have one.

00:54:01 ◼   ► I'll bet it's on your list.

00:54:02 ◼   ► Probably.

00:54:03 ◼   ► Passbook.

00:54:04 ◼   ► It is on my list.

00:54:07 ◼   ► So I think that's kind of the sleeper hit.

00:54:09 ◼   ► Right.

00:54:10 ◼   ► You know?

00:54:10 ◼   ► It's funny, like, when you launch the app now,

00:54:19 ◼   ► there's nothing in it.

00:54:21 ◼   ► There's one screen, and it just says,

00:54:22 ◼   ► Passbook is for the stuff in your pocket.

00:54:24 ◼   ► And it's got, like, tickets and all that kind of stuff.

00:54:29 ◼   ► But there's a big infrastructure behind it.

00:54:34 ◼   ► And I think tellingly they sort of,

00:54:38 ◼   ► they released a new API that would allow apps

00:54:41 ◼   ► to sort of inspect only their own passes.

00:54:44 ◼   ► And there's a bunch of backend stuff

00:54:49 ◼   ► so that you can send out passes, create new ones,

00:54:51 ◼   ► and update the ones that somebody has on their phone.

00:54:55 ◼   ► I think it's interesting for iOS 6,

00:54:56 ◼   ► but I think it's going to be really big in iOS 7.

00:54:58 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:54:59 ◼   ► It's, it's, I totally agree.

00:55:01 ◼   ► I really think that it's, and I've, sometimes I'm wrong about these things.

00:55:05 ◼   ► Like when I think that this is a sleeper hit or like I call it like an iceberg feature

00:55:09 ◼   ► where you only see this little bit at the top but the implications underneath are huge.

00:55:16 ◼   ► But I really do think it, I think Passbook is going to be a big deal and I think long

00:55:20 ◼   ► term it's going to be on an awful lot of iPhone users' first screen.

00:55:24 ◼   ► Right.

00:55:25 ◼   ► Because one of them is… one of the things is that I really… I just keep thinking about

00:55:30 ◼   ► that. I really think Forstall was exactly right in his pitch in the keynote that half

00:55:36 ◼   ► the problem with these apps that do the barcode scanning now is that you're never going

00:55:40 ◼   ► to have them on your first or second screen. You know, like you're united, you know.

00:55:44 ◼   ► Because I mean… and some people fly the same airline every time. And I, you know,

00:55:48 ◼   ► I fly the same handful of airlines. But it's like, you know, who knows if you're, you

00:55:51 ◼   ► know, Continental Airlines app. Where the hell is it? I don't know.

00:55:55 ◼   ► And it's the worst thing is you're up there at the front of the line and you're like paging

00:55:59 ◼   ► up to screen eight of your home screen looking for the thing.

00:56:04 ◼   ► Because they do some really clever…

00:56:06 ◼   ► I don't even know how much is…

00:56:09 ◼   ► I guess we can talk about it.

00:56:10 ◼   ► But they're doing some clever stuff though with Passbook where based on your location,

00:56:13 ◼   ► it'll know… like… right?

00:56:17 ◼   ► It's like you open Passbook when you're in a Starbucks, it knows you're in a Starbucks

00:56:22 ◼   ► or it guesses you're in a Starbucks at the very least,

00:56:25 ◼   ► and there's your Starbucks.

00:56:26 ◼   ► You don't even have to-- so not only do you not have to look

00:56:28 ◼   ► around for a Starbucks app, when you open Passbook,

00:56:31 ◼   ► if it knows you're in a Starbucks,

00:56:32 ◼   ► you don't even have to look for your Starbucks pass.

00:56:35 ◼   ► You don't even need to open Passbook.

00:56:36 ◼   ► It's on your home screen.

00:56:37 ◼   ► Oh, right.

00:56:38 ◼   ► Right.

00:56:38 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:56:39 ◼   ► Right.

00:56:40 ◼   ► You turn the thing on, and it's there like in a notification.

00:56:43 ◼   ► You're in Starbucks.

00:56:43 ◼   ► You swipe it.

00:56:44 ◼   ► Up comes your Starbucks card.

00:56:46 ◼   ► Like, it doesn't even launch the app.

00:56:47 ◼   ► It just comes up over the home screen,

00:56:49 ◼   ► and you can just scan it right there.

00:56:51 ◼   ► Right.

00:56:52 ◼   ► One of the interesting things about Passbook is that it can work in coordination with an

00:56:57 ◼   ► app.

00:56:58 ◼   ► Yes.

00:56:59 ◼   ► And do other things, and you can use the app to do things like make changes, like the example

00:57:06 ◼   ► that they gave would be like if it was an airline, then you wanted to change your seat.

00:57:11 ◼   ► You'd need an app for that, like a Passbook.

00:57:14 ◼   ► What do they call them?

00:57:16 ◼   ► Are they cards or are they passes?

00:57:18 ◼   ► Passes.

00:57:19 ◼   ► A pass itself doesn't have code.

00:57:20 ◼   ► It's just information.

00:57:21 ◼   ► So if you want to change stuff, you've got to have an app.

00:57:24 ◼   ► But for a lot of cases, you don't even need an app.

00:57:27 ◼   ► There are a lot of situations where developers or stores or services can support Passbook

00:57:37 ◼   ► and it takes some server code on their side, obviously, to do the interaction.

00:57:42 ◼   ► But in terms of what's running on the phone, all they have to do is support Passbook and

00:57:45 ◼   ► it doesn't even require an app.

00:57:48 ◼   ► I really think that it's interesting and it's a very humble way to get started with this,

00:57:57 ◼   ► where it's not like this boil the ocean approach that I think Google has taken with Google

00:58:01 ◼   ► Wallet where it's like, "We're going to support this NFC stuff," and it, in theory, works

00:58:08 ◼   ► everywhere and in practice works nowhere or almost nowhere.

00:58:11 ◼   ► Well, I think it's an approach where they're not relying on the endpoint to have any specific technology.

00:58:16 ◼   ► Right?

00:58:25 ◼   ► Right.

00:58:25 ◼   ► They're just going to support what people already do and build out from there.

00:58:25 ◼   ► So one interesting thing is, let's say you've got your Starbucks card.

00:58:30 ◼   ► You could probably, or Apple could probably work out a way that they could charge up your Starbucks card from your iPhone.

00:58:37 ◼   ► probably work out a way that they could charge up your Starbucks card from your iTunes account.

00:58:43 ◼   ► I thought about that too. The only thing about that is that when any of your money goes through

00:58:48 ◼   ► your iTunes account, Apple takes 30 percent. So I don't see how that would work.

00:58:53 ◼   ► Well I mean, they could work out a deal with Starbucks and they take less than 30 percent.

00:58:57 ◼   ► Right. Like maybe for the Passbook stuff they'll do it in a way that... and I almost feel like

00:59:03 ◼   ► they have to if they're and i think long term everybody you know there have been rumors about

00:59:07 ◼   ► apple getting into nfc and payments and stuff like that uh that there's for as much as they've stuck

00:59:14 ◼   ► to their guns across the board music video apps books with this 70 30 70 30 in-app purchases 70 30

00:59:25 ◼   ► everything when money goes through the store it's 70 30. maybe the way that they do it is that they

00:59:30 ◼   ► They don't really it's not called going through the store right like all this stuff that goes through the store is 70/30

00:59:36 ◼   ► But the payment processing is is not that it's just hooked up to your account

00:59:41 ◼   ► So it goes through the same credit card. You've got hooked up

00:59:43 ◼   ► But you know they would I I they could really you know they could undercut everybody on that

00:59:50 ◼   ► I mean they could just charge what it you know just a break-even thing and just have it as a reason to have an iPhone

00:59:55 ◼   ► right I think there's

00:59:58 ◼   ► They've got a lot of credit cards

01:00:00 ◼   ► All right, and then they can do stuff too. They could even do it

01:00:02 ◼   ► You could do it wouldn't even just be charging up your Starbucks card. You could do it like

01:00:06 ◼   ► you know if you're with the airline thing where you've got a coach seat and you

01:00:11 ◼   ► Go to your thing and you could maybe get a notification that there's an upgrade available

01:00:15 ◼   ► You know the business class or first class or something like that and you just do it in the app and it goes through your

01:00:22 ◼   ► iTunes store thing you don't even have to sit there and fuddle around with credit cards or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, exactly

01:00:29 ◼   ► Like I think they've got a good pitch for businesses, which is there's less friction. All right

01:00:33 ◼   ► Or you could you know, you could even buy, you know, like when you have to buy

01:00:38 ◼   ► Your drink or a sandwich on the on the flight, you know, you could just do it through the phone

01:00:43 ◼   ► I mean and again you may not even have to take your phone out of your pocket to have it scanned

01:00:46 ◼   ► Right. I think that I think the implications of passbook are huge. Yeah, I think so, too and it's a really clever system

01:00:54 ◼   ► I mean, I guess we can't get into the details of how it works because that's clearly NDA

01:00:58 ◼   ► but it's really, really clever. And so anybody out there who does, if you've got an account

01:01:03 ◼   ► and you're thinking about what WWDC sessions to watch, I would highly recommend the Passbook

01:01:09 ◼   ► sessions because they're really interesting. And I thought they were, you know, all the sessions

01:01:15 ◼   ► at WWDC are good, but I thought those were really exceptionally well-structured from like a

01:01:21 ◼   ► pedagogical standpoint. Like, it just opens your mind to how it works. And it's a really clever

01:01:27 ◼   ► system. It's very satisfying.

01:01:30 ◼   ► Adam Boffa - Yeah. So I'm not sure it'll be huge for IO6, but I think they're going to

01:01:35 ◼   ► start making a lot of deals around this and we'll see what happens.

01:01:37 ◼   ► Jared Polin - What else do you have? Do you have anything else from WWDC?

01:01:41 ◼   ► Adam Boffa - Not really. I think that's it. There's new maps. Whatever.

01:01:45 ◼   ► Jared Polin - I don't know what to make about that. I know people are saying that there's

01:01:50 ◼   ► there's not as much detail on the maps. I think the lack of transit stuff, you know,

01:01:58 ◼   ► I linked to a thing this week from somebody saying that, you know what, that's actually

01:02:01 ◼   ► a good idea because the transit stuff is all over the map, no pun intended. But like in

01:02:10 ◼   ► Europe, there's some places where the transit information is owned by private companies

01:02:14 ◼   ► And they don't want Google having it for free, and they're blocking them.

01:02:20 ◼   ► But on the other hand, I wrote a very brief piece, a little link thing, early this morning.

01:02:26 ◼   ► Bottom line, though, is from users, users don't care about that stuff.

01:02:28 ◼   ► All users are going to know is that if they used to rely on the transit info in the Maps

01:02:32 ◼   ► app and it's gone, that's a downgrade.

01:02:35 ◼   ► So I mean, I've got to say that's points off for iOS 6.

01:02:39 ◼   ► I mean, I don't care.

01:02:41 ◼   ► Maybe long term it does work out better, but in the short term people are going to notice

01:02:45 ◼   ► and it's never a good thing.

01:02:47 ◼   ► Well, I think the question is would you rather have flyover or know what bus line to take?

01:02:53 ◼   ► Right.

01:02:54 ◼   ► Flyover is really cool.

01:02:56 ◼   ► I also think flyover is, I like it way better than street view, than Google street view.

01:03:01 ◼   ► And I guess the argument for street view is that it's cool, but it's not as useful.

01:03:06 ◼   ► Street view have literally used to like, I know this building here, this restaurant,

01:03:10 ◼   ► And I know they've got their phone number on the window.

01:03:15 ◼   ► And I've literally used Street View to go and find it.

01:03:18 ◼   ► I guess that's the argument, is that Street View

01:03:21 ◼   ► is from the perspective of you on the sidewalk.

01:03:23 ◼   ► Right.

01:03:26 ◼   ► It's like, I've walked down that street.

01:03:26 ◼   ► I know where that thing is, and I'm trying to remember,

01:03:28 ◼   ► and I can go and see it.

01:03:30 ◼   ► Flyover's incredibly cool technology, though, I've got to say.

01:03:37 ◼   ► Let me take it to … Before we talk about the rest of this stuff, this is a good time

01:03:40 ◼   ► to do the second sponsor.

01:03:41 ◼   ► And our second sponsor is a new app for the iPad called VJ, spelled V-J-A-Y from Algorithm.

01:03:52 ◼   ► You may know them from their other app, DJ, which was like a record-spinning app for the

01:03:58 ◼   ► iPad, very, very acclaimed.

01:04:01 ◼   ► Have you ever seen videos of people using an iPad or multiple iPads to sort of do, I

01:04:08 ◼   ► don't know what you call it, what DJs do.

01:04:13 ◼   ► I'm sort of out of my league here because I'm not very musical.

01:04:15 ◼   ► Are you a musical guy?

01:04:18 ◼   ► I – no.

01:04:19 ◼   ► No.

01:04:20 ◼   ► Well, it's a very cool app.

01:04:21 ◼   ► I am.

01:04:22 ◼   ► I mean, I like music.

01:04:23 ◼   ► I listen to a lot of music.

01:04:24 ◼   ► It's called – yeah.

01:04:25 ◼   ► Here's what it is.

01:04:27 ◼   ► is real-time touch scratching for videos. You mix videos and songs together and

01:04:34 ◼   ► you can make mashups, you can make home videos, you can do it to entertain people,

01:04:39 ◼   ► but it's more than just clips edited together. It's a performance, right?

01:04:44 ◼   ► It's like being a DJ and mixing music live except with music and video. So it's

01:04:50 ◼   ► not just a video, it's not a video editor per se. It's a way to blend two videos

01:04:55 ◼   ► together with music live, like a performance.

01:04:59 ◼   ► Like you sit there and play with it.

01:05:02 ◼   ► And you can record them.

01:05:03 ◼   ► You can output them over HDMI and AirPlay

01:05:06 ◼   ► with real-time output right over AirPlay.

01:05:08 ◼   ► So like somebody who is entertaining

01:05:10 ◼   ► a crowd, like an actual DJ or VJ, like at a party,

01:05:15 ◼   ► you would have this iPad app in front of them

01:05:17 ◼   ► and could sit here and blend these things

01:05:18 ◼   ► and have it projected on a big screen behind them.

01:05:21 ◼   ► It's super impressive and from a user interface perspective,

01:05:25 ◼   ► it is everything is live, there's no latency.

01:05:28 ◼   ► It's super smooth. It works on the iPad two and the new iPad,

01:05:33 ◼   ► parentheses three. Did you play with it? I sent you a promo code.

01:05:38 ◼   ► I did. I did. It's very impressive. It is super impressive. It is the sort of thing where I,

01:05:43 ◼   ► myself, I don't, I can't use it to the way that it could be used, but I guarantee you that with

01:05:48 ◼   ► with this app, there will be videos of people making these amazing things and mixing these

01:05:52 ◼   ► things and people will be like, "I can't believe it." And it fits right in with this

01:05:58 ◼   ► resurgence in argument about whether the iPad is for creation or consumption, which is,

01:06:04 ◼   ► to me, I cannot believe that we're still having this argument in 2012. But this app,

01:06:09 ◼   ► VJ from Algorithm, is like ground zero, step one of, "My God, this thing can be used

01:06:14 ◼   ► for creation. Like in a way, and the best thing about it is it's a perfect example of

01:06:19 ◼   ► the sort of creation that you can do on the iPad that you couldn't do on a Mac. Because

01:06:26 ◼   ► the whole…

01:06:27 ◼   ► Or it's very visceral.

01:06:28 ◼   ► And it's multi-touch. It's two things at once. So there's only one mouse on the

01:06:31 ◼   ► Mac. You can't spin two things at once. You can't twist two different things at

01:06:35 ◼   ► the same time on the Mac, which is the entire point of VJ, that you're tweaking two songs

01:06:41 ◼   ► at once or two videos at once at the same time. Really nice UI, skeuomorphic in a very,

01:06:48 ◼   ► very appropriate way where it's this, you know, you launch the app and it makes it feel

01:06:54 ◼   ► like your iPad is like a dedicated device meant for video mixing. Really, really cool

01:07:00 ◼   ► app. Very well done. Regular price, $19.99. Deja vu, right now, 50% off intro pricing.

01:07:10 ◼   ► It's only $9.99 on the App Store.

01:07:14 ◼   ► You can find out more at algorithm, A-L-G-O-R-I-D-D-I-M.com or you could just Google VJ, V-J-A-Y and

01:07:25 ◼   ► look it up there.

01:07:26 ◼   ► $9.99 on the App Store, amazingly creative app.

01:07:30 ◼   ► Anybody who has any kind of interest in music and stuff like that, go get it.

01:07:34 ◼   ► It's a great app, beautiful.

01:07:35 ◼   ► So you had some good sponsors this week.

01:07:38 ◼   ► Terrific sponsors.

01:07:39 ◼   ► I like it. So I'll say this. I was on a phone conversation with the Algorithm guys about DJ.

01:07:47 ◼   ► They were having some weird core animation issue. And Michael Simmons, the Flexibits guy, actually introduced me to them.

01:07:53 ◼   ► So we had a little bit of a chat trying to work out what was going on. They are really, really smart guys. Very nice. Their apps are amazing.

01:08:06 ◼   ► Go buy it. Please.

01:08:07 ◼   ► See, that's what I'm talking about, though.

01:08:09 ◼   ► Guy English is the guy that you talk to when you're having a core animation problem.

01:08:14 ◼   ► That's the guy.

01:08:15 ◼   ► Do you probably get calls like this every day, or somebody with an amazing app, but

01:08:19 ◼   ► they're running up a thing where they're stuck at 54 frames per second, and they know that

01:08:23 ◼   ► that stinks because anything under 60 is kind of janky.

01:08:26 ◼   ► And then they call you, and then you tell them what's wrong, and then all of a sudden

01:08:29 ◼   ► they're running at 65 frames per second.

01:08:32 ◼   ► To be honest, I don't know what I told them helped.

01:08:34 ◼   ► Well, I don't know.

01:08:37 ◼   ► We chatted about what was going on.

01:08:39 ◼   ► I don't want to take any credit.

01:08:40 ◼   ► I don't know if I actually did help them, but we chatted, and they're very, very smart

01:08:44 ◼   ► guys.

01:08:45 ◼   ► All right.

01:08:46 ◼   ► Very smart guys.

01:08:48 ◼   ► Great sponsors.

01:08:49 ◼   ► Thank you both.

01:08:50 ◼   ► So the other big news of the week is from Microsoft.

01:08:55 ◼   ► You and I sort of—what were we doing?

01:09:00 ◼   ► We weren't watching it because they didn't do the video live.

01:09:02 ◼   ► we were following the live blog coverage live and then chatting to each other on the back

01:09:08 ◼   ► channel.

01:09:09 ◼   ► And, well, let me just tell you this.

01:09:12 ◼   ► Here's the thing I was thinking.

01:09:13 ◼   ► This is me yesterday.

01:09:14 ◼   ► It was yesterday.

01:09:15 ◼   ► Here's what I was thinking.

01:09:16 ◼   ► I got nervous about having you on the show.

01:09:19 ◼   ► Because one thing everybody always wants, people say, "Get somebody on the show who's

01:09:22 ◼   ► going to fight back and tell you what the hell's wrong with you."

01:09:27 ◼   ► And that's why I thought, "All right, I'm going to do it.

01:09:28 ◼   ► I'm going to get Guy.

01:09:29 ◼   ► Guy's not going to let me slide.

01:09:32 ◼   ► And this is what I'm thinking.

01:09:33 ◼   ► I'm thinking, Guy, I mean, I haven't written anything good

01:09:36 ◼   ► in weeks.

01:09:37 ◼   ► And Guy's going to call me out on that.

01:09:39 ◼   ► He's going to say, what are you doing?

01:09:40 ◼   ► You haven't written a--

01:09:41 ◼   ► so I thought, I got to write something good.

01:09:44 ◼   ► I got to write something so that Guy can't tell me

01:09:46 ◼   ► that I've been slacking off.

01:09:47 ◼   ► And so here's what I did.

01:09:48 ◼   ► I went back to where I am, and I stole all of your ideas,

01:09:52 ◼   ► all of your comments from the surface event,

01:09:55 ◼   ► and then turned them into a little article for Darren

01:09:57 ◼   ► Fireball.

01:09:58 ◼   ► - Well, that's a really great article.

01:10:00 ◼   ► I don't know my ideas.

01:10:02 ◼   ► I mean, whatever.

01:10:03 ◼   ► I'm not particularly,

01:10:05 ◼   ► I don't get jealous about where ideas come from.

01:10:06 ◼   ► Like, I wouldn't,

01:10:08 ◼   ► like he said that to me on Twitter,

01:10:09 ◼   ► and I'm like, I didn't realize it was me,

01:10:11 ◼   ► and I thought it was more of us just chatting.

01:10:13 ◼   ► - I didn't, you know, I'll give you credit.

01:10:14 ◼   ► I stole the fact that they couldn't,

01:10:17 ◼   ► they clearly couldn't make enough decisions.

01:10:20 ◼   ► That was from you.

01:10:21 ◼   ► - Oh, well, thank you.

01:10:23 ◼   ► Yeah, no, I think they,

01:10:27 ◼   ► I think they made good decisions,

01:10:29 ◼   ► but they didn't make great decisions.

01:10:31 ◼   ► Both of those products are interesting by themselves.

01:10:35 ◼   ► One less so.

01:10:36 ◼   ► The Intel one looks kind of garbage to me, personally.

01:10:39 ◼   ► But I could see that being a product

01:10:41 ◼   ► that they would want to ship.

01:10:43 ◼   ► To do both of them is crazy.

01:10:46 ◼   ► I don't understand what the hell they're thinking.

01:10:48 ◼   ► Well, why announce both of them at the same time?

01:10:52 ◼   ► Why not just announce the ARM one and make it all about that?

01:10:56 ◼   ► Here's the argument is that they've announced an arm-based tablet and an Intel-based tablet

01:11:06 ◼   ► that's thicker.

01:11:07 ◼   ► So it's sort of like the arm-based one is vaguely, you know, roughly equivalent to like

01:11:10 ◼   ► an iPad and the Intel-based one is roughly equivalent to like a MacBook Air but with

01:11:16 ◼   ► a touchscreen.

01:11:17 ◼   ► And then they also introduced this very clever capacitive, I guess, smart cover, magnetically

01:11:24 ◼   ► attached but that has a keyboard on it and very the part that's super clever

01:11:30 ◼   ► about it isn't just that the idea of hey why not you know why not have the

01:11:33 ◼   ► underside of the cover be a keyboard and it attaches magnetically like Apple

01:11:39 ◼   ► smart covers but the thing that's really clever is that it draws power over that

01:11:42 ◼   ► magnetic connection so that the keyboard cover doesn't itself need a battery so

01:11:46 ◼   ► like if you were gonna make I'm sure after they did that there's probably

01:11:50 ◼   ► going to be like 20 Kickstarter campaigns this week for people to make something like

01:11:55 ◼   ► that for the iPad. But if you did it for the iPad, it would have to be a Bluetooth thing,

01:11:59 ◼   ► and that means that it would draw – it would need like a battery. And I don't know that

01:12:02 ◼   ► it could even be as thin as the Microsoft one. But then, like 20 minutes later in the

01:12:07 ◼   ► event, then they come out with another cover that has a keyboard that actually has physical

01:12:11 ◼   ► moving keys.

01:12:12 ◼   ► I don't get it.

01:12:15 ◼   ► So in other words, the message – instead of the message being, "Here it is. We're

01:12:19 ◼   ► our own tablet. Boom! This is it. And we've got this amazing cover. Here it is.

01:12:26 ◼   ► They've got this mixed up story of here's a tablet and its arm and it's

01:12:32 ◼   ► thinner and lighter and cooler and here's this other keyboard. Oh, but here's

01:12:37 ◼   ► this other tablet that looks the same from the front and then you turn it

01:12:40 ◼   ► sideways and it's real thick and it has vents but it runs Photoshop and anything

01:12:46 ◼   ► from Windows. So you know, it's it is a reasonable, it's not a crazy trade off,

01:12:50 ◼   ► there's actually reasons somebody might want to do it. Oh, and here's this other

01:12:53 ◼   ► keyboard cover. And they're not, we don't know when they're shipping and what the

01:12:57 ◼   ► prices are, and the other one is going to ship at least three months after the

01:13:00 ◼   ► other one that we don't know when it's going to ship. And to me the whole thing

01:13:03 ◼   ► just sort of falls apart at that point. Yeah, well I mean, I think the thing is

01:13:07 ◼   ► that they're chasing customer affection rather than sort of selling them a

01:13:15 ◼   ► product. Do you know what I mean? They're nervous. They don't know which one to do.

01:13:20 ◼   ► I think one group probably came up with the arm one and then somebody upstairs was like,

01:13:25 ◼   ► "No, well, we got to have this Intel one." And they just did both. And I don't think they...

01:13:29 ◼   ► One thing that struck me about the event was that this is an idea that you didn't steal. So

01:13:37 ◼   ► I get to sound smart.

01:13:39 ◼   ► They didn't sell their choices that they made.

01:13:46 ◼   ► And they specifically called out

01:13:50 ◼   ► how hard it was to make choices.

01:13:53 ◼   ► - Right. - Which I found interesting.

01:13:56 ◼   ► Like, I think that's just the wrong thing to do.

01:14:00 ◼   ► Like, basically, you make your choices,

01:14:01 ◼   ► you come up with your product, and then you sell it.

01:14:03 ◼   ► This is it, we believe it.

01:14:05 ◼   ► And what they specifically called out in the event

01:14:08 ◼   ► is like, man, we had a lot of hard choices to make,

01:14:10 ◼   ► but we think these are great.

01:14:12 ◼   ► And yet you've got a spectrum of stuff,

01:14:14 ◼   ► which clearly means that you don't,

01:14:16 ◼   ► you didn't put all the wood behind one arrow.

01:14:18 ◼   ► You didn't pick something to be great.

01:14:20 ◼   ► - Perfect turn of phrase, right.

01:14:24 ◼   ► They didn't put all their wood behind one arrow.

01:14:26 ◼   ► - Which I think is a shame

01:14:28 ◼   ► 'cause the arm one is interesting.

01:14:30 ◼   ► - Or if they did, maybe from their perspective they did

01:14:35 ◼   ► that they're thinking of it from the perspective of we're going to start making PC hardware

01:14:41 ◼   ► in general, which is a tremendous fundamental shift for the company.

01:14:44 ◼   ► And I know people have said regarding my article, it's not that Microsoft has never gotten into

01:14:49 ◼   ► hardware before.

01:14:50 ◼   ► They've made the Xbox, they've made all sorts of peripherals before, they made the Zunes.

01:14:55 ◼   ► But yeah, so they've made hardware before, but the one, it's almost like a religious

01:14:59 ◼   ► line that they've never crossed is they've never made PC hardware before.

01:15:03 ◼   ► Right. That's I mean, the Zune is one thing where you enter the hardware market where

01:15:10 ◼   ► your partners are, right, you know, but that's not their key market, right?

01:15:15 ◼   ► This is the bread and butter. The foundation of the entire Microsoft empire is this notion

01:15:20 ◼   ► of we make a PC operating system and apps for that operating system office, primarily

01:15:28 ◼   ► from a financial standpoint, but you know, all sorts of other stuff. They make the airplane

01:15:32 ◼   ► And you guys, Dell, HP, Sony, Toshiba, Samsung, you guys make the hardware.

01:15:45 ◼   ► You guys make the hardware, we do the software.

01:15:47 ◼   ► And it's very crisp in the PC industry and that, you know, that's where all of the money

01:15:53 ◼   ► has come from.

01:15:54 ◼   ► And now they've…

01:15:55 ◼   ► So I think from their perspective that they've put all their wood behind the arrow of, "Okay,

01:15:58 ◼   ► now we're making hardware too."

01:16:01 ◼   ► from the messaging standpoint, that's interesting to Microsoft.

01:16:04 ◼   ► I mean, it is very interesting to Microsoft.

01:16:07 ◼   ► But from a consumer standpoint, they don't really care.

01:16:11 ◼   ► People just want to buy a nice machine and have it work.

01:16:14 ◼   ► Yeah, it's not product focused.

01:16:15 ◼   ► It's more corporate focused.

01:16:19 ◼   ► So what I think was lacking from the event

01:16:22 ◼   ► was a story, a narrative, about why you'd want this

01:16:27 ◼   ► and what you would do with it.

01:16:30 ◼   ► And because they didn't have a story at all, it means that they didn't even come…

01:16:35 ◼   ► First, you need the story.

01:16:37 ◼   ► And then you've got to figure out a way in that story to differentiate between the

01:16:40 ◼   ► two devices, the Intel one and the ARM one.

01:16:43 ◼   ► But because they didn't have a story period, it's a real, I think, mismatch messaging-wise

01:16:50 ◼   ► of why there's two of them and what the differences are.

01:16:53 ◼   ► Well, I mean, they should have given the whole event to that Panos guy.

01:16:56 ◼   ► Yeah, I thought so too.

01:16:58 ◼   ► I thought he was the only guy who was comfortable.

01:16:59 ◼   ► And I realized that what he was talking about was a little bit self-referential, where he

01:17:05 ◼   ► was talking about the design and the design process.

01:17:09 ◼   ► But his enthusiasm was genuine, and he actually was the only guy who seemed comfortable up

01:17:12 ◼   ► there.

01:17:13 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:17:14 ◼   ► I cracked a joke on Twitter during the event.

01:17:17 ◼   ► I cracked a couple jokes.

01:17:18 ◼   ► But one of the jokes – number one, though, I just want to say, even though I cracked

01:17:21 ◼   ► jokes, that doesn't mean I don't like the thing.

01:17:23 ◼   ► I'm, color me very intrigued by the whole thing.

01:17:25 ◼   ► And I think the same thing is true for you, too, right?

01:17:27 ◼   ► Yeah, very much so.

01:17:28 ◼   ► I mean, I think this thing could be…

01:17:30 ◼   ► I think this is the whole…

01:17:33 ◼   ► The thing I'm skeptical about is Windows 8 on regular PCs.

01:17:37 ◼   ► I think Metro on regular PCs, from what I've seen and played with it, I think it's wrong.

01:17:44 ◼   ► I think Metro on a touchscreen device is really, really interesting, and especially on a bigger

01:17:51 ◼   ► one, one that's bigger than a phone.

01:17:53 ◼   ► Like in some sense, I do think that iOS is a little bit like a phone OS that runs on

01:17:58 ◼   ► a tablet, whereas I think that the Metro user interface really feels… seems like it's

01:18:04 ◼   ► natural for like a nine-inch tablet, ten-inch tablet.

01:18:07 ◼   ► Color me very interested.

01:18:08 ◼   ► But, you know, so the jokes are just me, you know, cracking jokes.

01:18:12 ◼   ► But my joke… one of my jokes was that the… because the Intel one…

01:18:16 ◼   ► I'm with you.

01:18:17 ◼   ► The Intel one to me seems janky because it's thick and has vents and has a fan.

01:18:21 ◼   ► It's a…

01:18:22 ◼   ► magnetic pen. I honestly I'm a I'm a fan of the pen input idea. I think it's a

01:18:30 ◼   ► great idea. magnetizing it to you thing. No, don't do that. Right. That's wrong.

01:18:35 ◼   ► The all of the differences between their arm one and the Intel one to me are

01:18:40 ◼   ► advertisements for the arm one. Yes. So I cracked the joke that the maybe I'll get

01:18:47 ◼   ► the deep the things wrong but I said it's it's thicker and it has a fan and

01:18:51 ◼   ► it has a cassette tape deck. Because it just seems like it's, you know, it's, it's old

01:18:57 ◼   ► technology, you know, it's, it's, and it's a lot to me, it's also a lot like the tablet

01:19:04 ◼   ► PCs that Microsoft's been trying to sell for for 15 years. Right, right. You know what,

01:19:09 ◼   ► you know, they should have done just occurred to me. You're right. It's all it's older tech,

01:19:12 ◼   ► but they should have done is introducing the Intel one first. Hmm. Yeah, we got here's

01:19:18 ◼   ► Here's what we got.

01:19:18 ◼   ► You know, it's got the old windows.

01:19:20 ◼   ► It's got all support.

01:19:21 ◼   ► It's a very comfortable.

01:19:22 ◼   ► It's like a MacBook Air with a touch screen.

01:19:24 ◼   ► It's got the clickety clickety keyboard.

01:19:26 ◼   ► Great.

01:19:27 ◼   ► How do you like that?

01:19:28 ◼   ► Nice. Pretty excited.

01:19:28 ◼   ► Guess what?

01:19:30 ◼   ► Here's an ARM one.

01:19:30 ◼   ► Pure Metro.

01:19:32 ◼   ► Very fancy.

01:19:33 ◼   ► Like it's got a fancier keyboard.

01:19:34 ◼   ► They did them in the wrong order.

01:19:37 ◼   ► They really did.

01:19:38 ◼   ► - Think about the order that Apple did

01:19:39 ◼   ► the 15 inch MacBook Pros last week.

01:19:42 ◼   ► - Right.

01:19:42 ◼   ► - First, the old one that's not exciting.

01:19:45 ◼   ► I mean, and I say not exciting.

01:19:48 ◼   ► It actually is. The new old 15-inch MacBook Pros are actually very nice upgrades.

01:19:53 ◼   ► I mean, it's like cutting-edge Intel chipsets. It's a really nice performance upgrade.

01:19:58 ◼   ► But they did those first.

01:19:59 ◼   ► Right. But I mean, still, we're all calling them the new old ones.

01:20:03 ◼   ► Right. Yeah, you're exactly right. Think about the way Apple did the MacBook Pros. I completely

01:20:07 ◼   ► agree. Do the one that's older tech first and do the skating to where the puck is going

01:20:13 ◼   ► next, which is ARM, which is thinner, which is no vent, no fan, no need for that, runs

01:20:19 ◼   ► cool, no legacy apps. Yeah, yeah, they totally did them in the wrong order.

01:20:26 ◼   ► Well, and I think that's telling because I think that they think they probably did them

01:20:30 ◼   ► in the right order, where the one that can't run the desktop windows is the lesser product

01:20:35 ◼   ► of them. So their big reveal was like, guess what, you can run desktop stuff on this. And

01:20:42 ◼   ► think that is, you know, telling about the company.

01:20:50 ◼   ► I'm also curious about the timing of the event.

01:20:53 ◼   ► And like, I'd, you know, who you'll never know, because, you know, if you're going to

01:20:57 ◼   ► pre-announce something, it, when is the right time to pre-announce it?

01:21:01 ◼   ► And you know, I've, you know, Apple pre-announces almost nothing.

01:21:06 ◼   ► They tend to announce stuff when it's ready or like ready next week.

01:21:12 ◼   ► But for example, they pre-announced the iPhone by six months.

01:21:15 ◼   ► And I think there's a couple of…

01:21:16 ◼   ► That's a special reason though.

01:21:17 ◼   ► Right.

01:21:18 ◼   ► Because they weren't cannibalizing their own sales.

01:21:20 ◼   ► Right.

01:21:21 ◼   ► And they had to start doing federal…

01:21:23 ◼   ► FCC stuff.

01:21:24 ◼   ► FCC stuff that it was going to leak anyway.

01:21:26 ◼   ► So this was a way to control the reveal.

01:21:30 ◼   ► But the big thing is they weren't cannibalizing their own sales.

01:21:33 ◼   ► And so Microsoft is in a very similar position with this, where it's really…

01:21:37 ◼   ► I don't think it's going to stop sales of existing Windows notebooks and PCs, but it

01:21:45 ◼   ► might maybe a little for some buyers slow sales of iPads or make people wait a little

01:21:51 ◼   ► bit.

01:21:52 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

01:21:53 ◼   ► Maybe.

01:21:54 ◼   ► If it works, if it catches on and the idea of we should wait for the surface at least

01:22:00 ◼   ► to see it, if there's any merit to it, it's only going to hurt Apple and/or Android tablet

01:22:06 ◼   ► makers.

01:22:07 ◼   ► anybody who's already using Windows.

01:22:09 ◼   ► Yeah. Right? I don't think that they risk cannibalizing anything of their own.

01:22:12 ◼   ► I don't think they thought it through that much, though. I mean, you're

01:22:15 ◼   ► presupposing that they've got a plan. But I also think,

01:22:19 ◼   ► well, I think it's a lot about the fact that at some point, once they get this

01:22:23 ◼   ► thing, the wheel's running on this thing production-wise, they can't keep it secret.

01:22:27 ◼   ► Maybe. But I mean, those, I mean, those things seem

01:22:31 ◼   ► to barely work, right? Like, the journalists didn't get to play with the keyboards.

01:22:35 ◼   ► everything was all screwed up and one of them froze on stage. That's just bad.

01:22:41 ◼   ► And like it was the worst thing about it is that he didn't even handle it well.

01:22:45 ◼   ► No. It's not you know stuff went wrong for Steve at times but you know he

01:22:51 ◼   ► laughed or he handled it well. Right. Sort of like Johnny Carson with a bomb

01:22:55 ◼   ► joke. Right. Yeah you just got a roll with it. This was like excuse me give me a

01:22:59 ◼   ► minute, ambles over to like the spare one. Okay, we're back.

01:23:04 ◼   ► He almost the way he ambled over there, it this was Steven

01:23:08 ◼   ► Sinofsky, it almost looked as though he was just gonna run off

01:23:11 ◼   ► the stage and not come back. Like he was just

01:23:14 ◼   ► he was I would have I would have just left. They've just thrown

01:23:17 ◼   ► the thing on the ground and just left. But so so everything we

01:23:23 ◼   ► know about this event is it was very last minute, right? They

01:23:25 ◼   ► I think invites went out during the week of WWDC.

01:23:30 ◼   ► People didn't know where to go once they got to LA.

01:23:35 ◼   ► It seems to me that, I don't know, I have no idea,

01:23:40 ◼   ► but apparently Google is going to be announcing

01:23:45 ◼   ► a Nexus tablet next week at I/O.

01:23:50 ◼   ► And it seems to me that maybe Microsoft knows that,

01:23:53 ◼   ► that finally figured it out.

01:23:58 ◼   ► And that they want to frame any IO announcements

01:24:00 ◼   ► through the lens that they've just presented hastily.

01:24:05 ◼   ► Because you know, maybe not in the tech press necessarily,

01:24:13 ◼   ► but in the mainstream press, you know that

01:24:17 ◼   ► whatever's announced at IO is going to be related

01:24:20 ◼   ► what Microsoft has just said.

01:24:22 ◼   ► Yeah, I think so too.

01:24:25 ◼   ► And in terms of being arranged at the last minute, it does seem like the invitations

01:24:29 ◼   ► and et cetera, at least the invitations went out after the WWDC keynote.

01:24:36 ◼   ► And so I can only guess that they were like, "Let's see if Apple announces anything relevant,"

01:24:42 ◼   ► which they didn't.

01:24:44 ◼   ► But I think that there's… and who knows, maybe Microsoft has better intel than we do

01:24:49 ◼   ► do that maybe they even know more about what Google's going to announce. But the consensus

01:24:53 ◼   ► is certainly that Google's going to announce something that's pretty much along the same

01:24:56 ◼   ► lines, a Google-branded tablet. And I think they wanted to get in front of that.

01:25:04 ◼   ► Steve: Yeah. I mean, is any press about the Google tablet is going to be pressed for them

01:25:07 ◼   ► too? It's what Google did with the 3D maps or tried to do. I mean, personally, I don't

01:25:13 ◼   ► think it's a great move. Dave: Right. I think it looks defensive.

01:25:17 ◼   ► Exactly. But it is, it's a common thing. Google just did it with the maps.

01:25:21 ◼   ► I guess we're running short on time here, but we have a few more things I wanted to talk to you about.

01:25:28 ◼   ► Stuff that you're working on. You run a conference in Montreal.

01:25:33 ◼   ► Started last year. Singleton.

01:25:35 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:25:36 ◼   ► The Indy Mac, or Indy, I say Mac, but Indy Apple Developer Conference.

01:25:40 ◼   ► Right. With Luke Fentel, Scott Morrison, and a lot of help from Petra Mueller.

01:25:46 ◼   ► Mueller. Yeah, it was fantastic. I was there last year and it was a terrific time. People

01:25:52 ◼   ► are, I think, much… Did you get a lot of people asking at WWDC about Singleton 2?

01:25:57 ◼   ► Oh, yeah. Yeah. Everybody's asking when it's going on sale and what's going on.

01:26:00 ◼   ► Right. It's going to be… I think it's going to be a WWDC situation now where it's

01:26:04 ◼   ► like you're going to put it on sale and the damn thing is going to sell out.

01:26:07 ◼   ► Yeah. I mean, that happened last year. Like, I had to ask you not to actually mention it

01:26:11 ◼   ► on Derek Fryball last year because it went pretty quick then.

01:26:16 ◼   ► It is rare.

01:26:17 ◼   ► It is actually very rare that people ask me not to link to something.

01:26:20 ◼   ► Hey, I'm going to put this thing on sale.

01:26:24 ◼   ► Don't link to it on Daring Fireball, because I think that the people who read your site

01:26:28 ◼   ► are really going to jump all over it.

01:26:30 ◼   ► What are you going to do?

01:26:32 ◼   ► Are you going to have a bigger venue?

01:26:34 ◼   ► Michael has a bigger venue.

01:26:35 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:26:36 ◼   ► It's a little bit bigger.

01:26:37 ◼   ► It's about 120 people compared to the 75, 80 that we had last time.

01:26:40 ◼   ► It's a very small crowd, but I think a small crowd is good.

01:26:46 ◼   ► The value is, I think the speaker is being a lot of value, but I think in a way the greater

01:26:52 ◼   ► value is having a small crowd, meeting everybody, and talking about what the speakers had to

01:26:57 ◼   ► say.

01:26:58 ◼   ► Dave Asprey I'm always interested too, like sometimes

01:27:05 ◼   ► when people talk to me about Daring Fireball sponsorships or the talk show sponsorships,

01:27:11 ◼   ► and they'll ask, "Well, what kind of results can I expect?"

01:27:13 ◼   ► And I often, I don't really know.

01:27:15 ◼   ► I mean, I don't measure stuff like that.

01:27:17 ◼   ► Like, when I have links to your site, it just goes right to you.

01:27:21 ◼   ► There's no click tracker.

01:27:22 ◼   ► And even if I did have a click tracker, who knows what that means?

01:27:24 ◼   ► And who knows whether you can even trust it or whatever,

01:27:27 ◼   ► and whether one thing goes-- I always say, the bottom line is,

01:27:31 ◼   ► I think the most telling thing is how many repeat sponsors there are.

01:27:35 ◼   ► And there's a lot.

01:27:36 ◼   ► And that means that they came back and they were happy.

01:27:37 ◼   ► And so when I-- you were doing a conference,

01:27:40 ◼   ► because I've often thought maybe I should try to put a conference together.

01:27:43 ◼   ► The interesting thing to me wasn't whether you did the first one. It was whether you'd want to do a second one

01:27:48 ◼   ► Right and you did. Yeah. Well, we had it. It was a big success. We

01:27:53 ◼   ► Not financially actually just it breaks even through it's not a this is not a business for us

01:27:59 ◼   ► It's just something that we wanted to do

01:28:01 ◼   ► We had it like a really great time

01:28:05 ◼   ► We had great speakers great turnout and you know, we wanted to do it again. I'm going to amp it up and try it out

01:28:10 ◼   ► again

01:28:11 ◼   ► Because I think it's actually

01:28:13 ◼   ► We're not focused the same way.

01:28:17 ◼   ► There's a lot of indie conferences and a lot of really good ones, but we're not really focused on the same kind of thing.

01:28:21 ◼   ► We aim to sort of be a more meta level, if you will.

01:28:26 ◼   ► Last year was about...

01:28:31 ◼   ► We tend to pick themes. Well, there's only been two, but the idea is that we're going to pick themes.

01:28:36 ◼   ► And last year was basically...

01:28:41 ◼   ► that we were at an inflection point. Like the Mac was clearly going the way of iOS in

01:28:46 ◼   ► terms of the Mac App Store, sandboxing, and a lot of indie developers, the way that they

01:28:53 ◼   ► run their businesses was going to change. So we thought it would be valuable to get

01:28:58 ◼   ► a bunch of people together and sort of discuss that, discuss where things were going and

01:29:03 ◼   ► how people were going to adapt to the change and I think that worked well. This year the

01:29:09 ◼   ► theme is going to be about growth and scaling and the process behind that.

01:29:14 ◼   ► Because I think as smaller developers or basically people in the industry,

01:29:20 ◼   ► we're all getting a lot more customers or in your case a lot more readers than

01:29:27 ◼   ► we used to say five years ago.

01:29:34 ◼   ► And how do we handle that?

01:29:34 ◼   ► Like, what does that mean for our businesses and our software and the way that we approach

01:29:41 ◼   ► the market and our customers?

01:29:43 ◼   ► It's a good theme.

01:29:45 ◼   ► I was just talking to some people last week at WWDC.

01:29:48 ◼   ► There's definitely some really, really small shops.

01:29:51 ◼   ► One man shows, two man partnerships that have more customers than I don't know ever before.

01:30:01 ◼   ► I mean, I guess there are websites that could do it.

01:30:04 ◼   ► the web sort of enabled that. But with these apps, there's people who have more customers

01:30:07 ◼   ► than it's fathomable for a one-person shop to do. And I don't know that—it's a good

01:30:14 ◼   ► topic because I just don't know that we're hooked up evolutionarily to deal with that

01:30:18 ◼   ► sort of scale at an individual level. Like if you ran a bakery, it doesn't make any sense

01:30:27 ◼   ► that you'd have 40,000 customers a week. It just doesn't work. But with apps, it works.

01:30:33 ◼   ► you can do it.

01:30:35 ◼   ► - Well, yeah, and there's still challenges.

01:30:37 ◼   ► Support load goes way up.

01:30:38 ◼   ► - Right.

01:30:39 ◼   ► - I just, I think it's an interesting topic.

01:30:47 ◼   ► I think it's what's happening this year.

01:30:49 ◼   ► Last year, I think, was like big change.

01:30:51 ◼   ► This year, things are growing.

01:30:53 ◼   ► I don't know what it'll be next year,

01:30:54 ◼   ► but hopefully I'll identify it,

01:30:56 ◼   ► or will identify it and come up with another good thing.

01:30:59 ◼   ► - So the other thing that you've got cooking

01:31:01 ◼   ► is you've got a new company.

01:31:02 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:31:03 ◼   ► and distilled.

01:31:04 ◼   ► Yeah, with our good friend, Chris Parrish.

01:31:07 ◼   ► Chris Parrish, formerly of Rogue Sheep.

01:31:11 ◼   ► You formerly of Rogue Amoeba.

01:31:14 ◼   ► We went rogue.

01:31:15 ◼   ► Oh, God.

01:31:16 ◼   ► It's the sheep jokes.

01:31:17 ◼   ► We'll cut that out.

01:31:18 ◼   ► Don't worry about it, guys.

01:31:19 ◼   ► Yeah, we'll cut that right out.

01:31:23 ◼   ► And you guys, you're not ready to announce anything yet, but you guys are working on

01:31:27 ◼   ► an app, and it is a Mac app, not an iOS app.

01:31:33 ◼   ► And I think that's interesting because I feel like certainly the Mac, you know, Mac sales

01:31:38 ◼   ► are up.

01:31:39 ◼   ► Mac, it's never been better time to be a Mac developer.

01:31:41 ◼   ► But iOS is growth, is so explosive that it dwarfs the growth the Mac has been undergoing.

01:31:50 ◼   ► And there's sort of an assumption, I think, that most people, if they're going to start

01:31:54 ◼   ► a new thing to do apps, it's going to be iPhone and iPad apps.

01:31:57 ◼   ► So I suppose the answer to that question is that we wanted to solve a problem,

01:32:02 ◼   ► and the problem existed or was best solved on the Mac.

01:32:11 ◼   ► So what the app is, is basically it's called napkin.

01:32:17 ◼   ► It's a concise visual communication and it's for marking up images and working with

01:32:21 ◼   ► designers and developers remotely.

01:32:25 ◼   ► So you can very quickly with a novel input method,

01:32:29 ◼   ► make notes on an image and share it.

01:32:31 ◼   ► Given that that's the problem we were trying to solve,

01:32:37 ◼   ► and it's a problem that I've encountered,

01:32:39 ◼   ► like you said, when I was working at Rogue Amoeba,

01:32:41 ◼   ► I was working remote, and would often want to send

01:32:44 ◼   ► notes back and forth on the work, or the widgets,

01:32:48 ◼   ► or the design, and it was difficult.

01:32:51 ◼   ► Well, and you and Chris work remote, because Chris is--

01:32:54 ◼   ► Chris is in Seattle and I'm here in Montreal.

01:32:56 ◼   ► Alright, so you're both in Canada but on different sides of the continent.

01:33:01 ◼   ► Exactly, exactly.

01:33:02 ◼   ► Different coasts.

01:33:07 ◼   ► So you guys probably use it.

01:33:08 ◼   ► You guys probably use it, you know, dog fooding it.

01:33:12 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

01:33:13 ◼   ► We use it a lot.

01:33:14 ◼   ► And, you know, a couple of other people use it too.

01:33:18 ◼   ► Is it retina ready?

01:33:20 ◼   ► No.

01:33:21 ◼   ► Well, it will be.

01:33:24 ◼   ► Easy, right?

01:33:29 ◼   ► Well, I mean, we need to 2x the resources, basically.

01:33:32 ◼   ► But it's like, we're pretty close to shipping.

01:33:36 ◼   ► It's like, we want to ship same time as Mountain Lion.

01:33:39 ◼   ► We're going to be Mountain Lion only,

01:33:42 ◼   ► and we're going to use all their goodies.

01:33:45 ◼   ► But yeah, to answer the question about iOS,

01:33:48 ◼   ► this was a problem that primarily existed on the Mac.

01:33:51 ◼   ► when a designer is working in Photoshop or a developer is working in Xcode,

01:33:56 ◼   ► and you want to quickly share things back and forth.

01:34:00 ◼   ► It is an app that is very well suited to the iPad.

01:34:06 ◼   ► But the problem we wanted to solve manifests itself mainly on the Mac right now.

01:34:12 ◼   ► I think that it fits.

01:34:17 ◼   ► I think that that's one of the messages Apple has been trying to reiterate in the last year or so,

01:34:19 ◼   ► more or less don't forget about the Mac. I can't believe that, from Apple's

01:34:27 ◼   ► perspective, that they can't believe that after six consecutive years of

01:34:31 ◼   ► consecutive quarters, 24 consecutive quarters where the Mac has, Mac sales

01:34:36 ◼   ► have grown faster than the PC industry at large. 24 consecutive quarters. They

01:34:42 ◼   ► still have to remind people like, hey the Mac is awesome and it's, there's

01:34:48 ◼   ► there's totally problems that are best solved on the Mac.

01:34:53 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think so.

01:34:54 ◼   ► I mean, I think there's still a bit of a,

01:34:56 ◼   ► like a gold rush mentality around iOS.

01:35:00 ◼   ► I, or, you know, Chris and I, I think,

01:35:04 ◼   ► would rather figure out a problem to solve

01:35:09 ◼   ► and work out the best way to solve it.

01:35:10 ◼   ► And in this case, it's on the Mac.

01:35:12 ◼   ► - I also think, I do think that there's an opportunity

01:35:15 ◼   ► there, too, that a new thing for the Mac

01:35:18 ◼   ► be able to gain attention quicker than stuff for the iOS because there's so much less

01:35:24 ◼   ► of that gold rush mentality.

01:35:26 ◼   ► Yeah, I think so too.

01:35:28 ◼   ► Where there's so many thousands of developers releasing iOS stuff that the Mac stuff can

01:35:35 ◼   ► gain traction.

01:35:36 ◼   ► And I thought that was obvious too.

01:35:39 ◼   ► I thought it was clear at the keynote, and it's occurred to me that I was a little bored

01:35:42 ◼   ► during the Mountain Lion section because it was almost all old stuff, stuff we already

01:35:46 ◼   ► knew. But then somebody pointed out that it was, you know, most of the developers there,

01:35:53 ◼   ► they don't even, they don't know anything about Mountain Lion because they're not writing

01:35:56 ◼   ► Mac apps. It was all news to them. That's why there was so much applause for like the

01:36:00 ◼   ► stuff that was, you know, on Apple's website for months.

01:36:04 ◼   ► Yeah, I think Syracuse was saying that on a news show.

01:36:07 ◼   ► Yeah, that's exactly, you know what, that's where I got it. I think, you know what, I

01:36:10 ◼   ► think he told me that in person last week, too.

01:36:13 ◼   ► It could be.

01:36:18 ◼   ► But yeah, the Mountain Lion section of the keynote

01:36:21 ◼   ► was really kind of boring.

01:36:23 ◼   ► I think maybe Power Nap was new.

01:36:25 ◼   ► Which is cool.

01:36:27 ◼   ► Yeah, it's cool, but I mean, yeah, it puts me to sleep.

01:36:30 ◼   ► Yeah, it was Power Nap and dictation.

01:36:31 ◼   ► I think were the two new things that were revealed.

01:36:34 ◼   ► So it was not the most exciting.

01:36:36 ◼   ► No, no, neither was your developer technology.

01:36:39 ◼   ► They just work.

01:36:41 ◼   ► They do the thing.

01:36:38 ◼   ► Oh, and you can tweet in a notification area now.

01:36:41 ◼   ► Oh, right.

01:36:42 ◼   ► Like nothing groundbreaking.

01:36:44 ◼   ► But I think Mountain Lion is the--

01:36:47 ◼   ► it's what Lion should have been, basically.

01:36:51 ◼   ► It's the polished up version.

01:36:52 ◼   ► I think iOS 6 is the same.

01:36:54 ◼   ► It's a polished up version of iOS 5.

01:36:58 ◼   ► We're not on a major leap year right now.

01:37:01 ◼   ► All right.

01:37:03 ◼   ► And we've got to wrap this up.

01:37:04 ◼   ► But there was a story on Gizmodo today.

01:37:07 ◼   ► somebody wrote in the headline, I think, more or less says it all, is that Microsoft is

01:37:10 ◼   ► now the most exciting company in tech. And it's typical Gizmodo linkbait, where they're

01:37:17 ◼   ► trying to take an obvious contrarian perspective. But I have to say that in broad strokes, I

01:37:24 ◼   ► actually agree with that. And later in the article, I forget who wrote it, I'm not going

01:37:29 ◼   ► to, who cares, it's Gizmodo. But they, instead of saying exciting, they said innovative,

01:37:33 ◼   ► is most innovative. Now there, I think, is more of an argument. I think exciting is the

01:37:38 ◼   ► word that actually is more apt, which is that nobody was really expecting the surface thing

01:37:44 ◼   ► this week. They kept that secret, and people were thinking the best people thought was

01:37:48 ◼   ► maybe like a Barnes and Noble joint, you know, smaller, six-inch type thing that was more

01:37:54 ◼   ► like an e-reader. This is way more ambitious than anything people had guessed, and they

01:37:59 ◼   ► kept it under really tight wraps.

01:38:02 ◼   ► Nobody knew it didn't leak.

01:38:03 ◼   ► Whereas everything Apple has announced is more or less as expected.

01:38:08 ◼   ► There's stuff like Passbook that is news and wasn't really rumored or expected, but it's

01:38:13 ◼   ► not major.

01:38:14 ◼   ► It's not exciting.

01:38:17 ◼   ► Apple has become, I think, predictable in a very good way, in a way that is good for

01:38:21 ◼   ► the company.

01:38:23 ◼   ► And I think iOS 6 and Mountain Lion reflect that.

01:38:27 ◼   ► I think they're very, very good lists of features year over year.

01:38:31 ◼   ► Very impressive 12-month updates to what came before them.

01:38:35 ◼   ► But they're not…

01:38:36 ◼   ► Exciting is not the word I would use to describe them.

01:38:39 ◼   ► Well, I mean, I think Microsoft is interesting in that they're kind of screwed.

01:38:47 ◼   ► Apple is less interesting in that they're on top of their game and they're executing

01:38:50 ◼   ► well.

01:38:51 ◼   ► Right.

01:38:52 ◼   ► It's not as exciting to be the guy in the lead.

01:38:54 ◼   ► guy who's gonna like the race car driver who's making the exciting moves is the

01:38:57 ◼   ► guy who's in second right yeah and they're not just in the lead to look a

01:39:00 ◼   ► lap ahead right and you know there's it's not that they're not doing

01:39:05 ◼   ► interesting stuff I'm sure there'll be a lot of cool stuff coming out but for the

01:39:12 ◼   ► you know for the you know to for the observer Microsoft is offers more drama

01:39:22 ◼   ► I'd say.

01:39:23 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:39:24 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:39:25 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:39:26 ◼   ► And I think that's good.

01:39:27 ◼   ► I think it's actually what they need to do.

01:39:28 ◼   ► It makes me optimistic about their prospects.

01:39:32 ◼   ► It would make me optimistic, except that their products seem all screwed up.

01:39:35 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:39:36 ◼   ► So I'm not really sure.

01:39:37 ◼   ► But at the very least, I feel like at the very least, though, it shows that they're

01:39:40 ◼   ► not in denial.

01:39:41 ◼   ► Yes.

01:39:42 ◼   ► Right?

01:39:43 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:39:44 ◼   ► What would be sad would be if they had their head in the sand and were just thumbs in their

01:39:48 ◼   ► ears, you know, "Nah, nah, can't hear you," doing the same thing that they have been doing,

01:39:55 ◼   ► you know, and just pretending that the industry hasn't totally shifted and that Apple hasn't

01:40:01 ◼   ► taken over the penthouse suite.

01:40:02 ◼   ► Right.

01:40:03 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:40:04 ◼   ► I mean, I think one of the…

01:40:06 ◼   ► I think my favorite part of that surface post that you put up last night was the analysis

01:40:12 ◼   ► of where the money's going.

01:40:14 ◼   ► Right.

01:40:15 ◼   ► And I think that's telling, and I think you're probably right that they've noticed that,

01:40:19 ◼   ► and they're going to have to start cannibalizing their partners to get back to the thicker

01:40:24 ◼   ► profit margins.

01:40:25 ◼   ► Right.

01:40:26 ◼   ► And it's, like I said, I really think when I think about it, it's a classic Microsoft

01:40:29 ◼   ► move, where a classic Microsoft move is ballsy and aggressive.

01:40:33 ◼   ► And it is.

01:40:34 ◼   ► But it's not ballsy and aggressive against Apple, even though it's competitive against

01:40:37 ◼   ► Apple.

01:40:38 ◼   ► I'm sure they hope it really is.

01:40:39 ◼   ► But it's really the ones that they're really, like, punching in the face are their PC OEM

01:40:44 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:40:45 ◼   ► They're going to take all their money.

01:40:46 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:40:47 ◼   ► Well, that's the goal.

01:40:48 ◼   ► You know?

01:40:49 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:40:50 ◼   ► Guy, thanks for being here.

01:40:51 ◼   ► It's a pleasure.

01:40:52 ◼   ► So coming soon, aged and distilled, and we even got a product named Napkin.

01:40:57 ◼   ► Looking forward to that.

01:40:59 ◼   ► You've got a blog, kickingbear.com.

01:41:02 ◼   ► Is it dot com?

01:41:03 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:41:04 ◼   ► Where you often – well, not often, but occasionally write very, very smart stuff.

01:41:10 ◼   ► Thank you.

01:41:12 ◼   ► Anything else that I should thank you for?

01:41:14 ◼   ► Do I owe you a drink?

01:41:17 ◼   ► I'm not sure.

01:41:18 ◼   ► I lost track, man.

01:41:20 ◼   ► Maybe.

01:41:21 ◼   ► Yes.

01:41:22 ◼   ► Let's just say yes.

01:41:23 ◼   ► You want me to drink?