ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► What? What's happening? Why? Like, I don't…

00:00:04 ◼   ► [

00:00:08 ◼   ► We have actually gotten a considerable amount of feedback about this.

00:00:12 ◼   ► But I guess, John, that you felt that Matthew's feedback was perhaps the best summary.

00:00:18 ◼   ► So would you like to tell us about this?

00:00:19 ◼   ► Yeah, anytime we ask any question, the Apple geniuses or the ex-Apple geniuses all come

00:00:24 ◼   ► out.

00:00:25 ◼   ► And this was about serial numbers and motherboards and the serial number being etched into metal

00:00:29 ◼   ► on various Apple computers and what if you get parts replaced that the serial number

00:00:33 ◼   ► is attached to.

00:00:35 ◼   ► The only thing that the geniuses couldn't tell us is facts from my past that I can't

00:00:41 ◼   ► remember because I'm old.

00:00:42 ◼   ► I have this vague memory of getting some part swapped in the distant past that none of these

00:00:48 ◼   ► guys know about because they probably weren't Apple geniuses then because Apple stores didn't

00:00:52 ◼   ► exist then.

00:00:53 ◼   ► Or maybe, I don't know, anyway.

00:00:55 ◼   ► The idea was that I got a computer back and they were like, "Oh, just so you know, your

00:00:58 ◼   ► serial number will be different now because we replaced the parts that determined that."

00:01:02 ◼   ► In this modern day and age in some as of now and some indeterminate time in the past that I can't remember back to

00:01:09 ◼   ► All of the motherboards Apple cells are apparently able to be flashed with a serial number

00:01:14 ◼   ► So when they give you one they just you know, they put they put your old serial number into it

00:01:18 ◼   ► So your serial number of your computer doesn't change even if they replace the part that contains a serial number

00:01:22 ◼   ► I put Matthew Cox's thing in here because he had the interesting bit that

00:01:26 ◼   ► Each part is factory repair to reuse three times before being scrapped

00:01:30 ◼   ► So you're supposed to only flash three different serial numbers into there

00:01:33 ◼   ► Although in theory this you could bypass that if you wanted to

00:01:38 ◼   ► And what else did he have in here?

00:01:41 ◼   ► About the stickers the idea is you're not supposed to be able to see the stickers

00:01:44 ◼   ► Sometimes there'll be a part that's replaced that has an etching on it and those cases the technician is supposed to use permanent marker

00:01:50 ◼   ► To note the serial number. Obviously, this is not in a visible location

00:01:52 ◼   ► You wouldn't see it

00:01:54 ◼   ► But some people send us screenshots of the permanent marker thing like that

00:01:57 ◼   ► They need to write the actual serial number on the part if it's not etched into it

00:02:02 ◼   ► And so on the inside and someplace that you won't see they just in their little scrawl handwriting right right in this serial number and

00:02:08 ◼   ► Boy, I wouldn't want to know that's on my computer. So if it is don't tell me

00:02:12 ◼   ► How many of those do you think are in your monitor your cinema display? I hope none because I well who knows

00:02:20 ◼   ► I don't want to think about it

00:02:21 ◼   ► Anyway, the external case on my monitor is the same I can tell but it's got all the scratches

00:02:24 ◼   ► They put into it every time it gets repaired

00:02:26 ◼   ► It's not their fault.

00:02:31 ◼   ► They always ask in that survey, "How is the external appearance of your thing?"

00:02:34 ◼   ► It's like, it's fine.

00:02:35 ◼   ► A regular person won't notice it, but it's literally impossible to handle things like

00:02:40 ◼   ► this that are just like this perfect anodized aluminum finish, heavy things and moving them

00:02:46 ◼   ► around.

00:02:47 ◼   ► It's impossible to not get scratches on it, so they do every time it goes in and out.

00:02:52 ◼   ► Small ones that mostly you can't see, but anyway.

00:02:55 ◼   ► And the final bit that I thought was interesting is that Apple are starting to put serial numbers

00:03:01 ◼   ► on other internal components.

00:03:05 ◼   ► And he says this ensures that no three-way swaps are carried out for warranty scams and

00:03:09 ◼   ► also that each part is reused three times.

00:03:10 ◼   ► These parts usually have tiny QR codes on them, about half the size of a small fingernail,

00:03:15 ◼   ► which require expensive barcode scanners to scan and which are declared during the repair

00:03:19 ◼   ► process for tracking purposes.

00:03:20 ◼   ► So not just like big things like your motherboard or whatever, but even the little tiny parts,

00:03:24 ◼   ► to little, little tiny serial numbers and little, little tiny QR codes to keep track

00:03:28 ◼   ► of them all and to make sure that they're right.

00:03:30 ◼   ► And they say that the technicians like it because it's much easier to see it with the

00:03:34 ◼   ► fancy barcode scanners to scan the tiny little QR codes than trying to read tiny little alphanumeric

00:03:38 ◼   ► codes through a magnifying glass and copying them down because, you know, the zeros look

00:03:43 ◼   ► like eights, you know, look like Bs and all these other problems on these tiny things.

00:03:47 ◼   ► So I thought this was interesting that the serial number proliferation and using all

00:03:52 ◼   ► that with modern techniques to track it to make sure that the parts are used three times

00:03:57 ◼   ► and then trashed and stuff like that.

00:03:58 ◼   ► So never fear, your serial number will not change.

00:04:02 ◼   ► Although part of the process a lot of people wrote in about was the technicians are really

00:04:06 ◼   ► supposed to give you your serial number because if you get it and they don't give it to you

00:04:10 ◼   ► with your old serial number into it or with no serial number into it, lots of stuff won't

00:04:14 ◼   ► work.

00:04:15 ◼   ► Like iMessage will be all cranky if you don't have a serial number or any sort of thing

00:04:17 ◼   ► that's derived from the serial number involving authentication.

00:04:20 ◼   ► Like your hard drive and all your data will all be the same, but the OS and the computer

00:04:24 ◼   ► will be very angry if either they forgot to put a serial number on it, flash it into the

00:04:29 ◼   ► motherboard that they replaced, or they put a different one into it.

00:04:31 ◼   ► So I forget someone was telling us the techniques they used to make people remember it.

00:04:37 ◼   ► But anyway, if everyone's doing their job right, you shouldn't have to worry about this

00:04:40 ◼   ► issue at all.

00:04:41 ◼   ► You'll just have to think maybe a little bit about someone's handwriting and permanent

00:04:44 ◼   ► marker on the inside of your computer.

00:04:46 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:04:48 ◼   ► Oh goodness, I just wanna see your face

00:04:50 ◼   ► if you open up your computer one day

00:04:51 ◼   ► and see somebody's chicken scratch in there in Sharpie.

00:04:54 ◼   ► Oh God.

00:04:55 ◼   ► - I only accept the etched-in signatures

00:04:58 ◼   ► of the original Macintosh team,

00:04:59 ◼   ► which I do have on the inside

00:05:01 ◼   ► of a couple of my computers in the attic.

00:05:03 ◼   ► - Oh my goodness.

00:05:04 ◼   ► All right, so tell us about

00:05:05 ◼   ► long-distance wireless charging, Jon.

00:05:07 ◼   ► - That was at the end of the last episode, I think,

00:05:09 ◼   ► talking about, you asked about, Casey,

00:05:12 ◼   ► like inductive charging, like what if there's no

00:05:14 ◼   ► lightning port, what if you just had to put your phone

00:05:15 ◼   ► like a pad or a mat or some other thing that this way the watch charges where you don't

00:05:19 ◼   ► plug something into it but you just rest it on something and Marco was talking about how

00:05:24 ◼   ► that's maybe not such a great idea because you gotta have all these pads and even the

00:05:28 ◼   ► watch is annoying with its little pad that comes at it and you know and then I threw

00:05:32 ◼   ► out like the idea of well what would be something that everyone could agree would be great is

00:05:36 ◼   ► if you didn't have to put it on a pad or plug it into anything you just plug something into

00:05:41 ◼   ► the wall in the room and then all the devices in the room get charged.

00:05:45 ◼   ► Somehow it gets power wirelessly from that location specifically targeted to each device.

00:05:50 ◼   ► And your liver.

00:05:51 ◼   ► Yeah, and I just threw that out there as a thing, but apparently lots of companies are

00:05:56 ◼   ► working on this tech.

00:05:57 ◼   ► We'll throw some links in the show notes.

00:05:58 ◼   ► This is an Ars Technica article that links to a Bloomberg article that talks about companies

00:06:02 ◼   ► doing stuff like this.

00:06:03 ◼   ► Of course, there are competing standards and, you know, they're saying the current ones

00:06:06 ◼   ► are much slower than plugging in a wire, as you might imagine.

00:06:10 ◼   ► And the other link we'll put in the show, it's just to Artemis, that company with the

00:06:13 ◼   ► P cell technology that we talked about a while ago.

00:06:15 ◼   ► >> Oh yeah, is anything going on with them?

00:06:17 ◼   ► >> The whole thing with them was like, besides the thing that they were promoting, they had

00:06:21 ◼   ► that little teaser at the end of their intro, like, oh, and there are other applications

00:06:24 ◼   ► that we're thinking about for this technology that we're not ready to discuss.

00:06:27 ◼   ► And everybody who wrote about that story was like, we think probably what they're talking

00:06:31 ◼   ► about is power delivery, because their cool technology was like that they could use computers

00:06:38 ◼   ► essentially to calculate the correct interference pattern to exactly target the devices that

00:06:43 ◼   ► are in range.

00:06:44 ◼   ► So they would sort of manipulate all the big overlapping bouncing waveforms with like sort

00:06:49 ◼   ► of a feedback loop until it would hone in on wherever your phone is.

00:06:54 ◼   ► And it would track it.

00:06:55 ◼   ► Like you could be, you know, they had a thing like you can go in a car once you go over

00:06:58 ◼   ► 70 miles an hour, it's not fast enough to keep up with where you are or anything like

00:07:01 ◼   ► that.

00:07:02 ◼   ► But for people just walking around holding their phones, it would use interference as

00:07:05 ◼   ► an advantage instead of a disadvantage, using the power of computers to figure out this

00:07:10 ◼   ► complicated math to exactly target you.

00:07:11 ◼   ► So what they're basically doing is taking electromagnetic radiation and concentrating

00:07:16 ◼   ► it in a fairly small area.

00:07:18 ◼   ► It's just Wi-Fi or cell signals.

00:07:20 ◼   ► It's not radiation that's going to do anything harmful.

00:07:23 ◼   ► But once you have that ability to basically say, "I can take electromagnetic radiation

00:07:27 ◼   ► and target it in a very small area that you can move wherever the hell you want, and we'll

00:07:30 ◼   ► keep up with wherever it is. Then if you crank up the power, you know, like, you know, it's

00:07:36 ◼   ► some form of delivering energy through the air to charge a battery. You can't really

00:07:41 ◼   ► crank it up ambiently because like then, you know, if you put all your devices in a microwave

00:07:46 ◼   ► and that bombards it with lots of high energy electromagnetic radiation, but it does it

00:07:52 ◼   ► uniformly. It doesn't like everything in the microwave is hitting that. You can't make

00:07:56 ◼   ► an entire room a microwave oven. Not that you're saying I'm using microwave radiation,

00:08:00 ◼   ► But anyway, you really need to target it because if you target it, then you can crank up the

00:08:03 ◼   ► power and everybody else in the room doesn't get a huge amount of power thrown into them,

00:08:10 ◼   ► just the spot where you're targeting it does.

00:08:11 ◼   ► You still have to stay within reasonable safe limits, which is why I keep talking about

00:08:15 ◼   ► cooking your internal organs and if they're off on where they aim it or whatever.

00:08:18 ◼   ► But the ability to target a small area is what gives you the ability to turn the power

00:08:24 ◼   ► dial up even at all, both practically speaking because you're concentrating in a smaller

00:08:30 ◼   ► area and also because if you start to get into the realm depending on what wavelength

00:08:34 ◼   ► and signals you're using, you start getting into the realm where they could actually affect

00:08:39 ◼   ► the human body, at the very least you're not just doing it to every single person standing

00:08:44 ◼   ► in the room, you're just doing it maybe to the hand that's holding the phone or whatever.

00:08:48 ◼   ► So I imagine that the companies that are working on this tech are working on it at such low

00:08:53 ◼   ► power that it does not pose a harm to humans and it's probably not as fancy as the P cell

00:08:58 ◼   ► where it exactly targets with this constructive interference thing.

00:09:02 ◼   ► It is probably much simpler and lower power than that.

00:09:06 ◼   ► But for a situation, the reason I was thinking about this, even not just like, "Oh, you show

00:09:10 ◼   ► up in the hotel room and you just plug this wall art in and all your devices charge."

00:09:14 ◼   ► Even for at home, because plugging in your phone before you go to sleep, it's got eight

00:09:19 ◼   ► hours to charge.

00:09:20 ◼   ► It doesn't take eight hours to charge your phone.

00:09:21 ◼   ► It takes way less than that.

00:09:22 ◼   ► So if I could just not have to worry about plugging in my phone, whenever my phone was

00:09:26 ◼   ► just on my nightstand, anywhere on my nightstand, not on a special pad or like even just anywhere

00:09:31 ◼   ► in my bedroom.

00:09:32 ◼   ► If I knew that if I put my phone anywhere in my bedroom and go to sleep, when I wake

00:09:35 ◼   ► up in the morning it will be fully charged and I have to do nothing, I would buy that

00:09:38 ◼   ► thing.

00:09:39 ◼   ► Like, because you don't care how slow it charges, you're going to be asleep for many hours and

00:09:42 ◼   ► it will, you know, it maybe wouldn't work for an iPad because sometimes it takes forever

00:09:46 ◼   ► to charge.

00:09:47 ◼   ► But even just the very simple, very low power version of this that didn't require me to

00:09:51 ◼   ► remember to plug my phone in, I'd buy that in a second.

00:09:53 ◼   ► So I hope these people working on this get it done sooner rather than later.

00:09:58 ◼   ► Just watch where you put your hand on your liver at night.

00:09:59 ◼   ► It's going to be so low power though, but it's barely trickling.

00:10:02 ◼   ► And maybe it'll keep me warm in these cold New England winters when it's 60 degrees

00:10:07 ◼   ► here today or whatever.

00:10:09 ◼   ► So tell us about the shared iPad development guidelines, which I didn't even know was

00:10:13 ◼   ► a thing until I saw this in the show notes.

00:10:15 ◼   ► We talked about it last time.

00:10:16 ◼   ► It was like the education, iPads, the multi-user account thing.

00:10:20 ◼   ► Sure.

00:10:21 ◼   ► I just didn't see the developer guidelines until tonight.

00:10:23 ◼   ► Yeah, this is just a public URL, so if you want to go to it, you can see the guidelines

00:10:27 ◼   ► for like, say you're going to write an application that's going to be on one of these shared

00:10:30 ◼   ► iPads in a classroom where you've got 20 different students that could all "login" to your iPad

00:10:34 ◼   ► at any time.

00:10:36 ◼   ► And it's all the same things that we thought, just following up on this to put the URL in

00:10:40 ◼   ► there.

00:10:41 ◼   ► Like the guidelines are like, make sure you put all the data in the cloud.

00:10:43 ◼   ► This is for app developers.

00:10:44 ◼   ► If you're writing an app that you want to be well behaved, put all your data in the

00:10:47 ◼   ► cloud, pull the data down when you need it.

00:10:50 ◼   ► Every time someone does something to change the data, shove it back up into the cloud.

00:10:55 ◼   ► All the little things that you're used to keeping locally, like first launch or progress

00:11:00 ◼   ► flags like how they launched this app before, what screen were they on or whatever.

00:11:04 ◼   ► That stuff that you used to keep like in a little plist locally, don't.

00:11:07 ◼   ► You got to put that in the cloud too otherwise every time someone logs in it'll be like their

00:11:10 ◼   ► first launching it over and over again.

00:11:13 ◼   ► And use all the APIs that Apple's added over the past few years about marking your storage

00:11:17 ◼   ► just purgeable by the OS so it can come through and say,

00:11:20 ◼   ► oh, I'm allowed to delete that because the app has told me

00:11:23 ◼   ► that it is available elsewhere.

00:11:25 ◼   ► So if I delete it, it's fine.

00:11:26 ◼   ► Because again, if you have 20 students,

00:11:28 ◼   ► they can't all fit their data on there

00:11:29 ◼   ► as multiple students log in and new data gets pulled down

00:11:32 ◼   ► from the cloud, it's going to inevitably evict data

00:11:34 ◼   ► from the person who used it five logins ago.

00:11:37 ◼   ► And they talk about using the various APIs

00:11:41 ◼   ► for syncing stuff.

00:11:43 ◼   ► But, so these guidelines, this is,

00:11:46 ◼   ► You know it's for it's for shared iPad which is their education thing, but these same guidelines are very similar to the guidelines

00:11:52 ◼   ► They've given to people on

00:11:54 ◼   ► iOS and even OS 10 again with the the marking your data as purgeable and doing everything with the cloud and

00:12:00 ◼   ► So that less state is kept on the local machine

00:12:03 ◼   ► Well, it's even closer to the Apple TV where the Apple TV from the start

00:12:06 ◼   ► They even they specifically say you have no persistent storage only iCloud

00:12:10 ◼   ► Yep, and then you can your app can't even be that big so half your app has to be pulled down on demand as well

00:12:16 ◼   ► So these are these are like guidelines many people pointed out like this is like slowly inch by inch

00:12:21 ◼   ► Creeping up onto the Chromebook model, which is you know, of course, there's nothing on this computer

00:12:25 ◼   ► This computer is nothing. This computer is basically a local cache of some stuff that lives elsewhere

00:12:29 ◼   ► Nothing is ever canonically on this computer

00:12:32 ◼   ► Which is a great idea and Google just skipped everything and went right to there and your whole OS is a web browser and so

00:12:37 ◼   ► and so forth, Apple is slowly moving up to it. Very slowly, but every little bit helps.

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00:14:04 ◼   ► That's audible.com/atp.

00:14:05 ◼   ► Thanks a lot to Audible for sponsoring our show.

00:14:09 ◼   ► So earlier today, Walt Mossberg discovered the functional high ground.

00:14:13 ◼   ► So this year, I don't have to say anything this year.

00:14:16 ◼   ► Everyone's doing it for me.

00:14:17 ◼   ► Yeah, I know.

00:14:18 ◼   ► You just planted the seed.

00:14:19 ◼   ► You incepted the tech press.

00:14:20 ◼   ► That's not the past tense of inception.

00:14:22 ◼   ► Anyway, so the point is—

00:14:23 ◼   ► That sounds gross.

00:14:24 ◼   ► I'm sorry, tech press.

00:14:26 ◼   ► Whoops.

00:14:27 ◼   ► So anyway, so Walt wrote on The Verge an article about how he really feels like Apple software

00:14:34 ◼   ► quality has gone downhill lately, and so there are a couple of quotes I wanted to pull out

00:14:37 ◼   ► and read really quickly.

00:14:39 ◼   ► And this is Walt Mossberg again.

00:14:41 ◼   ► In the last couple of years, however,

00:14:42 ◼   ► I've noticed a gradual degradation

00:14:44 ◼   ► in the quality and reliability of Apple's core apps

00:14:46 ◼   ► on both the mobile iOS operating system

00:14:48 ◼   ► and its Mac OS X platform.

00:14:50 ◼   ► - He doesn't know what the name of the Mac operating system

00:14:52 ◼   ► is, that's fine, Walt, we know.

00:14:54 ◼   ► - It's almost as if the tech giant

00:14:56 ◼   ► has taken its eye off the ball

00:14:57 ◼   ► when it comes to these core software products

00:14:59 ◼   ► while pursues big new dreams like smartwatches and cars.

00:15:02 ◼   ► Fast forward a little bit.

00:15:03 ◼   ► But the exceptions are increasing,

00:15:05 ◼   ► and I hold Apple to its own higher,

00:15:07 ◼   ► often-proclaimed standard based on all these "it just works" claims of the oft-repeated

00:15:13 ◼   ► contention by Mr. Jobs and his successor Tim Cook that Apple is in business to make "great

00:15:19 ◼   ► products." Apple's advantage is that it designs and builds software together. So if the software

00:15:24 ◼   ► is an excellent, it does the superlative hardware a disservice.

00:15:29 ◼   ► It was a pretty stern lashing that I thought that Walt gave, and he seems to, from what

00:15:37 ◼   ► I've read of Walt Moseberg, he seems to generally like Apple stuff quite a bit. And he said

00:15:43 ◼   ► in this article, "I still think the iPhone is the best smartphone, I still love their

00:15:46 ◼   ► hardware, but man, this software is getting a little crummy these days." And it's fascinating

00:15:53 ◼   ► to me to see someone at The Verge, which clearly has a readership that surpasses Marco.org,

00:16:02 ◼   ► someone there saying, "You know what guys, things are looking a little rough these days."

00:16:08 ◼   ► And I don't know if you guys have anything you'd like to add about this, but I mean at

00:16:11 ◼   ► what point, and I feel like I've asked this question to you guys a thousand times, at

00:16:14 ◼   ► what point does Apple recognize this and start to fix it?

00:16:18 ◼   ► Yeah, this article, like so many articles that Walt Mossberg and those people are used

00:16:23 ◼   ► to writing, like it's necessarily has to be like, it's almost as if he's writing for newspaper

00:16:28 ◼   ► recall him inches, that he can't—he's not going to go on for just pages and pages,

00:16:32 ◼   ► as some people are known to do. He's going to get in and out quickly, but it also means

00:16:38 ◼   ► that he can't really support his contention particularly well. Like, it's just kind

00:16:43 ◼   ► of like, look, if you already agree with me, then you will enjoy my complaining session,

00:16:46 ◼   ► and I'll cite a few small examples, but there's no, like, systematic support for

00:16:51 ◼   ► the thesis, no attempt to explain why. It's just like, you know what, sometimes things

00:16:55 ◼   ► don't work for me and I'm cranky about it" and immediately jump to "I think this is part

00:16:59 ◼   ► of an overall trend" but by being just one more pebble in this little mountain or whatever,

00:17:05 ◼   ► it doesn't really matter what he says in this article. All that matters is that there's

00:17:08 ◼   ► an article on this topic, yet another article on this topic. Gruber wrote about it too,

00:17:14 ◼   ► a lot of people have been reacting to it because he's Walt Marsburg.

00:17:17 ◼   ► Dow Rimple too? Yeah, because he's Walt Marsburg and because The Verge is a big site or whatever.

00:17:23 ◼   ► In the media sometimes there are these fads where people get on a kick of like, you know,

00:17:27 ◼   ► complaining about a particular thing or harping on a particular topic.

00:17:30 ◼   ► So there's that to look for it as well and that like once a sort of a narrative gets

00:17:35 ◼   ► out there, every publication wants to have a piece either about that topic, supporting

00:17:39 ◼   ► it or, you know, surrounding it.

00:17:41 ◼   ► That comes and goes.

00:17:42 ◼   ► We know how that works.

00:17:43 ◼   ► But as Gruber points out at this point, you know, Marco wrote this thing a long time ago

00:17:46 ◼   ► and he, like was it like last year or something?

00:17:48 ◼   ► Yeah, 13 months ago.

00:17:49 ◼   ► And he wasn't the first one to complain about Apple software quality and he won't be the

00:17:53 ◼   ► last but the fact is that like we've had these flare-ups but it's not as if it just goes away

00:17:58 ◼   ► and people go oh year later no one will even be talking about Apple software quality like

00:18:01 ◼   ► I would feel like it's multiple years at this point and that you could say that you know part

00:18:06 ◼   ► of the media narrative and the sort of feeding on itself that they're getting more strident and

00:18:10 ◼   ► urgent but I even ignoring that just saying like they're not going away that this this story seems

00:18:14 ◼   ► to now be evergreen that you could write the story you know every few months you could write the same

00:18:19 ◼   ► story and as Gruber points out he sees a lot of people reading the Walt Mossberg thing

00:18:24 ◼   ► and agreeing and doesn't see a lot of people disagreeing.

00:18:28 ◼   ► And in some respects like you can say that makes sense too because of course everyone's

00:18:31 ◼   ► got complaints about their computers.

00:18:32 ◼   ► It's like you know complaining about work or traffic like everyone's like oh yeah no

00:18:36 ◼   ► those are all bad things right.

00:18:38 ◼   ► That may be true but especially for something like Apple if it was a if it was a non-story

00:18:45 ◼   ► you would have all the people who fill the traditional role of calling BS on people's

00:18:49 ◼   ► complaining about stuff that Apple does. Like Apple is, you know, like anytime someone slams

00:18:54 ◼   ► Apple for a reason that seems ridiculous or unfair or holding Apple to different standards

00:18:59 ◼   ► than other companies or whatever, there's plenty of press to fight back against that.

00:19:04 ◼   ► But I just don't see it for these type of stories where people are like, "You know what?

00:19:08 ◼   ► That's not fair." Apple stuff is actually really, because everybody is like, Apple's

00:19:12 ◼   ► not living up to its own thing. Mossberg said that, Gruber said that, a lot of people said

00:19:17 ◼   ► like it's Apple's own standards that we're holding them to.

00:19:20 ◼   ► It's not as if we're demanding that they be different

00:19:22 ◼   ► than other companies because just for the hell of it,

00:19:25 ◼   ► their whole value proposition is we are better

00:19:28 ◼   ► than the other guys.

00:19:29 ◼   ► We make the hardware and software together.

00:19:30 ◼   ► We make the best products in the world.

00:19:32 ◼   ► And so the fact that this can still be a story,

00:19:34 ◼   ► like I think that's the story,

00:19:37 ◼   ► not the individual articles or the details of them

00:19:41 ◼   ► or what people are cranky about

00:19:42 ◼   ► or what anecdote each person puts in their thing.

00:19:44 ◼   ► But the fact that you can just keep writing these stories

00:19:47 ◼   ► And I feel like you couldn't have written them, for example, maybe like in a time, think

00:19:52 ◼   ► of a time when Apple where people would have said, "No, that's not true.

00:19:56 ◼   ► I have a Windows 95 computer.

00:19:59 ◼   ► It's been nothing but problems.

00:20:00 ◼   ► But I got this new Mac with iLife and I'm able to do all these amazing things and it

00:20:07 ◼   ► is just so much better and nicer and so much more understandable and I couldn't make heads

00:20:10 ◼   ► or tails on my other computer."

00:20:11 ◼   ► So if you're saying that Apple doesn't know how to write software, you're crazy because

00:20:14 ◼   ► I think their software is great.

00:20:15 ◼   ► Yeah, all software has problems.

00:20:17 ◼   ► there are bugs, you know, that's what you would have gotten if you had done this during

00:20:21 ◼   ► one of the more, you know, one of the times in history when Apple software was more unimpeachably

00:20:27 ◼   ► good. But I think over the past, I don't know, I'm gonna say five years or so, not that it's

00:20:32 ◼   ► like they're going downhill or it's like they're sliding off into oblivion, but there's been

00:20:36 ◼   ► enough of an annoyance for enough people that you can write these stories and people go,

00:20:40 ◼   ► "Yeah, that seems about right." Like maybe your individual problems aren't a big deal,

00:20:44 ◼   ► haven't had your individual problem, maybe you're overblowing it for the sake of getting

00:20:48 ◼   ► views and being dramatic or whatever. But the general theme that Apple software quality doesn't

00:20:56 ◼   ► seem to live up to the standards it sets for itself, I think people broadly agree with that.

00:20:59 ◼   ► And as Casey points out, maybe Apple doesn't broadly agree with that. But at this point,

00:21:07 ◼   ► the bit that Gruber had at the end, the fact that we're still talking about it a year later

00:21:12 ◼   ► and that the consensus reaction is one of agreement suggests that Apple probably does

00:21:15 ◼   ► have a software problem and they definitely have a perception problem.

00:21:18 ◼   ► Like whether their problem is real or not, I think even Apple has to admit, even Apple,

00:21:22 ◼   ► if you disagree as a company that all these articles are overblown and you have your own

00:21:25 ◼   ► metrics that show your software quality is better than ever and blah blah blah, you definitely

00:21:29 ◼   ► have a perception problem.

00:21:30 ◼   ► Because I feel like all of us out here are just reading these articles and going, "Yeah,

00:21:34 ◼   ► yeah, that's pretty much the case.

00:21:35 ◼   ► It's kind of a shame."

00:21:36 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, when I first read

00:21:39 ◼   ► Walt Mossberg's article today,

00:21:41 ◼   ► I was honestly a little bit disappointed in,

00:21:44 ◼   ► that it wasn't better backed up,

00:21:46 ◼   ► because I think the examples he chose were not,

00:21:50 ◼   ► for the most part, they were not like widespread,

00:21:52 ◼   ► it seemed like they were all kind of like

00:21:54 ◼   ► weird things that happened just to him.

00:21:57 ◼   ► However, when I thought about it more,

00:21:58 ◼   ► and I started seeing everyone else's articles,

00:22:00 ◼   ► the reality is like, everybody has their own set

00:22:04 ◼   ► of weird Apple bugs and stuff that happened to them.

00:22:07 ◼   ► - And don't forget,

00:22:08 ◼   ► Walt Mossberg has this special concierge treatment

00:22:10 ◼   ► where if he has any weird problem,

00:22:12 ◼   ► weird things that happened to him,

00:22:14 ◼   ► Apple people parachute out of the sky

00:22:15 ◼   ► and help him debug his problems.

00:22:17 ◼   ► That does not happen for regular,

00:22:18 ◼   ► you go to the Apple store and buy a device

00:22:20 ◼   ► and you have something that you can't figure out,

00:22:22 ◼   ► no one from Apple calls you

00:22:23 ◼   ► and has the guy who wrote the software

00:22:24 ◼   ► walk you through debugging procedures, right?

00:22:26 ◼   ► Only Walt Mossberg gets that,

00:22:27 ◼   ► which totally skews his perception

00:22:29 ◼   ► and he has written in the past about,

00:22:31 ◼   ► "Hey, I had some problems with this device

00:22:33 ◼   ► but Apple helped me out and blah, blah, blah." I'm like, "It's great that you're telling

00:22:36 ◼   ► us this, but geez, don't you realize that's not going to happen for anybody else? They're

00:22:39 ◼   ► just going to be stranded." So anyway, that's why I tried to underplay this particular article

00:22:48 ◼   ► with just old man yells at Cloud, like, "My software doesn't work sometimes and it's

00:22:53 ◼   ► annoying." But like I said, it's just one more little pebble, one more little pebble

00:22:57 ◼   ► in a giant pile that everyone just chucks their own little pet problems onto.

00:23:00 ◼   ► - Yeah, and the reality is, some of this,

00:23:04 ◼   ► you can look back at any part of Apple's history,

00:23:06 ◼   ► and you can say, well, there were always problems.

00:23:08 ◼   ► Like, some people think, oh, everything was better

00:23:10 ◼   ► in Snow Leopard, but no, it wasn't.

00:23:12 ◼   ► Like, there were always problems with every release,

00:23:14 ◼   ► and there's always been bugs and shortcomings

00:23:15 ◼   ► with all their stuff.

00:23:17 ◼   ► Any time you can point back in history,

00:23:19 ◼   ► it was never perfect.

00:23:20 ◼   ► But I do think my thesis from last year

00:23:23 ◼   ► that blew up so badly, that like,

00:23:26 ◼   ► yeah, it's never been perfect,

00:23:27 ◼   ► but the list of asterisks just keeps getting longer

00:23:30 ◼   ► and longer and longer, I think that has only continued.

00:23:33 ◼   ► Now, I'm not personally having as many problems now

00:23:37 ◼   ► as I did a year ago, because the whole Discovery D fiasco

00:23:41 ◼   ► caused a lot of problems for me.

00:23:42 ◼   ► But even the same thing happened back then.

00:23:45 ◼   ► A lot of people said, "Well, I don't have that problem,

00:23:47 ◼   ► "but I have all these other problems."

00:23:48 ◼   ► And so everyone has different problems,

00:23:51 ◼   ► and I think the reason why everyone has enough problems

00:23:55 ◼   ► to be agreeing with these things.

00:23:58 ◼   ► The reason why I think this is not just a perception

00:24:01 ◼   ► of an overall quality decline,

00:24:03 ◼   ► this is a real overall quality decline,

00:24:05 ◼   ► is just that the world we live in now

00:24:07 ◼   ► has so many devices, so many services,

00:24:10 ◼   ► everything is constantly changing, everything's in flux,

00:24:14 ◼   ► that it is harder now than it's ever been

00:24:18 ◼   ► to maintain high quality.

00:24:20 ◼   ► And Apple's simply not doing it.

00:24:21 ◼   ► Like, they aren't maintaining high quality.

00:24:24 ◼   ► and it seems pretty clear that they can't.

00:24:26 ◼   ► It isn't that they're evil or stupid,

00:24:30 ◼   ► it just seems like they can't maintain high quality.

00:24:33 ◼   ► Actions speak louder than words.

00:24:35 ◼   ► I love the quote they gave Walt Mossberg.

00:24:37 ◼   ► In response to my inquiries about this, Apple said, quote,

00:24:41 ◼   ► "We have dedicated software teams

00:24:42 ◼   ► across multiple platforms.

00:24:44 ◼   ► The effort is as strong there as it has ever been."

00:24:47 ◼   ► - That's probably true, but you get an E for effort.

00:24:49 ◼   ► That doesn't really help you.

00:24:50 ◼   ► - Yeah, see this, this is a pet peeve of mine.

00:24:53 ◼   ► It drives me nuts whenever I hear somebody like Tim Cook

00:24:56 ◼   ► excuse something by saying,

00:24:58 ◼   ► "The team's working really hard on that."

00:25:00 ◼   ► 'Cause you know what?

00:25:01 ◼   ► I don't care how hard the team is working.

00:25:02 ◼   ► That is your problem, that is the team's problem,

00:25:04 ◼   ► that is not my problem.

00:25:05 ◼   ► That is how you talk to yourself and your team internally.

00:25:08 ◼   ► That is not how you talk to the public,

00:25:10 ◼   ► because the public doesn't give a crap

00:25:11 ◼   ► how hard the team is working.

00:25:12 ◼   ► The public cares about results.

00:25:14 ◼   ► - Sometimes they care that, like,

00:25:15 ◼   ► it seems like you as an Apple don't care about this,

00:25:17 ◼   ► and sometimes part of the damage control is saying,

00:25:19 ◼   ► "No, no, we really do care."

00:25:20 ◼   ► Like, as if he can speak for the whole company,

00:25:21 ◼   ► But I believe they really do care.

00:25:23 ◼   ► This, Gruber cited his interview with Phil Schiller where he talked about these issues,

00:25:28 ◼   ► again, a whole year ago.

00:25:29 ◼   ► So this is not like, you know, this keeps coming around and around.

00:25:31 ◼   ► And I think a lot of things in that interview, like, all we have, this is the only insight

00:25:36 ◼   ► I have into what the hell is actually going on at Apple.

00:25:38 ◼   ► But the image I have in my head of what's going on is explained by the venues that I

00:25:42 ◼   ► think they're doing badly in.

00:25:44 ◼   ► One, which I talked about at length, is the whole cloud services thing, which they've

00:25:47 ◼   ► always been weak at, and that more and more things are cloud service based.

00:25:50 ◼   ► And so if they're bad at cloud services,

00:25:51 ◼   ► the badness spreads more.

00:25:52 ◼   ► So let's set that aside for a second.

00:25:54 ◼   ► The other thing that the thread that both Gruber

00:25:57 ◼   ► and Walt Mossberg are talking about in this round,

00:25:59 ◼   ► and not so much what you were talking about last year,

00:26:00 ◼   ► is not really like the OS or like something wrong

00:26:05 ◼   ► with the software in the sense that it bugs

00:26:12 ◼   ► and stuff like that, just like application design.

00:26:14 ◼   ► Like your application,

00:26:16 ◼   ► they don't seem to be as good as they used to be.

00:26:19 ◼   ► They're not as simple, they're not as understandable,

00:26:21 ◼   ► they do weird things.

00:26:22 ◼   ► Gruber's thing was that like photos told him

00:26:24 ◼   ► that five photos couldn't be uploaded,

00:26:25 ◼   ► but he couldn't figure out how to tell which five photos.

00:26:29 ◼   ► Like application design decisions.

00:26:31 ◼   ► And the reason I think,

00:26:32 ◼   ► this gets back to Phil Schiller in our interview,

00:26:33 ◼   ► the reason I think Apple probably is less inclined

00:26:36 ◼   ► to agree with this is that the metrics they've chosen,

00:26:39 ◼   ► seems to me, the metrics they've chosen

00:26:41 ◼   ► to put on their software efforts is,

00:26:44 ◼   ► one, they don't have a lot of good metrics

00:26:45 ◼   ► on how well things interact with the cloud,

00:26:47 ◼   ► because obviously it works in test

00:26:48 ◼   ► then it works when we connect to our test server and it works when blah blah blah but

00:26:51 ◼   ► then if it doesn't work for people out in the field, oh well, internet demons, we don't

00:26:55 ◼   ► know what's going on, right? But it seems to me that Apple has really concentrated,

00:27:01 ◼   ► and I hear this from Apple engineers, on like if there's a crash or if something that crashes

00:27:04 ◼   ► the application that needs to get fixed. And I think Apple software over the past few years

00:27:09 ◼   ► has crashed way less than it has in the past. I can't even remember the last time I had

00:27:12 ◼   ► like an Apple application on the other iOS on the Mac,

00:27:16 ◼   ► like a crash at all, let alone a repeatable crash.

00:27:19 ◼   ► Like every time I do this, the whole app crashes.

00:27:21 ◼   ► Like I really think they have really reduced crashes.

00:27:24 ◼   ► Would you think that's great?

00:27:24 ◼   ► Isn't that great that they reduced crashes, right?

00:27:28 ◼   ► But maybe concentrating on that has taken their eye off

00:27:30 ◼   ► of the other balls, which is one, application design,

00:27:33 ◼   ► which I want to talk about a little bit more later.

00:27:35 ◼   ► I have this item in the show and it's about photos, right?

00:27:37 ◼   ► About like how you make the application

00:27:39 ◼   ► and two, cloud services, which doesn't show up as a crash,

00:27:42 ◼   ► just shows up as data that doesn't sync, and as cloud infects every single application

00:27:45 ◼   ► we have, that becomes maddening.

00:27:47 ◼   ► So Margo, you were talking about the functional high ground with stuff like, you know, the

00:27:51 ◼   ► naming service, just plain doesn't work.

00:27:53 ◼   ► And that's not really a crasher either, even if the demon was crashing behind the scenes,

00:27:56 ◼   ► you wouldn't see it, but it's just stuff doesn't work.

00:27:58 ◼   ► But I really feel like Apple's OS and their applications have way fewer crashes than they

00:28:04 ◼   ► did back in, like, I keep going back to the Leopard days and stuff like that, where things

00:28:07 ◼   ► would crash all the time.

00:28:08 ◼   ► and it's like, oh, you know,

00:28:09 ◼   ► or even the classic Mac OS days going back farther.

00:28:11 ◼   ► Like, that they've made such progress there

00:28:13 ◼   ► that they must feel really good about themselves internally

00:28:15 ◼   ► or their metrics must be all looking up,

00:28:17 ◼   ► but they don't realize that their crap discipline

00:28:18 ◼   ► doesn't work to perform the desired function,

00:28:20 ◼   ► either because the app is designed wrong,

00:28:22 ◼   ► or because it's trying to connect to some cloud service

00:28:24 ◼   ► and doing the wrong thing,

00:28:25 ◼   ► and people just have no recourse

00:28:26 ◼   ► other than to stare at their screen

00:28:27 ◼   ► and hope their note will appear.

00:28:29 ◼   ► - It is, it was very clear to me last year,

00:28:31 ◼   ► I kept hearing from people here and there, secondhand,

00:28:35 ◼   ► I kept hearing that internally Apple was caught by surprise

00:28:40 ◼   ► that that article was getting traction

00:28:42 ◼   ► because they thought everything was fine.

00:28:45 ◼   ► Because by their metrics,

00:28:47 ◼   ► everything was better than it's ever been.

00:28:49 ◼   ► And that's great if your metrics cover everything,

00:28:53 ◼   ► but nobody's metrics cover everything, that's impossible.

00:28:56 ◼   ► And so in reality, you've optimized for the metrics.

00:28:59 ◼   ► And I see Apple doing this a lot recently.

00:29:03 ◼   ► I don't know if that's a Tim thing

00:29:04 ◼   ► if that started before Tim was in charge,

00:29:07 ◼   ► but it seems like Apple's really heavily

00:29:09 ◼   ► into data-driven decision-making now.

00:29:12 ◼   ► And I think there's so many flaws with that,

00:29:15 ◼   ► and number one starts with what is the data

00:29:17 ◼   ► you're basing the decisions on,

00:29:18 ◼   ► and is that telling the whole story?

00:29:20 ◼   ► Is it accurate, is it being gamed?

00:29:23 ◼   ► Things like that, as these problems are very challenging

00:29:25 ◼   ► in any kind of organization that tries to measure anything.

00:29:28 ◼   ► And I think we're just seeing the ways that falls down.

00:29:32 ◼   ► And one of the ways that falls down is

00:29:34 ◼   ► if they're measuring quality by number of crashes,

00:29:37 ◼   ► well there's a lot of bugs that don't cause crashes.

00:29:41 ◼   ► And it doesn't seem like we're reducing those,

00:29:43 ◼   ► and in fact we seem to be increasing them.

00:29:46 ◼   ► And as you mentioned with services,

00:29:48 ◼   ► so many of the bugs that I see now,

00:29:52 ◼   ► now that Discovery is fixed as far as I know,

00:29:55 ◼   ► most of the bugs I see now are interactions

00:29:58 ◼   ► with Apple's services in some way.

00:30:02 ◼   ► Whether it's the Apple TV trying to play media

00:30:04 ◼   ► from iTunes and failing for God knows why,

00:30:06 ◼   ► or showing a bunch of weird password dialogues

00:30:09 ◼   ► on the phone for store purchases or anything,

00:30:11 ◼   ► like you know, weird stuff like that,

00:30:12 ◼   ► it seems like it's the interaction with the services

00:30:15 ◼   ► that is falling down so badly.

00:30:17 ◼   ► And we will definitely talk about design flaws,

00:30:20 ◼   ► because that's a separate category,

00:30:22 ◼   ► but the actual failures and bugs so often

00:30:25 ◼   ► are service related that people are actually hitting here,

00:30:27 ◼   ► that I don't think Apple is measuring the right things.

00:30:32 ◼   ► If they don't think there's a problem,

00:30:34 ◼   ► then their metrics are a problem.

00:30:37 ◼   ► - And like the seat of the pants thing,

00:30:38 ◼   ► like the way that we would imagine in the fantasy scenarios,

00:30:41 ◼   ► like how does Apple have such great quality?

00:30:43 ◼   ► Well, it's because Steve Jobs uses the products

00:30:46 ◼   ► and if anything goes wrong for him,

00:30:47 ◼   ► he comes back and yells at people and they fix it, right?

00:30:49 ◼   ► That's the silly fairytale of how quality was maintained

00:30:52 ◼   ► back in the Steve Jobs days.

00:30:53 ◼   ► But the reason that fairytale works for us

00:30:55 ◼   ► is because we can picture in our mind,

00:30:57 ◼   ► like this thing everyone asks ourselves,

00:30:59 ◼   ► like don't these guys at Apple actually use their products?

00:31:02 ◼   ► But again, I'll go back to contact syncing, which is, you would think the simplest possible

00:31:07 ◼   ► thing, very small, very bounded data set, not complicated data, it's basically all text,

00:31:13 ◼   ► right?

00:31:14 ◼   ► And you just want to have the same contact, you want to enter contact on your phone and

00:31:17 ◼   ► have it show up on your Mac, you want to enter contact on your Mac and have it show up on

00:31:20 ◼   ► your phone, you just want them to be in sync with each other.

00:31:22 ◼   ► Like maybe you have an iPad in it, but it just seems like it should be a problem that

00:31:26 ◼   ► is so incredibly boring and licked that it just works every time.

00:31:29 ◼   ► yet, pretty much once every 1.5 years, my wife comes to me and says, "I entered some

00:31:34 ◼   ► contact here and it's not showing up there." And then I have to do a bunch of rain dances

00:31:38 ◼   ► to make that work. And I'm like, "Seriously? I'm doing this again? This is happening again?"

00:31:42 ◼   ► It's contact syncing. And you think, "Doesn't Tim Cook have contacts in his phone? Doesn't

00:31:48 ◼   ► he, like, when he's on his phone, enter someone's contact information and then come back and

00:31:53 ◼   ► and go on his iPad at work and be pissed that that contact information isn't there?

00:31:59 ◼   ► That's not a crasher, but that should show up as, "Hey, contacts doesn't work for the

00:32:04 ◼   ► job that it's supposed to do."

00:32:06 ◼   ► And then, of course, he has no recourse because you just sit there and you stare at it like,

00:32:09 ◼   ► "Maybe the contact will show up eventually?

00:32:12 ◼   ► Should I try signing out of iCloud and deleting all my local data off the device?

00:32:16 ◼   ► What should I just..."

00:32:18 ◼   ► First you got to do all the stuff of backing up all your contacts.

00:32:21 ◼   ► I've done this so many times I know all the steps, but there's no way in hell a regular

00:32:24 ◼   ► person's going to do all these things, and you just sit there and you stare at it.

00:32:29 ◼   ► Stuff like that with services, how do you put a metric on that?

00:32:31 ◼   ► The only metric is Steve Jobs tried to enter a contact and got mad and came and yelled

00:32:35 ◼   ► at people.

00:32:36 ◼   ► I don't know how you, like, a cloud services company needs to measure that, and they need

00:32:40 ◼   ► to get good at measuring that, but Apple doesn't seem to.

00:32:44 ◼   ► When problems like that happen for a problem domain that I think should have been solved

00:32:50 ◼   ► like decades ago, it just makes me lose faith in everything.

00:32:53 ◼   ► I was like, "I can't get contacts right."

00:32:56 ◼   ► Like, forget about the complicated stuff.

00:32:57 ◼   ► That just, they should just spend the next five years

00:33:01 ◼   ► saying contacts will always work, right?

00:33:03 ◼   ► And I'm not even talking about like little things,

00:33:05 ◼   ► complicated scenarios, simultaneous use.

00:33:07 ◼   ► I'm just saying like, you enter it on your phone,

00:33:09 ◼   ► you come back five hours later,

00:33:11 ◼   ► you look on your Mac and it's not there

00:33:12 ◼   ► and you don't know why and you wait two days

00:33:14 ◼   ► and it still doesn't show up

00:33:15 ◼   ► and you're just scratching your head

00:33:17 ◼   ► and that makes me want to just scream.

00:33:19 ◼   ► You know, it's funny because my contacts sync, to my knowledge, has always worked perfectly.

00:33:25 ◼   ► I never run into the iMessage problems that so many people run into.

00:33:29 ◼   ► However, earlier today I was trying to AirPlay something to our brand new Apple TV, and I

00:33:37 ◼   ► cannot think of a device in the house that isn't on the latest and greatest version of

00:33:42 ◼   ► iOS or OS X.

00:33:45 ◼   ► and I go to AirPlay to my Apple TV,

00:33:47 ◼   ► and I see family room, space paren for paren.

00:33:51 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:33:52 ◼   ► - Oh no, it's back.

00:33:53 ◼   ► - Oh no, the house has been infected.

00:33:56 ◼   ► Clearly the only option is to burn it down and start anew.

00:33:59 ◼   ► - Well, did the AirPlay work though?

00:34:01 ◼   ► That is the real question.

00:34:02 ◼   ► - It did, it did.

00:34:02 ◼   ► - Well, then consider yourself lucky.

00:34:04 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly.

00:34:05 ◼   ► I don't know, it's,

00:34:07 ◼   ► I feel like what you guys have said

00:34:11 ◼   ► is my experience as well.

00:34:12 ◼   ► Like, it used to be that I would have almost no glitches or random errors or issues.

00:34:18 ◼   ► I mean, it would happen from time to time, but very rarely.

00:34:22 ◼   ► And I feel like, and I don't have a list in front of me or anything like that, and maybe

00:34:25 ◼   ► I'm just allowing myself to be influenced by what, you know, the press is saying, but

00:34:30 ◼   ► I really do feel like I'm seeing a lot more small issues these days.

00:34:36 ◼   ► And sometimes big issues, like the iMac, the first iMac.

00:34:39 ◼   ► I've just seen these issues from time to time that I never used to see before.

00:34:43 ◼   ► And, you know, Aaron and my parents are coming to me and saying, "Oh, this isn't

00:34:48 ◼   ► working right. What can I do?" And my answer has been a very sad shrug a lot

00:34:54 ◼   ► more often lately than it ever was in the past.

00:34:56 ◼   ► Because what can you do?

00:34:59 ◼   ► Like, that's the thing with these sync issues.

00:35:01 ◼   ► And to bring up another one I heard recently on a podcast, I think it was the

00:35:04 ◼   ► talk show, I don't remember, that someone was talking about like, "Oh, I just used

00:35:06 ◼   ► the Apple bundled notes app, which has improved tremendously in capability.

00:35:09 ◼   ► You know, like you can do all the drawings in the notes app and you can do like rich

00:35:12 ◼   ► text and pictures and all this stuff.

00:35:14 ◼   ► And it doesn't use IMAP as a storage backend.

00:35:16 ◼   ► It's like a modern full fledged notes application.

00:35:18 ◼   ► So I'm using it so much more.

00:35:19 ◼   ► I practically, I practically use it as they were saying, I practically use it as a, like

00:35:23 ◼   ► as a replacement for like paste bot or like those copy and paste things where you will

00:35:26 ◼   ► essentially copy something on your phone.

00:35:28 ◼   ► You want to be able to see, to paste it on your Mac.

00:35:30 ◼   ► So they'll just enter it in notes and then, you know, put down their phone half a second

00:35:35 ◼   ► later, launch Notes on their Mac, and the note they just put on their phone is on their

00:35:37 ◼   ► Mac, and they're all amazed at how fast it syncs. And that's a success story. That's

00:35:41 ◼   ► the way it should be for all these things, because hey, it's not a lot of data. I just

00:35:44 ◼   ► pasted like a URL, for instance, in Notes on my phone, and then I'm going to open Notes

00:35:48 ◼   ► on my Mac, and that URL will be sitting there. Well, I also have a Notes document in the

00:35:51 ◼   ► Apple official Notes application, which I do use, that is just a bunch of URLs that

00:35:55 ◼   ► I frequently tweet at people, because they'll ask like, "Hey, where is Casey's blog post

00:35:58 ◼   ► on all the toasters you reviewed?" or something, and I don't want to have to find the URL again,

00:36:01 ◼   ► So I go to the Notes thing, and I added that URL note.

00:36:05 ◼   ► I don't remember.

00:36:06 ◼   ► A couple weeks ago I added it.

00:36:07 ◼   ► And then several days later I went to my Mac and someone asked a question about something

00:36:11 ◼   ► and I was going to tweet a reply with the URL and I opened Notes on my Mac and the URL's

00:36:15 ◼   ► note wasn't there.

00:36:16 ◼   ► And so I picked up my phone on my desk where I had added the note several days earlier

00:36:20 ◼   ► and I looked at it on my phone.

00:36:21 ◼   ► There's a URL note there.

00:36:22 ◼   ► I'm like, "Did I add it to the local only one because they know there's the cloud in

00:36:25 ◼   ► the local ones?"

00:36:26 ◼   ► Nope, it's in the cloud one.

00:36:27 ◼   ► And I put the phone down and then I look back at the Notes application on the Mac and then

00:36:31 ◼   ► And I went to the iCloud system preferences and said, "Yeah, Notes is checked, you know,

00:36:34 ◼   ► and it's syncing or whatever."

00:36:36 ◼   ► And then I quit Notes and I forgot about it.

00:36:38 ◼   ► The next day I came back again, launched Notes to get a URL.

00:36:41 ◼   ► The URL note wasn't there.

00:36:43 ◼   ► There's no, like, refresh button to click.

00:36:45 ◼   ► There's nothing to be done except for I could have signed out to iCloud or unchecked and

00:36:49 ◼   ► recheck the Notes thing or whatever, but I'm like, "What does a regular person do in this

00:36:53 ◼   ► scenario?"

00:36:54 ◼   ► And I thought about something like Dropbox where when I launch Dropbox on my Mac, a bunch

00:37:00 ◼   ► a bunch of little spinners run, a bunch of little badges appear on icons, and at a certain

00:37:04 ◼   ► point it's synced. Like, I know when I launch it, it syncs everything in my Dropbox. When

00:37:07 ◼   ► the little badge is gone from the Dropbox icon on Ionya bar, I have some faith based

00:37:12 ◼   ► on years of experience that Dropbox is satisfied that it has successfully synced everything

00:37:16 ◼   ► to my computer. Were I to quit Dropbox and relaunch it, I know that on launch it would

00:37:20 ◼   ► say "I better make sure everything in the Dropbox is up to date, and then we'll show

00:37:23 ◼   ► a little spinner, and then it will go away." And yet with Notes on my Mac, when I launch

00:37:27 ◼   ► it if the note I expect to be there isn't there like Casey said I don't know

00:37:31 ◼   ► I shrugged my shoulders you know and like and so I just quit it I quit notes

00:37:35 ◼   ► and then I came back a couple days later and I launched it and my year-old note

00:37:38 ◼   ► was there like that's that's not that's not a success it wasn't it there's no

00:37:42 ◼   ► crashes apples metrics muscle grade on that right but what what's happening why

00:37:48 ◼   ► like I don't like and especially for something you hear other people you

00:37:54 ◼   ► You know, saying great things about, like when it works you're just like, this is awesome

00:37:58 ◼   ► because you're excited the same way that people, I want it to be boring like Dropbox where

00:38:02 ◼   ► maybe it's not the most efficient and fanciest thing in the world, but over years of use,

00:38:06 ◼   ► you know, and Dropbox has its weird corners where it saves your conflicted copy with this

00:38:09 ◼   ► weird parenthetical name and it can get confused in complicated scenarios.

00:38:13 ◼   ► All I want is the easy scenarios to be so boring that I never think about them.

00:38:17 ◼   ► I don't launch Dropbox with trepidation wondering if the data that I expect to be there will

00:38:21 ◼   ► be there.

00:38:22 ◼   ► when I run out of my quota or whatever, it puts a little red badge icon and all I have

00:38:27 ◼   ► to do is free up a little bit of space and it notices that I freed up space and it resyncs

00:38:32 ◼   ► things. It should just be boring, right? It shouldn't be this mysterious roll of the dice

00:38:38 ◼   ► and then when it does work you have no idea why it started working because literally I

00:38:41 ◼   ► didn't even try to debug this. I didn't try to change it. So I think I went like a week,

00:38:44 ◼   ► a week and a half with that one note that I added on my phone not appearing on my Mac

00:38:48 ◼   ► And eventually it appeared.

00:38:50 ◼   ► And I have no idea why.

00:38:51 ◼   ► And so that's why, like Casey, one of my relatives

00:38:54 ◼   ► asked me questions.

00:38:54 ◼   ► I'm like, I don't know, take it to the Apple genius.

00:38:57 ◼   ► I don't want to do the rain dance for them.

00:38:58 ◼   ► There's no obvious solution.

00:38:59 ◼   ► They're not doing anything wrong as users.

00:39:01 ◼   ► It's just a constant source of frustration

00:39:04 ◼   ► for things that should be boring at this point.

00:39:06 ◼   ► And I give Apple a total pass at the edge of the envelope,

00:39:09 ◼   ► where they're pushing the envelope,

00:39:10 ◼   ► doing complicated things.

00:39:11 ◼   ► I give them a pass on things like Siri.

00:39:12 ◼   ► That's really hard to do.

00:39:14 ◼   ► Natural language.

00:39:16 ◼   ► Just make easy things easy, make hard things possible

00:39:19 ◼   ► to throw out more pearl catchphrases, right?

00:39:22 ◼   ► Easy things are not easy a lot of the time,

00:39:26 ◼   ► even when hard things are possible,

00:39:27 ◼   ► there seems to be no connection between them.

00:39:29 ◼   ► - Yeah, my favorite persistent bug

00:39:32 ◼   ► that was around for a long time and then resolved itself

00:39:35 ◼   ► and has now come back rearing its ugly head,

00:39:38 ◼   ► crippling my ability to respond quickly and easily

00:39:40 ◼   ► with emoji is the keyboard texture placement

00:39:44 ◼   ► that's built into the system

00:39:45 ◼   ► all synced via iCloud as far as I'm aware. So this is in, if you're on the Mac, System Preferences,

00:39:50 ◼   ► Keyboard, and then the Text tab. I use these to quickly type emoji that I use constantly.

00:39:56 ◼   ► And when I got the new iMac, none of them synced. There's still, as far as I can tell,

00:40:01 ◼   ► syncing between my iOS devices. They used to sync between my iOS devices and my Mac,

00:40:06 ◼   ► but now they're not syncing with my Mac and I have no course of action to diagnose. I have no way to

00:40:12 ◼   ► to figure it out. There's nothing I can do to fix this. Just hope.

00:40:16 ◼   ► Yeah, all you've got are the rain dances, because you know what the rain dances are.

00:40:19 ◼   ► You know, sign out of iCloud, disable that syncing, delete and recreate your account.

00:40:23 ◼   ► Like all these things, you're trying to basically kick the thing into gear to say, "Go do that

00:40:28 ◼   ► thing that you think you need to do where you synchronize data," because you have a

00:40:32 ◼   ► sneaking suspicion that it thinks it's synchronized. But you know it's not, because you can't see

00:40:36 ◼   ► your emoji shortcuts, but it thinks it's done. It thinks there's nothing to do.

00:40:40 ◼   ► Yep, that's exactly right.

00:40:41 ◼   ► - Well, and also, the rain dances that,

00:40:45 ◼   ► like John, you said, you just send people to the genius.

00:40:48 ◼   ► The geniuses can't do anything really.

00:40:50 ◼   ► - No, but I want them to walk through,

00:40:52 ◼   ► yeah, I want them to walk through the steps.

00:40:53 ◼   ► I don't wanna be the one walking through that.

00:40:54 ◼   ► - Right, and those steps are horrible.

00:40:56 ◼   ► Like, if anything involves either restoring your phone,

00:41:00 ◼   ► or even like, signing in and out of iCloud,

00:41:03 ◼   ► with modern computers and modern devices,

00:41:07 ◼   ► if you've bought into Apple's ecosystem,

00:41:09 ◼   ► if you use photos, if you use music.

00:41:12 ◼   ► Signing out of iCloud is an incredibly destructive action.

00:41:16 ◼   ► You should never, ever, ever have to do that

00:41:19 ◼   ► unless you're like selling a computer.

00:41:21 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:41:21 ◼   ► Then sign out of iCloud and format the whole thing.

00:41:23 ◼   ► Signing out of an iCloud on a modern Mac,

00:41:26 ◼   ► if you have stuff in photos and music and everything,

00:41:28 ◼   ► and if you're using all the sync and everything,

00:41:30 ◼   ► that is risky, it is complicated, it is time consuming.

00:41:34 ◼   ► It can possibly waste a ton of bandwidth.

00:41:36 ◼   ► You might lose data if you don't do it right.

00:41:38 ◼   ► - And it won't necessarily work.

00:41:40 ◼   ► - Yes, and although the sad part is unfortunately

00:41:42 ◼   ► how often it does actually solve the problem, but--

00:41:44 ◼   ► - Although when it does solve it, I always feel like,

00:41:46 ◼   ► so I'll see you guys here in a month

00:41:49 ◼   ► when it doesn't work again?

00:41:50 ◼   ► 'Cause it's not like you've actually solved the problem,

00:41:52 ◼   ► you've just restarted the counter

00:41:54 ◼   ► on when things will go awry, it seems like.

00:41:56 ◼   ► - And so to me, if anybody at Apple is considering

00:42:00 ◼   ► it a success when you can solve a problem

00:42:01 ◼   ► by signing out and signing back in,

00:42:03 ◼   ► like no, that is not a success.

00:42:04 ◼   ► That is like, you saved your butt on that particular

00:42:08 ◼   ► instance of that bug by putting people through a really,

00:42:11 ◼   ► really invasive process, but that should not be

00:42:15 ◼   ► standard operating procedure.

00:42:17 ◼   ► You should not have people not only having to do this,

00:42:21 ◼   ► having to sign into iCloud and delete all the crap

00:42:24 ◼   ► and then re-sign back in and re-download all the crap,

00:42:27 ◼   ► or have to restore your phone,

00:42:29 ◼   ► which is even worse than all that.

00:42:31 ◼   ► You shouldn't have people doing this on a routine basis

00:42:35 ◼   ► to solve seemingly random and somewhat frequent problems

00:42:38 ◼   ► Because A, that's really destructive now,

00:42:41 ◼   ► and B, once people get into that habit,

00:42:43 ◼   ► it's like quitting all the apps in the app switcher,

00:42:45 ◼   ► once people get into that habit,

00:42:47 ◼   ► years from now, people are going to still be doing this,

00:42:50 ◼   ► thinking it's going to solve all their problems,

00:42:52 ◼   ► like that's gonna be like what annoying power users

00:42:55 ◼   ► tell their relatives, oh, you just gotta restore your phone,

00:42:57 ◼   ► oh, you just gotta sign out of iCloud and sign back in.

00:43:00 ◼   ► That causes damage for years to come

00:43:01 ◼   ► in people's superstitions way beyond the time

00:43:05 ◼   ► when you've stopped needing these horrible solutions.

00:43:08 ◼   ► So it really is a long-term damage being done here in so many ways, with the quality issues

00:43:14 ◼   ► and with the remedies and everything.

00:43:17 ◼   ► I just get the feeling, and I hope I'm wrong, I hope this is just Apple putting on a good

00:43:20 ◼   ► face because they don't really share a lot, but I just get the feeling that Apple is either

00:43:26 ◼   ► oblivious or in denial to these problems and also that they're defensive.

00:43:32 ◼   ► What I hear from Apple people, they're usually very defensive about how well they're doing

00:43:36 ◼   ► and they think they're doing a lot better than I think they're doing. Maybe I'm just

00:43:40 ◼   ► the least lucky person in the world, but it sounds like everybody has these stories about

00:43:44 ◼   ► random stuff that just doesn't work right for them or has failed for them or has done

00:43:49 ◼   ► bad things. Like, this is a big problem and I won't hedge my bets and say, "Well, either

00:43:58 ◼   ► it's real or there's a perception problem." No, no, it's a real problem. This is obviously

00:44:04 ◼   ► This is way too big and widespread

00:44:05 ◼   ► to be just a perception problem.

00:44:08 ◼   ► You know, I heard earlier, I read a blog post,

00:44:10 ◼   ► I forget, I'm sorry, I forget where it was,

00:44:11 ◼   ► but somebody was saying like, you know,

00:44:13 ◼   ► modern Microsoft stuff is no better for them.

00:44:15 ◼   ► It's a huge mess for them too.

00:44:16 ◼   ► Like, you can look at other makers,

00:44:18 ◼   ► you can look at Microsoft, you can look at Google,

00:44:20 ◼   ► you know, you can say, oh, well everybody has problems.

00:44:23 ◼   ► That is also not a defense.

00:44:25 ◼   ► Like, yeah, everybody has problems.

00:44:26 ◼   ► You know what, everybody else makes crappy PCs.

00:44:29 ◼   ► It doesn't mean the Mac can be crappy.

00:44:31 ◼   ► You know, like that's not how Apple works,

00:44:32 ◼   ► That's not why any of us use Apple stuff.

00:44:35 ◼   ► So you know, that's not good enough.

00:44:37 ◼   ► - And there are examples of things that are better.

00:44:39 ◼   ► Like it's not like you're saying, oh, nobody is better.

00:44:41 ◼   ► That's not true, I just named one, Dropbox.

00:44:43 ◼   ► Dropbox is better at syncing files.

00:44:44 ◼   ► - Right, right, you know, so like,

00:44:46 ◼   ► it seems like Apple, from what they project

00:44:50 ◼   ► to the outside world, again, whether this reflects

00:44:53 ◼   ► their internal thinking or not, I don't know.

00:44:54 ◼   ► But what they project to the outside world is,

00:44:57 ◼   ► everything's fine, we're working really hard on it,

00:45:00 ◼   ► and everything's fine.

00:45:01 ◼   ► Like that is what we hear from Apple.

00:45:04 ◼   ► And the reality is that everything's not fine.

00:45:07 ◼   ► And I really, really hope that they see that.

00:45:10 ◼   ► Because all I hear from them usually is defensiveness.

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00:46:40 ◼   ► We've heard from so many people

00:46:42 ◼   ► who have their cat's-purs and who love them.

00:46:43 ◼   ► And we've actually heard from a few who said,

00:46:45 ◼   ► you know what, it didn't work out for me,

00:46:47 ◼   ► it wasn't what I wanted, and I called and I returned it.

00:46:50 ◼   ► And those people had such great experiences

00:46:52 ◼   ► even returning it that they thought to email us

00:46:55 ◼   ► and say, you know what, they're really great

00:46:57 ◼   ► even if you return it.

00:46:58 ◼   ► So really there's no pressure here, there's no risk here.

00:47:01 ◼   ► Try it for 100 nights in your home

00:47:02 ◼   ► and the pricing on this is great.

00:47:05 ◼   ► Mattresses usually, for a good mattress,

00:47:07 ◼   ► you're usually paying about 1500 bucks or more.

00:47:09 ◼   ► Cash for mattress start at just $500 for a twin

00:47:12 ◼   ► all the way up to 850 for queen, 950 for king.

00:47:15 ◼   ► So this is like half the price that you're gonna pay

00:47:17 ◼   ► for a similar quality mattress from anybody else.

00:47:19 ◼   ► These are really great prices,

00:47:20 ◼   ► under $1000 for a high quality mattress is fantastic.

00:47:24 ◼   ► So check it out today, these are again,

00:47:26 ◼   ► amazing latex foam and memory foam combo mattresses

00:47:30 ◼   ► for just the right sink, just the right bounce.

00:47:32 ◼   ► These are obsessively engineered

00:47:33 ◼   ► and they're made right here in the USA,

00:47:36 ◼   ► right here in America.

00:47:37 ◼   ► So check it out today.

00:47:38 ◼   ► Go to casper.com/atp and use code ATP

00:47:43 ◼   ► to get $50 towards any mattress purchase.

00:47:47 ◼   ► Terms and conditions do apply for that.

00:47:49 ◼   ► Once again, casper.com/atp and use code ATP.

00:47:54 ◼   ► Thanks a lot to Casper for sponsoring our show.

00:47:56 ◼   ► I'm gonna throw in a couple other Casper tidbits.

00:47:58 ◼   ► I think probably this is gonna be in a future ad read

00:48:01 ◼   ► because they sent you guys two, I'm assuming.

00:48:04 ◼   ► - Yeah, the sheets and the pillow, right?

00:48:05 ◼   ► - Yeah, the sheets and the pillow,

00:48:06 ◼   ► and I'm assuming there's gonna be some ad read

00:48:08 ◼   ► in the future where it's gonna be like,

00:48:09 ◼   ► oh, let me tell you about the Casper who's in the pillow.

00:48:11 ◼   ► But I've already got the pillow,

00:48:12 ◼   ► and I've been sleeping with it,

00:48:13 ◼   ► and I gotta tell you, I'm very impressed by this pillow.

00:48:16 ◼   ► I read all the little piece of paper

00:48:18 ◼   ► that comes with the pillow about how they design it,

00:48:20 ◼   ► like yeah, yeah, whatever,

00:48:21 ◼   ► 'cause I'm super picky about pillows.

00:48:23 ◼   ► And I was in the market for everyone.

00:48:24 ◼   ► - You?

00:48:25 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah. I was very impressed by this pillow. Like, the stuff they put in that little card,

00:48:30 ◼   ► like, "Oh, he specially designed it to be supportive and you can sleep in any position,"

00:48:34 ◼   ► and if you're just like, "Yeah, blah blah blah, it's a pillow, right?" I gotta tell

00:48:37 ◼   ► you, this is a hell of a pillow. We'll probably talk about it in some future ad read. But

00:48:41 ◼   ► I'm thinking of ordering a second one just so when this one wears out, if Casper, like,

00:48:45 ◼   ► doesn't make this pillow anymore, I'll have a backup.

00:48:48 ◼   ► You gotta have a backup pillow.

00:48:50 ◼   ► You have to. I've done this, I've made the mistake before with my stupid slippers that

00:48:52 ◼   ► I'm wearing now. I didn't buy two pair and these wore out and now I can't get them again.

00:48:56 ◼   ► You know, two is one and one is none.

00:48:58 ◼   ► Exactly. So, yeah, maybe I should buy three. I don't know.

00:49:01 ◼   ► I have a closet with two pairs of shoes in it that are replacements for the pair of shoes

00:49:04 ◼   ► I wear every day because in case Doc Martin stopped making them.

00:49:08 ◼   ► You know, you joke, but the Skechers shoes that Matt Alexander loves to make fun of me

00:49:13 ◼   ► for, they are not making them anymore probably because Matt called in a favor so I wouldn't

00:49:17 ◼   ► wear them anymore and I had one backup pair but now I'm out of backup pairs and I don't

00:49:21 ◼   ► I'm gonna do. It's terrible. Clothing's the worst. It is. You guys alluded to app

00:49:26 ◼   ► design and you had some thoughts about that. Let me prime the pump a

00:49:31 ◼   ► little bit and ask what the crap is the point in photos because I'm not... I added

00:49:38 ◼   ► all of my pictures to photos which I hadn't used in at least a couple of

00:49:44 ◼   ► years if not more than that. And outside of much easier access to shared photo

00:49:49 ◼   ► streams, which actually I should point out very quickly work flawlessly for me and I

00:49:53 ◼   ► have zero complaints about them.

00:49:57 ◼   ► What is photos really doing for me?

00:49:59 ◼   ► There doesn't appear to be a way to look at pictures by location.

00:50:05 ◼   ► There's the faces thing, which I never really trust.

00:50:07 ◼   ► I've got photo stream access.

00:50:10 ◼   ► Okay.

00:50:11 ◼   ► Yay.

00:50:12 ◼   ► But, and I can see all my selfies that I take all the time, I guess.

00:50:16 ◼   ► So what is the point in photos?

00:50:18 ◼   ► What is it doing for you that makes it worthwhile?

00:50:23 ◼   ► And then you can perhaps spring from that

00:50:25 ◼   ► to why is photos a piece of crap?

00:50:27 ◼   ► - I think photos is a great starting point

00:50:29 ◼   ► because I can answer your questions

00:50:30 ◼   ► at the same time talking about the app design issues

00:50:34 ◼   ► because they're both related to photos.

00:50:36 ◼   ► I guess I'll talk about this,

00:50:37 ◼   ► but my specific photo complaints in a future thing,

00:50:39 ◼   ► but just addressing your concerns,

00:50:40 ◼   ► like what am I supposed to be using photos for?

00:50:43 ◼   ► This is an app design philosophy

00:50:45 ◼   ► that really is kind of separate

00:50:46 ◼   ► from the like, do things work, is my data sinking,

00:50:50 ◼   ► you know, measuring crash or metrics

00:50:53 ◼   ► instead of something else.

00:50:54 ◼   ► But it's kind of related in that a lot of the time

00:50:56 ◼   ► people are complaining about Apple software quality.

00:50:58 ◼   ► Sometimes they're complaining about things don't work.

00:51:00 ◼   ► Sometimes they're complaining about cloud stuff,

00:51:01 ◼   ► but sometimes they're complaining

00:51:02 ◼   ► like even when everything's working exactly

00:51:04 ◼   ► as it's supposed to be, as it appears to be for you

00:51:05 ◼   ► in photos, people still don't feel the applications

00:51:09 ◼   ► are as useful or as interesting or as fun

00:51:13 ◼   ► or like they're not giving them enough value.

00:51:16 ◼   ► And I trace a lot of that back to the design philosophy that started many years ago on

00:51:20 ◼   ► the Mac specifically.

00:51:21 ◼   ► I mean, I guess you could talk about it on iOS a little bit, but on the Mac I really

00:51:24 ◼   ► feel it, where someone somewhere—I'm not going to say it was Johnny Ive, but it is

00:51:29 ◼   ► in keeping with his hardware ethos, but who knows—decided that complexity is the enemy

00:51:36 ◼   ► in software design.

00:51:37 ◼   ► And that's basically true.

00:51:38 ◼   ► Like, a lot of Apple's great software designs have been like, you know, "Let's simplify

00:51:42 ◼   ► this application.

00:51:43 ◼   ► Let's, you know, Steve Jobs, hopefully think—can I just say that?"

00:51:45 ◼   ► I just have one window that like I just drag a thing onto it makes me a DVD like I just want one window

00:51:50 ◼   ► I don't want a million buttons. I don't want a million pallets and toolbars and all those stuff

00:51:55 ◼   ► And you remember like those old pictures of like Microsoft Word

00:51:58 ◼   ► What version was it on the PC was it?

00:52:01 ◼   ► office 95 the one where like you can if you put every

00:52:04 ◼   ► Toolbar and word out on a six or a day before any screen you had like one line of text left

00:52:10 ◼   ► where you could type stuff in.

00:52:12 ◼   ► Like that was, you know,

00:52:13 ◼   ► and Apple's reacting against that to simplify, right?

00:52:16 ◼   ► But it really kicked into high gear,

00:52:19 ◼   ► I think maybe around Lion or something

00:52:22 ◼   ► where they took applications,

00:52:23 ◼   ► but even back when it was just iPhoto,

00:52:24 ◼   ► they took iPhoto, which had been, you know,

00:52:26 ◼   ► they'd been iterating on it.

00:52:27 ◼   ► They'd been making new versions of iPhoto.

00:52:29 ◼   ► They've been adding features and doing all sorts of stuff.

00:52:32 ◼   ► And then someone said, you know what?

00:52:33 ◼   ► We've got too much crap in iPhoto.

00:52:34 ◼   ► There's too many toolbar buttons.

00:52:36 ◼   ► There's too many like, you know, options,

00:52:38 ◼   ► the whole customized toolbar thing.

00:52:40 ◼   ► And then we have buttons in the bottom, and then we have a sidebar, and then there's regions

00:52:42 ◼   ► in the sidebar, and groups and subgroups, and then we have a floating panel for keywords,

00:52:47 ◼   ► and it's just too much stuff.

00:52:48 ◼   ► We need to clear all this crap out of iPhoto.

00:52:50 ◼   ► Again, this is before photos.

00:52:51 ◼   ► And so they went through, and they said this big top bar in photos, get rid of pretty much

00:52:56 ◼   ► all those buttons.

00:52:57 ◼   ► The bottom bar, get rid of the bottom bar entirely.

00:52:59 ◼   ► The sidebar, what can we remove from there?

00:53:00 ◼   ► Floating palettes, how many of those can we get rid of?

00:53:03 ◼   ► What things do we not need in the menu commands?

00:53:05 ◼   ► Options for showing the keywords underneath photos?

00:53:06 ◼   ► Nobody uses that except for Syracuse, so get rid of that feature and never bring it back.

00:53:09 ◼   ► Um, just removing, removing and simplifying.

00:53:12 ◼   ► And that instinct of simplifying, I think is admirable and the correct one.

00:53:17 ◼   ► But you know, as whatever that I forget it was that designer whose name I can't

00:53:21 ◼   ► remember is like everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.

00:53:25 ◼   ► They, I think they've crossed that line and what it has led to like, you know,

00:53:28 ◼   ► going through iPhoto and then going to photos, photos is even more like remove

00:53:32 ◼   ► everything, don't have any buttons or widgets or things like have to have just

00:53:38 ◼   ► like the minimum number of things you can possibly see on the screen as if

00:53:41 ◼   ► visual clutter is the number one enemy. Visual clutter is an enemy and

00:53:45 ◼   ► conceptual clutter and complexity those are enemies but at a certain point you

00:53:49 ◼   ► have someone like Casey who's like "I launched photos and it looks like an

00:53:52 ◼   ► unadorned window with a bunch of my photos in it" and I'm like "what does this

00:53:55 ◼   ► do for me? What can I do?" Like the silly field they used to have that had like

00:54:02 ◼   ► the star ratings in iPhoto you would look at that and if you're familiar

00:54:05 ◼   ► with iTunes, you're like, "Oh, what does this do? It's got these little empty white stars,"

00:54:09 ◼   ► and as you click on them, you can click on one, two, or three, and you would see the contents of

00:54:12 ◼   ► the window get filtered, like, "Oh, when I click this thing up, it's like a dedicated field for

00:54:15 ◼   ► quickly filtering by star rating," right? That's maybe like a UI too far, but at least you could

00:54:20 ◼   ► very quickly say, "Oh, that's a way I can do things," and then you would lead from there to

00:54:24 ◼   ► the little menu that would pop up from the bottom bar that would let you do more sophisticated

00:54:28 ◼   ► filtering on the view, so you could view by location and stuff like that. All of these

00:54:32 ◼   ► things that used to have toolbar buttons that have either been removed entirely from the

00:54:36 ◼   ► application or hidden away under some other little button or menu item.

00:54:42 ◼   ► It's like, what do you think we want to do with the application?

00:54:44 ◼   ► Do we just want to go there and see our pictures and scroll through them?

00:54:47 ◼   ► Then maybe Photos is a good application.

00:54:48 ◼   ► But if the application is capable of doing anything else, say I want to organize my photos,

00:54:52 ◼   ► I want to sort through them into piles and make little albums.

00:54:57 ◼   ► Maybe I'm going to make a calendar at Snapfish and I want to find all the good photos of

00:55:00 ◼   ► the kids for the past year group by season and I want to edit my photos. Are all the

00:55:06 ◼   ► editing tools hidden behind a sidebar in a mode that are not visible or whatever? And

00:55:11 ◼   ► it's all the more going when I do it on a gigantic 5K iMac, huge 27-inch screen with

00:55:15 ◼   ► these massive toolbars going along the top and bottom and these sidebars and there's

00:55:20 ◼   ► nothing in them. There's no buttons. Everything is buried. Everything is buried under seven

00:55:24 ◼   ► clicks that I have to get to. It's like, "What are you saving the space for?" That empty

00:55:28 ◼   ► space in the toolbar is making Casey not understand what the hell this app is even good for, and

00:55:32 ◼   ► making me, that I know what the app is good for, have to click seven times to get to the

00:55:36 ◼   ► features I wanted.

00:55:37 ◼   ► It should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.

00:55:40 ◼   ► People want to feel like the application is there to help them do things, not wipe the

00:55:44 ◼   ► entire slate clean and like, "Oh, everything should be like," whatever, "deferring to your

00:55:49 ◼   ► content.

00:55:50 ◼   ► Your content should be the star."

00:55:51 ◼   ► But people want to do stuff with their content.

00:55:52 ◼   ► Let them have buttons easily accessible to do the most common operations.

00:55:56 ◼   ► And yeah, maybe the old way of like, oh, we'll give you a customizable toolbar with a million

00:55:59 ◼   ► toolbar buttons and you can decide what you need used most often.

00:56:02 ◼   ► And you've got to design your own application basically by direct, like maybe that's the

00:56:05 ◼   ► wrong answer too, but they've gone way too far on the Mac specifically made applications

00:56:09 ◼   ► that just make a mockery of the massive screen that I have.

00:56:12 ◼   ► And it makes people feel like, makes people feel like the applications are less useful.

00:56:17 ◼   ► And I feel like they are less useful either because people won't discover the things they

00:56:20 ◼   ► can do because they're too hidden.

00:56:22 ◼   ► Or they'll know the things they can do and get frustrated like I am having to click through

00:56:27 ◼   ► 17 different buttons every time they do an operation they do all the time.

00:56:29 ◼   ► I want to crop, I want to straighten, I want to adjust some white levels, and I don't want

00:56:34 ◼   ► to click a million times.

00:56:35 ◼   ► I do that over and over and over again.

00:56:37 ◼   ► Every time I do it, I have to reveal these layers of UI that are hidden underneath the

00:56:42 ◼   ► magic cloth of don't clutter my UI.

00:56:44 ◼   ► That's not clutter.

00:56:45 ◼   ► That's what I want to use the application for.

00:56:47 ◼   ► So I need to strike that balance, and they're not currently doing it.

00:56:51 ◼   ► why I think a lot of people use Apple's applications and just feel like something is missing. Like

00:56:55 ◼   ► the excitement of using the original iLife Suite of like, "Wow, look at all these things

00:56:59 ◼   ► I can do!" And yeah, it's pretty complicated, I've never done it before, but there's like

00:57:04 ◼   ► three or four or five buttons and once I learn what they do, it's like you do this, you do

00:57:07 ◼   ► this, and then you do this, and you drag that over there and you get a thing, and you get

00:57:10 ◼   ► a movie, and you can play music, and you can burn a CD. Like, the old versions of these

00:57:14 ◼   ► applications had way more visual clutter on them, but people could use them to figure

00:57:19 ◼   ► out what is this app good for and then how do I use it to do that thing, right?

00:57:23 ◼   ► And at some point, the solution to everything was don't show people butts anymore, don't

00:57:29 ◼   ► show people panes, don't show people windows, hide everything under as few things as possible,

00:57:33 ◼   ► and that's the solution.

00:57:34 ◼   ► And I feel like that is sort of part of the dissatisfaction.

00:57:38 ◼   ► Like, getting back to Gruber's complaint was like, he was in photos and the little tiny

00:57:41 ◼   ► text was like the only friggin' thing in the entire gigantic bottom bar of my 27-inch monitor.

00:57:46 ◼   ► It was like a little text message that tells you like you have X number of items in your library

00:57:50 ◼   ► accounting for Y number of megabytes and he had a little message that said like

00:57:54 ◼   ► failed to upload five items and his his reasonable question was

00:57:58 ◼   ► What five items but what you know, so so what did he do in that? There's nothing there

00:58:03 ◼   ► He clicked on the text the completely featureless text like like iOS 7 and on has taught him

00:58:08 ◼   ► There's a slim chance that if you click on that text like just plain text not even like embossed really just like plain text

00:58:14 ◼   ► Maybe if I clicked on the text, it would tell me, "Nope, five items failed to upload."

00:58:19 ◼   ► And it's just sitting there staring at you, taunting you, like, "Five items failed to

00:58:22 ◼   ► upload."

00:58:23 ◼   ► And you're looking around, and you're looking around the bar, and I guess you just start

00:58:25 ◼   ► going to the menu bar and go, "Tell me what items failed to upload?

00:58:29 ◼   ► Show a log window?"

00:58:30 ◼   ► Like, no, no chance there's going to be a log window.

00:58:33 ◼   ► Are you crazy?

00:58:34 ◼   ► There's just nothing that can tell him how he's supposed to fix his problem.

00:58:39 ◼   ► Eventually he Googles for it, which is a bad sign, because if someone's using your application

00:58:42 ◼   ► and it's telling you something and the recourse eventually go to Google and he found like

00:58:45 ◼   ► a support discussion.

00:58:46 ◼   ► They said, "Oh, if you make a smart folder and you make the smart folder filter on items

00:58:50 ◼   ► that have failed to upload, no user's going to figure that out.

00:58:52 ◼   ► And then it will show you the things that failed to upload and you'll have to divine

00:58:55 ◼   ► the reasons they failed to upload on your own," which he eventually did and solved his

00:58:59 ◼   ► problem.

00:59:00 ◼   ► But like all in the name of minimalism, it's like, "I don't want anything on that bottom

00:59:04 ◼   ► bar except for text."

00:59:05 ◼   ► Should the text be clickable?

00:59:07 ◼   ► No.

00:59:08 ◼   ► It is.

00:59:09 ◼   ► Could there be...

00:59:10 ◼   ► If something goes wrong, what should we do?

00:59:11 ◼   ► No dialogues.

00:59:12 ◼   ► have a status bar, don't have an activity window, don't put all those confusing things,

00:59:15 ◼   ► and most of those things are right, but their solutions are wrong. It's making an application

00:59:20 ◼   ► that is less useful, more frustrating to use, but I guess it doesn't crash, right?

00:59:26 ◼   ► - Yeah. I mean, I use the Photos app. You know, Casey, honestly, I like it a lot. However,

00:59:33 ◼   ► the reason I like it a lot is because I don't do any editing in it, because doing any of

00:59:38 ◼   ► the editing drives me nuts, just like what John was saying.

00:59:41 ◼   ► So what are you doing with it? Because I'm not—maybe I'm just having a dumb moment,

00:59:46 ◼   ► but I don't see anything that this does for me other than maybe making a gazillion albums

00:59:52 ◼   ► and doing a whole lot of manual management that I have zero interest in.

00:59:57 ◼   ► What it does for me—and who knows what it does for everyone else—what it does for

01:00:00 ◼   ► me is a few things. First of all, it is one unified place where I can have all of my photos

01:00:06 ◼   ► synced to be visible, not only from my main computer,

01:00:10 ◼   ► where I'm working on them and storing the full res versions,

01:00:12 ◼   ► but also to be synced onto my phone, my iPad,

01:00:16 ◼   ► if I ever take it out of the drawer,

01:00:17 ◼   ► and my laptop when I take it on vacation.

01:00:19 ◼   ► And so I have access to all my photos everywhere.

01:00:22 ◼   ► And I know there are other solutions

01:00:23 ◼   ► that can do this as well.

01:00:24 ◼   ► However, I like this one 'cause it's built into everything

01:00:26 ◼   ► and syncs really fast most of the time.

01:00:29 ◼   ► So that, just having all your photos available everywhere,

01:00:34 ◼   ► at least for basic viewing, I love that.

01:00:36 ◼   ► That's number one.

01:00:38 ◼   ► Number two is it's another backup.

01:00:39 ◼   ► You know, it's kind of a safety

01:00:40 ◼   ► because I do the iCloud photo library thing, of course.

01:00:42 ◼   ► So it's kind of another backup for just my photos

01:00:45 ◼   ► that in case everything else goes wrong,

01:00:47 ◼   ► maybe someday I'll need that.

01:00:49 ◼   ► We also do the sharing thing.

01:00:50 ◼   ► Like between our family and friends,

01:00:53 ◼   ► we do often do shared photo albums.

01:00:56 ◼   ► Like if we go on a trip or something,

01:00:59 ◼   ► or we have friends over, or we visit some relatives,

01:01:02 ◼   ► we'll make a shared photo album for that,

01:01:03 ◼   ► and we'll send everyone the link afterwards.

01:01:05 ◼   ► And so for all these things, it does work fairly well.

01:01:10 ◼   ► The share photo album thing, the UI for how you invite

01:01:13 ◼   ► people on the Mac is horrible, but it does overall,

01:01:17 ◼   ► the functionality does work.

01:01:18 ◼   ► - Don't you love that little pop down thing

01:01:20 ◼   ► from the toolbar, this tiny constrained window

01:01:22 ◼   ► that you can't resize that it is deadly.

01:01:24 ◼   ► Like there are so many clicks you can do.

01:01:26 ◼   ► You can do clicks in that window that the entire

01:01:27 ◼   ► contents disappear and since there's no like save button,

01:01:30 ◼   ► you're like did it just auto save my deletion

01:01:31 ◼   ► of every person from this shared photo?

01:01:33 ◼   ► I've done that like three times accidentally to my entire family and said I have to invite

01:01:36 ◼   ► you all again.

01:01:38 ◼   ► Click on the thing in the email.

01:01:39 ◼   ► If you use Gmail, you can't click on your iOS device, forward it to your mail address

01:01:43 ◼   ► that's in Apple Mail.

01:01:45 ◼   ► Like all these Byzantine instructions.

01:01:47 ◼   ► And that UI, that frustrates me so much.

01:01:48 ◼   ► That little tiny UI.

01:01:50 ◼   ► Like you've got this huge screen.

01:01:52 ◼   ► And I'm only inviting like 15 people in my family to this thing.

01:01:55 ◼   ► You've got this huge screen and yet I'm forced to edit it in a buggy view, like a capsule

01:02:01 ◼   ► view.

01:02:02 ◼   ► shows everything in little capsules or whatever,

01:02:03 ◼   ► a buggy capsule view that periodically erases everything

01:02:06 ◼   ► with no sort of save functionality.

01:02:08 ◼   ► You just need to hide the thing

01:02:10 ◼   ► and assume that it is auto-saved or something.

01:02:12 ◼   ► The worst, it's the worst.

01:02:14 ◼   ► - So there's a lot of UI problems in photos.

01:02:17 ◼   ► And I agree, Jon, I agree that overall,

01:02:22 ◼   ► it does seem like Apple, in a similar way

01:02:26 ◼   ► that if you wanted to make a criticism

01:02:27 ◼   ► of their hardware designs, my criticism

01:02:30 ◼   ► for their hardware designs recently

01:02:31 ◼   ► has basically been like, basically everything

01:02:34 ◼   ► is just getting like, make it as thin as possible

01:02:36 ◼   ► and it seems like they don't have a lot of other ideas.

01:02:38 ◼   ► And that isn't always true,

01:02:40 ◼   ► but that is kind of the overall like,

01:02:42 ◼   ► if you had to pick one dysfunction that they have,

01:02:44 ◼   ► that seems to be the most common one.

01:02:46 ◼   ► In that same way, in the software design,

01:02:49 ◼   ► the main way the software design fails,

01:02:52 ◼   ► or fails most often, is that they oversimplify something

01:02:56 ◼   ► to the point where they are favoring the way it looks.

01:03:01 ◼   ► And so it can make great screenshots,

01:03:03 ◼   ► or it can make great ads, or great presentations,

01:03:05 ◼   ► or something, but when you actually have to use it,

01:03:09 ◼   ► the way it looks is getting in the way.

01:03:11 ◼   ► The way it looks is making them make decisions

01:03:14 ◼   ► that make it harder to use, or more confusing.

01:03:17 ◼   ► - There's actually a metric-based support for that too,

01:03:19 ◼   ► because a lot of what they're doing is removing features.

01:03:21 ◼   ► Like they're not just hiding them,

01:03:22 ◼   ► but they're flat out removing them.

01:03:23 ◼   ► For example, your options of how to sort the main view

01:03:26 ◼   ► in photos are drastically reduced from iPhoto, right?

01:03:30 ◼   ► Fewer features means fewer possibilities for testing,

01:03:34 ◼   ► means fewer bugs, right?

01:03:35 ◼   ► So there is actually a metric-based motivation for this.

01:03:38 ◼   ► Do we need to have all those features?

01:03:39 ◼   ► How many people do show keywords under their photos?

01:03:41 ◼   ► What if they have too many keywords and it busts our layout?

01:03:43 ◼   ► When we use this new iOS collection,

01:03:46 ◼   ► iOS ported collection view,

01:03:47 ◼   ► you can't have an unlimited number.

01:03:49 ◼   ► I'm just harping on my pet features.

01:03:51 ◼   ► But the fewer features you have,

01:03:53 ◼   ► the less stuff that can go wrong in your application,

01:03:55 ◼   ► the fewer crashes you have,

01:03:56 ◼   ► the fewer scenarios you have to test.

01:03:58 ◼   ► This is a metric that is appealing

01:04:00 ◼   ► internally the Apple, if your goal is,

01:04:02 ◼   ► let's write more bug-free software,

01:04:03 ◼   ► make your software simpler, it benefits the user

01:04:06 ◼   ► at a certain point because most people don't care about that

01:04:08 ◼   ► and you should simplify it and if they want a more powerful

01:04:10 ◼   ► one they should get the pro feature or whatever,

01:04:11 ◼   ► and it also benefits Apple in that they are,

01:04:14 ◼   ► they're making more reliable software by removing features,

01:04:16 ◼   ► but they just go too damn far and they get to the point

01:04:19 ◼   ► where Casey's like, so this is just a generic window frame

01:04:22 ◼   ► with my photos in them, what the hell is that?

01:04:24 ◼   ► What do I get?

01:04:25 ◼   ► What is this?

01:04:26 ◼   ► And the Photos app is, everything is so buried,

01:04:30 ◼   ► and this is what I refer to, I've referred to it before

01:04:33 ◼   ► as the junk drawer philosophy of design,

01:04:35 ◼   ► where you still have complex products,

01:04:40 ◼   ► you still have complex functionality.

01:04:42 ◼   ► Having one app that stores every photo you've ever taken

01:04:46 ◼   ► on any of your devices and cameras,

01:04:49 ◼   ► and that can do all these edits and all this sharing

01:04:51 ◼   ► and all this management.

01:04:52 ◼   ► - I think you can still order books from it, right?

01:04:54 ◼   ► - Maybe, like all the features that are still part of this,

01:04:59 ◼   ► that they haven't killed, that is a complex set of features.

01:05:03 ◼   ► And so there is going to be some minimum level

01:05:06 ◼   ► of just required complexity in any app

01:05:09 ◼   ► that encompasses all of those features.

01:05:11 ◼   ► And it seems like what Apple considers great design is,

01:05:16 ◼   ► as you said, basically just like delete everything.

01:05:18 ◼   ► Like great design is to have an app with no buttons anywhere

01:05:22 ◼   ► until you enter modes.

01:05:23 ◼   ► That is bad design, that is great visual design

01:05:28 ◼   ► for marketing screenshots.

01:05:29 ◼   ► It is horrible design for actual use.

01:05:33 ◼   ► And Apple has, this was not like a post-Steve Jobs thing

01:05:36 ◼   ► or a Johnny Ive in power thing.

01:05:39 ◼   ► This started earlier, this started way before that.

01:05:41 ◼   ► This started with Steve and earlier.

01:05:43 ◼   ► Apple has for a long time now been a little bit out of whack

01:05:48 ◼   ► in prioritizing visual appeal

01:05:51 ◼   ► a little bit too much over usability.

01:05:53 ◼   ► And you can see this going all the way back,

01:05:54 ◼   ► like when they get rid of the visible scroll bars

01:05:56 ◼   ► in Windows and stuff like that.

01:05:57 ◼   ► Like there's so many examples of this in OS X and in iOS.

01:06:01 ◼   ► And of course, iOS 7 I think went really far

01:06:04 ◼   ► in that direction, and probably a little bit

01:06:05 ◼   ► too far in that direction.

01:06:07 ◼   ► But the way to manage complexity in the interface

01:06:11 ◼   ► is not to just hide it all behind drawers and modes.

01:06:14 ◼   ► Like there are better ways to design apps.

01:06:18 ◼   ► And sometimes it will make for a screenshot

01:06:21 ◼   ► that has a few objects in it that aren't your content.

01:06:25 ◼   ► That's fine.

01:06:26 ◼   ► That's software.

01:06:27 ◼   ► This is, like, that's what this is useful for.

01:06:30 ◼   ► If that makes it useful, like, right now I have a photos app

01:06:34 ◼   ► where editing it looks so pretty that I never do it

01:06:37 ◼   ► because you have to enter, like, three different modes

01:06:39 ◼   ► to get through the controls that I wanna use every time.

01:06:42 ◼   ► Like, even rotating a photo.

01:06:45 ◼   ► Oh, I took this with my phone held in a weird way

01:06:47 ◼   ► and I wanna rotate it 90 degrees.

01:06:48 ◼   ► It's like four clicks.

01:06:50 ◼   ► - Tap the crop icon, right?

01:06:51 ◼   ► 'cause you wanna rotate that sounds like crop, right?

01:06:53 ◼   ► And then on the crop thing there's a rotate thing

01:06:55 ◼   ► and just keep tapping until it's rotated the right direction

01:06:58 ◼   ► and enjoy the animations between each one

01:07:01 ◼   ► of those mode switches.

01:07:02 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, it just seems like all of their design now

01:07:07 ◼   ► is way too heavily focused on visual and marketing appeal.

01:07:12 ◼   ► It seems like not only have they not cared

01:07:17 ◼   ► about making it harder to use in favor of that,

01:07:20 ◼   ► but it seems like they don't even know how anymore

01:07:22 ◼   ► to make it easy to use.

01:07:24 ◼   ► It seems like whatever talent that existed at Apple

01:07:27 ◼   ► that was able to make things easy to use

01:07:29 ◼   ► is no longer in power or is no longer there or something.

01:07:34 ◼   ► It just seems like that group is gone.

01:07:37 ◼   ► And that is fundamentally what frustrates me so much

01:07:40 ◼   ► because they have the ability to make such great stuff.

01:07:43 ◼   ► They have so many smart people who work there.

01:07:45 ◼   ► They've done it before.

01:07:46 ◼   ► They used to be so much better at prioritizing usability.

01:07:51 ◼   ► And again, it was never perfect.

01:07:52 ◼   ► There were always examples of them prioritizing

01:07:53 ◼   ► looks over usability, but I think they're worse,

01:07:57 ◼   ► in that way, I think they're worse now than ever,

01:07:59 ◼   ► in a way that looks are taking too much precedent

01:08:02 ◼   ► over usability.

01:08:03 ◼   ► And I do think that lies right at Johnny Ive's feet.

01:08:06 ◼   ► 'Cause I think that the rate at which that has accelerated

01:08:10 ◼   ► coincides exactly with Johnny Ive being made

01:08:12 ◼   ► head of all software design.

01:08:14 ◼   ► - Not exactly, but did he,

01:08:16 ◼   ► I really think 10.7 is where it started to happen on the Mac, because that's where I

01:08:19 ◼   ► really saw it.

01:08:20 ◼   ► Like, where applications that they've been year over year and always tend to come bundled

01:08:23 ◼   ► like Contacts and Address Book or whatever, they just got features just ripped out of

01:08:28 ◼   ► them.

01:08:29 ◼   ► And I think that was before Johnny Ive came over.

01:08:30 ◼   ► And again, the simplicity motive, like, it's positive.

01:08:34 ◼   ► In general, that's usually the right move.

01:08:36 ◼   ► A lot of the guidelines that Apple talks about in their UI guidelines are telling you to

01:08:39 ◼   ► simplify only, but you just have to know you can go too far.

01:08:44 ◼   ► It is really possible to go too far, both with removing features, which again is very

01:08:48 ◼   ► attractive to everybody involved, and with hiding features.

01:08:51 ◼   ► And it's just, it's like, I was just at a brief glimpse when you were talking, Marco,

01:08:54 ◼   ► about the possible Apple car UI, which I'm sure will be much smarter about the car UI

01:08:59 ◼   ► than this, but like, the equivalent of my iPhone of frustration is if the Apple car

01:09:03 ◼   ► came out and every time you wanted to indicate a turn, you would press on a touchpad to the

01:09:07 ◼   ► turn indication function, and then you'd press on the touchpad which direction you want the

01:09:11 ◼   ► indicator to go.

01:09:12 ◼   ► And then it would reset to the main menu each time.

01:09:15 ◼   ► And you're like, you know what, Apple?

01:09:17 ◼   ► One of the controls that you use a lot when you're driving a car

01:09:20 ◼   ► is a turn signal.

01:09:20 ◼   ► It should not be two button presses away on the touch

01:09:22 ◼   ► screen that you have to glance at.

01:09:24 ◼   ► And so to get use of what you use photos for,

01:09:26 ◼   ► what I use it for, Casey, is basically what Marco said.

01:09:29 ◼   ► I do iCloud backup, and my photos are everywhere,

01:09:31 ◼   ► and so on and so forth.

01:09:32 ◼   ► This is actually my wife's photo library,

01:09:33 ◼   ► because she's got the big library.

01:09:34 ◼   ► And they don't understand how families work.

01:09:36 ◼   ► Separate issue.

01:09:38 ◼   ► But also, I do all of my editing there.

01:09:41 ◼   ► I don't really fancy editing, but pretty much all the time

01:09:43 ◼   ► I am cropping, rotating, adjusting the lighting

01:09:46 ◼   ► before I throw it into a shared library.

01:09:49 ◼   ► And I also go through and I do my favorite.

01:09:50 ◼   ► So basically like the photos go in there.

01:09:53 ◼   ► I have to like manually import the ones from my phone.

01:09:56 ◼   ► Anyway, and then I go through them all

01:09:58 ◼   ► and I favorite the ones I think are good.

01:10:00 ◼   ► And at that point I might also adjust them.

01:10:03 ◼   ► And then if I'm doing something with them,

01:10:04 ◼   ► like, oh, I want to throw these into a shared stream

01:10:06 ◼   ► or we want to make a calendar,

01:10:07 ◼   ► I want to, you know, do something with the photos.

01:10:11 ◼   ► I do the editing there.

01:10:12 ◼   ► And every time, I always want to crop.

01:10:15 ◼   ► I probably want to rotate.

01:10:17 ◼   ► It isn't really bad at holding cameras perpendicular

01:10:19 ◼   ► to the, you know, parallel to the horizon or whatever.

01:10:24 ◼   ► I'm really crappy at that.

01:10:25 ◼   ► Anyway, I always want to do those things.

01:10:27 ◼   ► All of them are like nine clicks away.

01:10:28 ◼   ► And it's like, what is one click away in this application?

01:10:31 ◼   ► Nothing is.

01:10:32 ◼   ► Can I quickly filter the images based on writing?

01:10:33 ◼   ► Nope, that's not one click away.

01:10:34 ◼   ► Can I do like a quick smart,

01:10:36 ◼   ► Like nothing is one click away.

01:10:37 ◼   ► Everything is like two, three clicks away and cropping, cropping is the worst.

01:10:41 ◼   ► I just want to kill the person who made this feature.

01:10:43 ◼   ► Edit, edit, crop, aspect original, edit, crop, aspect, original,

01:10:47 ◼   ► edit, crop, aspect, original, edit, crop aspect, original.

01:10:50 ◼   ► How many, can you just remember that I always want original as the default,

01:10:53 ◼   ► even if you're gonna make me click 700 times to get to the fact that it doesn't

01:10:57 ◼   ► even remember the aspect that I want.

01:10:58 ◼   ► And then you get to drag and they changed the way dragging works in

01:11:00 ◼   ► photos and it's a little bit weird, but.

01:11:02 ◼   ► Oh, it's like, what, what do you think?

01:11:05 ◼   ► And I asked the same question.

01:11:06 ◼   ► What do you think people use this app for? There are features there. Why is every single one of them very? Surely there's one

01:11:11 ◼   ► It's like the controller where all the buttons are the same size. Surely there is one or two features that you think are the most

01:11:16 ◼   ► commonly used. Make them super obvious. In Overcast there's a big honking freaking play button because most people play audio

01:11:22 ◼   ► Marco had put the play button under three menus that you had to go through and straight across now

01:11:27 ◼   ► How to play this podcast. Go to options, go to playback and hit the play button. No, it's like a gigantic play button in the middle

01:11:34 ◼   ► the screen you can't miss it it's so frustrating so let's assume for a second

01:11:40 ◼   ► because I spend almost no time editing and no time categorizing my photos which

01:11:47 ◼   ► is true so let's assume for a second I want to go to a photo from when Marco

01:11:51 ◼   ► and Tiff and Aaron and I were in Germany how the hell do I do that I guess I

01:11:55 ◼   ► search like but if I know the date I just have to fart around with the

01:11:59 ◼   ► scroll bar until I know the until I land on the right date like it's just it's

01:12:03 ◼   ► It's insane to me that there's no, like, jump to date or anything like that.

01:12:07 ◼   ► In the iPhoto world, I would go to the lower left, and right next to that little rating

01:12:11 ◼   ► thing, there would be a little pop-up that you click, and it would pop up a calendar

01:12:14 ◼   ► widget and you could just click on a date.

01:12:16 ◼   ► And it would immediately filter the main pane view to that date.

01:12:20 ◼   ► Like, because, like you said, that's a common thing.

01:12:23 ◼   ► How do I quickly go to a date?

01:12:25 ◼   ► There should be a "always visible" button that you can click that pops up a calendar

01:12:28 ◼   ► thing that lets you pick a date from it.

01:12:30 ◼   ► Like if that's a common task, and I think it is a common task, and you've got literally

01:12:34 ◼   ► two feet of gray to put buttons in, put something there.

01:12:39 ◼   ► Like it wasn't even that much.

01:12:40 ◼   ► This was like a centimeter worth of space.

01:12:42 ◼   ► It was like a little field that you can click in for the rating and like a little like a

01:12:45 ◼   ► gear menu or a pop-up thing.

01:12:47 ◼   ► Like it was even a little bit too hidden back then.

01:12:50 ◼   ► But it's like what are you saving all the space for?

01:12:52 ◼   ► Like what do you get in the end of the person with the most unused gray pixels wins?

01:12:55 ◼   ► Well, this is what I'm saying.

01:12:57 ◼   ► Like this is bad design.

01:13:00 ◼   ► It's not just that this looks prettier

01:13:04 ◼   ► or this is clunkier to use.

01:13:06 ◼   ► Design is not about how it looks.

01:13:10 ◼   ► It's about how it works.

01:13:12 ◼   ► There's a reason why Steve Jobs said that

01:13:14 ◼   ► and everyone always quotes him on it.

01:13:16 ◼   ► Modern day Apple I think has forgotten that

01:13:18 ◼   ► or has deprioritized that too much.

01:13:21 ◼   ► Now it is all about how it looks

01:13:23 ◼   ► and we hope it kind of works well.

01:13:24 ◼   ► And there is no better example of this in my opinion

01:13:28 ◼   ► than a lot of the UI on the Apple TV.

01:13:31 ◼   ► And we have to also include Apple Music

01:13:33 ◼   ► in a lot of this as well.

01:13:34 ◼   ► - Now hold on, before we go there, which we should--

01:13:36 ◼   ► - We should do a sponsor break first,

01:13:37 ◼   ► 'cause that's gonna be long too.

01:13:38 ◼   ► - Not only should we do that,

01:13:40 ◼   ► but I would also like to compliment photos,

01:13:42 ◼   ► because as Jon was talking, and I was lamenting,

01:13:45 ◼   ► how do I go to our trip, I did a search for Nürburgring.

01:13:49 ◼   ► I did not type the umlaut on the first U,

01:13:53 ◼   ► and sure enough, it came up.

01:13:55 ◼   ► So kudos to Photos.

01:13:57 ◼   ► I still would prefer to have an easy way,

01:14:00 ◼   ► even if it's just a keystroke,

01:14:02 ◼   ► to jump to a specific date,

01:14:04 ◼   ► but I was able to type out Nürburgring,

01:14:07 ◼   ► and because all of these were taken with an iPhone

01:14:09 ◼   ► and they're all geotagged and blah, blah, blah,

01:14:11 ◼   ► it did find, if not all of the pictures,

01:14:14 ◼   ► then darn near all the pictures almost immediately.

01:14:17 ◼   ► So, points for photos on that one.

01:14:19 ◼   ► - Well, that's why they can convince themself

01:14:21 ◼   ► that it's okay to remove all this.

01:14:22 ◼   ► So they say, "Well, regular people

01:14:23 ◼   ► "don't wanna deal with all these buttons.

01:14:25 ◼   ► "It would be better if there was just a search field

01:14:26 ◼   ► that everyone can use that would just do the right thing.

01:14:28 ◼   ► But we know that Apple still lags behind Google in general in the, "Hey, here's a box where

01:14:32 ◼   ► you can write random text and we'll figure out what you mean."

01:14:34 ◼   ► Google does that amazingly well.

01:14:36 ◼   ► Apple does it less well but is getting better at it.

01:14:38 ◼   ► But the bottom line is sometimes, like if you're doing that quickly, that's fine.

01:14:42 ◼   ► But say you were going to pick three pictures to make fractures of from the Nurburgring

01:14:47 ◼   ► thing, you want to make sure that you are seeing all the pictures you have from the

01:14:50 ◼   ► Nurburgring.

01:14:51 ◼   ► So merely the search wouldn't be good because you're like, "Oh, maybe some of them came

01:14:54 ◼   ► from someone else's camera and they weren't geotagged."

01:14:56 ◼   ► You'd want to, you know date-wise when you were there, so you would inevitably eventually

01:15:00 ◼   ► say, "You know what?

01:15:01 ◼   ► I just really want to see all the photos from date X to date Y."

01:15:04 ◼   ► And so you'd be forced to figure out how to do that in the UI.

01:15:07 ◼   ► And like, it's great that the search box is there for quick things like that, but the

01:15:11 ◼   ► next level down of like, "I just want to do a specific date search," the job of good

01:15:15 ◼   ► software is to make that task simple enough that people can figure it out.

01:15:21 ◼   ► Like that they can figure out without making like a smart album and using some UI to set

01:15:25 ◼   ► Boolean expressions and stuff. There should be a simple friendly UI that regular people can figure

01:15:30 ◼   ► out, like an obvious way they would say that they would just learn through the language of using the

01:15:34 ◼   ► application. If I want to see things by date range, here's this calendar widget. It pops up,

01:15:38 ◼   ► I can pick a start date and an end date and it filters the window. And that's very modal and it

01:15:42 ◼   ► means I can't do anything else in the main view or whatever, but it's simple enough that people can

01:15:46 ◼   ► use it. But, and it's the thing you're asking to do is just one step more complicated than let me

01:15:51 ◼   ► just type random search and hope the application figures out what I want to do. But still, I think

01:15:55 ◼   ► is within the realm of functionality that an application like Photo should do. It's

01:15:58 ◼   ► not, you know, Aperture or Lightroom or it's not like a pro-level application, but regular

01:16:04 ◼   ► consumers have to do these kind of tasks too. And the job of the application is to make

01:16:09 ◼   ► them able to do them, not to say regular consumers will never figure out how to click on a calendar

01:16:14 ◼   ► widget. Just have to let them figure out that they can type in a text box.

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01:17:58 ◼   ► - So Apple Music and the Apple TV.

01:18:00 ◼   ► - Oh boy.

01:18:01 ◼   ► You know, the Apple TV makes me so sad, it really does.

01:18:03 ◼   ► I mean, to me, the Apple TV is kind of,

01:18:08 ◼   ► it kind of exemplifies all the problems

01:18:11 ◼   ► I've been talking about tonight.

01:18:13 ◼   ► Really? Because I like most things with the new Apple TV.

01:18:17 ◼   ► The remote, I would say, is in keeping with what we've been talking about tonight.

01:18:21 ◼   ► But I have to admit that the fact that it has the Plex app on it and that I've been using it more,

01:18:25 ◼   ► and that most of the other apps that I do play video when I hit the button,

01:18:28 ◼   ► is really giving me a more positive attitude towards the Apple TV lately.

01:18:31 ◼   ► Yeah, I agree that the remote is a little rough, and I still think--

01:18:34 ◼   ► A little rough. The remote is a mess.

01:18:36 ◼   ► Yeah. And I still think that the up, down, left, right buttons work better for me

01:18:41 ◼   ► than the silly mini touch pad.

01:18:43 ◼   ► But all in all, I really do like my Apple TV.

01:18:46 ◼   ► So Marco laid on us, what's wrong with the Apple TV?

01:18:48 ◼   ► - So we should just briefly go over the remote,

01:18:51 ◼   ► just for the sake of completeness.

01:18:53 ◼   ► Obviously we've talked about it before,

01:18:55 ◼   ► but I think this remote is like the hockey puck mouse.

01:18:59 ◼   ► It is something that was designed only for visual appeal,

01:19:03 ◼   ► and such at the expense of usability

01:19:07 ◼   ► and just basic ergonomics.

01:19:10 ◼   ► The remote is just a design disaster, that's what it is.

01:19:15 ◼   ► I am not gonna say it's nicely designed

01:19:20 ◼   ► because it looks nice, because it is not nicely designed.

01:19:24 ◼   ► I will say it looks kind of nice,

01:19:26 ◼   ► but that does not mean it's well designed.

01:19:28 ◼   ► And the fact that that came out of a design division

01:19:30 ◼   ► at Apple, they should look at that and feel sorry

01:19:33 ◼   ► they put that out there and make a better one

01:19:35 ◼   ► for the next generation, because that is not good design.

01:19:39 ◼   ► If so many people have trouble with this,

01:19:42 ◼   ► it isn't just me, it isn't just you guys,

01:19:45 ◼   ► I don't know a single person who has an Apple TV

01:19:47 ◼   ► who has not had some kind of problem

01:19:50 ◼   ► with that remote design,

01:19:51 ◼   ► whether it's picking it up upside down

01:19:53 ◼   ► and accidentally inputting things into the touch pad,

01:19:55 ◼   ► not knowing which way is up in the dark,

01:19:57 ◼   ► not knowing which button is which,

01:19:58 ◼   ► which button is where, what the buttons actually do,

01:20:00 ◼   ► which one is kind of the home button.

01:20:01 ◼   ► Like, that is a massive design failure.

01:20:05 ◼   ► And that is the primary input method for this device.

01:20:08 ◼   ► So that's not a small deal. This is a big deal.

01:20:11 ◼   ► - You know, let's assume for a second

01:20:13 ◼   ► that the touchpad was okay, which it isn't,

01:20:15 ◼   ► but let's go with it.

01:20:16 ◼   ► What on God's green earth made them use menu for back,

01:20:21 ◼   ► because that's basically what it does, is go back,

01:20:25 ◼   ► and the TV for home?

01:20:28 ◼   ► Why not use the little rounded rect

01:20:30 ◼   ► that's been on all these iOS devices

01:20:32 ◼   ► up until Touch ID became a thing?

01:20:34 ◼   ► Why not use the rounded rect for the TV button?

01:20:37 ◼   ► Well, Rana Wreck doesn't make sense because the icons aren't little rounded things like

01:20:41 ◼   ► they are on the phone.

01:20:42 ◼   ► You know, like that's the mnemonic for that.

01:20:44 ◼   ► And menu, I give them a pass on menu because on every TV connected remote, like menu basically

01:20:49 ◼   ► means back.

01:20:50 ◼   ► Like, I think they're going in line with the terminology for menu.

01:20:53 ◼   ► They're going in line with the terminology precedent set by every other AV remote for

01:20:58 ◼   ► the past 20 decades or whatever.

01:21:00 ◼   ► It is kind of bad though that most of the time when you hit menu, what you see is not

01:21:03 ◼   ► a menu.

01:21:04 ◼   ► But that's true on every TV remote.

01:21:07 ◼   ► Menu always means back.

01:21:09 ◼   ► Yeah, but since when does Apple pay attention

01:21:11 ◼   ► to the consumer electronics industry's standards for design?

01:21:13 ◼   ► I feel like that's what they're doing.

01:21:15 ◼   ► The TV one, the home one, is--

01:21:17 ◼   ► I mean, really, it should have just been a house,

01:21:18 ◼   ► but Apple doesn't like to do that, right?

01:21:19 ◼   ► Because at least that would make some sense.

01:21:21 ◼   ► But that would be, again, falling in line

01:21:22 ◼   ► with the television thing.

01:21:24 ◼   ► The problem is, what they made looks like a television set

01:21:27 ◼   ► and not an application.

01:21:29 ◼   ► So if anything, you would imagine

01:21:30 ◼   ► that would be the power button.

01:21:32 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, really the problem with the home button

01:21:35 ◼   ► is the placement, you know, like,

01:21:36 ◼   ► I know Rene Ritchie did this little mock-up,

01:21:38 ◼   ► we'll finally link again, but like,

01:21:40 ◼   ► if you put the home button centered below the other buttons,

01:21:43 ◼   ► like in a place where a home button on iOS device is,

01:21:45 ◼   ► it makes a lot more sense.

01:21:47 ◼   ► All the different shortcuts, like, you know,

01:21:48 ◼   ► you can double tap it and go to a multitasking feature

01:21:50 ◼   ► and kill unresponsive apps.

01:21:52 ◼   ► Most people will never know that, they will never find that.

01:21:54 ◼   ► If it was where a home button is on iOS,

01:21:57 ◼   ► they might get that, the chances would be higher.

01:21:59 ◼   ► It's still not great.

01:22:00 ◼   ► - But it's not a touchscreen.

01:22:01 ◼   ► Like they just need to start over with remote.

01:22:03 ◼   ► Like again, they have to realize that it's like a device

01:22:06 ◼   ► that sits on couches, that's wedged between couch cushions

01:22:08 ◼   ► that's held by entire hands that, you know,

01:22:12 ◼   ► I mean, I didn't want to harp on the TiVo remote,

01:22:13 ◼   ► but like they just need to start over with that.

01:22:15 ◼   ► But the worst thing about it,

01:22:16 ◼   ► you mentioned the hockey puck mouse.

01:22:17 ◼   ► I think it's worse than the hockey puck mouse

01:22:19 ◼   ► because using the hockey puck mouse could be frustrating

01:22:22 ◼   ► when like you'd push the mouse up

01:22:24 ◼   ► and the cursor would go up on an angle

01:22:26 ◼   ► and you'd realize you don't have it aligned

01:22:27 ◼   ► and you do some little finger feel to feel

01:22:28 ◼   ► where the cord is or feel the little dent

01:22:31 ◼   ► they put in later versions or whatever.

01:22:33 ◼   ► But I never felt sort of like timid

01:22:36 ◼   ► using the hockey puck mouse.

01:22:37 ◼   ► I never felt like I need to approach it gingerly

01:22:39 ◼   ► that something will go wrong.

01:22:41 ◼   ► And yet this stupid remote, I have to place it gingerly

01:22:44 ◼   ► to make sure it's not on a surface

01:22:46 ◼   ► where it will slide down into a crack

01:22:47 ◼   ► 'cause it's so frigging small and skinny, right?

01:22:49 ◼   ► I need to, when I pick it up,

01:22:50 ◼   ► I need to pick it up carefully,

01:22:52 ◼   ► both because I wanna make sure I got the orientation right,

01:22:55 ◼   ► which I have done a million times the wrong way.

01:22:57 ◼   ► I have not succumbed to putting a Roar brand on it,

01:22:59 ◼   ► but I'm getting really close.

01:23:00 ◼   ► Because I have to be careful not to touch the touch sensitive top half of the thing because something you know

01:23:06 ◼   ► Because that it will take my touch input and do something with it even it's always on it's always hot

01:23:12 ◼   ► Even if the thing it does is non-destructive merely by bringing up like the progress bar at the bottom

01:23:17 ◼   ► I don't want to accidentally bring the progress bar up if I'm just moving the thing out of the way to make room for like

01:23:23 ◼   ► A snack or something

01:23:24 ◼   ► I don't want to suddenly put a giant bar in the middle of the show that a bunch of people are watching

01:23:27 ◼   ► Even if it goes away on its own like I don't have to do anything. It's non-destructive, but it's annoying

01:23:32 ◼   ► And so I feel like I'm playing a game of operation which is an old board game kids go find the old ad

01:23:37 ◼   ► Every time I use this thing

01:23:40 ◼   ► I don't feel that way when I touch any of my other remotes

01:23:43 ◼   ► And you know my favorite one Tebow remote like everything's fine about it

01:23:47 ◼   ► In fact the only thing that you were like a dame for is that?

01:23:49 ◼   ► When it became when I got a TV or Bluetooth support now

01:23:52 ◼   ► I can't blindly mash it with as long as I know it's not plenty of TV because now

01:23:57 ◼   ► If you mash a Bluetooth remote, it doesn't matter if it's pointing the TV, which is a great feature and I love it

01:24:02 ◼   ► But it does make me have to be slightly more careful not to just pick it up like a barbarian and just squish the whole

01:24:07 ◼   ► Thing but I feel I feel like I am on you know, I'm walking on

01:24:12 ◼   ► I don't know what the expression eggshells. There you go. That's it. That's what I'm walking on eggshells

01:24:18 ◼   ► When I'm trying to use that stupid little remote, right because like it's always

01:24:23 ◼   ► waiting for you to accidentally touch this area that is not a button that actually does

01:24:27 ◼   ► things and like that is unlike every other remote that has ever existed and there's

01:24:31 ◼   ► a reason for that. So anyway, you know, I don't want to beat up too much on the remote

01:24:35 ◼   ► because I think that we could take a whole episode on that and most people have probably

01:24:39 ◼   ► agreed that yeah, it's not good. But just the entire Apple TV interface, there are parts

01:24:44 ◼   ► of it that work fine but the main content browsing interfaces, you know, which is kind

01:24:48 ◼   ► of a big thing that you do a lot on this thing. Like we buy Top Chef. We have bought every

01:24:53 ◼   ► season of Top Chef from iTunes since season five. We're currently on season, I believe,

01:24:58 ◼   ► 13. When a new episode comes out every week, we go to the top and we click on the Top Chef

01:25:05 ◼   ► because it's new and it loads after a very long wait time. The Top Chef section of the

01:25:10 ◼   ► iTunes store, in the bottom half of the screen, there is a horizontally scrolling line of

01:25:18 ◼   ► episodes. This includes every episode from every season we've bought. So from season

01:25:25 ◼   ► 5 through season 13, every single episode is in that list. Somewhere along the way,

01:25:32 ◼   ► Apple forgot that we had watched seasons 5 through like 10. So those are all marked as

01:25:38 ◼   ► unwatched for some reason. So every time we open this up, it opens up to the first unwatched

01:25:47 ◼   ► episode in the list, which is the very first episode in the list of season 5. Delightful.

01:25:53 ◼   ► We're in season 13. Now there is no entry here that says, you know, switch to a different

01:25:57 ◼   ► season or anything. No. The way you have to switch is by scrolling to the right through,

01:26:03 ◼   ► I don't know, 70 episodes or something? Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, paging through this

01:26:08 ◼   ► giant long horizontally scrolling list of episodes, which are squares, you know, this

01:26:15 ◼   ► massive line of episodes from season five all the way,

01:26:19 ◼   ► scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll,

01:26:21 ◼   ► scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll,

01:26:22 ◼   ► all the way till you get to the end of season 13

01:26:24 ◼   ► where we actually are, and then hit play on that.

01:26:27 ◼   ► I don't know if there's any way for me to mark

01:26:29 ◼   ► six seasons of a show as play without actually

01:26:31 ◼   ► opening up every single one of them,

01:26:32 ◼   ► seeking to the end, letting it stop.

01:26:33 ◼   ► Like, who knows, it doesn't matter.

01:26:36 ◼   ► And of course, we hope the episode's actually there

01:26:38 ◼   ► when we look, even though iTunes says it was there,

01:26:41 ◼   ► and if you click more on iTunes, it'll be there,

01:26:43 ◼   ► that problem is just on the old Apple TV too.

01:26:45 ◼   ► - Just mark them all as viewed in the web interface

01:26:47 ◼   ► or in the Mac version of this app?

01:26:48 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, sure, yeah, that's a good idea.

01:26:50 ◼   ► So, yeah, like-- - Those exist, right?

01:26:52 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, of course.

01:26:53 ◼   ► I'm sure desktop iTunes will work perfectly.

01:26:56 ◼   ► So, you know, it's, every part of this interaction

01:27:00 ◼   ► is a failure in some way.

01:27:01 ◼   ► So A, why were those marked as unplayed?

01:27:04 ◼   ► We watched them all, we bought them all years ago,

01:27:06 ◼   ► so A, something went wrong on the service end at some point.

01:27:10 ◼   ► Of course, it's Apple's services, it's iTunes,

01:27:12 ◼   ► it's the iTunes store, of course something went wrong.

01:27:14 ◼   ► So that's problem number one.

01:27:16 ◼   ► Problem number two, why is this every single season

01:27:20 ◼   ► in one giant list?

01:27:21 ◼   ► Was this designed in a way where they ever tested it,

01:27:26 ◼   ► loading a show that had more than one season?

01:27:28 ◼   ► I honestly am asking this question.

01:27:30 ◼   ► Did any of the designers at any point test this interface

01:27:34 ◼   ► with a show that had seven seasons, 10 seasons?

01:27:37 ◼   ► There are many shows like this.

01:27:40 ◼   ► - Even if it had one season,

01:27:41 ◼   ► - That's too much to scroll horizontally.

01:27:42 ◼   ► - Yes.

01:27:43 ◼   ► - The idea that horizontal scroll,

01:27:44 ◼   ► no one wants to scroll horizontally.

01:27:46 ◼   ► We learned anything.

01:27:47 ◼   ► - Yes, horizontal scrolling is always wrong.

01:27:48 ◼   ► Like the old Apple TV put this

01:27:50 ◼   ► in hierarchical vertically scrolling lists.

01:27:52 ◼   ► So every season had its own entry, perfect, right?

01:27:55 ◼   ► Because usually like changing seasons

01:27:58 ◼   ► is kind of a big navigational step.

01:27:59 ◼   ► You don't like accidentally cross over

01:28:01 ◼   ► between seasons very often.

01:28:03 ◼   ► Like you do that intentionally.

01:28:04 ◼   ► So like that can be its own stage in the tree.

01:28:08 ◼   ► You know, so A, there's the failure of like

01:28:10 ◼   ► why were these episodes all marked as unplayed?

01:28:12 ◼   ► B, why are they all on the same list?

01:28:14 ◼   ► C, when I play one in season 13,

01:28:18 ◼   ► and then we come back a week later

01:28:20 ◼   ► when there's a new episode in season 13,

01:28:23 ◼   ► right after the one that we just played,

01:28:25 ◼   ► why does it start again at season five?

01:28:28 ◼   ► Every part of this is a failure.

01:28:29 ◼   ► And the reason why this is designed this way

01:28:32 ◼   ► is either A, incompetence, that they didn't even test

01:28:36 ◼   ► whether this would work with a show

01:28:37 ◼   ► that had more than one season,

01:28:39 ◼   ► or B, that it was more important for them

01:28:42 ◼   ► to have this big, glamorous, pretty looking screen

01:28:46 ◼   ► that has this big promo art in the background

01:28:49 ◼   ► and it doesn't have the clutter or the ugliness

01:28:51 ◼   ► of actual text that describes what you're looking at

01:28:53 ◼   ► or a vertical list that's easy to navigate.

01:28:56 ◼   ► So either way, this is a massive failure.

01:28:59 ◼   ► And this, I'm just picking on one screen here,

01:29:01 ◼   ► but it's a pretty common screen you see on the Apple TV.

01:29:04 ◼   ► And this just, to me, represents so much

01:29:08 ◼   ► of the pattern of design failure that we keep seeing out of Apple recently. And Apple Music

01:29:13 ◼   ► is very similar. And I haven't, I honestly have not spent a ton of time with Apple Music

01:29:17 ◼   ► because it is so bad. And for me, it not only is badly designed, for me it actually doesn't

01:29:22 ◼   ► work. Like, whatever their local CDN node is that serves me, very often a song will

01:29:29 ◼   ► just end before, like it'll end prematurely and just go to the next song. And I assume

01:29:34 ◼   ► some kind of streaming failure, but I don't know why. It sucks. That's infuriating,

01:29:41 ◼   ► honestly, because I would like to use Apple Music, and I'm still paying for it because

01:29:44 ◼   ► I keep forgetting to go cancel it, and I keep thinking, "Oh, maybe it'll work better."

01:29:47 ◼   ► I would love to discover new music, but Apple Music just sucks so bad I can't do it. It

01:29:51 ◼   ► literally just doesn't work well for me. But also, just the design of that and the

01:29:56 ◼   ► design of the new iOS music app that followed from that, it is so much in the same design

01:30:02 ◼   ► failure pattern of we're gonna make it look like a magazine, like we're gonna make it

01:30:07 ◼   ► look like this fancy rich content experience, but in fact it's really hard to both use and

01:30:14 ◼   ► to figure out what the heck is going on, where you are, what's going to happen when the song

01:30:18 ◼   ► ends. It is so hard to figure out anything. This is not good design. This is not how you

01:30:26 ◼   ► you design software. And it is not only bad ideologically, it's bad in actual use. It's

01:30:34 ◼   ► one thing if you say, "Well, you know, you should really always have whitespace around

01:30:38 ◼   ► X for good practices." This goes beyond good practices. It is actually dysfunctional.

01:30:43 ◼   ► You know, if they had only looked at Plex, which gets this whole season thing right,

01:30:48 ◼   ► I know you're tired of hearing--

01:30:49 ◼   ► No, Plex doesn't quite get it right either.

01:30:51 ◼   ► Oh, please.

01:30:52 ◼   ► So Plex is trying to present me with like the next episode in the series that I want to watch

01:30:57 ◼   ► But I never trusted it to pick the right one so to make sure I have to go it

01:31:01 ◼   ► I have to go early back out and then I have to pick all instead of just the browser to pick all so I can

01:31:05 ◼   ► See the thing and then I click into it

01:31:07 ◼   ► And then I see the seasons listed then I have to click into the season and then I see the episodes in a horizontally scrolling

01:31:11 ◼   ► List and then I scroll over to the episode that I want

01:31:14 ◼   ► When you're looking at an episode on the Apple TV you're looking at an episode and there's like three or four buttons on there on

01:31:20 ◼   ► on that screen. One of them is "Go to Season."

01:31:23 ◼   ► I'm saying, like, starting from the top. I launch the Plex app, it brings me to the

01:31:26 ◼   ► thing that says "Discover," which I never want to see, and then "All." And I have

01:31:29 ◼   ► to go to it, because if I do go to "Discover," like, in the upper left it has a thing, but

01:31:32 ◼   ► it shows, like, the icon of the show that I want to watch. But if I click it, I'm not

01:31:36 ◼   ► sure it's going to resume me at the right time. Maybe I should just trust it. Like,

01:31:39 ◼   ► I feel like Netflix does a better job where it very quickly presents me with a thing that

01:31:43 ◼   ► says, "You watch this, you watch this, you watch this, you're in the middle of this,

01:31:46 ◼   ► or the next one is this," where with Plex that stuff's buried in Plex. Still does

01:31:49 ◼   ► horizontal scrolling for the episodes within a season at least it's a hierarchy there.

01:31:53 ◼   ► But anyway, like yeah, everything about Apple TV being designed like a magazine and not

01:31:59 ◼   ► like a thing that people use and that horrible remote, that's all bad.

01:32:04 ◼   ► But the final note, I guess to cap this thing off, is sort of the meta discussion we've

01:32:09 ◼   ► had many times about negativity towards Apple and you know, complaining about things and

01:32:15 ◼   ► stuff like that and the fact that the show isn't called Hypercritical even though it's

01:32:17 ◼   ► It's got one of the people from that show on it.

01:32:21 ◼   ► Two aspects of this.

01:32:22 ◼   ► One is, although we're complaining about a lot of things here, at the end of last year

01:32:28 ◼   ► I listed photos as one of my favorite things that Apple had done that year.

01:32:31 ◼   ► And that's still true, because the main functionality that photos provides, having my photos everywhere

01:32:35 ◼   ► and having them backed up to the cloud and stuff like that, I've wanted that for so long,

01:32:38 ◼   ► and it actually does that job so far for me.

01:32:40 ◼   ► If it doesn't do it, I have no recourse, because I don't know how to make it do what it's supposed

01:32:43 ◼   ► to do, but so far it's been good for me, so I still give that a thumbs up.

01:32:47 ◼   ► And like I said about the Apple TV, which has all sorts of problems, in the end, if

01:32:51 ◼   ► video plays when I press a button, that is a big step up from the previous one, which

01:32:55 ◼   ► would just show me spinners and strange error messages and numbers inside parentheses and

01:33:01 ◼   ► make me sign into my iTunes account and stuff.

01:33:03 ◼   ► So progress, good progress there.

01:33:05 ◼   ► But the broader thing I think on the negativity is I don't think anyone who is listening to

01:33:11 ◼   ► and is, you know, complaining, can say, you know, listen to the complaining and not liking

01:33:16 ◼   ► it, can say that this is just us at this point. Like, I feel like this is a broader thing.

01:33:21 ◼   ► Now, you can still believe that it's a broader narrative about a drop in quality that is

01:33:25 ◼   ► not founded, that it is somehow, like, feeding on itself and that it is a manufactured thing

01:33:30 ◼   ► of the media and of people all talking to each other, and like, that, again, that is

01:33:34 ◼   ► an aspect of the media, and we are a small part of that. But so much time has passed,

01:33:40 ◼   ► so many people with so much experience, so much diverse backgrounds.

01:33:44 ◼   ► All the people saying this aren't all jilted lovers who idealized some point in the past

01:33:48 ◼   ► where Apple was great.

01:33:49 ◼   ► Some of these people are people who recently switched to the Mac.

01:33:52 ◼   ► Some people have been Mac users forever.

01:33:53 ◼   ► Some people are not Mac users at all.

01:33:55 ◼   ► They're just looking in from the outside.

01:33:57 ◼   ► It's so diverse and there's so many different opinions about this and all of them are kind

01:34:00 ◼   ► of concentrating on it.

01:34:01 ◼   ► It's not the end of the world.

01:34:02 ◼   ► The company's not doomed.

01:34:03 ◼   ► We still like it better than everybody else for the most part.

01:34:07 ◼   ► It's a trend.

01:34:08 ◼   ► It's a thing.

01:34:09 ◼   ► want to just, you know, like Marco wasn't willing to backpedal this far, but if you're

01:34:13 ◼   ► going to say, maybe it's just a perception, right? But whatever it is, there's something

01:34:17 ◼   ► there. And we are not manufacturing that thing. And we are not, like, I feel like we're not

01:34:23 ◼   ► blowing it out of proportion. I feel like we all have a proportional idea of like, in

01:34:27 ◼   ► the grand scheme of things, we're all still using these products. We all still like them.

01:34:30 ◼   ► They all are better than their predecessors in important ways. But we're seeing things

01:34:34 ◼   ► fall down in ways that we had historically expected Apple to do better at. And we can

01:34:38 ◼   ► see obvious problems that Apple seems like they don't, and that it persists and it goes

01:34:41 ◼   ► on and on, and you know, like we talked about, not having crashers is great. Like, I really

01:34:45 ◼   ► do feel that over many years that their software has gotten more reliable. It's not like you

01:34:49 ◼   ► can only have one or the other. It's not like we're saying, "Bring back the crashers and

01:34:52 ◼   ► put a million toolbar buttons in our applications and stuff," right? It's like, we're looking,

01:34:57 ◼   ► you know, we want them to keep that good stuff, but bring back some of the old skills that

01:35:03 ◼   ► they had, like Margo said. Whoever was designing those other applications that are not there

01:35:06 ◼   ► and they're not in charge, they need to be because, you know, like, it's a regression.

01:35:13 ◼   ► It's a small regression, but it's a trend, and it's happening, and I think we are not

01:35:17 ◼   ► the source of that trend, and I think none of us are saying anything is dire as the emails

01:35:24 ◼   ► we get from people who just can't hear, can't bear to hear us say anything bad about Apple.

01:35:28 ◼   ► Like, I don't, the sky is not falling. We don't hate Apple. Apple's not a bad company.

01:35:34 ◼   ► is not doomed, but I feel like this is a thing.

01:35:39 ◼   ► I feel like this is a thing, and this is not a thing that we have manufactured.

01:35:43 ◼   ► Marco didn't make this happen by writing a blog post last year.

01:35:45 ◼   ► It didn't start with him, it's not going to end with him, and it is ongoing from people

01:35:49 ◼   ► who have no idea who any of us are.

01:35:51 ◼   ► Yeah, I completely agree.

01:35:53 ◼   ► And, you know, looking at the devices that I've bought over the last year or so, I love

01:36:00 ◼   ► the crap out of my iPad Mini 4.

01:36:02 ◼   ► I mean, I can't, off the top of my head, think of any complaints I have about it.

01:36:06 ◼   ► This 27-inch iMac that I had no business buying because I don't do desktop computers, that's

01:36:12 ◼   ► not my thing.

01:36:13 ◼   ► I freaking love this computer after I got my second one because the first one didn't

01:36:18 ◼   ► work.

01:36:19 ◼   ► But that's neither here nor there.

01:36:20 ◼   ► But I really like my 6S.

01:36:23 ◼   ► I can't think of any particular complaints I have about that.

01:36:25 ◼   ► I would like things to be a little different in a couple of departments, but I don't have

01:36:29 ◼   ► any actual complaints.

01:36:31 ◼   ► And I actually really like my new Apple TV.

01:36:33 ◼   ► I was wishy-washy on getting it, and it ended up being a holiday gift, but now that it's

01:36:39 ◼   ► here, I use that thing constantly.

01:36:42 ◼   ► And it was getting to the point that I almost never used our old Apple TV.

01:36:46 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm using my Apple TV way more than I use the old one as well.

01:36:49 ◼   ► Like, that's the real proof.

01:36:50 ◼   ► Like, as annoying as that remote is, the old Apple TV was getting almost no use, and now

01:36:53 ◼   ► this one gets a ton more.

01:36:55 ◼   ► The reason why the Apple TV's problems drive me crazy is that we use the Apple TV every

01:37:00 ◼   ► day. Like this is, like, and I could go on a much longer rant about how much worse I

01:37:05 ◼   ► think the both the Amazon Fire TV and the Roku whatever whatever that I got, you know,

01:37:10 ◼   ► a year ago or whatever, both of those are now sitting collecting dust because I hated

01:37:14 ◼   ► them both even more. But, you know, the fact is like, as you said, like this drives us

01:37:19 ◼   ► nuts because like we do use this stuff. And in some cases we don't want the alternatives

01:37:24 ◼   ► because they're worse for us in some way or they're, you know, they don't solve

01:37:27 ◼   ► or whatever, but the reason why this stuff matters,

01:37:31 ◼   ► what am I gonna do?

01:37:32 ◼   ► If Mac OS takes another dive towards bad reliability

01:37:37 ◼   ► and stuff, what am I gonna do, switch to Windows?

01:37:41 ◼   ► That's worse, that's way worse.

01:37:43 ◼   ► So the reason why we care so much about this

01:37:46 ◼   ► and we harp about this is because we don't wanna