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Upgrade

155: Apple Hardware Draft

 

00:00:00   [Music]

00:00:10   From Relay FM, this is Upgrade episode 155.

00:00:15   Today's show is brought to you by Blue Apron, Ting, Encapsula and Mack Weldon.

00:00:20   I am very excited about today's episode as we continue the Upgrade Summer of Fun.

00:00:25   Summer of Fun!

00:00:27   Summer of Fun!

00:00:28   My name is Myke Hurley.

00:00:29   I am joined by Mr. Jason Snell. Hi, Jason Snell.

00:00:32   Hi, Myke Hurley. Are you having fun yet?

00:00:34   I'm having the most fun.

00:00:36   This is our Summer of Fun, and we have an extra special fun episode planned for today.

00:00:41   How are you enjoying your Summer of Fun?

00:00:43   It's wonderful, and I think what I really want to know is,

00:00:48   how are you enjoying your Summer of Fun?

00:00:50   Nobody cares about that, Jason Snell, because we have some amazing guests today!

00:00:54   Indeed.

00:00:55   I would like to introduce co-founder of Relay FM, Mr. Stephen Hackett.

00:00:58   Hello, Steven Hackett.

00:00:59   Hello, Michael Hurley and Jason Snell.

00:01:02   And host of Roboism on Real AFM, the wonderful Alex Cox.

00:01:05   Hi, Alex.

00:01:06   Hi, guys.

00:01:07   And the host of a fantastic show called Reconcilable Differences, and it's all he does, Mr. John

00:01:12   Siracusa.

00:01:13   Hi, John.

00:01:14   Hello, everybody.

00:01:16   Best known as host of Reconcilable Differences.

00:01:18   No, I think best known as host of Robot or Not.

00:01:20   Oh, yes, of course.

00:01:22   How could I forget the number one smash hit of Robo or Not, where they talk about whether

00:01:27   ships or robots or not. We have a very special episode today. We're doing a couple of really

00:01:32   exciting things. The first of them is we're going to be doing an Apple products draft,

00:01:37   which Jason will explain the rules for in a moment, which is why we have assembled this

00:01:41   crack team of Apple enthusiasts. The second half is meeting a demand from John Siracusa

00:01:48   that me and Jason and John must redo Myke at the Movies Blade Runner with the Final

00:01:53   Cut edition. This is purely on John's demands, so that's going to be the second half of

00:01:58   today's episode. Now, Jason, because we have done so many drafts and I have yet to

00:02:02   understand how the rules of the draft work, can you please explain them for our participants

00:02:07   and audience?

00:02:08   Yeah, so what we're going to do today is we're going to do a draft where, in a series

00:02:12   of rounds, everybody in this podcast will be able to choose something from a category.

00:02:19   And in this case, the category is Apple Hardware.

00:02:24   That's it.

00:02:25   Hardware made by Apple at any point is eligible for this draft.

00:02:29   Once you choose it, it's off the board, somebody else can't take it.

00:02:31   And it's a way for us to discuss some of the great Apple hardware of history.

00:02:36   We'll do a few rounds until we run out of time, you know, two or three, who knows.

00:02:41   And we can, the person who picks the hardware will say why they picked it, and then we can

00:02:46   have a little chat if other people want to chime in and then we move on to the next person.

00:02:50   I believe one of the key parts of a draft, Myke, that you have gotten your head around

00:02:54   is every draft needs an order. So do we have an order?

00:02:58   We most certainly do. I consulted Random.org to generate an order for our draft and it

00:03:03   will go as follows. First we'll be doing it on Syracuse, then Stephen Hackett, then it

00:03:07   will be me, then Alex Cox, then Jason Snell. That is going to be our draft order for the

00:03:11   episode.

00:03:12   I am always last to pick on the incomparable. I do it as a courtesy here. I just get randomly selected last. That's fine

00:03:19   It's fine. I'm used to it. It's okay Jason. It's okay

00:03:22   So I do before we begin our picks there's just something that I want to talk about real quick right now

00:03:28   We are in our membership season at relay FM throughout August and in September

00:03:33   We have a whole host of fun and exciting things that we do for our relay FM members

00:03:37   Memberships start at $5 a month, and as a Relay FM member, you get access to a behind-the-scenes

00:03:42   newsletter preview of upcoming shows that we're going to be putting on at Relay FM,

00:03:46   a members-only podcast in which Stephen Hackett interviews a couple of hosts about a big topic

00:03:50   every month, and also access to a feed full of bonus episodes of Relay FM shows that go

00:03:56   throughout August and September.

00:03:58   And what we have planned for upgrade is very special.

00:04:01   If you remember last year, you may have heard me and Jason and CGP Grey.

00:04:05   We did a text adventure together called Six Gun Showdown.

00:04:08   Well we have another one, it's called Spooky Manor and it is unbelievable and we're all

00:04:12   very proud of it.

00:04:13   And that is going to actually be coming out this weekend.

00:04:16   So as you're hearing this, if you become a Relay FM member or you're already a Relay

00:04:19   FM member, that's going to be going live on Friday, August 25th.

00:04:23   So you'll be able to hear us traverse through Spooky Manor, which Jason says with aplomb

00:04:29   every single time.

00:04:30   Yeah, I was going to say, it's not Spooky Manor, it's

00:04:31   It's Spooky Manor!

00:04:36   There you go.

00:04:40   And I would say if you will want to hear this, we had a really good time and it came together

00:04:45   really well.

00:04:46   And you can only hear it if you are a Relay FM member.

00:04:49   So you can show your support for this show by just going to our page at relay.fm/upgrade.

00:04:54   You can sign up to support this show and become a member.

00:04:56   But you will get all of this stuff if you're a member of any show of anything at Relay

00:05:01   So go to relay.fm/membership, find out more, become a member, and you'll get access to

00:05:06   a bunch of bonus content that's going to be happening throughout the month.

00:05:10   So without further ado, we can hand over to Jon Siracusa.

00:05:14   Jon, what is pick number one in the Apple product draft?

00:05:18   Kind of excited that I got number one because we've done similar things to this before,

00:05:24   where we ask a bunch of Apple enthusiasts who we all know,

00:05:29   pick your favorite something from Apple.

00:05:32   And in the past, it's been like, pick your favorite Mac.

00:05:34   And a lot of people pick the same thing.

00:05:36   So since I get the first pick, I'm going to pick it

00:05:38   so nobody else can.

00:05:40   My number one pick is the Macintosh SE30.

00:05:43   I think, not universally, but by majority,

00:05:45   declared the best Mac ever by people who should know,

00:05:48   including me.

00:05:49   (laughing)

00:05:51   - What about people that have never used it, John?

00:05:53   What do they do?

00:05:54   So here, let me outline my reasoning on this.

00:05:56   First of all, the original Macintosh--

00:05:59   we all know that little-- the cute little guy.

00:06:00   It's all in all in one computer.

00:06:01   It's taller than it is wide.

00:06:04   The whole mouse graphical user interface, keyboard

00:06:07   with no arrow keys on it.

00:06:08   It's like a very important point in history.

00:06:12   And that form factor lasted for a while.

00:06:15   That was a Macintosh.

00:06:16   And then you had the Macintosh Plus,

00:06:18   which was just like the first one.

00:06:19   You had the 512 and the Plus.

00:06:21   And they all kind of looked the same.

00:06:22   The surface details changed a little bit.

00:06:23   At a certain point, the line started to branch out, sort of like the iPhone Plus.

00:06:28   You get the Mac 2, which was not a cute little guy with a little screen and a little floppy

00:06:32   disk mouth and everything.

00:06:33   Instead, it was like a big, flat PC-looking thing, but it had color and it was big and

00:06:37   fancy and expensive, and that kind of took the wind out of the sales of the cute little

00:06:42   original Macintosh.

00:06:43   It's like, "Oh, well, you've got the original Macintoshes, which are adorable, and then

00:06:46   you've got like the big, professional, expensive, expandable thing with card slots and color

00:06:50   and all that stuff."

00:06:52   The SE30 was sort of the last great all-in-one Mac,

00:06:57   because there had been, you know, the Mac 2 was already out

00:06:59   and actually it's successor, the Mac 2X was out,

00:07:02   even more powerful Mac 2.

00:07:04   The Mac SE30 was essentially a Mac 2X

00:07:06   in the original form factor, right?

00:07:08   And the original form factor has a lot of things going for it

00:07:12   as like black and white, nine inch screen,

00:07:14   like just, it is the iconic original Mac.

00:07:17   And this was the best one of those that they ever made.

00:07:20   It was amazing internal, all shoved into this little tiny thing.

00:07:23   And as for like the color and the power and everything, you could in fact add a 24-bit

00:07:28   color card to this thing.

00:07:29   24-bit color, not 16 colors, not 64 colors, not 256 colors, not 65,535 colors, but millions

00:07:37   of colors in Mac parlance.

00:07:39   So you could actually connect an external color monitor to this thing.

00:07:43   That's how powerful it was that you could have two monitors and this little tiny computer.

00:07:47   It was amazing.

00:07:48   It was the best original Mac form factor and therefore the best Mac of all time because

00:07:53   the original Mac is the best Mac.

00:07:55   Yeah, as a fellow old person, I know we're telling stories about the before time for

00:08:00   the rest of you, but John's absolutely right.

00:08:03   I remember my first Mac was an SE.

00:08:06   The SE30 was way more expensive, but it was definitely a cut above because it was Mac

00:08:12   2 power, but still in one of those little plastic things that had its own handle that

00:08:17   you just could pick it up and carry it around. But it had all that power in it, it was kind

00:08:21   of mind-boggling how fast it was compared to an SE or like later the Classic. Those

00:08:28   were all the kind of baseline standard computer, whereas this was like, if you think about

00:08:34   the first Mac, this is the Pro. This is the Mac Pro. The one time that they made that

00:08:40   original Mac shape with the Pro-level hardware in it instead of sort of the base-level hardware.

00:08:46   And yeah, people loved it.

00:08:48   And expansion even, like how they managed to get exp— like how can you have— there's

00:08:51   no card slots.

00:08:52   And this thing, actually there was a card slot.

00:08:54   The fact that you could have an external color monitor was just mind-blowing.

00:08:58   And the fact that if you didn't have an expansion, it was just a little nine-inch monochrome

00:09:02   black and white screen.

00:09:04   So you had all this power powering this tiny little monochrome screen.

00:09:07   It was so fast.

00:09:08   Like if you're used to using a 512 or a plus or something, you get one of these.

00:09:12   It was amazing.

00:09:13   And then you mentioned the classics.

00:09:14   kept this form factor around with the whole classic line and the classic 2 and then eventually

00:09:18   the weird color classic, all those computers were lesser. They were like, "Well, that time

00:09:24   is over, these are classic, they're old-fashioned or crappy." There's nothing old-fashioned

00:09:29   about this. This was the most powerful Mac you could get in this form factor or any form

00:09:34   factor because the 2X was basically the same power but with color and everything. And so

00:09:38   this was the end of the line for that strain of the species.

00:09:42   Alright Steven, you're up.

00:09:44   So I prepared a couple of different lists for this, and one of my lists were things

00:09:47   John Syracuse will pick in order, and SC30 was first, so he, uh, John played right into

00:09:54   it.

00:09:55   According to form.

00:09:56   So my first pick, like John thought a lot about this, and the machine I'm going to pick

00:10:00   has a lot of similarities to the classic Mac.

00:10:03   It's an all-in-one, it looked great for the time and still holds up today, and it was

00:10:10   a machine that a lot of Mac lovers really cared about because it was important.

00:10:15   And that is the original iMac in 1998. Steve Jobs comes...

00:10:19   What a surprise.

00:10:20   This is a shocking turn of events. Shocking, I say.

00:10:24   I kind of left that one for you too.

00:10:26   John and I are staying on brand today. So Steve Jobs comes back to the company. The place is a

00:10:32   disaster. He very famously kills lots of products and introduces the grid of four, professional,

00:10:38   consumer desktop and a portable and the iMac was the desktop consumer machine it

00:10:44   was the quote is from a different planet a planet with better designers wrapped

00:10:49   in blue translucent plastic and you know as a computer it was very basic it had

00:10:55   everything you needed had a bunch of stuff that people thought they needed

00:10:59   but Apple said no like a bunch of legacy ports that have been on the Mac for a

00:11:03   long time. All those were gone in favor of USB. Digging through old Macworld, in May

00:11:09   of 1998 Macworld Magazine had a grid of like 20 something USB devices and most of them

00:11:15   weren't even real yet. And then just a year later it was just like just pages and pages

00:11:21   of hundreds and hundreds of USB devices. You know I researched that table, Steven, you're

00:11:26   bringing back terrible memories. None of those things were shipping. There were no USB products.

00:11:30   saw the iMac and they were like, "Uh oh, we better announce some USB products that don't

00:11:36   exist yet."

00:11:37   We got this.

00:11:38   This is before FireWire, it's before CD burners and DVD burners.

00:11:42   All that stuff would come to the iMac.

00:11:43   The iMac G3 proved to be a very flexible platform and Apple added lots of stuff to it over time.

00:11:49   But that original Bondi Blue is a very important machine and it gets my pick in round one.

00:11:57   Can't argue.

00:11:58   That's a good pick.

00:11:59   Not a shocker, but that was a hugely important product in the history of the Mac.

00:12:06   And yeah, that was the return of goodness to the all-in-one.

00:12:11   I think even John would agree about that.

00:12:13   Not that it surpassed, but like, yeah, the all-in-one Mac kind of lost its way.

00:12:20   Especially that molar Mac, what was that about?

00:12:22   Be nice.

00:12:23   Be nice, I have one out here.

00:12:25   Yeah.

00:12:26   But the iMac was cute though.

00:12:27   Yeah, it was a little cute gumdrop like and the fact that they riffed on in the same way that they riffed on the design of

00:12:32   The original Mac with you know the the plus and the SE and the classic line and everything

00:12:36   That it was a sturdy form factor that you could you know do different colors and different styles and slot loading and just play with

00:12:42   It and it was you know adorable the whole time and it's got you know if you if you had

00:12:47   In the 80s you did it said Steve Jobs like okay?

00:12:50   There's gonna be a computer in the late 90s that's going to be like like the original Mac

00:12:54   But all over again like an all-in-one Mac. What might it look like like imagine a futuristic kind of

00:12:59   Original Macintosh form factor you might draw something silly like the little gumdrop things like obviously you'll never make a real computer like this

00:13:06   But wouldn't it be cool if it was like this weird amorphous blob that was colored and that's actually what he did

00:13:10   It's like it even did even did the hello

00:13:12   You know advertisement with a little Mac paint hello word written in script just like they had done with the original Mac

00:13:17   They knew they were doing it and they did it and it's like how can you successfully pull that off to?

00:13:22   Replay your own hits translated into a different decade and it worked totally

00:13:26   So I figured that I was gonna be surrounded by everybody's first max

00:13:30   And I figured that was what I was gonna get so se 30 was not my first Mac Myke come on, okay

00:13:38   Okay, favorite max then. I don't know. I don't know how old you are John you you you span all space and John is timeless. Yes

00:13:44   so I I

00:13:48   I get to pick what I consider to be one of Apple's most important products,

00:13:52   but I figured I would be the only one to pick it, and it's the iPod Mini.

00:13:55   The iPod Mini was my first Apple product, and I think a lot of people that are my age and

00:14:01   are interested in this type of stuff now may have fallen in the same hole.

00:14:04   Apple computers were not as exciting then, I think, for people of my age.

00:14:09   They became that way, definitely, because of the iPod and the whole Halo Effect thing.

00:14:14   This was an MP3 player that could hold all of the songs that I could ever want in my pocket.

00:14:20   And it was tiny, and I had a pink one, and it was awesome, and the screen was blue, and I loved it.

00:14:26   And I had every possible accessory. I had like a belt clip so I could put it on my belt,

00:14:31   and then I could just walk around school listening to things with my white earbuds.

00:14:35   It was the style at the time. And this thing completely changed my life, right?

00:14:41   Like it enabled me to be able to have the freedom to listen to whatever I wanted to listen to whenever I wanted to listen to it.

00:14:47   And it started me on this whole journey.

00:14:49   You know, the iPod Mini then became later iPods, which then became my first Mac.

00:14:53   And it got me into all of this stuff because it was this impossible piece of technology that was just interesting

00:15:00   beyond its

00:15:02   hardware. The idea of what you could do with this thing, what you could put in it, when before that I was using a CD player,

00:15:08   right, and could listen to one CD at a time.

00:15:10   I even had a mini disc player for a while, right?

00:15:12   But you still could only listen to one album at a time

00:15:14   It was this thing you had to carry around the little like weird mini discs and just put one in and take it out

00:15:19   But the iPod mini allowed me to have everything I could ever possibly want a time when I started to become

00:15:25   interested in music and technology and

00:15:27   It was amazing and I love it and a year ago or so

00:15:32   I don't have mine anymore, but Stephen bought me one. So I now still have a pink iPod mini

00:15:37   Which lives in my home and I think it's one of the most important products for me

00:15:42   And I think just in apples general history the iPod mini is is incredibly important. It's the flagship example of Apple

00:15:48   cannibalizing itself they have this very successful iPods and well

00:15:53   I guess the nano is after that the mini was incredibly successful

00:15:56   And then it was completely replaced by the nano and the mini itself

00:15:59   Was smaller capacity than the classic but you know like the price didn't match the capacity decrease and be like

00:16:07   Why are you ever going to pay for a mini?

00:16:08   It is so much smaller, but not that much less expensive.

00:16:12   Uh, and, uh, the answer was because it's pink.

00:16:14   That's why.

00:16:15   Yeah.

00:16:15   And smaller.

00:16:16   Them in all different colors and they were tiny and it was wonderful.

00:16:20   Like it was just this wonderful little thing and, uh, I loved it so much.

00:16:24   Alex, you're up.

00:16:25   All right.

00:16:27   So, uh, when the iPhone was announced, I was like everybody incredibly,

00:16:32   incredibly excited, but I looked at this thing and knew that my parents

00:16:36   were not going to go for it. So when a little bit later, the first generation iPod touch was

00:16:43   announced, I was just over the moon. Because I'm like, okay, this is something that I can totally

00:16:49   sell my parents on that I'm going to be allowed to use all my Christmas and birthday money to get.

00:16:55   And at that time, you know, parents were still afraid of letting all the use on the internet. So I

00:17:01   didn't have like I, I would have to the iMac I had at the time didn't have an airport card. So I

00:17:08   would go downstairs to still have to use the Gateway 2000 to get online. It was like an

00:17:14   animal. And as soon as I got the iPod touch it it was kind of like a disaster design or UI wise,

00:17:23   because there wasn't a phone. So the icons weren't even there was Safari, YouTube, calendar

00:17:29   contacts, clock calculator, and then settings and then just a

00:17:33   blank space. So immediately, I jail broke it. And then there

00:17:37   were apps. Yeah, and, well, ascidia was a huge thing. And

00:17:45   like, that's how the first time I use Twitterrific. And that's

00:17:49   the first time I had internet all over my house. And it was

00:17:52   just the start of like a beautiful, magical life. And

00:17:57   And then, lo and behold, my parents were like, "Oh, that's pretty cool.

00:18:01   That's pretty nice."

00:18:02   So eventually I did get the first iPhone after the big price drop.

00:18:06   But I have a really, really soft spot in my heart for the first generation, especially

00:18:13   because the edges, they were like this matte black that almost, it was kind of like a precursor

00:18:20   to the chamfered edges of the iPhone 5.

00:18:24   It was just really pleasing to hold, whereas the rest of the iPod Touches for a while then

00:18:30   had a metal back that got real scratched up real quickly because the metal went all the

00:18:36   way up to the sides, kind of like the iPhone 3G.

00:18:41   So this is actually also my favorite iPod Touch design.

00:18:45   People forget that that original iPod Touch didn't have many of the apps on it.

00:18:50   tried to like prevent people from using it to do anything other than play music

00:18:56   and then like they did a software update at some point maybe Steven remembers when

00:19:00   but it was literally like oh right we give up just have all the apps it's we

00:19:03   also had to pay for them yeah right yeah it was like it was like $10 or something

00:19:08   because the accounting software update mm-hmm it was very strange I mean I have

00:19:12   very similar warm feelings about the original iPod touch and it was high on

00:19:17   my list because it was my first iOS device or iPhone OS device. In the UK, the iPod Touch

00:19:23   came out before the iPhone because regulations. So I had an iPod Touch for a long time. I

00:19:29   have this memory of being on a family vacation in Spain and I'm sitting in the house and

00:19:34   just entering contacts into a phone, from my phone into my iPod Touch because that was

00:19:39   like the best thing I could have possibly done on that vacation. And it was just like

00:19:43   playing with the rubber bands, scrolling and all that. Like I just was completely lost

00:19:46   in this thing and it was, it's really important to me too because it opened that whole world

00:19:51   up for me.

00:19:52   I think this one was also the fastest iOS device, or sorry, the fastest iPhone OS device

00:19:56   for a while. Was this one of the second gen? I always forget.

00:19:59   Yeah. And people forget that, um, like, I know you guys think I'm super young, but this

00:20:04   is still at a point where unlimited texting was, was a luxury. So what my friends and

00:20:11   did, we basically used Twitter as our texting service because no one was on it and we didn't

00:20:18   like...

00:20:19   What?

00:20:20   It was at all public or you were doing DMs to each other?

00:20:22   Oh no, it was all...

00:20:23   There was no...

00:20:24   There were no DMs yet, so it was all public.

00:20:26   And I go back in time and there are just nonsense tweets that I'm like, "Okay, so are we meeting

00:20:33   at the mall?

00:20:34   What's happening?

00:20:35   Oh, we're going to see...

00:20:37   Rent the movie.

00:20:38   Okay, cool."

00:20:39   And the whole world can see those.

00:20:40   This is why your parents didn't want you on the internet.

00:20:42   (laughing)

00:20:44   - You were right the whole time.

00:20:45   (laughing)

00:20:47   - All right, Jason, do you wanna close out the first round?

00:20:49   - Yes, of course, because random.org says I must.

00:20:52   So the original MacBook Air was a terrible computer.

00:20:57   Let's just say it.

00:20:58   It was, it had like a non-standard video out port

00:21:02   that was never used on any other Mac.

00:21:04   To get to the USB and headphone jack,

00:21:06   you had to pop down a little door on the side

00:21:08   that kind of went down a little bit.

00:21:11   You didn't pop open a flap to reveal the ports.

00:21:14   The ports were literally on a door

00:21:16   that kind of dropped down when you flipped it open.

00:21:19   And my favorite feature,

00:21:21   when it got a little warm in the room,

00:21:23   one of the cores would just turn off

00:21:25   because it couldn't keep it cool enough

00:21:27   and your mouse would start to just like

00:21:30   not move smoothly anymore

00:21:32   and you basically couldn't do anything.

00:21:34   But it worked great.

00:21:35   If you were in a meat locker,

00:21:36   it went at full speed and it wasn't a problem. Then Apple released the second

00:21:41   Wave. I think there may have been two generations of that first MacBook Air

00:21:45   but there was a second Wave MacBook Air and that was they did a 13 inch model

00:21:49   and an 11 inch model.

00:21:52   Those are the ones that we think of as the MacBook Air basically to this day

00:21:56   and they nailed it to the point where now they kind of can't get rid of it

00:22:01   because it's $999 and everybody still wants to buy it even though it's got

00:22:05   two-year-old processors in it. My list here of things that I could pick

00:22:11   is full of kind of smaller than they should be. Why did they make that laptop,

00:22:15   Apple laptops? Because I love the little Apple laptops and the 11-inch MacBook Air

00:22:20   is basically my favorite, but I want to take that second wave MacBook Air.

00:22:24   When the MacBook Air came out, definitely the statement was this is Apple's vision

00:22:30   for what a laptop should be and while it isn't entirely practical now, it will

00:22:35   eventually be. And the second wave went from being not as overpriced as

00:22:40   that first generation, but still kind of like the iPod mini, priced for smallness,

00:22:45   right? Like you weren't paying more for more, you were paying more for less in

00:22:50   terms of size and weight. And by the time it's gotten to what is probably the end

00:22:56   of its life, if people will ever let it go and stop buying it, it is now the

00:23:01   cheapest Mac laptop and if you look at all the MacBook Pros they're basically

00:23:06   MacBook Airs. The MacBook Pro Escape is essentially a MacBook Air. It weighs

00:23:12   about what a 13-inch MacBook Air does so the MacBook Air has fulfilled its kind

00:23:17   of destiny of defining what the future of laptops would be but it's just a

00:23:21   great that both of the 13 and the 11 they're great laptops and and I have

00:23:27   loved mine and it's probably my favorite Mac that I've ever had is the little MacBook Air,

00:23:32   which is gone away except in education. So I think I'm going to have to take that, not

00:23:37   the first one because it was really bad, but that second Design Wave MacBook Air. I think

00:23:42   that was one of Apple's great laptop triumphs and they were right in terms of where the

00:23:47   future of laptops was going.

00:23:48   Yeah, there was a long time there where when anybody asked you who wasn't a, you know,

00:23:52   a software developer or some hardcore geek, "Hey, what Apple laptop should I get?" You

00:23:56   You just say 13-inch MacBook Air.

00:23:57   And you wouldn't have to have any long discussion about it,

00:23:59   because it was such a good machine, such a good balance.

00:24:02   Like right when the price went down,

00:24:03   but it was still fast, and before Retina,

00:24:05   when there was nothing to be embarrassed about it,

00:24:07   and everything about it was great, and everybody loved it.

00:24:10   That was nice.

00:24:11   We are out of those days now, where

00:24:12   there's a lot of caveats, and hemming, and hawing,

00:24:15   and introspection.

00:24:15   Now we're in the why won't you die phase of the MacBook Air.

00:24:18   Or even just like there's not an easy go-to for like, hey,

00:24:21   I want to get a Mac laptop.

00:24:23   Which one should I get?

00:24:23   You're like, oh, well.

00:24:24   - Not until you like the small, the MacBook,

00:24:26   but it's limited, but the MacBook Pro and the touch bar.

00:24:28   - Don't care about touch bar, but touch ID is nice,

00:24:30   but if you don't care about that, but it's expensive,

00:24:33   and the Air still exists, don't be tempted by it

00:24:35   'cause the screen now sucks, so it's hard.

00:24:37   - I'm basically the person who recommends

00:24:39   what computer everybody should get at my company,

00:24:42   and it used to be, like you said, oh, 13-inch Air,

00:24:46   or if you're doing any video, this MacBook Pro,

00:24:49   and now it's like, we actually need to set a meeting

00:24:52   side for this to discuss everything you want. Okay, let's go through what monitor you need.

00:24:58   It's... I missed those days of, you know, one year ago.

00:25:04   Days of simplicity. Myke, that's a round done.

00:25:07   Hooray! We did it everybody, so let's take a break. Today's show is brought to you by

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00:26:52   All right. So Mr.

00:26:54   John Siracus, we're back to you for your second pick.

00:26:57   So earlier you made an inaccurate prediction that we would all pick

00:27:01   our first Macintoshes, although I don't think Stephen's first Mac

00:27:04   was a was an original iMac, right?

00:27:06   It was not. Yeah.

00:27:08   OK, but now they're on to pick two.

00:27:11   Now's the time.

00:27:12   And I am going to pick my first Mac, and my first Mac was the first Mac.

00:27:18   The product whose name was—and I'm kind of disappointed that Apple still doesn't refer

00:27:21   to it this way in its documentation when I looked it up—but the name of the product

00:27:24   was Macintosh.

00:27:26   The box said Macintosh on it.

00:27:28   There were no other MacIntoshes.

00:27:29   There was just the one.

00:27:31   So there was no qualifiers needed.

00:27:34   Kind of like iPhone.

00:27:35   It was just Macintosh, spelled out all the way, not abbreviated Mac, which I also don't

00:27:39   really enjoy.

00:27:40   And this is maybe an old person thing, but the original Macintosh was really a really

00:27:45   important product.

00:27:47   These days everyone will say the iPhone was more important, and they're probably right

00:27:50   in the grand scheme of things for like for mass people for the entire for the entirety

00:27:53   of humanity the iPhone was definitely more important.

00:27:56   But for computer nerds I would argue the Macintosh was more important because it was like the

00:28:02   turning point from a blinking cursor on a dark screen to what we now know as modern

00:28:10   computing where you would, you know, well, the first thing that strikes me about the

00:28:15   turning point is the inversion. Black screen, light text. This inverted it. It wasn't green

00:28:21   or amber. It was white, like a piece of paper. And the ink quote unquote on it was black.

00:28:28   and the pixels were super tiny,

00:28:29   it was the retina of its day.

00:28:31   Today, retina, a lot of people, you know,

00:28:34   if you show it to them and their vision's not very good,

00:28:36   or you show them a retina next to a non-retina,

00:28:38   either don't see the difference,

00:28:39   or if you point out the differences,

00:28:40   like, oh, I don't care, I don't care,

00:28:42   the serifs look a little bit smoother.

00:28:43   But the Macintosh, as compared to like the Apple II,

00:28:47   A, anybody could tell that those pixels were smaller.

00:28:49   They may not have care,

00:28:50   but you could tell the pixels were smaller.

00:28:52   And B, the things you could do with those pixels.

00:28:55   There was like a different class of things that you could do.

00:28:57   Retina didn't really provide a different class of things

00:28:59   because it's not like Retina Hairline suddenly opened up

00:29:01   a new class of application

00:29:02   'cause they're just too darn small for people to see.

00:29:03   You can't say, well, now I can make art

00:29:05   with Retina Hairlines than it couldn't before.

00:29:08   That's, you know, maybe you could say

00:29:09   the photos look a little bit sharper, but that's about it.

00:29:11   But the original Macintosh looked different

00:29:15   than everything else before it.

00:29:15   And then of course it had the GUI.

00:29:16   And I've said this many times in the past,

00:29:19   but the overriding sense of what made the Mac different

00:29:21   from every other computer was that there was this sort of,

00:29:26   coherent world inside the computer that you could look at.

00:29:29   It was like looking inside a little dollhouse,

00:29:31   like a little diorama, like here is this little world

00:29:33   and you can go in this little world and play it.

00:29:35   And it obeys a reasonable set of rules

00:29:36   and it's like a little toy box,

00:29:37   which was so different from sort of the Enigma machine

00:29:40   of a blinking cursor and knowing commands

00:29:42   and typing basic into your television screen

00:29:45   or whatever you were doing before

00:29:46   in your Commodore 64 or VIC-20 or whatever.

00:29:49   Such a hard turn, such an important change

00:29:52   and so far ahead of everything else.

00:29:54   And then people looked at this

00:29:55   and thought for a really, really long time,

00:29:57   much longer than the iPhone.

00:29:58   They thought, this is weird.

00:30:00   It's not a real computer.

00:30:03   It's just a silly toy.

00:30:05   This whole gooey thing will never catch on.

00:30:07   Computers with mice are stupid, right?

00:30:09   We didn't have that with the iPhone.

00:30:10   There wasn't like a six year period

00:30:12   where people kept buying Blackberries

00:30:14   and said the iPhone was dumb.

00:30:15   Everyone else said, oh, we're just gonna do that.

00:30:17   Like they caught on and they figured it out.

00:30:19   With the Mac, there was this long period

00:30:21   where we felt like we were the only people

00:30:23   the world using the future, and we sort of were. And so the original Macintosh, super important,

00:30:28   amazing, the most mind-blowing product ever to be introduced in my lifetime, you know,

00:30:32   for me personally, even though the iPhone is more important for humanity, the original

00:30:37   Mac is more important to me. I can't dispute this. It was on my list for sure. I was a little

00:30:41   surprised that it wasn't John's first pick, but I, yeah, yeah, absolutely. How could it not be picked?

00:30:48   It's hard to follow that, but in thinking about products that really change the way

00:30:54   we approach computing, my next pick is a little bit of a Trojan horse.

00:30:59   So it's a pick within a pick.

00:31:01   It's a little pick sandwich.

00:31:03   And it is the combination of the original AirPort base station and the original iBook.

00:31:10   The original iBook's not that important historically.

00:31:12   Colorful, it's like a toilet seat.

00:31:14   We're going on a really interesting route here that I was not expecting.

00:31:18   I don't know what sort of toilet seats you use.

00:31:21   You've got two legitimate old people and one old person in training.

00:31:27   Steve.

00:31:28   Yep.

00:31:29   So the iBook 53, it's a weird machine.

00:31:32   But in the middle of the keynote, where they announce that Steve Jobs is on a bright orange

00:31:38   iBook and then walks away from the podium as the webpage is loading.

00:31:42   And that moment is what I'm talking about because it was the introduction of wireless

00:31:47   networking to the Mac platform.

00:31:50   And the keynote is great.

00:31:51   I will dig up a YouTube link for the show notes where he makes Phil Schiller jump off

00:31:55   a platform onto an airbag to prove that it's wireless, like while it's transmitting data.

00:32:01   All sorts of crazy antics.

00:32:03   He has a hula hoop going around the computer at one point.

00:32:06   For me, the money moment was, and you know, I'm going to go there, Steven.

00:32:12   When the some brightly colored, you know, bright shirt wearing Apple employees carrying

00:32:19   those bright iBooks started coming from the back of the room down the aisles with the

00:32:26   iBooks to show people, you know, all of us who were in the room there that they were

00:32:32   on the internet.

00:32:33   And that was a great little magic trick moment where it's like, and here are these laptops,

00:32:37   there's one right in front of you looking at loading web pages.

00:32:40   And it was all orchestrated.

00:32:41   It was a real showbiz moment when they did that.

00:32:43   Yeah.

00:32:44   And what that brought into our lives

00:32:48   was being able to use a computer without having it plugged

00:32:51   into anything in the network.

00:32:53   And that seems so trivial today.

00:32:56   I have two Wi-Fi light bulbs on my desk.

00:32:59   And all of that comes from technology introduced here.

00:33:03   And it is just amazing.

00:33:05   At this point, Steven, I can tell you,

00:33:08   because I'm an old person, I was living in the same house I'm living in now, we had our

00:33:13   DSL modem was in a back bedroom and I had literally a 80 foot long ethernet cable that

00:33:22   snaked down our hallway, you had to step over it, down our hallway into our living room

00:33:27   to the couch so that we could plug in and be on the internet.

00:33:32   This is life before WiFi, it was stupid.

00:33:34   Awful.

00:33:35   But the airport changed that, and it's come a long way,

00:33:38   and now Apple maybe doesn't make airport products anymore.

00:33:41   But a base station coupled with a bright orange laptop,

00:33:44   and you were free as long as you were within the three

00:33:48   hours of battery life, whatever you got.

00:33:50   Original airport is my pick.

00:33:52   And it was cute too.

00:33:54   The era of cute things.

00:33:55   The original iBook was cute, looked

00:33:56   like a little purse with a handle.

00:33:58   And the base station was cute.

00:33:59   It looked like a little flying saucer.

00:34:00   All their stuff was cute.

00:34:01   Adorable.

00:34:02   And the Steve Jobs thing where he made Phyllis Shiller jump

00:34:04   Reminded me of the scene in Conan the Barbarian where

00:34:08   Power is you know what power is that's power. I can make my executives jump

00:34:14   like

00:34:16   It was pretty high like you're if you're working at a tech company

00:34:20   You don't think part of your job description is going to be to jump 30 feet onto an airbag while holding a computer

00:34:24   And they're like an accelerometer live on the yeah on the screen

00:34:28   There was some silly justification

00:34:30   But it's kind of it was kind of like the the leg stealing scene in Guardians of the Galaxy

00:34:33   You feel like Steve is chuckling under his breath all time. No. Yeah, this is important to show

00:34:37   All right, so we're up to pick number eight and I am really surprised that we haven't seen the iPhone in this list

00:34:48   Yeah, I know everyone wants to get their max in too many old people

00:34:53   But I'm I am very surprised that there is no iPhone

00:34:57   So I'm gonna pick the iPhone but not the original. Oh good. Hmm. I want to pick the iPhone 6 plus

00:35:04   This is my favorite iPhone

00:35:13   It's not my favorite design like physically, you know

00:35:17   I would say that maybe the original or the iPhone 5 or 4 I think a nicer looking

00:35:23   But this was the iPhone that I really wanted like since the original this was the one that I wanted the most

00:35:30   because it had a bigger screen and it had a bigger battery and they were the two things that I really wanted from a phone and

00:35:37   I have had been and I'm a plus-size believer since the beginning

00:35:43   Whenever one thought it was ridiculous many people still do think it was ridiculous

00:35:47   but I was immediately sold on this as a device that I wanted because

00:35:52   it was the best of everything for me.

00:35:54   Like why would I not want a bigger screen

00:35:56   for my most important computer?

00:35:58   I want to get more information on it.

00:35:59   I want to be able to read more.

00:36:00   I want to be able to see more.

00:36:02   And I think that the Plus line of phones

00:36:05   was a fantastic decision for Apple.

00:36:06   I think it helped as the numbers show,

00:36:08   it really propelled them forward even further

00:36:11   into markets that they were looking to try and attract.

00:36:14   And I think that it was fantastic

00:36:15   and they've continued to do great things with that line.

00:36:18   It's the line that seems to get some features first

00:36:21   because they can put them into the bigger body.

00:36:24   And I hope that even though we're going

00:36:27   into potentially uncharted waters with the iPhone,

00:36:30   I hope that into the future,

00:36:31   we continue to get this model

00:36:33   that's just a little bit bigger than what most people want,

00:36:36   because there are some people like me

00:36:38   that always want to be in the Plus Club.

00:36:40   - Not surprised.

00:36:41   - I know it upsets you, Jason.

00:36:43   - No, no, I think that was the most mic pick

00:36:46   that there could ever be.

00:36:47   - I think it was really important for Apple

00:36:48   to introduce a bigger phone.

00:36:50   I still want them to introduce even bigger iPads and I always want them to do a bigger

00:36:53   phone.

00:36:54   The question was always like the bigger phone, but other people will buy it, not me.

00:36:58   But to see Myke, another tech enthusiast, somehow find room in their life and in their

00:37:02   pants for this monstrosity has always surprised me.

00:37:06   I have big pants, Jon, don't worry.

00:37:08   The message is real good.

00:37:09   City of big pants, that's what they call London.

00:37:11   I tried for nearly a year to find jeans that would fit it.

00:37:14   Nope, nope.

00:37:15   So I'm sorry.

00:37:16   Did you check like a clown shop?

00:37:19   (laughing)

00:37:21   Maybe magicians, you know, they could have big pockets,

00:37:24   right, you might be able to get something that way

00:37:25   that might look kind of normal.

00:37:27   Magicians could help you out.

00:37:28   Alex, you're up.

00:37:29   - All right, I'm gonna go with another iPhone,

00:37:32   but not the original iPhone.

00:37:34   The iPhone 4, which is probably my favorite iPhone.

00:37:39   It introduced retina, which felt really magical.

00:37:44   I'm sure they said that on stage.

00:37:46   But holding it in my hand and looking at it,

00:37:49   that was the first time it felt like

00:37:51   this is a device that is supposed to disappear.

00:37:54   And it felt like the perfect size,

00:37:56   the metal on the edge was just so cool.

00:37:59   And also this is kind of a pick within a pic.

00:38:01   Like when Antennagate happened and supposedly people

00:38:05   would squeeze the phone and you would get less reception,

00:38:08   that was the first time I remember

00:38:09   like there being a big Apple scandal.

00:38:12   And so then they gave everybody a free case

00:38:15   or free bumper case that had purchased an iPhone 4. And that's also that bumper case

00:38:21   is the only good iPhone case Apple has ever made. Now they make these terrible, squishy,

00:38:28   squeaky like plastic things, or leather ones that immediately like the patina isn't like

00:38:35   a normal leather patina, it just rips and falls apart. But this bumper was like exactly

00:38:40   what you wanted. It still showed off the iPhone 4's design, it still like disappeared and

00:38:46   looked like it was part of the phone. And there were a lot fewer cracked screens, even

00:38:51   though both sides are made of glass. I think this was also the first time the Kindle app

00:38:56   came to the iPhone. So that was a dream come true. My library was in my pocket.

00:39:02   I think this is my favorite industrial design family. Like iPhone 4 and 5 all are of the

00:39:09   same design. Like the five got taller, but they're all the kind of two flat surfaces

00:39:14   with the ring, like a little baking mold around the outside. And it looks, it's very much,

00:39:21   it looks like a Braun razor or something. It's, I like, I think it's a very pretty design.

00:39:26   And we lived with it for whatever four years. And this was where it came in. And of course

00:39:30   it was lost in a bar and found by Gizmodo. So it's got that going for it too.

00:39:35   Oh yeah.

00:39:36   The forward design was also my favorite.

00:39:38   I think it was absolutely the most attractive and the best design for its era.

00:39:43   Because obviously, eventually the phones got bigger, and if you look at one today, they

00:39:46   look minuscule, right?

00:39:47   I think it was the wrong size.

00:39:49   Like I think the 7 and 6 are closer to the right compromise for size, but back then,

00:39:54   you know, cost and the screen and all that other stuff, there was a lot going into it.

00:39:59   But if you look at the original, like what Apple's industrial design team wanted the

00:40:03   the iPhone to be, I forget what this design was called, it had some code name, this is

00:40:07   what they wanted to make and they couldn't make for years. Like they said, this is what

00:40:10   the iPhone's gonna look like, it's this weird, you know, ice cream sandwich thingy or whatever,

00:40:13   and they just couldn't do it. And so they made the original iPhone and the 3G and 3GS

00:40:17   before this one, but they didn't give up on it. They're like, we wanna make this phone

00:40:20   look like this, and eventually they did. And I think it kinda shows, like, this is what

00:40:24   was in their head. You know, if you put the 4 next to the ones that came before it, they

00:40:28   all look like weird attempts to do something, and the 4 just looks like completely real

00:40:33   And I also love that bumper because it had the rubber grips on it like that if a film it actually made it

00:40:39   Like less slippery in your hand instead of just sort of you know

00:40:43   Either more slippery or not changing it at all because the rubber

00:40:46   Right when your your hand met it and you did you get to see the shiny glass back in the last front probably again

00:40:50   Probably not a great idea, but boy that phone look good. Yeah, and I think that the

00:40:54   One of the I don't entirely agree John

00:40:57   I think that the the six and seven design is actually the one that's the most direct

00:41:02   descendant of the original, which I think is Johnny Ive wanting to make a like super curvy,

00:41:07   curved edges, curved to the back kind of thing. It wasn't Johnny Ive. Don't you remember in the court case

00:41:12   they said like here are

00:41:14   possible designs for the iPhone and one of them was the ice cream sandwich one and when one of them was more curvy and the ice

00:41:19   cream sandwich, it wasn't Johnny Ive specifically, it was some other guy I think came up with the ice cream sandwich one and they couldn't do that one.

00:41:23   Yeah, my point is that there's sort of two different design directions and with the four or five ice cream sandwich design

00:41:29   they went with sort of Design Direction B,

00:41:31   and I do think it is a fantastic design.

00:41:33   Whereas the 6 and the 7 feel like those are descendants

00:41:37   of Design Direction A, which was that original phone,

00:41:40   which is super curvy.

00:41:42   And it's funny that Apple has flipped back and forth.

00:41:44   Of course, you can still get the SE,

00:41:45   which has this design today.

00:41:46   My favorite in this family was the 5,

00:41:49   because it had the black phone for the 5.

00:41:52   It was like the Darth Vader phone, and I love that,

00:41:54   and I like that it was slightly bigger.

00:41:56   - It was black until you touched it.

00:41:58   Yeah, it's true. I had to put it in the case, but it would be so beautiful. But it's a great design.

00:42:02   Has "ice cream sandwich" design become canon now? Is this the term?

00:42:06   I don't know.

00:42:07   No, it had a code name. In the court case, they had like a diagram and a code name for that design.

00:42:11   I forget what it was, though.

00:42:13   That does look like an ice cream sandwich, kinda.

00:42:14   So I'm gonna close out the second round by out-doing John as the oldest person on this podcast,

00:42:22   because I'm gonna take you back to a time when Apple didn't make Macs.

00:42:26   They made some other products. And I'm going to select one of the first computers that I ever used.

00:42:35   I'm going to pick the Apple IIe. And now they're Apple II enthusiasts out there going, "No!" But

00:42:42   like the Apple II Plus originally didn't do lowercase. The Apple IIc is an interesting

00:42:48   example of Apple kind of trying to do a closed case product, which they would end up doing a

00:42:52   whole lot of in the future but I love the Apple IIe. I had an Apple IIe. You could

00:42:57   pop off the top and it had expansion slots in it. I had a couple of floppy

00:43:01   drives, you know, I drove a color monitor. I played games on it and wrote short

00:43:07   stories on it and wrote school papers on it. It was definitely... different people

00:43:14   can... people can debate like the Commodore 64 and things like that but to me this

00:43:19   was the computer until I saw a Mac for the first time and so my my desire for

00:43:26   Apple products and my love of that six color rainbow logo goes back to the 2e

00:43:33   and it was the I think the sweet spot in the Apple to line because it was you

00:43:40   know it preceded the 2c and was more expandable but it corrected a lot of the

00:43:44   problems of the 2+ and you know you could boot into Apple DOS, you could boot into Pro

00:43:50   DOS, you could run at 80 characters per line or 40 depending and you know every now and

00:43:56   then I take an Apple II emulator out for a spin because that's pure nostalgia for me.

00:44:02   Also I played Karateka on the Apple II and that was the best game ever so yeah Apple

00:44:08   IIe.

00:44:09   Amazing longevity and education too because I'm not as old and decrepit as Jason but I

00:44:13   I used Apple IIe's in high school.

00:44:15   Like in the school in high school,

00:44:17   they were teaching classes on Apple IIe's,

00:44:20   which even then were old.

00:44:21   They had two GS's in the library

00:44:22   and they had Macs in the school paper office,

00:44:24   but the IIe's was like, they had the most of them.

00:44:26   There was a whole room full of them

00:44:28   and they were still actually using them.

00:44:29   Pretty amazing.

00:44:30   - Yeah, well, I mean, even in,

00:44:32   I think you're like five or six years younger than me,

00:44:34   but like the Apple IIe, the Mac had been out,

00:44:36   I graduated from high school in 1988.

00:44:38   The Mac had already been out for four years,

00:44:40   but the computer lab was entirely Apple IIs.

00:44:44   And I took an Apple II to college with me

00:44:46   because I didn't get a Mac until my sophomore year in college.

00:44:49   And it performed admirably, although it was not

00:44:53   what I would call a compact machine

00:44:56   by any stretch of the imagination

00:44:57   once you attach the floppy drives and the monitor

00:45:00   and got it all set up.

00:45:01   But it was great.

00:45:02   And you could just write a program.

00:45:04   10 print hello, 20 print go to 10.

00:45:05   It was just right there.

00:45:06   No work required to write a stupid program.

00:45:09   wish I could say anything. I've literally never seen an Apple II in my life.

00:45:14   You can go to a museum.

00:45:15   That's kind of on my bucket. Yeah, it's on my bucket list. I've also never seen an original

00:45:18   Macintosh.

00:45:19   Or just go to Steven's house. He's got them all.

00:45:22   In high school, or rather in middle school, our computer lab only had molar Macs for some

00:45:28   reason. I feel like it would be Steven's dream.

00:45:30   It's more like a nightmare, I think, but no.

00:45:33   That's when they fall out.

00:45:35   It's a fever dream.

00:45:37   a dream. It's definitely a fever dream.

00:45:38   David A.

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00:47:31   All right, so we are on to round three.

00:47:35   So we're gonna head back over to Mr. Circuser.

00:47:38   - All right, continuing the trend/theme,

00:47:41   I'm going to pick another Mac for my number three choice.

00:47:45   This Mac is vaguely relevant to our current times in two ways.

00:47:49   First the fancy new edge-to-edge screen iPhone with a notch on the top of whatever is supposedly

00:47:54   codenamed Ferrari as a expensive but lower volume but you know super duper fast presumably

00:48:01   you know model in the line.

00:48:04   And also today as we await the sort of kind of announced for the future Mac Pro which

00:48:10   is not coming this year but sometime in the future that will be like the return of the

00:48:16   big bad Mac, the Mac that is spare no expense, make it as fast as possible, make it awesome

00:48:22   and also awesomely expensive.

00:48:24   And so for my number three pick I am picking the Macintosh 2FX.

00:48:28   One of the best names ever for a computer because FX is cool, X's are cool and FX looks

00:48:33   nice.

00:48:35   And it was a Mac that was faster than all the other Macs, more expensive than all the

00:48:40   other Macs, and filled with stuff that was, you know, it's not like a parts bin Mac, and

00:48:47   most of them weren't parts bin Macs back then, but lots of custom stuff inside there to make

00:48:51   it the best of any of the Macs.

00:48:53   Like every part of this computer that wasn't better than its predecessors, they made it

00:48:57   not just a little bit better, but a lot better and a lot more expensive.

00:49:01   It was on the cover of Macworld magazine with the famous,

00:49:05   I don't know how this line became famous

00:49:07   because it's not even that exciting,

00:49:08   but it was everyone knows who was alive this time

00:49:10   that the Mac 2FX is wicked fast.

00:49:12   Because that's what they wrote.

00:49:13   - Wicked fast, yeah.

00:49:14   - On the cover of the magazine.

00:49:15   And it was, and it was a type of computer like a Ferrari

00:49:18   most people never saw.

00:49:20   Like it was years before I saw a Mac 2FX.

00:49:23   'Cause where were they?

00:49:24   Where could you even, who had one?

00:49:25   They cost as much as a car, right?

00:49:27   You could see a Mac 2 if you were lucky

00:49:29   and you went to your local reseller,

00:49:30   but they wouldn't have a Mac 2FX out on the floor.

00:49:33   And again, using it, this is kind of weird

00:49:36   because most people don't have this experience.

00:49:37   Well, maybe you did with the Mac OS X error.

00:49:39   Like how do you tell whether a computer is fast?

00:49:41   Back in the early days of the Mac,

00:49:42   you could tell a computer was fast

00:49:43   because it did all the gooey stuff perceptively faster.

00:49:47   Like you'd pull down a menu

00:49:49   and move your mouse through the menu,

00:49:51   highlighting the items as you go down.

00:49:53   That was perceptively faster on a Mac 2FX

00:49:56   than it was on its siblings.

00:49:58   opening and closing windows, right?

00:50:00   The little rubber banding animation,

00:50:02   opening and closing applications, you know,

00:50:03   there was just using the computer,

00:50:06   you could tell it was faster.

00:50:08   And you don't get that feel that much these days

00:50:09   because in the modern era, even a slow iPhone,

00:50:12   maybe the animations are a little bit jumpy,

00:50:13   but scrolling is generally good everywhere.

00:50:15   And, you know, on the Mac used to be resizing windows,

00:50:17   but that was slow everywhere.

00:50:19   And then how fast the Mac you could get,

00:50:20   it was like more of a software problem than hardware one.

00:50:22   The Mac 2FX was like a Ferrari, an expensive lost object.

00:50:27   and the original embodiment of speed,

00:50:30   of power and speed in the Mac line.

00:50:32   - I have no idea how my college newspaper in 1991,

00:50:36   when the Mac 2FX was a currently shipping model,

00:50:38   got a Mac 2FX, but we did.

00:50:42   And it was, or it might even been '90,

00:50:45   it was like right when it came out.

00:50:46   And I don't know how we got one.

00:50:48   We didn't get it my first year there,

00:50:49   but my second year there, we had a Mac 2FX.

00:50:51   And that was an update,

00:50:53   'cause originally our Fast Mac was a 2CX.

00:50:55   We had the 2FX.

00:50:57   And I'll tell you what a great demo of how fast it was was.

00:51:01   In PageMaker, which we used to lay out our newspaper,

00:51:03   on a Mac SE, you would do this--

00:51:05   I think it was like command option click

00:51:07   would take you to 100%.

00:51:09   So you'd be zoomed out to look at the page layout.

00:51:11   And it would actually Greek the text.

00:51:13   It wouldn't even show you.

00:51:13   Try to draw the text because it would be too small.

00:51:16   So it just was like the text was just gray bars.

00:51:18   And then you do command option click.

00:51:19   And it would go to 100%.

00:51:21   And it would redraw the screen zoomed in at the point

00:51:23   where you clicked.

00:51:24   And you'd sit there and watch page maker laboriously

00:51:27   draw the frame of the page.

00:51:28   And then it would flow the text in.

00:51:30   And maybe if there was a graphic or an image,

00:51:32   you would draw that in.

00:51:33   And you would just sit there and wait.

00:51:34   And on the 2FX, you would do that same thing and go click.

00:51:37   And it'd be like, boom, there you were at 100%.

00:51:40   Like today, basically, except for us,

00:51:44   that was the difference.

00:51:45   So we fought over who got to use the 2FX, of course.

00:51:47   But it was startling how much faster

00:51:49   it was than the 2CX, let alone the SEs that we were using.

00:51:52   It was amazing.

00:51:54   I'm so happy.

00:51:55   This is one of those rare cases where I got to use the top of the line Mac.

00:52:00   It's the first time I ever got to use a top of the line Mac.

00:52:02   And I didn't even realize it at the time.

00:52:04   I just knew how fast it was.

00:52:05   And it was awesome.

00:52:06   I remember the hard drive sound because it

00:52:09   had a fast hard drive in it too.

00:52:11   So you'd be moving around on a page, and normally you'd

00:52:14   hear this kind of very slow--

00:52:15   [MUMBLING]

00:52:16   --hard drive sound coming from the inside of an SE.

00:52:20   And on the two effects, it was this distinct tick sound.

00:52:23   it would be like tick tick tick and then it was loaded it was magic amazing

00:52:27   amazing computer huge too it was not like all the two C's were all these

00:52:32   little tiny boxes like a like a donut box or something and 2FX was not it was

00:52:38   it was just massive it was a slab it was it was nothing like a like a little

00:52:45   computer it was a huge slab of metal basically on my John Syracuse a

00:52:48   prediction list the two effects was second so so I think I'm gonna go with

00:52:56   the theme of my first Mac and that comes with some caveats it was actually a

00:53:03   company computer but the boss let me use it as my own so I sort of took it to

00:53:07   college with me I used it for years even when I worked for them like very

00:53:11   part-time ecology basically just let me keep the machine and that is the

00:53:14   the Titanium PowerBook G4.

00:53:16   First time we'd seen a G4 in a notebook.

00:53:20   Before this, the PowerBooks were all plastic.

00:53:23   They'd been gray for a long time,

00:53:24   and then they were black with the G3 series,

00:53:27   and curvy, and the logo was upside down

00:53:31   when he opened the lid, which made everybody sad.

00:53:33   In fact, when Steve Jobs introduced this,

00:53:35   he showed the back of the computer,

00:53:36   and everybody laughed, and he made fun of it.

00:53:39   And it was, it set the tone for the MacBook,

00:53:44   The PowerBooks and the MacBook Pros we still use today.

00:53:46   My MacBook Pro is sitting here on my desk.

00:53:48   It's thin, it's made of metal, it's got rounded edges,

00:53:51   it's very clean looking, and the titanium

00:53:55   introduced all of that stuff.

00:53:56   Now it had its problems that I'm sure people will point out,

00:53:59   mainly that the paint would flake off

00:54:00   and sometimes the screen would just come off the hinges.

00:54:03   Totally fine, just ignore those problems

00:54:05   because it's a beautiful machine

00:54:07   and I had the one gigahertz model,

00:54:10   had the fast, I think it had a super drive in it,

00:54:13   A gig of RAM, it really was a killer machine for the time.

00:54:17   And one that I still like the way it looks.

00:54:20   It's kind of busy compared to the aluminum that would follow.

00:54:23   Lots of different surfaces and colors and textures.

00:54:25   But I think it looks great.

00:54:27   And it was an inch thick.

00:54:28   And it just blew my mind at the time.

00:54:30   And looking back, it's sort of the grandfather for all

00:54:33   the notebooks that we know today.

00:54:35   It's also the ice cream sandwich school of design.

00:54:37   I remember that was introduced.

00:54:40   We were waiting for a G4 to be in a PowerBook.

00:54:44   And then when it was introduced, and they showed the side view,

00:54:46   and it was like one inch thin, or whatever the marking thing was,

00:54:49   people gasped.

00:54:50   It was like, A, maybe they're going to put a G4 in there,

00:54:53   but that's going to be really hard.

00:54:54   And B, the fact that it got thinner,

00:54:55   we weren't used to that at that point.

00:54:57   Apple-- I mean, we should have been.

00:54:58   I don't know if this was before or after the Nano,

00:55:00   but it was like a mini to Nano transition.

00:55:02   This is the best, fastest computer

00:55:03   with this amazing SuperDrive thing in it,

00:55:05   and it's incredibly thin.

00:55:07   That computer was shocking.

00:55:08   It was one of the first sort of future tech,

00:55:11   kind of like the MacBook Air.

00:55:12   Like, you can't make a computer like that.

00:55:14   Right.

00:55:14   Pretty amazing.

00:55:15   Yeah, it was before the mini effect.

00:55:18   It was, I think, as I stall to look this up,

00:55:22   I think it was before even the original iPod.

00:55:25   I mean, this was early days.

00:55:26   It was 2000.

00:55:27   And yeah, I love the Wall Street and successors

00:55:31   that were those first really kind of like redesigned

00:55:34   Steve Jobs era Power Books.

00:55:35   But they were still big plastic blobs.

00:55:38   And this was not.

00:55:40   This was a metal, thin metal laptop.

00:55:43   And guess what?

00:55:44   Every pro laptop they made after this looked like this.

00:55:48   I mean, although it took them,

00:55:49   they realized titanium, not a good material,

00:55:51   but they got there.

00:55:52   But this was the first iteration

00:55:53   where you could see where they were going with it.

00:55:55   And you know, it was the first one on the path

00:55:57   to what we think of now as the MacBook.

00:55:59   - Is this the first product that Apple made

00:56:02   using a premium material?

00:56:04   - Well, I mean, they played,

00:56:06   Johnny and I was playing with materials,

00:56:07   they weren't premium materials, they were like translucent plastic bits and stuff like

00:56:11   that.

00:56:12   Yeah.

00:56:13   Whereas it was the first--

00:56:14   This wasn't 100% titanium.

00:56:15   No.

00:56:16   It was like magnesium and a bunch of other-- like it was-- it was titanium-- the titanium

00:56:17   name was as much marketing as it was reality.

00:56:19   Yeah.

00:56:20   Yeah.

00:56:21   But it's like the first time that they really-- is it like the first time they made-- they

00:56:24   made a point of it, right?

00:56:25   Like this is the titanium.

00:56:26   Yeah.

00:56:27   Because you wouldn't call it the plastic computer, right?

00:56:29   Yeah, almost luxury-- luxury-like--

00:56:30   Yeah.

00:56:31   --feel.

00:56:32   Yeah, I think so.

00:56:33   And the thinness of that screen, which again I think came back to bite them, and they--

00:56:36   moved away and made those screens a little bit thicker and more rugged than that one

00:56:41   because it was so kind of too thin, but it was amazing to move that hinge and feel that

00:56:46   super thin screen. It wasn't just that the computer was one inch thin, it was that the

00:56:51   screen part of it was like impossibly thin. Yeah, they'd show all the side views in the

00:56:55   marketing, like they'd show it from the side and it looked impossible, like you can't make

00:56:59   a computer, how could it be that thin? Yeah, exactly right. And then your kid just snaps

00:57:03   it off with one hand and you realize this is bad. Yeah, good times.

00:57:10   Anytime I open mine I sort of say a prayer to the gods of industrial design first.

00:57:15   Yeah, please not this time.

00:57:18   I'm gonna pick a device that changed how I think about computers, and it's the iPad Pro

00:57:25   12.9. When this device was introduced I was interested, but I had had a weird relationship

00:57:33   with iPads over, you know, since 2010 to this point. This is what, this was 20, this is

00:57:39   the end of 2015 when the iPad Pro 12.9 came out. So, you know, those five years at the

00:57:44   iPad, I'd kind of gone back and forth a lot, you know, from thinking it was amazing and

00:57:49   I loved it to just getting bored of it and stopping using it and just going back to my

00:57:52   Macs. And when this device came out, Air West 9 was kind of in beta and I'd been playing

00:57:58   around with multitasking on an iPad Air and was thinking that this is, this is pretty

00:58:02   interesting like I like the way that some of this works and I was intrigued

00:58:06   to see what was gonna happen and then the iPad Pro came out and it was

00:58:11   interesting I picked one up and it changed everything I found myself being

00:58:16   drawn to using iOS to do all of the work that I could possibly do on it I'm aware

00:58:22   of how it can be more difficult and especially when this came out it was

00:58:26   even more difficult to try and do all of these types of things on the iPad than

00:58:30   it is today. You know, multitasking was very much in its infancy. But there was just something

00:58:35   about the whole package of this beautiful big screen, which was, you know, it felt really

00:58:42   nice to hold and it was lighter than the laptop that I had at the time. Plus a keyboard that

00:58:46   was also a case and a stand, you know, that would protect the screen, but I could also

00:58:50   stand it up to watch movies. And the Apple Pencil, which was a fantastic device for me.

00:58:56   You know, it felt better than any stylus I'd ever used, and it allowed me to be able to

00:59:00   change my input methods during a time when I was starting to struggle with RSI problems.

00:59:05   Being able to use the Apple Pencil to navigate the UI was kind of, was perfect for me then.

00:59:11   And it changed the way I think about computers.

00:59:13   In my mind now, Macintosh's are production machines.

00:59:18   They are where I do professional things.

00:59:21   I record and edit podcasts and videos on Macs.

00:59:24   Once the editing is done, the Mac gets turned off,

00:59:27   and I go back to the iPad to do everything that I want to do.

00:59:31   My entire business, all of the stuff that I would do

00:59:33   to run a business day to day, is run from an iPad.

00:59:37   And I wouldn't change it, because I love it.

00:59:39   And the 12.9-inch iPad Pro was what opened this up to me,

00:59:44   because it finally became a device where the hardware

00:59:46   and software really met for me,

00:59:48   and it just made perfect sense.

00:59:50   - I had this on my list,

00:59:53   Because I knew somebody needed to pick an iPad and it was definitely on my list because

00:59:56   of that.

00:59:57   I couldn't.

00:59:59   My love for small laptops apparently is inverted into large iPads.

01:00:03   I don't know how that happened.

01:00:05   But small laptops and large iPads are basically the same kind of size, right?

01:00:10   You're meeting in the middle.

01:00:11   I have a strong preference for the 11-inch MacBook Air over the 13 and yet now I use

01:00:15   a 13-inch, essentially, iPad.

01:00:17   I don't know what happened there.

01:00:18   Shh, don't think about it, Jason.

01:00:20   It's confusing.

01:00:21   Very confusing.

01:00:22   - This has actually turned into my family computer now,

01:00:27   because it's kind of unnecessary for my wife and I

01:00:31   to share our laptops and just inconvenient,

01:00:34   and I know that iOS is sort of counterintuitive

01:00:37   to having a family share it,

01:00:40   but it's just so great to move it everywhere,

01:00:43   and it feels like my home iPad.

01:00:46   And I don't know, it's this weird soft spot

01:00:52   that I initially held it and thought I was going to return it

01:00:56   and thought no way, this is just too much.

01:00:59   But it's still kind of my main note-taking computer

01:01:02   and it is how I just completely changed,

01:01:07   it changed the way I thought about iOS

01:01:10   and also it really clicked like okay,

01:01:13   now I am the old person and this is the future.

01:01:17   This is the iPad long game.

01:01:19   - Yeah, I was so glad when they came out

01:01:20   with a bigger iPad because I always felt like,

01:01:22   I mean, when they came with the iPad,

01:01:23   there was this promise before they introduced it

01:01:25   of like, what could iOS or iPhone OS or whatever be,

01:01:28   what would it be like on a bigger screen,

01:01:29   like a tablet-sized screen?

01:01:30   And when they came out with the iPad

01:01:31   and it was so similar to the phone, it's like,

01:01:33   ah, seems like they're leaving money on the table here.

01:01:35   Like, there's more you could do.

01:01:36   Like, the device would become even more powerful.

01:01:38   You just make it bigger.

01:01:40   And then the stylus, obviously,

01:01:41   adding a whole other dimension to that.

01:01:42   And the keyboard, and when you have a keyboard,

01:01:43   it can be a reasonable size.

01:01:45   Like, just so great to see them break out of the,

01:01:48   But I feel like it's kind of the in-between form factor to say, if this is going to be

01:01:51   the future of computing, it's got to be bigger.

01:01:54   Got to be bigger, more powerful, more flexible.

01:01:56   And I hope they keep going in this direction.

01:01:58   I was also glad when they didn't unify on the 10.5 inch, but upgraded to the 12.9 as

01:02:05   well.

01:02:06   So I say, keep going with this, and I'm ready for one that's even bigger.

01:02:09   Alex?

01:02:10   Alright, so I am going to finally pick a Mac and not an iOS device. I so this was the last

01:02:23   consumer laptop I used and I think this is the the Mac that I used the longest. It's the Apple

01:02:32   MacBook Core Duo 2.0, also known as the black MacBook, basically. And I remember getting this

01:02:44   only because I thought the color was really cool. And I could get it used at like the base price.

01:02:52   And this is also the first laptop that I could get, like I could get into the guts of it. And I

01:02:59   maxed out the RAM and maxed out the hard drive. It was kind of constantly lighting up in strange

01:03:07   ways. Like the screen wasn't great. It was the first glossy screen, I think, in the MacBook

01:03:12   line. And also it set my thighs on fire at least once a day because it was...

01:03:19   So to speak.

01:03:20   Yeah. It was not supposed to have two gigs of RAM. But yeah, I just slowly

01:03:28   upgraded over the years. And it lasted, I think, from middle school all the way until I graduated

01:03:33   high school. And it just even even today. It just looks nice. I don't know it also is one of my

01:03:40   favorite keyboards they ever had, despite the fact that I think this was their first black keyboard

01:03:47   on a laptop or sorry, and a Mac. I don't even know how to qualify this a Mac book. I know that the

01:03:57   old PowerBooks had them. It was also my first Intel Mac. So I could, what was it, boot into,

01:04:06   I don't remember even what it's called anymore. Bootcamp. Yeah. And I could play Steam on

01:04:13   the other side of my laptop. And it just felt really cool. And I learned a lot about computers

01:04:19   from this one laptop. So not important in the big scheme of Apple history, but important

01:04:24   to me.

01:04:25   I had a black MacBook and I loved it. This is the era where if you wanted a smaller MacBook

01:04:31   than the MacBook Pro, you know, you got an iBook and then the MacBook came out for,

01:04:38   which is the name change was when they went to Intel. And the black version initially cost more

01:04:44   and didn't have anything more other than the color, but it looked so cool. I loved it so much.

01:04:48   And you're right, you can get to the hard drive and the RAM through the battery bay.

01:04:51   So it was super easy to upgrade it and I wish Apple would make a legitimately black laptop again.

01:04:58   Not this Space Gray's fine, but this one, yeah, it looked so cool with the white Apple logo and the

01:05:03   black polycarbonate. It was great. Yeah, it had the same problem of looking good as long as no

01:05:09   one touched it, which is kind of a shame. It's like now they have the tech, like the matte black

01:05:13   iPhone. I feel like that finish holds up pretty well, both to fingerprints and to scratches.

01:05:17   Imagine a Mac laptop that was the same color

01:05:19   as the matte black iPhone, that would be great.

01:05:21   - Yeah, it'd be awesome.

01:05:22   I do think that plastic MacBook was important though.

01:05:25   You know, the black one was more expensive.

01:05:26   I think that you got more hard drive space,

01:05:28   but it was basically the same computer.

01:05:30   But at least when I was in school and in college,

01:05:34   those MacBooks were everywhere.

01:05:38   It really seemed to gain market share

01:05:42   well above what the iBook,

01:05:45   or even on something like the 12 inch PowerBook every did.

01:05:48   And like the Air, like Jason said earlier,

01:05:52   for a while there, you could just say, hey, get a MacBook.

01:05:55   Get the white one.

01:05:57   If you got a little extra money to spend,

01:05:59   the black one is way cooler.

01:06:00   But it's sort of a well-rounded machine for everybody.

01:06:03   And even though it wasn't a MacBook Pro,

01:06:05   you could still get some production work done

01:06:08   if you needed to.

01:06:09   I think it was a great machine.

01:06:11   And they had, again, like many of these models,

01:06:14   that had problems.

01:06:15   The black one was a little better about the chipping

01:06:19   and the staining, the white plastic

01:06:21   ended up being plagued by, but definitely a cool machine.

01:06:24   I remember my brother had a black MacBook,

01:06:25   and I had a MacBook Pro at the time,

01:06:28   and even with the MacBook Pro,

01:06:29   I was envious of how cool his MacBook looked.

01:06:31   So stealthy with the black plastic.

01:06:33   I still think they look great.

01:06:34   - Yeah, this is an important computer to me.

01:06:36   It was my second ever Mac on my first laptop.

01:06:39   I absolutely loved it.

01:06:40   I had the white one.

01:06:42   I had little pieces of the wrist rest cracking off.

01:06:45   (laughing)

01:06:46   But like, I loved that thing.

01:06:48   You know, like also the wrist rest started to go yellow

01:06:50   over time, which was lovely.

01:06:52   But that was just a absolutely fantastic computer.

01:06:56   Like, it opened my eyes up to what it would be like

01:07:00   to have a computer that wasn't fixed into one position,

01:07:02   you know?

01:07:03   And it was, I absolutely loved it.

01:07:06   It was a great looking thing.

01:07:07   That was a fantastic Mac.

01:07:10   "Oh, this was also, I realized, my first Mac

01:07:12   "with a DVD player, and this is when Netflix,

01:07:15   "you know, still sending out discs."

01:07:18   And so, this was my early binge-watching experience,

01:07:22   just getting all of those seasons of Doctor Who via disc.

01:07:28   - That's great.

01:07:28   - All right, Jason, you've got the last official pick.

01:07:30   - Yeah, I know, I'm gonna close this out.

01:07:32   So, I had a bunch of things on my list

01:07:33   that when we bring out our dead here in a minute,

01:07:35   we can talk about, but I feel like they've been,

01:07:38   got an iPhone, we've had iPhones picked, I've got an iPad, we've had those picked.

01:07:45   So I'm going to go with something that has not been picked yet, and also it firmly places

01:07:49   me on Tmold, but it's super important. So this is an Apple hardware product, cost $7,000

01:07:56   when it was released in 1985, so that's like more than $15,000 today. But you know what?

01:08:04   In some ways, it was the most important Apple hardware product released.

01:08:10   I would argue in the top five most important Apple products of all time because of what

01:08:16   it did for the Mac and the different fields and industries that it revolutionized.

01:08:24   It's the Laser Writer, which introduced...

01:08:28   I'm very...

01:08:29   Okay.

01:08:30   very... okay. Oh yeah, you better be agreeing with me because I'm right. The Laser Writer,

01:08:37   the... It's a brilliant pick. It is the first time, it's postscript, it allowed WYSIWYG publishing to

01:08:43   exist, it let you print on regular paper at 300 dots per inch, which is impossibly good,

01:08:51   like print quality essentially. The Laser Writer changed everything. It made Apple successful in

01:08:58   publishing. It made Adobe exist basically. It completely changed the publishing

01:09:05   industry. It created desktop publishing. It created service bureaus where people

01:09:10   could go and get their stuff that they made on their Macs printed at high

01:09:13   resolution because that was a thing that you did back in those days when it cost

01:09:16   seven thousand dollars is you would take your files and fonts, you better remember

01:09:20   to bring your fonts or it's going to be ugly, and you take them down to the local

01:09:24   place that had a laser printer, a laser writer, and you would print it out. The

01:09:29   first time I printed a paper, we had a laser printer, we had a laser writer in fact

01:09:32   at my college newspaper along with a giant image setter that was like the

01:09:35   size of a car that did 600 dpi and I would print out college papers on it and

01:09:41   it was like unreal. It was like I had had a letterpress make my papers for me. It

01:09:46   was so unbelievable because in those days everything was dot matrix,

01:09:50   everything looked crappy, and then this was real stuff and now we take it for

01:09:54   granted and people have moved on to things like you know everybody's got an

01:09:58   inkjet printer now but that laser printer, it really did change

01:10:02   everything. It changed the computer industry, the publishing industry, and a

01:10:06   lot of people's lives because without the laser printer you were printing you

01:10:11   know your beautiful Mac graphics and fonts and things and then they would end

01:10:15   up on like an inkjet printer and they would not look very good but when you

01:10:19   did it on the laser printer they looked as good as anything you could get from a

01:10:22   professional print shop as long as your design skills were good otherwise it

01:10:26   still looked like a clown made it. Anyway, I know it's a wacky pick but everything

01:10:30   else we made you've all made some great picks and I wanted this oddball piece of

01:10:35   Apple hardware we don't even think about it now super important that this product

01:10:39   existed and it came from Apple. Apple was the one that made it happen and that

01:10:44   means something to that Apple didn't sort of say boy I hope somebody makes a

01:10:47   printer for our Macintosh they're like no we're gonna make it and they did.

01:10:51   mentioned this was also the most powerful Mac for a while, the most powerful Apple computer

01:10:55   for a while, did you mention that earlier? I didn't, but yes, it was, the stuff on the

01:10:59   inside was, I mean there's a reason it cost $7,000, it was bananas, it had a 12 megahertz

01:11:06   Motorola 68000 CPU and 512k of RAM and so at that point it was more processing power

01:11:14   because the Mac only ran at 8 megahertz and the emblazon writer ran at 12 megahertz. I

01:11:19   I don't disagree with the importance of this pick.

01:11:21   I just never could have picked it.

01:11:23   You know, like if you were to say,

01:11:24   I know that's why I'm here.

01:11:25   Let's work on Jason's list.

01:11:26   That's why I'm here.

01:11:26   It never would have come up, right?

01:11:27   Pretty good.

01:11:28   Yeah, yeah.

01:11:29   It's another one of those things where you kind of had

01:11:32   to be there in terms of computers printing things.

01:11:35   Not just like, this is pre-Inkjet, right?

01:11:37   Dot matrix printers and not good dot matrix printers.

01:11:40   Bad.

01:11:41   Very bad.

01:11:42   Dot matrix printers where you could see the dots.

01:11:43   So if you had a computer at home and this is my experience

01:11:46   and you handed in a paper for school,

01:11:47   instead of writing it on a typewriter, yes, an actual typewriter, if you had a computer,

01:11:51   which was much better because you didn't have to use like whiteout or backspacing or retype

01:11:54   the whole page and everything, you know, if you had a computer, you could print it out

01:11:57   on your Apple II or whatever and your dot matrix printer and you'd hand in the paper

01:11:59   and you were one of the impressive students, like here I am, I'm fancy, I have a computer,

01:12:03   I'm handing in my paper that is printed on my printer on my computer, right?

01:12:07   If you laser printed something, it was like you had torn pages out of a book in the library.

01:12:11   It's like, you didn't write this.

01:12:13   This is how does this even exist? Because it's like a page from a book, like from the

01:12:18   library, but it's got your words on it. Like, is it a practical joke? It didn't look like

01:12:23   a different category of things. It didn't look like, oh, you had a better printer because

01:12:26   everyone knows you can't print things like that. A better printer was the Apple image

01:12:29   writer. Like that was a better dot matrix printer. And you could tell a difference of

01:12:33   I'm going to write for, I'm going to print from Mac, right? On my Apple image writer.

01:12:37   That looked better than the dot matrix printers. Laser printer looked like an alien had come

01:12:41   down and like it literally looked like like a piece of paper torn out of a book or a magazine

01:12:46   but but it had your words on it and it was like impossible now i didn't have laser on it nobody

01:12:50   had a laser on it but no every once in a while you know if you had an uncle who had a laser on it he

01:12:54   could do that and print out a paper on it it was like you were a published author it was like now

01:12:58   i'm published because my serifs are 300 dpi i feel like in a hundred years on a future upgrade uh

01:13:06   Cyborg, Jason, and Myke are going to be talking about how, yeah, remember the original 3D

01:13:12   printers? They were really terrible. Now we just print our food. Remember stores? Wow.

01:13:18   Was this changeover akin to something like retina? Like the idea of, like, I've never

01:13:23   seen something look so clear. Yeah, this is retina for paper. Like, the

01:13:27   dot-- Like John was saying, the dot matrix original, like, they had their own type--

01:13:31   So you just send the text there and it would be in whatever its font was would be and maybe

01:13:36   if you're lucky it had two fonts but it was basically just you could see the dots and

01:13:40   it was in a grid and then like the Apple like the style writer or you know that was the

01:13:46   image writer image writer because you'd go to Mac write and you'd pick a different font

01:13:51   and I would always pick some hideous font and I would print it and teachers were blown

01:13:54   away by it because it was not it wasn't a typewriter because that like like the courier

01:13:57   or typewriter font or whatever that was printed on the little metal heads and it wasn't a

01:14:01   dot matrix. It was different fonts. I would have different size text for the title and

01:14:05   my name and the body text. That was the big step forward was that you went from dot matrix

01:14:10   like all those all those things that I printed out on my Apple to where it was just like

01:14:13   letters on a piece of paper with the dots and then from the Mac you could go and print

01:14:18   these things where it would be like you could see the fonts but the quality was still really

01:14:22   terrible and then you get to the the laser writer which had a certain number of built-in

01:14:26   fonts and it was suddenly you went from kind of like you could certainly see the

01:14:31   ink smudges and the and all of that to immaculate like from like John said like

01:14:36   from a book like you ripped a page out of a book in the library and so yes it

01:14:39   was the retina of its day and the fact that not only could you do that but then

01:14:44   everything got accurate so like this is how you know we we did our college

01:14:48   newspaper on on Laser Writer essentially and you couldn't before you would have

01:14:53   gone to a newspaper and had them do your, you know, they would print it using their

01:14:59   typesetter machine that cost a fortune. And all of a sudden you could just do it with

01:15:04   this laser printer for $7,000. And it was unlike retina because retina was

01:15:08   like, it's not like there were professionals in the world that everyone knew. Like everyone

01:15:12   knows that the professional people already have phones that are retina resolution, but

01:15:14   regular people don't. Because in the printing world, we were all in a world where you'd

01:15:18   get a magazine. You'd go get a magazine and you'd look at the type in the magazine. It

01:15:21   magazine type like it was nice little serif fonts and you know 300 dpi or 600 dpi or whatever it was

01:15:26   that had existed for a long time it's just that you couldn't do that at home you can't you can't

01:15:31   make your own magazine at home that's madness um and and then this was the laser rider was

01:15:36   a thing that everybody knew existed that everyone was used to it was like and knew it was better

01:15:40   than newsprint because this room was awful and smudgy right everyone knew magazines existed and

01:15:44   all of a sudden you could make one in your house and that was what would blow people's mind because

01:15:48   It seemed like an impossibility because it wasn't a new innovation that everyone was

01:15:52   coming along for the ride for.

01:15:53   It was like taking something that was once the domain of super expensive things that

01:15:57   nevertheless the entire world knew about because everyone could read a magazine.

01:16:00   They just assumed they magically appeared and then now suddenly you could make one yourself.

01:16:03   It was amazing.

01:16:04   Yeah, and it was part of a big, I mean, desktop publishing is what, it was the max, like strong,

01:16:11   like the stronghold for such a long time.

01:16:13   They had all sorts of weird products.

01:16:14   They had the two page monochrome display and the portrait display.

01:16:17   You could lay out horizontal and vertically oriented pages.

01:16:19   We had those both at my college newspaper.

01:16:21   Yep.

01:16:22   All sorts of stuff that was really

01:16:25   geared for professional designers-- newspapers,

01:16:28   magazines, print stuff.

01:16:29   And that industry, in a lot of ways, I think,

01:16:33   helped Apple hang on there in the '90s.

01:16:36   Oh, yeah, it would have been dead without that industry,

01:16:39   for sure.

01:16:39   No doubt.

01:16:40   Weirdly, I think we've ended up speaking about the LaserWriter

01:16:43   more than any other product on this list.

01:16:45   So good pick, Jason.

01:16:47   - I love all of the Sims about that.

01:16:49   (laughing)

01:16:50   - It also looked really cool.

01:16:52   Again, Snow White design language, but cool.

01:16:54   - All right, so the draft is now complete.

01:16:56   The picks are done, but in standard Jason Snow draft rules,

01:17:00   we get to have a few minutes where we can just,

01:17:02   we can just talk about a couple of other things

01:17:04   that were on our lists that we didn't get to pick,

01:17:06   that maybe nobody got to pick.

01:17:09   And we'll get to do that just after this break,

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01:18:27   All right, Jon, I'm going to hand it back over to you to maybe pick one or two things

01:18:32   to talk about real quick that you didn't get to pick in the draft.

01:18:35   Let's bring out your deaths.

01:18:36   You're dead one or two, but I will go quickly because I'm well versed in the bringing out your dead and draft format

01:18:42   My number four pick was the power Mac g5. It's another one of those computers like the titanium that

01:18:47   Seemed impossible when the specs leaked people thought it was impossible like because we had waited so long like the Mac had stagnated with the g4

01:18:53   And the slow front side bus and this one just was such a huge leap

01:18:57   And you know you kind of get these huge leaps if you let the line stagnate and be crappy for a while

01:19:02   But again, you know because it had leaked and Steve Jobs joked about on stage people didn't even believe the leak because it was so amazing

01:19:08   So that was an important computer my 2008 Mac Pro that I've used for almost a decade now. What a workhorse

01:19:14   What an incredibly flexible machine sort of the peak of that tower design so flexible so powerful

01:19:19   So well made such longevity. I had the iPhone 4s as my first non Mac pic

01:19:25   But we already went over that I the the 4 line

01:19:28   I picked the 4s just because I feel like the 4 was a little slow compared to the 4s

01:19:32   The 4s was so much faster than it, but also you know was in that same form factor

01:19:36   I love that design, and I think the 4s is the best version of that design

01:19:38   I put the 5 in a separate category like the 4s way better with the more sandwichy thing the iPad Pro

01:19:44   9.7 inch the original one kind of like 13 inch MacBook Air one of those computers that

01:19:49   There was nothing wrong with it like it. You know you just recommend it wholeheartedly. It is great

01:19:54   It is it is thin it is powerful. It has an amazing screen on it

01:19:58   Like you can use the the Apple pencil with it. It was just I have one now. I love it

01:20:03   I feel like that is a really strong, you know, and the 9.7 line

01:20:06   It's gonna be hard to beat that because it was just so there was nothing bad about it

01:20:10   It was amazing the Apple cinema display the 22 inch one with the little pranzel some feet

01:20:14   I have that in my house as a review unit for a while and people come and visit my house and

01:20:21   Wouldn't know what category to put it in like they would say is that is that a TV?

01:20:25   Because it's obviously not a computer screen because a computer screens are CRT's and B

01:20:31   It's big like a TV, but it's skinny and it looks weird people. It didn't even read as a computer screen. It was so big

01:20:37   The 23 inch was actually a better version of that. But that was a pretty amazing thing and finally

01:20:42   power Macintosh g3 blue and white

01:20:46   Which was again another big jump over its predecessors in terms of like the other ones were there was the power of a G3

01:20:53   That was beige my boy that poor computer boy

01:20:55   You know had a little translucent handle on top a little translucent button on top of it

01:20:59   But the rest of it was boring

01:21:00   This thing had the door that opened up and all the guts laid out for you a very interesting design different than the current one

01:21:05   Where the door comes off and the stuff was on the inside this the stuff laid down a lot of the stuff laid down

01:21:09   It looked adorable. It was super fast. It was really cool

01:21:13   And I really love that it was the Yosemite case design that you reuse that name later

01:21:18   That's it for my bring up the dead pics

01:21:21   Steven how many of those were on your John Syracuse a pic list on my list I had blue and white g3

01:21:27   I did have the power Mac g5 on John's but I had the quad core version

01:21:31   But I'm only the one that was the big jump over like we're waiting for waiting for a new computer

01:21:37   By Mopar what could go wrong?

01:21:40   That would be on my list of the worst

01:21:42   Yeah, I had a couple of unique things I'll start with some of the more mainstream maybe I had the

01:21:51   iMac G or sorry the iMac

01:21:54   G5 sort of the same reason for the power Mac g5 and some of these other machines to put a g5 in an all-in-one

01:22:00   Seemed bananas to me at the time. You know, it was like two inches thick I think so

01:22:05   I mean currently I'm a now it's chunky but to have a g5 and an all-in-one just just really

01:22:10   really was something.

01:22:12   I also have the series of weird '90s Macs,

01:22:17   the Macintosh TV and the 20th anniversary Mac,

01:22:26   both big collector's items of course,

01:22:28   both unique, both kind of terrible computers,

01:22:30   but show Apple trying to do things

01:22:33   that were unique and different

01:22:39   and the Tam and the Macintosh TV,

01:22:42   they didn't sell very well, they weren't ever really popular

01:22:46   but I like that Apple was trying something different

01:22:48   even if they were false directions.

01:22:50   And as far as like oddball stuff,

01:22:53   I will throw in the Apple line of Quick Take cameras,

01:22:57   specifically the Quick Take 200, it was the last one,

01:23:00   kind of looks more like a digital camera today,

01:23:02   but the Quick Take 100 series was like a little sandwich

01:23:06   with a lens on the front of it,

01:23:07   you kind of held a sandwich up into the air

01:23:08   the thing from Star Wars that Luke looks through. Yeah, exactly. You know, a product that didn't

01:23:15   survive the Steve Jobs transition in '97, a whole like weird corner of Apple products

01:23:22   didn't make that. But again, signaling where Apple would go in the future, now cameras

01:23:28   are a huge part of what they make with the iPhone and iPad, and they were doing it back

01:23:32   then. Although really it was a Kodak camera rebranded, but I'll give them points for credit.

01:23:36   Alright, so I'm gonna... I've got three things.

01:23:39   The first is my first Mac, the original polycarbonate Intel iMac.

01:23:44   I decided that I was going to buy a Mac and decided that the next Mac that came out would be the one that I would buy

01:23:53   and it turned out to be this one.

01:23:55   So I consider myself pretty lucky there because I was just on the right wave because I was getting ready to buy a G5.

01:24:02   So the G5 with eyesight was on sale like five months or something before this.

01:24:08   Yeah, you really, uh, you good timing there, buddy.

01:24:11   I lucked out.

01:24:11   I lucked out, uh, the iPod video, because I have such good memories of this one,

01:24:18   because, uh, I was maybe being a bit of a cheeky guy here at this point.

01:24:23   So I explained, I got it for Christmas and I explained to my mom that, uh, the iPod

01:24:29   video had to have video on it to be useful.

01:24:31   So I spent a few days putting video on the device and telling it how difficult it was

01:24:37   and that it would take multiple days for the video to transfer.

01:24:41   So at night I would unplug the iPod and I would watch episodes of TV shows like The

01:24:47   Office and Family Guy under the covers with my iPod video.

01:24:51   So you're the one, the one person who watched video on there.

01:24:53   I watched and then I ended up watching video podcasts on it for years.

01:24:57   Here's the question, how close to your face did you hold it?

01:25:00   incredibly close.

01:25:01   - It's like touching your nose.

01:25:02   - Incredibly close, yeah.

01:25:03   It was almost like a cinema screen, I held it so close.

01:25:07   (laughing)

01:25:07   - You went cross-eyed.

01:25:08   - Multiple days it took to set that thing up

01:25:10   before Christmas, and that was a fun memory for me.

01:25:15   And the last that I will pick is the 10.5 inch iPad Pro,

01:25:19   the new iPad Pro, because I actually think

01:25:21   it's the best iPad ever made.

01:25:23   I think it is absolutely fantastic.

01:25:26   It has the best of everything that people were looking for

01:25:28   with an iPad, sort of size and power.

01:25:31   I've been spending a lot more time with it

01:25:34   over the last few weeks and that is an incredible machine.

01:25:38   And I think it is the best iPad that they have ever made.

01:25:41   - Am I up?

01:25:42   - You sure are.

01:25:43   - Man, I'm bad at drafts, guys.

01:25:45   - Not as bad as me, Alex, don't worry.

01:25:46   (laughing)

01:25:48   - I also had the iPod video for the same reason as Myke,

01:25:52   but also because this iPod actually had games on it.

01:25:56   And there was only one game that was good

01:25:58   And it was, yeah, it was like a rock band ripoff,

01:26:03   or a guitar hero ripoff.

01:26:04   Actually, it might have been made by Harmonix.

01:26:06   And you could listen to podcasts

01:26:08   and play this terrible game.

01:26:10   I listened to podcasts and listened to the music.

01:26:12   I don't know why they let that be a possibility.

01:26:15   (laughs)

01:26:16   - What about Breakout?

01:26:17   Breakout was a good game with the wheel, wasn't it?

01:26:19   - Yeah, yeah, I liked that.

01:26:20   - Oh, you're right, you're right.

01:26:21   And maybe Peggle too might have been,

01:26:24   I apologize, iPod video.

01:26:26   You were really underrated.

01:26:27   (laughing)

01:26:30   I also have AirPods because it's magical.

01:26:34   The iMac DV, which is the first iMac I used to edit video on

01:26:40   which was like, wow, okay, that defined my career,

01:26:43   so that's cool.

01:26:44   The original iPod Shuffle, which just was

01:26:48   a USB thumb stick basically, and I used it for everything.

01:26:52   And also, the sports case that came with it,

01:26:56   which had the like, Johnny Ives secret orange around it. So you could like just it stood

01:27:02   out just enough against the white. And now that I think about it, this probably should

01:27:08   have been my number one pick the iPhone six and seven battery cases, because the despite

01:27:16   everyone made fun of that bulge. But you know, we have camera bulges now why not have battery

01:27:22   And I hate the design of these, the six going forward, iPhone lines so much. They're soap

01:27:31   phones. I've never dropped a phone until now. And this is the one thing that makes me able to hold

01:27:39   my phone comfortably. And it's also made out of somehow a different plastic rubbery material than

01:27:46   the other silicone cases. And I don't know why they just don't make them all like this because

01:27:51   because this one doesn't degrade, it doesn't get all linty,

01:27:55   and it's just wonderful and perfect in every way,

01:27:59   in my opinion.

01:28:00   That's all I got.

01:28:02   - Alright, I had a bunch of stuff that I felt like

01:28:04   we were close enough that I didn't need to go there.

01:28:07   The first generation PowerBook really did change the game

01:28:10   for actually the entire computer industry.

01:28:12   It had the integrated pointing device,

01:28:14   it was a trackball below the keyboard.

01:28:17   They were a sensation in the early 90s.

01:28:19   was a big deal that you could take a computer with you and that it was that

01:28:22   that at the time thin and light and portable and I got a PowerBook 160 in

01:28:27   grad school and I loved it so much plus I could plug it into a color monitor at

01:28:31   home which was pretty awesome too. Oh that was also like the iPhone after that

01:28:36   every single laptop looked like a keyboard pushed up towards the screen like it

01:28:39   totally defined the laptop. Yeah. Not you know. Those are those it was a cool

01:28:43   laptop it really was amazing like to this day I would I would argue like that

01:28:47   that it still looks pretty great, that original design, and there's a reason it was a wild success.

01:28:52   Yeah, the original iPod, I was going to mention, except no substitutes. I mean, yeah, it didn't

01:28:59   have a door like on top of the firewire plug, and the firewire plug was huge, but like it was

01:29:05   a huge deal, and it, you know, with the stainless steel back and the click wheel front, and the wheel

01:29:11   really spun, it was not a fake click wheel. It was actually a circular piece of plastic that you had

01:29:16   to spin. It spun right off the device, eventually. Eventually it would, oh yes. You could just

01:29:21   pop it right back on though, it would just go right back on, trust me. I love the iPod

01:29:26   shuffle when it turned into the clip. I didn't like the stick of gum one so much as the clip

01:29:32   version, I thought that was a brilliant piece of design. I love those and they're little

01:29:37   bright colors and you could just clip it onto your shirt and mow the lawn or whatever. I

01:29:42   love the original iPhone design, I've written many thousands of words about how great that

01:29:45   I mentioned the iPhone 5. And then the 5K iMac, I think, is a spectacular computer. The fact that

01:29:50   Apple was finally able to make a computer with retina at a giant desktop size and with incredible

01:29:57   power inside of it. And I'm talking to you from one right now. And it's great. So those are my

01:30:02   oh, and I neglected to mention my other out. If the laser writer hadn't been the direction I was

01:30:08   going to go, I was going to go with that machine they make that sucks off the iPhone screen in the

01:30:11   back of the Apple Store so they can replace your screen right in there. That's an amazing piece of

01:30:15   of Apple hardware too. That's good. Yeah. I thought you were going to say iPod Hi-Fi,

01:30:18   and I'm surprised nobody picked the Newton. No, I mean, I had a Newton on my desk right

01:30:24   here, but I didn't pick it either. Yeah. That's the story of Newton's life. I didn't pick

01:30:28   it. And we all have Apple watches on, and no one picked that either. Yeah, well, you

01:30:32   know. Oh, that's telling. There's only so many picks, you know. There's only three rounds,

01:30:36   that's all you got. All right, so at this point we're going to say goodbye to Steven

01:30:41   And Alex, as me and Jason need to go to movie class,

01:30:45   we've joined Syracuse, which we're going to do in a moment.

01:30:48   So I just want to thank you both for joining us.

01:30:52   Steven, where should people go to find out more

01:30:54   about the work that you do?

01:30:56   You can find me on Twitter @ismh and my writing

01:30:59   at 512pixels.net.

01:31:01   I do a bunch of shows here on Relay.

01:31:03   And what about you, Alex?

01:31:04   You can follow me on Twitter @AlexCox, spelled C-O-X.

01:31:10   and DubaiFriday.com, which is a show I do with my boss, Max Temkin, and Merlin, man

01:31:16   of the internet, and at Robowism.fm, which is a show about robots and isms and technology

01:31:24   and a bunch of weird stuff with my friend Savannah Million.

01:31:27   Great, thanks so much for joining us, guys.

01:31:29   Thank you, and congratulations, Myke, on seeing the correct version of Blade Runner.

01:31:35   Ooh.

01:31:36   Oh, boy.

01:31:37   Oh, God.

01:31:38   Here we go.

01:31:39   Alright, so just after this break we're gonna talk about Blade Runner Final Cut.

01:31:46   But before we do, let me take a moment to talk about our final sponsor for this week's

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01:32:43   some of their lounge shorts and many more undershorts which is a term that I found out

01:32:48   recently when looking at doing laundry in the US. Undershorts seems to be the way that

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01:33:26   Okay, so a couple of months ago, me and Jason watched Blade Runner for Myke at the Movies

01:33:32   because whilst Jason wasn't a huge fan of the movie, I wanted to see it. I felt like

01:33:40   it was an important one to see because it has a lot of geek cred. Neither of us were

01:33:47   really crazy about the movie. I don't think that we necessarily, well I speak for myself,

01:33:53   I don't think we necessarily disliked it, but it didn't sit high up in the overall ranking

01:33:58   of Myke at the movies movies John Syracuse, uh heard this and demanded that

01:34:04   We watched the final cut and talk about it with him. So John, why are we doing this?

01:34:09   I'm not so sure I demanded it. In fact that I remember fearing I remember being afraid

01:34:14   Cuz like Jason doesn't really like it that much and you have weird taste in movies and are so young and impressionable and I did

01:34:23   just like it was gonna be the one of those ones where you're like

01:34:27   you know, dumping on a movie that I like, essentially. But I was pleasantly surprised

01:34:31   that both of you seemed pretty even-keeled about the movie, even though neither one of

01:34:34   you were big fans. But you did watch the theatrical release, which I think was Myke's sort of

01:34:39   misguided notion that he wants to watch the one that everybody saw. Nobody saw the theatrical

01:34:42   release, because when I was in theaters, nobody went to see it, because it was not a successful

01:34:45   movie. I feel like the one that has all the cachet—well, I guess the theatrical one

01:34:52   it does in terms of set design or whatever, but this is one of the first movies where

01:34:57   It was really important to the biggest fans of the movies that you watch a different cut

01:35:01   Like this obviously wasn't the first director's cut but it was sort of the most prominent

01:35:06   Directors cut among geeks that you know, do you know a movie that has a theatrical release and a director's cut?

01:35:11   I was like, oh, yeah Blade Runner and of course you have to watch a director's cut of Blade Runner

01:35:14   That was that was the really important thing to do

01:35:17   I think the director's cut was like 10 year anniversary of the movie or whatever

01:35:21   But it's one of those movies that you know is a cult classic and it was not it was not successful in

01:35:26   Its release but it just grew in stature over the years that became clear all the things that all the other movies that it had influenced

01:35:32   So yes, you got out of the way you watch a theatrical one

01:35:36   But I think it is important to watch the one that everybody loves essentially the one the one people say Oh Blade Runner

01:35:42   I love that movie. They're not talking about for the most part the theatrical release

01:35:45   They're talking about this other one and I guess you got the authentic experience of watching a theatrical one and now you have

01:35:52   the experience of watching what I think is the better one of the better cuts and

01:35:57   seeing the movie that everybody is raving about which is

01:36:01   I feel like different in two very important ways than the theatrical

01:36:05   So I want to talk about the differences and then maybe we can talk about just the movie itself and a little bit about why

01:36:11   You love it John, but I want to make sure that I'm following this correctly

01:36:14   So obviously the big what I assume is the biggest difference is the end right? There's no happy ending. There's no driving off

01:36:21   which is just which I really didn't like in the original like it felt so strange

01:36:25   and out of place right like we're driving down this road literally stuff

01:36:30   shot for another movie yeah yeah the two that's not the one of the two big

01:36:35   differences that I was referring to you want me to tell you what they are or she

01:36:38   yeah tell me what they are tell me what they are so I mean you know this one I'm

01:36:42   sure you're gonna get to a Nexus no voiceover right yeah yeah yeah so that's

01:36:46   that's the obviously the most prominent one because the voiceover is so so

01:36:49   So integral to the first one, right? Yeah, I didn't miss it either, right? Like,

01:36:53   I, you know, I mean, I have already seen the movie, so obviously it helps me understand

01:36:56   what's going on because like, I do find this to be a very confusing movie. Like, the story

01:37:02   is I think difficult to follow at points, especially like in the first 30 minutes. But

01:37:07   I don't know if the voiceover particularly helps with that.

01:37:11   You've got a little bit of Lex Friedman disease where you find movies confusing just inherently.

01:37:14   And I smell like there should be some remedial chorus for you and Lex to just like, "Following

01:37:19   along with the plot of movies. I have to admit that actually in this version,

01:37:23   which I'm going to just come out and say is the most I have enjoyed watching Blade Runner.

01:37:30   I think the plot is fairly straightforward. I think it's maybe because I've seen it enough

01:37:37   times now that I know what to look for, but it's like literally there are these escaped

01:37:41   replicants and they are trying to find a way to extend their lives and there's a guy who's

01:37:48   going to kill them and that's kind of it is he's methodically chasing them down

01:37:53   and they're methodically doing their thing and that's kind of it yeah but

01:37:56   Myke Myke gets hung up on the details that you want to understand like I don't

01:38:00   want something to be shown and not explained because it's like is is I think

01:38:04   it's like the not knowing what's important not knowing what's not

01:38:07   important or wanting every wanting to understand everything you see and not

01:38:10   allowing it to just be like just just accept it that people have umbrellas

01:38:13   with light of handles just accept it like just it's not important to the

01:38:16   movie just move on. I know this frustrates you, I know this frustrates you, but when

01:38:21   like when I say confusing like the plot of the movie is fine but like I have

01:38:26   questions about the world and that's important to me right like the

01:38:30   world-building thing is important. Why is it raining so much in Los Angeles?

01:38:36   Just all these things about like you know who is Tyrell, why does like the robot

01:38:42   seem to be outlawed and... I think this is kind of what people when they talk about

01:38:45   about like that a larger world is hinted at within a movie they said about a lot

01:38:49   of things where you'll see a movie and it'll have a story in a world but then

01:38:53   people will say also for books they'd be like but but the world is so rich you

01:38:57   see hints of such a larger world that there could be other stories in this

01:39:00   world behind it like and what most people describe as an attractive quality

01:39:05   hinting at a larger world beyond the realm of the story right you describe as

01:39:11   confusion and that there is a larger world beyond the story that I don't know

01:39:15   to think about and you find that unsettling rather than enticing.

01:39:18   Yeah. Well, okay, I would say there's a mix of it. Like with some movies, like I wouldn't say that

01:39:23   I wouldn't say that like I only find it that way. But like I in this movie, I feel like there are

01:39:29   just questions that I have, which I can't come to understand. And it frustrates me, like, you know,

01:39:36   about the replicants and like, they seem to be like illegal, but yet there's a man that everybody

01:39:41   knows makes them. Like it's just that I have just these these hang-ups about this movie which I

01:39:47   struggle to get my head around. I think I can help you with some of those because they are they are

01:39:51   in the movie if you've seen it enough times or once and paid a lot of attention. The second,

01:39:56   so that's that's so that's one, one is voiceover. Yeah. And the second most important change and

01:40:00   by the way before we get into more of these details is that I recommended the final cut

01:40:04   just because it's the one I had seen the most recently. I don't know the difference between

01:40:08   between the final cut and the director's cut.

01:40:10   I tried to Google it to see, like,

01:40:11   what the significant differences are.

01:40:12   - There are not a lot of significant differences.

01:40:14   Ridley Scott was approved the director's cut,

01:40:18   but he actually was unhappy with some things,

01:40:20   and they finally budgeted for him to go in

01:40:21   and make some of the changes.

01:40:23   But they're pretty minor timing things.

01:40:25   - Cleaning up special effects.

01:40:26   - Yeah, and some ultra --

01:40:28   The unicorn dream is extended.

01:40:31   Pris pulls on his nose when she's attacking him,

01:40:34   which doesn't happen in the director's cut.

01:40:36   But it's not huge.

01:40:38   feel the need to put that in. It's so strange to me.

01:40:41   That's what I'm saying. And again, the only reason I recommend the Final Cut instead of

01:40:44   a Director's Cut was just because I had seen it most recently and when I watched the Final

01:40:47   Cut...

01:40:48   It looks way better. It looks way better.

01:40:49   When I watched the Final Cut, my impression was I didn't notice any differences from the

01:40:54   Director's Cut upon watching the Final Cut and it looked really good. So that's my go-to

01:40:58   now, basically. But the second difference, the second difference, you have no voiceover

01:41:01   and the second difference is that the Final Cut and the Director Cut are unambiguous about

01:41:07   the fact that Deckard is a replicant. That is super important. It's not that it's a happy

01:41:11   ending or a sad ending, it's that the whole point of the movie, like it colors the whole

01:41:15   movie backwards and forwards, like the end of the Sixth Sense, right? That it ripples

01:41:18   backwards through the whole movie. It's a different movie when it is not clear that

01:41:23   Deckard is a replicant. I don't think it's even hinted at in a theatrical one. It's just

01:41:27   not like, that's a different movie. I like the movie where he's a replicant. That is

01:41:31   an entirely different movie. It colors the whole movie for me. It's not just like happy

01:41:35   ending versus sad ending. And so those two things, the voiceover, which I found cloying

01:41:39   and his performance really stilted and I think is totally unnecessary and takes away from

01:41:43   the things I like about the movie, and the fact that Deckard is a replicant. Those are

01:41:47   the two biggies for me.

01:41:48   So I definitely felt that more, but like I was wondering if I felt that way because I'd

01:41:53   found out afterwards, right, about how it's intended. Like what are the hints? Like, I

01:42:00   I mean, when I'm watching the movie, it feels that way, but I'm not sure what the specifics

01:42:06   are which make it clear that he is one.

01:42:08   I was going to say also as background here, Harrison Ford, I think, felt and feels that

01:42:15   Deckard is not a replicant.

01:42:17   The screenwriter wanted it to be an open question, but Ridley Scott prefers that Deckard is a

01:42:23   replicant so in making his version of the movie and his final cut, he's amped that part

01:42:29   I am not, I'm a dissenter on Deckard being a replicant. I think that one of the themes is

01:42:36   affinity with the replicants and whether they're human or not and whether they're sentient or not and what that means and the questioning

01:42:44   ourselves as the sort of viewpoint of Deckard and whether it matters and is he human or not? I think is part of, I

01:42:53   I really like the ambiguity of it, and so I'm not—I actually don't believe that it

01:42:58   is definitive, and I refuse to go down that route. I think it's an open question.

01:43:03   It's definitive, I feel like, in the director and final cut, but it's important, first of all,

01:43:07   it's important that the writer wanted it to be ambiguous, because that means, unlike Harrison

01:43:12   Ford, the writer put stuff in the movie in that direction, even in a theatrical cut, right? So

01:43:18   it's not like a retro, you know, like—what do you call it? —a retroactive continuity.

01:43:22   Redcon yeah, there you go

01:43:24   Where you take a movie that was made one way and you pretended something different in the movie are the important themes

01:43:31   That lay the groundwork for this right you've got

01:43:34   Deckard testing what's-her-name Sean young or is that it? Yeah Sean young what's-her-name? No you Rachel Rachel? Um yeah

01:43:42   You've got that test you've got the fact you've got after the fact like the fact that she's being tested and she doesn't know how

01:43:48   Can she not know what she is she doesn't know what she is right that we don't we as the audience don't know

01:43:52   when the test begins, but we eventually figure it out, and then he figures it out, right?

01:43:56   And Jason's right that one of the major themes of the movie is like the replicants. Can we relate

01:44:01   to them? Are we different from them because they're human? You know, like just the affinity

01:44:06   between like, oh, do you really separate yourself so much from these replicants? Are they so

01:44:10   different just because they were made? Are they really different than us? Can we feel kinship

01:44:14   with them in any way? And that's in the movie where Billy Decker is a replicant or not. The fact

01:44:19   that you have that scene early where both the audience and Harrison Ford are fooled

01:44:24   is the eventual thing that leads you to the ending thing where, "Okay, well, how can she

01:44:29   not know what she is? How can Deckard not know what he is?" And his affinity for the

01:44:34   replicants, it turns on affinity for yourself. It's the ultimate one that works on the audience.

01:44:40   Like, "What if you were a replicant? What if it's like, oh, now suddenly…" It's

01:44:45   suddenly easy to have empathy with the replicants when you realize that you were one, and the

01:44:47   whole time you felt like a person, a legitimate person, you never questioned it, and what

01:44:52   if we were to tell you that you are a replicant too? And what makes it definitive in the director's

01:44:57   cut and in the final cut is the unicorn dream. So the fact that like, you know, when Rachel

01:45:04   comes and she's insistent that she's real, that she had parents and she has memories

01:45:07   of everyone, Deckard's like, you know, rattles off a bunch of stuff she never told anybody,

01:45:11   is like they're Tyrell's nieces' memories. Like Deckard knows them. It's like you think

01:45:15   They feel like they're your memories, but they're not like I know about them. Let me rattle them off to you, right?

01:45:19   So the unicorn dream we see Deckard have or he's like drunk at his piano or whatever and falls asleep and dreams about a unicorn

01:45:24   He's dream about Ridley Scott's legend, which is a really weird movie that you might want to watch

01:45:27   But is not as good as Blade Runner

01:45:30   Unicorn, you know running through the fields or whatever. Um, and what's his name? We're James almost

01:45:37   Yeah, a domo from Val star

01:45:40   Is doing a little origami things all the time. He drops off a little origami

01:45:45   unicorn. Deckard never told him about his unicorn dreams. How would he know about Deckard's unicorn

01:45:49   dreams? The same way that Deckard knows about her weird dreams and the spider and all the other

01:45:53   stuff or whatever. Because they were implanted because he's a replicant. Now it could be 100%

01:45:58   coincidence that he dreams about a unicorn and that this guy just happens to do unicorn

01:46:03   origami, but that is amazing coincidence. There's a much simpler explanation and that's why it's

01:46:08   kind of the nail, nailing this down is you are a replicant. Here, you know, we know that you're a

01:46:14   a replicant, you didn't know until now, and I'm being nice and letting you guys go free

01:46:19   for whatever will happen after that elevator door closes, we don't know. So it's an ambiguous ending,

01:46:24   not a sad ending, but it's not a happy ending. But Deckard now realizes. He sees the unicorn,

01:46:30   he looks at it, he picks it up, he has that realization, and then they're just out of there.

01:46:34   >> Yeah. >> Do we know yet how this is working in the sequel that played Run of 2049?

01:46:40   >> Oh, let's not think about it. >> Yeah, well, I have to admit,

01:46:43   that was one of the things that always confused me is if they do a sequel that's set with an age

01:46:47   in Harrison Ford then that suggests that they're making a statement either that he is a replicant

01:46:52   that ages or he wasn't a replicant after all but I feel like that is... let's not let sequels

01:47:00   affect... talk about retroactive continuity affect your view of the existing movie. So I want to say

01:47:06   the ending always seemed weird to me and it actually reminded me about how they

01:47:11   did a cut of Brazil that has a weird love conquers all, I think they call it, ending.

01:47:16   It's like, "What are you doing? Did you see the movie?" And so I really like how this ends with

01:47:22   them getting into the elevator. I don't think... I guess I saw the director's cut at one point,

01:47:27   so I've seen this, but my memory of it... All my memories of Blade Runner are of the original,

01:47:31   because I saw that several times. And I have to say it, I love having no voiceovers. It feels

01:47:38   like a very different movie and I get why some people like the voiceover because it gives that

01:47:42   kind of film noir feel but I gotta say I like it without because then it feels really weird and

01:47:51   atmospheric and you have to figure it out and it feels more like a science fiction movie and it

01:47:56   feels more about the the images because let's let's be honest here this movie is more notable

01:48:04   because of how it looks than the words people say in it. There are some great words in it,

01:48:10   some memorable words, some things I quote all the time, but I think the voiceover makes

01:48:16   it seem even more like this is a movie really about me telling you things about this world,

01:48:21   and it's totally not. It's about showing me the world and letting me see these visions

01:48:25   of these huge billboards that are animated for different products and things that I don't

01:48:31   even understand what they're advertising and the little air cars moving around, which are

01:48:36   great. The fact that Tyrell Corporation is like a big pyramid, basically. It's this ridiculous

01:48:41   monstrosity, but then at ground level, everything is dirty and mixed up. That's what it's about.

01:48:48   I'm actually really happy that the voiceover is gone. I like it better without. I think

01:48:52   it's a much better movie without it there, and it looked so great. Like I said, I enjoyed

01:48:57   it a whole lot more, even though I'm one of those people who thinks that you still have

01:49:00   to do a little bit of work to prove, if Deckard's a replicant, why other things happen in the

01:49:06   movie, and likewise you could probably do a little bit of work to explain why maybe

01:49:11   that unicorn doesn't mean what it actually means. It's ambiguous enough that I'm happy

01:49:17   to embrace the ambiguity. I actually prefer it ambiguous because then it's making the

01:49:23   point that--it's the point of Deckard, which is if you don't even know about your own humanity

01:49:30   and yet you're judging them for theirs. I guess the implication too, Jon, correct me if I'm wrong,

01:49:35   is that Deckard and certainly Rachel are like next-gen replicants. They're Nexus 7, right?

01:49:41   Yeah, well that's the whole point. They're Nexus 7. Well, here's Rachel is Nexus 7. That's why she

01:49:45   doesn't know, because it's a new thing they're trying, giving them memories and backstories and

01:49:48   not letting them know, right? I always assumed that Deckard was like Nexus 8 or whatever,

01:49:53   right? That like to get the other replicants you need the best replicant. Like, so he's either

01:49:58   a Nexus 7 or a Nexus 8. Yeah, and maybe that's why he's different and why he's more human-like

01:50:04   and potentially they'll retcon it that way for the sequel. Well, they don't have to retcon

01:50:09   it because in the theatrical release, you remember how the theatrical release ends.

01:50:12   So you know Ray, Roy Batty, and Hollis Crew for your lifespan, right? And you know Nexus

01:50:18   7s are different, certainly different because Rachel doesn't even know what she is, right?

01:50:22   So she's very different. And if he's a Nexus 7 or a Nexus 8, when they go off on the car

01:50:26   driving down the green road with the weird ending and the voiceover. The voiceover basically says,

01:50:31   "I don't know how long we have." I think he says something like, "God, do any of us know?" or

01:50:36   something like that. They might have four-year light spans or they might not. And the same thing

01:50:42   with Edward J. Malmose. What's his character's name? I'm so bad with character names.

01:50:47   Gaff.

01:50:47   Gaff says, "It's too bad she won't live, but then again, who does?"

01:50:50   Then again, who does?

01:50:51   Basically saying, "Nobody lives forever. You're all going to die. You just don't know when."

01:50:55   Exactly.

01:50:55   I feel like both versions of the movie leave it completely open as to what is the lifespan of Rachel and

01:51:01   And Deckard. Deckard. We have we have no idea

01:51:04   So if they want them and the fact that they age again

01:51:06   It's clear that there is a biological component to them

01:51:09   Like I design your eyes and squishy eyeballs and everything that all that stuff's got to age right like they're not

01:51:14   Terminators inside. I noticed this time they talk about I mean, he's a DNA artist and they talk about the cells

01:51:19   So these are these are

01:51:21   Organic creatures at least in part right? They're not there. They're artificial

01:51:25   But that doesn't necessarily mean that they're that they've got metal parts in fact they may not

01:51:31   Stronger and smarter right in the same way a person could be stronger. Yeah, genetically design them. It's like the snake

01:51:36   It's like a real snake, but got little which is why they're not a robot yes, but that's a different show if

01:51:41   Deca is a more advanced version of the Nexus line. Why did they make him weaker so is he weaker?

01:51:49   That's the question. I mean he does hold on to the edge of a building with like three fingers.

01:51:53   All of the Nexus 6s, right?

01:51:54   Some of that, yeah right, so some of that is if you don't know your replicant,

01:51:59   you're running at abject fear because you're not going to go toe-to-toe with them because you

01:52:02   have the expectation that they can destroy you. But if we look at what actually happens in the

01:52:07   movie, he never like tries to go toe-to-toe and fight him. He gets his hand pulled through a wall

01:52:11   and his fingers broken, but you know anybody can break your fingers. And how could he stop them

01:52:15   from breaking his fingers? Well probably not with his hand through a wall. He does hold on to the

01:52:18   the edge of a building by like three fingers which is in the rain which is a thing a real

01:52:21   person could not do. It's kind of like Dumbo's feather. If you had told them, "By the way,

01:52:27   you're a replicant and you're stronger, like, fight them." And the second thing is, maybe

01:52:30   he's not stronger. Maybe part of the Nexus 7 and possibly Nexus 8 lines is you want them

01:52:34   to think they're human and if you made them super strong, it would be a giveaway.

01:52:38   Also the Nexus replicants that they're hunting are from Offworld and there's a strong suggestion

01:52:45   that they've been engineered for certain jobs. Like, Roy is a fighter. That's what he's for,

01:52:51   so of course he's going to be strong and brutal.

01:52:52   It doesn't explain why the prostitute would be super strong.

01:52:54   It's true. It's true. I was going to get there. But yeah, so there's a question like, do they

01:52:59   make them more robust for the off-world colonies? I wanted to ask that. I think one of the fascinating

01:53:03   things about this is there are the ads for "go to the off-world colonies," like they're

01:53:08   trying to get people to leave Earth. And I wonder, does that mean they want people off

01:53:14   of Earth? Does that mean the off-world colonies are really bad and they need more people on

01:53:19   them, but we don't really know anything about it?

01:53:21   I think it means the off-world colonies are really expensive, and everybody who's down

01:53:25   there in the muck in Los Angeles would love to go to the off-world colonies, but they

01:53:28   can't afford it. In the same way you see billboards for "go to Hawaii" or "have a tropical vacation,"

01:53:32   yeah, sure, we'd all love to have a tropical vacation, but it costs too much money. If

01:53:35   you had enough money to get off of this crap hole that is the Earth, you would go, presumably,

01:53:39   to the off-world colonies, assuming the advertising could be deleted. We don't know enough about

01:53:43   the universe to know are the off-world colonies actually good or are they crap

01:53:47   and they're trying to entice you to go there to be slave labor? And that's what

01:53:49   fascinates me about it yeah. There's the conversation between Pris and Sebastian

01:53:54   right where like it seems like he's not allowed because he has that sickness

01:53:59   that makes him look old right like she's like why aren't you there is it because

01:54:02   of the disease or whatever so like I always got the impression that it was

01:54:06   like earth is ruined so we had to go and make nicer places to live like that's

01:54:12   That's how I always viewed it, right? Because he wasn't allowed because there's something

01:54:16   wrong with him.

01:54:17   Right, but it's never said, it's only hinted at, which I kind of love, that you have to

01:54:21   fill in the—you have to guess about what this world is like.

01:54:24   And it's communicated by advertising, like oppressive advertising, that again, I like

01:54:27   the idea that these giant billboards with these attractive-looking people, you know,

01:54:31   with all their geisha makeup and all this other stuff, like, and you're just in this

01:54:35   presumably acid rain in this crappy dark city, right, eating noodles at the bar, like, but

01:54:41   always these ads are in your face constantly letting you know what it is that you can't

01:54:45   have.

01:54:46   Nailed it.

01:54:47   Is this movie colored differently?

01:54:49   It looks like they did some color timing on it.

01:54:54   I saw some side-by-sides where even from the director's cut that they've done some work

01:54:58   to get the...

01:54:59   It looks like it's been maybe re-graded.

01:55:02   I think more just to get it to be consistent because modern technology lets them do that.

01:55:07   I'm not sure it was like let's change it to look different so much as like Ridley Scott said I know how we make movies now

01:55:14   Can we get this to be all?

01:55:16   Uniform and so it is well and also like it's a very dark movie, right?

01:55:21   And it's actually very difficult to make a dark movie because especially when you were doing on film like this was it's a fine line

01:55:26   Between this is a dark scene and I can't see anything

01:55:28   Right and so digitally it's much easier nowadays and they can take the film and try to tweak it

01:55:34   So the scene like that you want the blacks to be inky black

01:55:37   But you want to be able to see what the hell is going on and if there's any difference that I imagine the original one

01:55:42   The blacks weren't quite in keep is if they made them inky everything else the scene would be all blacked out to you

01:55:47   You wouldn't be able to see anything and now digitally you can you know adjust the curves and get it just the way you want it

01:55:52   I still don't like the last part of the movie

01:55:54   I don't like the confrontation the run the running around no the running around the screaming the howling

01:56:02   I don't like it. The Daryl Hannah thing is really unpleasant.

01:56:06   I just, yeah. But it's purposefully unpleasant, and when he kills her, it's slow and he has

01:56:12   to keep shooting her because she's writhing. And she screams and she flails around. This

01:56:17   is one of the things she flails around, I mean, kind of like a machine.

01:56:21   Yes. Like, forcefully and in a way that you would

01:56:24   think a human wouldn't, which is at odds with the biological, supposed biological nature.

01:56:29   I think that's part of this movie is there's a lot of things that are that are off-putting and

01:56:33   The final the final scene and the shooting and all that stuff on all the violent parts are a great contrast to the rest of the movie

01:56:40   especially without the voiceover which not only is slow but

01:56:44   Without the voiceover there are long stretches where nobody says anything. Yeah, there's no dialogue at all

01:56:50   And you know, it's not just like that. It gives you more time to look at the scenery

01:56:53   It's that the movie slows down even more but you know

01:56:56   One of the things I like about the movie is it sort of lulls you into this zen state where

01:57:01   you're not like, "Come on, come on, what's the next plot point?"

01:57:04   And you get into that state and then they throw in a scene with the woman running through

01:57:09   the glass or some violence.

01:57:11   The violence stands out more in contrast to the rest of the movie where everything is

01:57:15   slow and I think it works.

01:57:17   Yeah, they're just...

01:57:18   I just got to the howling.

01:57:19   I can't...

01:57:20   Yeah.

01:57:21   It just doesn't make sense to me.

01:57:23   So one of the reasons we're doing this is because me and John were talking about this

01:57:27   at WWDC, right? And you said to me that like, the howling is meant to show like a primal

01:57:34   thing, right? It's why he takes all his clothes off and he's howling because he's on the way

01:57:38   out, right? Like he's dying, he's becoming more primal.

01:57:40   He's also kind of a predator hunting his prey and the idea there that the replicants are

01:57:44   what's next and that the humans are going to be, you know, eaten by the replicants.

01:57:50   I think he wants to be scary. This is what it's like to live in fear, right?

01:57:53   He wants to scare Deckard and he's going a little bit nuts towards the end of it.

01:57:57   It's kind of like if you had 24 hours to live, what would you do?

01:57:59   So, you know, go crazy, right? So he's enacting revenge.

01:58:04   He's teaching a lesson. Like, he could kill--

01:58:06   That's the other thing that Myke was confused about, I think, when we talked about it, was

01:58:09   that could he have killed Deckard? Presumably, yes.

01:58:12   Like at many points he could have killed him. He's toying with him.

01:58:14   He's like, it's the reason he leaves him alive. Why didn't you--

01:58:16   You know, you could have killed Deckard, but you didn't. You saved him.

01:58:18   picked him back up onto the roof and you gave your little speech and everything, right? He's not

01:58:22   trying to kill him. He wants him to see what it's like to live in fear and he wants to go out with

01:58:27   a bang, which he essentially does. Why though? One scene that I think in 1982 or whenever this,

01:58:36   when was this movie made? 1982, that you could get away with that from 2017 made me very

01:58:43   uncomfortable is Rachel wants to leave Deckard's apartment and he blocks her

01:58:48   and pushes her back and forces himself on her and you know what it was intended

01:58:55   to be oh this is this she's reluctant and he's forcing things and you know it

01:59:00   was meant to be read a certain way that is not not how it can be read now and I

01:59:07   find that I'd find that unpleasant so that was a very difficult scene to watch

01:59:10   If they made it today, they could make it exactly the same way, but the lesson would be that Deckard's not the greatest guy, right?

01:59:17   Whereas before, the lesson was supposed to be that Deckard is a man's man.

01:59:20   Yeah, and he just needs to show her that it's okay to love him by telling her, by barring the door and telling her what to say to him.

01:59:29   Right, which is a fine dynamic to have in the scene in terms of like, she's afraid and he doesn't want her to be afraid.

01:59:35   But the way to do it is not to physically assault her, right?

01:59:38   So like in a modern movie, if they were trying to have that outcome of the scene, she's afraid

01:59:43   of her feelings for him, they would talk about it.

01:59:45   And he would, you know, they have that scene in a million movies.

01:59:48   Like, you know, I know you have feelings for me, but you're afraid of them.

01:59:51   Let me convince you that you should give in to them, right?

01:59:53   Not by physically restraining you, but using my mouth words.

01:59:56   Yeah.

01:59:57   So that doesn't, I don't want to say that doesn't hold up.

02:00:00   It's like, I'm going to say that doesn't convey the thing that the movie makers wanted to convey

02:00:03   Exactly right way, you know, we've changed right but if you read it if you say, okay

02:00:08   Well ignore that and just read it in the modern sense

02:00:10   It just makes Deckard a less likable person

02:00:12   But it is entirely realistic because dynamics like that happened all the time because people are bad sure

02:00:16   It's just that the movie doesn't want us to judge him that way and that's the that's where you get that that dissonance happening

02:00:22   So that was it could have he could have like gone

02:00:24   I mean, that's another thing that they could have changed or edited in a different way, but

02:00:30   either the people making the movie still think that it's a manly man thing to do or

02:00:34   They didn't want to go like Steven Spielberg et walkie-talkie and say look. This is the movie

02:00:39   This is the movie we mean that says with the people who we were this is the time

02:00:42   Roger Ebert did a great movies about this movie, and he was always not a not a huge fan

02:00:48   I think his feelings about it are kind of like mine

02:00:51   Which is it is brilliant and it needs to be considered part of the cannon, but?

02:00:54   You know I even Harrison Ford has said he doesn't find it. He's never really warm to it

02:00:59   He thinks it's beautiful, but making an emotional connection is not that kind of movie. And

02:01:05   I think that's true. Ebert wrote that this is very deliberately not George Lucas-ing

02:01:11   this movie, right? It's just like this is the movie they made and it looks better, but

02:01:16   it's still not any different, more or less, from the movie that he wanted to make. The

02:01:20   effects got cleaned up, but they're the same effects. They're not new effects. And they

02:01:25   did a couple of digital things where they had a continuity problem, but they didn't

02:01:29   anything to the scene, they more like wiped some things out that were wrong to just make

02:01:33   it cleaner. And so yeah, you leave that scene in and it's just this is what that's the scene

02:01:38   that's in the movie in 1982. And yes, we don't think that way now. And that's, that's just

02:01:43   part of the part of the thing. I wanted to also mention Rutger Hauer. I, you know, I

02:01:47   quote that speech of his all the time. And John, you believe it or not, I mostly get

02:01:51   it right. It's one of those speeches that I actually get right because I'm really bad

02:01:55   at quoting speeches from movies. This time what I noticed is the choices he makes as

02:02:00   an actor are really interesting. Like the way he reads those lines, because those lines

02:02:04   are really cool, you know, the whole thing. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe,

02:02:11   you know, the whole thing. And he knows he's winding down and this is his last statement

02:02:15   before he dies. And yet the way he says those lines are, like every line is said in an interesting

02:02:23   way and and it's just it's a really cool speech but the performance is so weird and and I

02:02:32   think inhuman in some ways and superhuman like like incredibly human in other ways and

02:02:38   it's just like it's a really great classic movie moment it's one of my favorite speeches

02:02:43   in any movie is that is that Riker Hauer speech at the end right before Roy dies it's great

02:02:49   Yeah, just like the way he says "tis in rain" is so strange-

02:02:53   It is!

02:02:54   Like, the way he says the word "rain" is like there's more letters in it than there really

02:03:00   is.

02:03:01   It's very interesting.

02:03:02   You've got the little ticks and the pauses, and because he is, he's dying.

02:03:04   He's winding down, yeah.

02:03:06   So, hearing you guys talk about this on the earlier episode, you know, and hearing Jason

02:03:12   complain about it over the years and everything, and like, I'm not, you know, this is not my

02:03:15   world's favorite movie, but I've always liked it, but hearing everybody say "oh, it's boring,

02:03:19   long, it's weird. I kind of like started getting on board. I'm like, yeah, well, it's not,

02:03:22   it's not paced the way normal people want it to be. And it's not that great, but I have

02:03:25   to tell you rewatching it again for this podcast, I rewatch it again. I'm like, you know what?

02:03:28   This is a fantastic movie. Like I, I understand all the, all the problems and the reason people

02:03:33   don't like it. Uh, you know, I can see why they don't like it, but I overall, like I

02:03:39   watched it again and I was surprised by how much I still like it. Right. So that was my

02:03:43   impression of watching again. And the other thing I think about this a lot is despite

02:03:48   Basically the majority of the movie like that especially the long middle part and especially without the voiceover where people fall asleep

02:03:54   You know Jason falls asleep on his couch and everything

02:03:56   The opening scene to this movie with the interrogation is one of the best opening scenes of any movie ever

02:04:02   I feel like because it's so we yeah

02:04:05   The dialogue is so smart and and snappy and there's so much tension and it establishes the stakes and the world. I

02:04:13   Really feel like this movie doesn't because this movie is not about snappy dialogue like this hardly a dialogue in it and dialogue later

02:04:19   In the movie starts to get weird and slow and the people having conversations are either

02:04:23   Replicants or Sebastian who's weird or Tyrell is weird

02:04:27   But there are I feel like the writing on this there are some great scenes the opening interview scene the final speech at the end

02:04:34   You know

02:04:36   Tyrell his little discussion with Roy we made you as well

02:04:40   Oh man, that is, yeah. And that's another director's cut change where the dialogue,

02:04:44   he says "I want more life, father, now," which is how it should have always been. It's a

02:04:48   much better line that way. But that whole conversation where Tyrell is legitimately

02:04:55   saying, you know, "We made you better. Your life is shorter, but you burn brighter," and

02:05:00   there's some tenderness there right before Roy squeezes his head into pulp.

02:05:03   He gets a skull crush. But yeah. Anyway, that's what I feel like. Because that's not what

02:05:08   this movie is about, it doesn't get credit for those parts of it. I feel like there's

02:05:12   some of the best writing, like the speech at the end, not just for the performance,

02:05:16   but in so many movies that are trying to be like profound sci-fi type movies, they either

02:05:22   go too abstract, where it's just like, you know, word salad that's supposed to mean something

02:05:27   and it gets by with like the score and the effect, or too on the nose. And I feel like

02:05:31   all the good dialogue scenes strike a balance between "let me be completely on the nose

02:05:39   and explain to you in dummy terms exactly what's going on here" and "let me be artful."

02:05:43   Because the Tears and Rain speech explains it well enough that anybody watching it understands

02:05:48   what's going on there.

02:05:49   What is he saying about his life?

02:05:50   What is he trying to tell Deckard, right?

02:05:52   But it is also artful.

02:05:53   And the same thing with the interrogation scene, where they don't tell you, you know,

02:05:59   He's undergoing this test why they ask him these questions you don't know why he's asking this question

02:06:03   So it's a really good snappy back and forth lots of tension ending him getting shot

02:06:07   they should really should have checked him for guns before he went into the interview and

02:06:11   Magically being thrown back on the table which makes no sense

02:06:14   But there's a reason those scenes are famous. There's a reason you know like the turtle wire and she's flipping it over

02:06:18   Yeah, you know the tortoise would you know what a turtle is same thing and the smoking?

02:06:22   Oh god, you got to love the smoking like it's just we haven't figured that it's not even like what smoking actually looks like

02:06:28   It's like very purposefully these huge puffs of smoke with the light. They've got that horizontal like the sunlight coming in the room

02:06:35   So it's all meant to just make it again kind of noir-ish and super weird where they wanted to

02:06:39   Fill the room and so that you can see the light filtered through it and it's all very

02:06:43   Stylized yeah the pacing where he's asking questions or whatever and he just plows forward and making him ask him whatever and then after he

02:06:49   Plows authority says an answer to your query

02:06:51   They're written down for me because he'd asked earlier about right make up these questions

02:06:54   are like, "I love that scene. I love it." That guy. Helpful guy. And then he is dead.

02:06:58   Let me tell you about my mother. Like, what I like about those questions is that they'd

02:07:02   make me feel uncomfortable watching them, right? Because they're just like, "What is

02:07:06   this, like, weird nonsense?" That's what this movie is. Like, ultimately, I think what's

02:07:11   cool about this movie and what's great about this movie is that's what it is. It's all

02:07:14   about -- it's set up as being humans and replicants and we've got to find the replicants and kill

02:07:18   them and we don't even call them "kill them," we just retire them. But in the end, what

02:07:23   really talking about is people, right? It is the replicants are just our story at a

02:07:27   different pace. The whole point of Roy's speech at the end is he's just talking

02:07:32   about mortality. He's not talking about being a robot. He's talking about be a

02:07:35   person who has collected memories through their lives and at the end they

02:07:39   realize that they die and all of his experiences will be lost like tears and

02:07:43   rain and that's it. And he's not talking about it because he's a robot man. He's

02:07:47   talking about life and death and this whole movie, you know, that's the trick of

02:07:51   it is it's wrapped this whole thing about, you know, this future dystopia kind of looking

02:07:57   place and these robots that we're after and all of that. And in the end, you know, that's

02:08:02   not what it's about. It's about looking at them and not seeing ourselves.

02:08:06   And I think, like, also with the decorative replica angle, it's about the value of your

02:08:11   own life to yourself. Is that based on an externality? Is it based on your understanding

02:08:16   that, "Well, at least I'm not a robot. That's why my life is valuable." Like, or, you know,

02:08:20   of my memories are manufactured, do I feel any less myself or any less human? Because

02:08:26   that's one of the things that everybody in the movie eventually has to face or consider,

02:08:31   is the mortality that everything's going to go away and be their value. If I'm only valuing

02:08:37   myself because I know that I'm human, I'm not like those others. You could go in a million

02:08:42   different directions with what that's an analogy for in the modern world. But Rachel struggles

02:08:48   with it, it's her main struggle, even the escape replicants struggle with it, because

02:08:51   they want to be, they want to live, and not just because they want to live, they want

02:08:55   to be like everybody else. Like, why do I only get four years and you get longer? And,

02:09:01   you know, it's not fair that some people live longer than others. There's a lot in this

02:09:04   movie to dig out, and it's amazing that the movie works in some fashion, whether he's

02:09:10   a replicant or not. I just like the additional layer, not the sort of twist or gotcha, but

02:09:16   additional layer on top of that. And I like it. So you're like, I don't like it when, you know,

02:09:21   don't want it to be nailed down. I feel like it's not ambiguous, but it is ambiguous in that people

02:09:26   don't follow along with movies that well. Like in the same way that Total Recall is not ambiguous

02:09:29   about the ending of that movie, which is an entire other discussion, it seems ambiguous to people

02:09:34   because it doesn't hit you over the head with it. You have to put two and two together with the

02:09:38   unicorn thing and conceivably, if you don't understand probabilities and filmmaking, you'd

02:09:44   You'd be like, "Well, what if he just happened to pick a unicorn that day?

02:09:46   What if they just happened to show us his unicorn?"

02:09:50   But it doesn't come out and say, "Dickard says, 'That's when I realized I was a

02:09:53   replicant.'"

02:09:54   He never says that, or no one says it to him, or there's no realization other than

02:09:58   just a look on his face, right?

02:09:59   And then he's out in the elevator.

02:10:01   So I like that for, again, walking the line between being on the nose and being subtle.

02:10:07   And that's exactly what I want out of a movie.

02:10:11   I wanted to flatter my intelligence by not spelling things out for me, but I wanted to

02:10:16   be comprehensible so that I follow along. Like everyone wants that. They want to be

02:10:20   right on the edge. Like you want to feel good for figuring it out, but you don't want

02:10:25   it to be so difficult that you have to like read a webpage to do so.

02:10:27   So I mean I'll say overall like I feel better about this movie than I did before. Like there's

02:10:33   still stuff in it that's just weird to me, but the ending and stuff like that and the

02:10:39   the removal of the voiceover, I find it just to be more to my tastes. And I still think

02:10:47   that this movie is beautiful, like it's even more beautiful in this one. I just found the

02:10:52   visuals to be even more compelling. So I mean, I like this movie, I do. I do like it. It's

02:10:58   just not one of my favorites and I don't think it ever will be.

02:11:01   Yeah, I second that. I think going back to, I don't make an emotional connection with

02:11:09   this movie, so I appreciate it, but I don't love it. But I appreciate it for what it is.

02:11:14   And the fact is, I have seen it like five times now, so there must be something there.

02:11:20   Is it five full times though?

02:11:22   Oh yeah.

02:11:23   Is it like two and three?

02:11:24   No, Lauren falls asleep. I don't fall asleep. I get sleepy while I'm watching it, but when

02:11:28   I've shown it to Lauren, she's fallen asleep every time. So I don't do that anymore. I

02:11:31   this by myself. So I never, I don't put this on my list of favorite movies, not because it's dark,

02:11:35   because I do like a lot of dark movies, but because it does, you know, it does have the,

02:11:39   all the things that we've talked about, that sort of, you know, pacing unevenness and some of the

02:11:44   weird dialogue choices in the middle, and, you know, and in general it's not as grand or epic

02:11:51   or sweeping as, you know, some of my favorite movies, or not as like as perfect as some of

02:11:55   like the Miyazaki stuff is that I put in there, right? But this stands in a category of movies

02:12:01   that I remember seeing and noting their difference. Noting that they were different than other

02:12:08   movies, they were weird outliers. There's a lot of movies that are like this, a lot

02:12:12   of them do become cult classics. Yeah, maybe they're not the best movies, but they do certain

02:12:17   things so differently than their contemporaries. They stand out and then you take notice. You're

02:12:21   like, "Oh, wait a second. I thought..." A lot of times you watch a movie, you kind of

02:12:24   know what to expect. Like, "Oh, it's an action movie, it's comedy, I've seen a bunch of these.

02:12:27   I kind of know the formulas of the contemporary movies that are going to be like that.

02:12:31   And when one of them comes out and is different, it sort of stands aside.

02:12:35   And I was always attracted to that as a kid, whether it's Japanese animation that I would

02:12:39   see and note the difference, like, "Oh, this doesn't look like the animation on Saturday

02:12:44   Morning Cartoons."

02:12:45   It is different in a really important way, and it's set aside.

02:12:49   Blade Runner is like that.

02:12:51   The movie-making is different.

02:12:52   Of course, you were discussing in the past episode how influential the sort of dark future

02:12:56   design was that we now see everywhere, this was the first and most influential instance

02:13:01   of that, that ripple through history, like, that's why I set it aside. But yeah, in the

02:13:06   Pantheon of movies, it's not up there with like, The Godfather and Kiki's Delivery Service

02:13:10   and The Empire Strikes Back, because it's just not as good a movie as those, but it

02:13:13   is as important a movie, and that it goes off on this other shelf with me of like these

02:13:18   weird movies. I don't know how I categorize them, like, they stand out in history, they're

02:13:23   like icons and that when I watch them originally and when you watch them now they're like,

02:13:28   you know, this is so different than its contemporaries.

02:13:30   Mr. Syracuse, thank you for joining us today for all of the wonder that you have brought

02:13:34   to this episode. Where can people find you online and follow your work and such?

02:13:39   Well, I have a website that I write on almost once a year called hypercritical.co. You can

02:13:44   follow me on Twitter. It's @Saracusa. And I do a bunch of podcasts on various networks

02:13:50   That if you go to hyperco.co and click on about you can find links to all of them

02:13:54   All right

02:13:55   If you want to find out show notes for this week's episode head on over to relay.fm/upgrades/155

02:14:01   I want to thank our sponsors one more time Blue Apron, Ting, Encapsula and Mac Weldon. You can find Jason online

02:14:08   He's @JasonL on Twitter. He writes at 6colors.com

02:14:11   I am @imike

02:14:15   And don't forget become a relay.fm member go to relay.fm/membership to find out more

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02:14:30   Members, I want to just extend my thanks to our amazing guests today Stephen

02:14:36   Alex and John and also as always Thank You Jason. We'll be back next time until then. Say goodbye

02:14:43   Bye Myke, we'll see you in two weeks and I'll be back with my special mystery gas next week. Thanks everybody

02:14:49   [MUSIC]