00:00:15 ◼ ► I think that there's a very good chance that the Drexel University Dragons of the 2020-2021 season,
00:00:24 ◼ ► this team that got their ass kicked today by Illinois, could still go down in NCAA tournament history
00:00:43 ◼ ► They were perhaps the most shortened season of any team in the NCAA, in the NCAA. They were 12 and 7.
00:00:51 ◼ ► So they only won 12 games, including the conference tournament games that got them into the tournament.
00:00:59 ◼ ► Yeah, I was going to say that at the very least, even if you were a terrible team, if you won your conference tournament,
00:01:09 ◼ ► I looked at the bracket, and I didn't look at the play-in games, the teams who played yesterday,
00:01:17 ◼ ► There were a couple of other teams that had 14 wins, but Drexel with 12 was two games fewer than that.
00:01:24 ◼ ► I think there's a very high likelihood, knock on wood, fingers crossed, that we won't have another pandemic like this going forward,
00:01:33 ◼ ► and there's no feasible way that any other team with 12 wins could possibly make the tournament.
00:01:40 ◼ ► Unless it was a team with two wins that then somehow ran the table, which seems, in their conference tournament, seems almost impossible,
00:01:50 ◼ ► Right. I guess if you had a superstar player, like a future Michael Jordan, LeBron James caliber player,
00:02:26 ◼ ► and this year the small University of California schools are being represented by UC Santa Barbara.
00:02:37 ◼ ► I'm hoping someday the Tritons of UCSD will be in there and they'll be a 16 and they'll be drummed right out, and that'll be fun.
00:02:44 ◼ ► Because right now I went to grad school at Cal, and my dad went to Cal, so I'm a major sports fan for Cal,
00:02:51 ◼ ► which won the NIT one year, and when Jason Kidd played there, they got to the Sweet 16.
00:02:58 ◼ ► But I'm hoping one day UCSD will give me that delight of being a 16 seed that's drummed right out of the tournament.
00:03:10 ◼ ► It is bizarre. I mean, it's better to see these games than like last year where they were canceled,
00:03:18 ◼ ► It is kind of bizarre to see them playing in like a Drexel's game was in like a farmhouse,
00:03:25 ◼ ► like an old-fashioned sports fieldhouse that used to host basketball games like 70 years ago.
00:03:36 ◼ ► but it's a weird setup where the closest fans are, it's like they're playing inside a hockey rink, right?
00:03:52 ◼ ► Our friend of the show, mutual friend Dr. Drang, I guess he's a, I don't know, I know he lives in Illinois.
00:04:03 ◼ ► So it's funny, back just before the pandemic in late December of 2019, Cal played Illinois in a bowl game.
00:04:14 ◼ ► And it was in Santa Clara at the 49ers' stadium, so we went. And so I got to see the Illinois band.
00:04:47 ◼ ► They look very good, in my opinion. I'm nowhere near the college basketball fan I used to be, but I used to be obsessed with it.
00:04:54 ◼ ► And I know a good team when I see it. And you know, all right, well, they're a number one seed and they played a 16 seed in one big.
00:05:01 ◼ ► Duh, they looked good. But they looked really good. And, you know, reading up on them coming into this game, it's like they play a really good style of basketball.
00:05:16 ◼ ► I love a name like that. That's like the Phillies, right? Like what is Illini? I don't know. They're from Illinois.
00:05:34 ◼ ► Huh, that rings a bell. I know that I remember talking to Federico while Italy was having a terrible time of it and it hadn't come to the US yet.
00:05:43 ◼ ► Yeah, that was the next episode was that. But we were doing it right when the NBA stuff was happening.
00:05:54 ◼ ► And it was definitely, I remember that episode very distinctly because we were doing a lot of, well, what we're saying now is true at the moment, but tomorrow it may be completely different.
00:06:04 ◼ ► Because it had that feeling like we were in that period of a week where everything was going to change day to day.
00:06:10 ◼ ► Yeah. Yeah. Like when you're in a building and like a weird alarm goes off and it's like, what is that? We supposed to leave? And it's like, I don't know, maybe sort of.
00:06:18 ◼ ► And then they're like, just stand by. And it's like, huh, maybe we should get our stuff together and get ready to leave, you know?
00:06:29 ◼ ► I think things are looking up though. It's a good, you know, it's, you know, if we were on the cusp of everything falling apart a year ago, I feel very solid.
00:06:37 ◼ ► I feel just as, I feel like the odds are just as good that we're on the cusp of everything starting to come back together.
00:06:43 ◼ ► Yeah. I have optimism too. You know, it's tempered with the idea that if people let down their guard right here at the end, you have the potential to have like a little bit of a blowback, but that the vaccines are kind of tamping that down.
00:06:57 ◼ ► They're sort of like, the vaccines are in a fight with people's enthusiasm. And if you can get enough people vaccinated before people are too enthusiastic, then you can make it work.
00:07:07 ◼ ► Yeah. And I'm really optimistic too that by setting some gold dates, not like hard and fast, line in the sand, July 4th, you can party down.
00:07:19 ◼ ► But just, you know, if we keep our stuff, keep our acts together and everybody does their part, you know, we can really be back to normal by summertime.
00:07:28 ◼ ► I feel like that gives people hope and gives you a reason to keep going, even if you feel like, you know, I would like to go eat in a restaurant right now.
00:07:36 ◼ ► Yeah. Also, I would say the acceleration, you know, you see these theoretical numbers of acceleration of vaccines where especially in sort of January and February, they're like, well, there are more and there are more coming and all of that.
00:07:47 ◼ ► The last two weeks, especially, but over the last month, I keep hearing, first off, people I know, people who are in like some of the slacks that I'm in, all of a sudden are like, I got vaccinated today.
00:07:59 ◼ ► I got vaccinated today. I'm getting, it's like, I can now feel it's not just a number on, you know, on the news.
00:08:12 ◼ ► So that makes it more real too, right? Knowing that my in-laws and my mom are vaccinated with both shots.
00:08:20 ◼ ► My wife's had her first shot. I haven't because I live in my garage and don't see anyone.
00:08:29 ◼ ► But people I know, and people I know even just a little bit online, like they all have these vaccination stories now.
00:08:37 ◼ ► And that's what makes me honestly the most optimistic is like now I can feel it for real instead of it's a personal experience kind of thing.
00:08:44 ◼ ► Not me getting vaccinated, but like people I know are going through that now. Then it feels like this is really happening.
00:08:55 ◼ ► And for all the things that we can genuinely and apolitically say the US has handled very poorly throughout the last year.
00:09:50 ◼ ► Just thousands and thousands of people a day. It's just a terrific operation and, you know, exceeding the goals.
00:09:57 ◼ ► And they've got a great system right now where the surplus vaccinations, their surplus ability over the people who have appointments.
00:10:05 ◼ ► They're looking at the zip codes in the city of Philadelphia where the percentage of people vaccinated so far is under the average for the city as a whole.
00:10:17 ◼ ► And if you live in one of those zip codes, you could just show up at the convention center.
00:10:24 ◼ ► They recommend you get there before five and the weather is nice today and you could just show up.
00:10:30 ◼ ► So, you know, and anybody who was struggling to like fill out the Web page or something like that or, you know,
00:10:36 ◼ ► or if you're older and don't know how to fill out a Web page, which is the thing, you just show up.
00:10:40 ◼ ► And they're just telling people if you live in zip code, you know, one nine one oh four, which is actually my old zip code in West Philly.
00:10:51 ◼ ► You just show up, just show up today and you can get vaccinated and on your way out the door, you'll just get an appointment for three weeks from today to get the second dose.
00:11:01 ◼ ► Isn't it funny how far we've come that, you know, online appointments and all that are so normal now and they're so efficient in a lot of ways that you can.
00:11:09 ◼ ► This has really exposed the fact that there is certainly a portion of the population that either due to potentially age or due to the financial issues or whatever it is, like they don't have access.
00:11:28 ◼ ► I ended up telling my mom I filled out a bunch of forms for her, but I also told her call these numbers.
00:11:34 ◼ ► And that's what ended up happening is that she called a number and put her name in and they called her back and they said, come down and get your your first shot today.
00:11:43 ◼ ► And, you know, she's got an iPad that she uses and all that, but she still felt really flummoxed because, you know, there's a generation that hasn't waited for concert tickets on Ticketmaster or wherever or bought playoff tickets or something like that.
00:11:55 ◼ ► Whereas our generation, like I remember hitting the button to get those Giants playoff tickets and and 2010.
00:12:12 ◼ ► And the other problem, too, is at least with like tickets, you know, the main way to get it right.
00:12:23 ◼ ► Whereas with the bigger problem with the vaccine vaccinations is nobody knows like what's the one place to go to.
00:12:30 ◼ ► And because there isn't right. It's like you go to CVS, you go to you go to your local stadium, right?
00:12:44 ◼ ► And as we were, you know, learning the ropes of it, it's like the different the different pharmacies have different systems.
00:13:07 ◼ ► Rite Aid word spread typically opened up next day appointments like just before midnight.
00:13:15 ◼ ► And it was true. Like you could find them, you know, but, you know, a lot of times it was like, you know, 100 miles away in southern Delaware or something like that.
00:13:30 ◼ ► And it was like it's like I equate it to to like some of the discount hotel sites where it's like, oh, you know, here's one of these sites where you can say where you're going and you can get a discount hotel room.
00:13:42 ◼ ► And I'll tell you, like how many? That's a four star hotel, but they won't tell you exactly which hotel.
00:13:50 ◼ ► Oh, well, if it has a swimming pool, an indoor swimming pool and a business center, but doesn't have a gym, that's the, you know, the Hyatt whatever.
00:14:02 ◼ ► Right. And you can like backwards. And it's like, ah, so if you know, you want to go to the CVS website on Wednesdays, they seem to update the whole week.
00:14:16 ◼ ► But sometimes it doesn't happen till after midnight. I think with the Rite Aid thing, it literally came down to human beings.
00:14:22 ◼ ► Like it wasn't automated, like like something automatically happened at 1145 Eastern Time.
00:14:28 ◼ ► It was like at some point around 1130, somebody who worked for Rite Aid was like typing things in.
00:14:39 ◼ ► Anyway, it's good news here in the U.S., hopefully improving elsewhere around the world, too.
00:14:55 ◼ ► Look, you want to build a website, you know how I bet I bet a lot of people listening to my show know how to make their own website or know how to start with something where you actually have the source code to your website and install it yourself.
00:15:11 ◼ ► And, you know, at some level, sort of being responsible for the website yourself, the coding of it, the design of it, there does.
00:15:22 ◼ ► You might be taking a lot more work than you need to. And especially if it's a website that you're being asked to build for someone you know, you could send them to Squarespace and they can do it all in a WYSIWYG style from getting domain name, picking templates,
00:15:38 ◼ ► picking the features that go on the website, all of it, you just do it right there on Squarespace.
00:15:45 ◼ ► What you're looking at as the person making your website is exactly what everybody in the world will see when they look at it, except not through the editing interface.
00:15:56 ◼ ► It's actually the same thing. It is as close to WYSIWYG as the web gets. It's just a great service. I recommend it.
00:16:03 ◼ ► They keep sponsoring the show because people who listen keep using the code and keep creating new sites on Squarespace.
00:16:11 ◼ ► So if you or someone you know who comes to you for expert advice needs a website, go to Squarespace.
00:16:20 ◼ ► 30-day free trial. You don't have to pay anything. Squarespace.com/talkshow. That's the URL to go to.
00:16:28 ◼ ► And when you decide to sign up, when the free trial's over, you want to say, "Yeah, keep this website. I want to keep going with it. This is the real deal."
00:16:34 ◼ ► Just remember that code. Go back to Squarespace.com/talkshow and use the offer code talkshow.
00:16:40 ◼ ► Just T-A-L-K-S-H-O-W. And you get 10% off your first purchase. You can prepay up to a year. 10% free just for listening to the show.
00:16:59 ◼ ► You're younger than me, so sure. Let me be the same age as you now. That's great. I love it.
00:17:05 ◼ ► I want to preview what I want to talk about later in the show. But you and I, you've finished up this great…
00:17:10 ◼ ► It's funny because Skype says we haven't talked for four months. It feels like we've talked more recently than that.
00:17:20 ◼ ► Well, but it's also that I don't listen to a lot of stuff that I do. I don't listen to my own show. I can't stand it.
00:17:27 ◼ ► And if I appear on somebody else's podcast, I'll listen for a bit or something like that.
00:17:31 ◼ ► But I got into listening to the 20 for 20/20 Max things with you, and I was like, "Huh, I love all these Max."
00:17:39 ◼ ► And it's like, "I'm glad I said good things about them because I have such fond memories of it."
00:17:50 ◼ ► Yeah, they're basically unedited conversations between you and me. And then I did three with John Syracuse.
00:17:56 ◼ ► You guys talk the most of anybody, and I felt like in the end I had three hours of each of you.
00:18:02 ◼ ► That was a pretty good conversation that I used a tiny little fraction of in the actual shows.
00:18:08 ◼ ► So I released those at the end of the podcast, being the last one just dropped publicly today.
00:18:13 ◼ ► Right. The straight-up 20 for 20/20 episodes were tightly edited, documentary-style podcasts.
00:18:25 ◼ ► And really, really just exquisitely well done. I say that not just because you're my guest today and I want to say nice things about it,
00:18:33 ◼ ► and not just because I was featured in a few of them, but for enthusiasts of old Max, or Max period,
00:18:44 ◼ ► It's just really good, but I could really appreciate just how much work went into the slicing and dicing of,
00:18:51 ◼ ► "Okay, I'm in the editing room. I've talked to all of these people for all this time and start getting things in together."
00:19:08 ◼ ► But the outtakes, they just sort of, "Hey, let's just shoot the shit for an hour at a time about it," are good too.
00:19:16 ◼ ► And they're fun, and it is sort of like we were doing a regular podcast like this kind of podcast,
00:19:25 ◼ ► And when I got to the end, I was thinking, "Can I do anything? Is there anything extra? Do I have any bonus stuff?"
00:19:31 ◼ ► And I realized that between you and Syracuse, I had almost eight hours of material that I trimmed a little.
00:19:38 ◼ ► Like, John's dog starts barking at a couple of points, and you had to go take care of something in the middle of something.
00:19:44 ◼ ► And there were little bits here and there that I snipped, but it's mostly just us just talking about those old computers,
00:19:51 ◼ ► and occasionally random things. You can also see there's a progression of me explaining what I'm doing in the first conversation that's in June.
00:20:03 ◼ ► But it is. It's one of those things that's exactly like Mark Twain's great line about which books are the classics,
00:20:16 ◼ ► It's like, this project is a great thing that everybody will be so happy exists for decades to come,
00:20:33 ◼ ► Right? Yeah. You put all that work in, and then you look at it and you're like, "Ah, that's good. I'm glad I did that."
00:20:43 ◼ ► That is there. Anyway, a preview of what will come later on this episode is I did want to have you...
00:20:50 ◼ ► I thought it was a nice book. I thought it would be such a great bookend for me and you to talk at length about 20 years of Mac OS X.
00:21:02 ◼ ► Either the day it comes out or the day after will mark the exact 20-year anniversary of Mac OS X 10.0.
00:21:16 ◼ ► And, you know, having talked to you at such length over the last eight months, however long since we started that discussion about Mac hardware history, I thought it would be really interesting to bookend it with purely talking about the other side of the coin, the OS.
00:21:43 ◼ ► So one of the things in the last few weeks is the rare product cancellation from Apple in recent years.
00:21:51 ◼ ► The HomePod was canceled in a very sad Friday night announcement made to friend of the show Matthew Bansarino at TechCrunch who got the scoop.
00:22:05 ◼ ► It's two in a row, by the way, because the previous Friday afternoon was when they basically canned the iMac Pro.
00:22:16 ◼ ► We'll break into this conversation about Mac OS X 10.0 with whatever Apple killed this week.
00:22:40 ◼ ► But you don't have to be even a close follower to think that based on the performance we're seeing from the first round of M1 Apple Silicon Macs, that iMacs, based on whether they call it the M1 or the M1X or the whatever, M2, who knows what iMacs will come out with.
00:23:04 ◼ ► But even if they just came out with the M1s that we have, they would be excellent iMacs.
00:23:11 ◼ ► Now, maybe not quite iMac Pros, and I forget all the various things that an iMac Pro can do in terms of, like, hooking up additional displays to it in addition to the built-in one.
00:23:23 ◼ ► I would presume that whether they still have something called iMac Pro in the Apple Silicon world or just have lesser and more expensive just plain iMacs that span the gamut from very consumer, "I just want a regular iMac," to very professional, "No, I do really hard video editing and whatever else might really press the limits," you know, software development work.
00:23:52 ◼ ► It just seems very clear that Apple Silicon-based iMacs are going to compare very nicely against the Intel versions.
00:24:01 ◼ ► And that was honestly the last two rounds of Intel iMacs at the high end of the 27-inch model.
00:24:08 ◼ ► They've been faster than the bottom rung or two of the iMac Pro because the iMac Pro hasn't been updated and because the iMac Pro was originally conceived in a different era where they weren't going to do a Mac Pro.
00:24:20 ◼ ► And, you know, so I think it does stand to reason that, you know, they can call it a Mac, high-end iMacs, an iMac Pro if they really want to, but the need for it has gone away.
00:24:30 ◼ ► And it sounds like the Xeons that they were using aren't going to be made by Intel anymore.
00:24:42 ◼ ► And we know they're going to be new iMacs and the new iMacs are going to be faster than all the old iMacs.
00:24:47 ◼ ► Whereas the HomePod is very much a different story of a product that got launched with a lot -- they put a lot of effort, if you think back, like, I remember how much effort they put into that thing.
00:24:57 ◼ ► And if the stories are to be believed, there are people who've bought, like, bought HomePods in the last couple of weeks.
00:25:04 ◼ ► And there is -- and I don't know how much, you know, accuracy there is here, but it seems like there are ways for you to look and get the build date.
00:25:13 ◼ ► And it sounds like some of the HomePods that were being bought in its last week of life were built when the HomePod was new in the ramp.
00:25:22 ◼ ► Which suggests strongly that Apple just completely misjudged the market for these and had, you know, had so many to sell that they just sort of kept selling the first round until they were rid of them, and then they could just dump it.
00:25:47 ◼ ► I really love the fact that they start their announcement of the death of the HomePod by talking about how great the HomePod Mini is.
00:25:52 ◼ ► For several sentences, that's great, right? Like, "Look over there. A product that we're still selling. Over there."
00:26:00 ◼ ► It makes me wonder whether -- when Apple decided that they were going to get rid of the big HomePod and do the HomePod Mini, and it seems to me that they wouldn't call it the HomePod Mini if they were going to get rid of the big one.
00:26:17 ◼ ► I know overall, Apple's marketing names can sometimes be confusing or maybe don't quite make a lot of sense. I was pushing for them to have pro models of the iPhone longer than they have been, but that's clarified a little.
00:26:45 ◼ ► Yeah, it's what Federico Vittucci called it, "The mini version of nothing," now, right? Like, it's the mini version of a thing that doesn't exist, so what is it?
00:26:54 ◼ ► I think you're right. They obviously had some conflicting things. One is, do you want to use this as a product name for a product line down the road? Well, then maybe you keep it around.
00:27:06 ◼ ► But yeah, if all you're doing is swapping out the old one for the new one, it seems strange that you would give the new one this sort of mini version of the name and then keep the other one around for a little while and then get rid of it.
00:27:21 ◼ ► But I'm not entirely convinced we've seen the last HomePod product. I think we've seen the last of that HomePod, right?
00:27:28 ◼ ► But would they do a different kind of HomePod and have HomePod Mini and HomePod whatever, and a few different versions? Maybe, maybe. I mean, who knows what Apple's home strategy is?
00:27:40 ◼ ► But maybe Apple doesn't even know. It's unclear. But by all accounts, the HomePod Mini is pretty well thought of and probably fairly successful, but nobody really knows. I don't know.
00:28:11 ◼ ► So for those who don't remember, the iPod HiFi was a sort of, I'm guessing this is purely based on memory, maybe like a 2005 product?
00:28:34 ◼ ► And it was like a boom box, Apple-looking white boom box thing with a 30-pin connector on top that you would put an iPod onto it, and it would charge the iPod, and you could then play music from the iPod through this.
00:28:55 ◼ ► So I've never heard one in person. And it was like right before when I was going to media events, so I was only observing them from afar.
00:29:06 ◼ ► And that's listening to, "Hey, listen to how good these speakers are," is one of those things you can't really simulate by watching a video or something.
00:29:15 ◼ ► I'd say it sounds pretty good. I have a Sonos 5 that is clearly much better, that's about the same size, but I do have an iPod HiFi, and I'm not kidding.
00:29:25 ◼ ► It sits on my desk. It has an AUX-IN plug on the back, which the HomePod, of course, doesn't, that plugs into my iMac, and that's what I use to sort of listen to music and stuff when I'm working.
00:29:37 ◼ ► And it works great for that. It still does have the dock connector on the top. I think I've got some object laying over that so I don't have to look at it.
00:29:44 ◼ ► But the truth of that product was that was, it is similar to the HomePod in some ways. Now, it was a reaction to the Bose SoundDock being incredibly successful, and I think reading between the lines, Steve Jobs felt like they should be making that money and not Bose.
00:30:00 ◼ ► But then they made their mistake that is the same mistake they made with the HomePod, which is they over-engineered it.
00:30:07 ◼ ► They said, "We're going to go out with a product that's going to sound better, and people are going to pay the premium for an Apple product. They're going to do it because we are going to be able to beat them on sound quality."
00:30:19 ◼ ► And I think the lesson of both products is competing on sound quality is not going to get you a hit product, because people don't care.
00:30:28 ◼ ► Like, I know you care, engineer, about the sound quality of this thing, but the mass market kind of doesn't care. Like, there is a thin sliver of people who really care about sound quality, and then there are people who listen to music through an Amazon Echo and they're just fine.
00:30:43 ◼ ► And both of these products ended up being too expensive because they were over-engineered and people didn't want to buy them.
00:30:51 ◼ ► And as much as I like it, I mean, I like it, but the iPod HiFi, I didn't pay for it. I'm going to come clean here. This is Macworld's review unit that they never wanted back, and I just took it away with me.
00:31:03 ◼ ► But it had a carrying case, which I still have. It has room for like 6D batteries. You can run it on battery power so you can get to the beach.
00:31:13 ◼ ► Which is another shortcoming of the HomePod. It's not portable, it doesn't have an aux in, it doesn't really, it's at its best when you buy two of them and put them in a stereo pair and it was already overpriced and now you have to buy two of them.
00:31:26 ◼ ► Like, there's just so many reasons why it didn't work. Even though, I would say, like the iPod HiFi, not a bad product, like, in isolation. The problem is, what's the competition, what does it cost, what does the competition cost?
00:31:45 ◼ ► Yeah, and it is a similar situation. It turns out overpriced, not popular, only took one stab at it before pulling it. And it came into a market where there were a bunch of competing products.
00:32:01 ◼ ► I know the Bose thing you mentioned was very popular. I remember JVC had a bunch of seemingly pretty popular, hey, stick your iPod on this thing.
00:32:12 ◼ ► Yeah, I think they had a couple from JVC that I came very close to buying and just never quite pulled the trigger. But at multiple price points. And Apple clearly came in.
00:32:26 ◼ ► I mean, that was their pitch. And it's one of those things where I always say, like, part of being an Apple pundit is really just listen to them. Because for the most part, like, if you come in totally cynical thinking that they're full of shit and it's all marketing is lies and spin and try to see through, you know, what's the real...
00:32:48 ◼ ► No, just listen to what they say. And like, when they debuted the iPod HiFi, their story was, this sounds so much better than other products on the market. And we spent all this time to make it fill the room. And when the HomePod came out, it was the same thing. It was this sounds so much better than you might think it will.
00:33:05 ◼ ► And we've done, you know, all of this computational geometry. And as soon as the HomePod starts playing, it does this, you know, it's sort of like sonar. It starts playing immediately, but will adjust the acoustics it's emitting by figuring out where it's bouncing off walls and ceilings and the desk or counter or whatever it's sitting on.
00:33:33 ◼ ► And adjust the acoustics accordingly. And when they're in a pair, they coordinate as a pair, like two teammates on a basketball team passing the ball back and forth like, all right, got it better instantly. And it's all true. It sounds... We have two in our kitchen. They're actually minis now.
00:33:54 ◼ ► But the coordination between them sounds better than two. Two HomePods sound better than twice as good as one HomePod, whether they're minis or HomePods. It's a better than 2x improvement for having two.
00:34:10 ◼ ► And you have to experience it. I'm not an expert. I would never propose to write at an expert level a review of them audio quality wise. But even as a non expert, it's very easy to tell that they sound more than 2x better.
00:34:26 ◼ ► But that is a huge part of the, you know, was HomePod too expensive? I truly believe that the true HomePod experience is to have two of them paired. And that was a $700 out of the box setup.
00:34:43 ◼ ► And again, all sorts of people spend way more than $700 on speakers for their home entertainment system, or even if it's just to listen to music in their den or their office or whatever.
00:34:57 ◼ ► There's dozens and dozens of stores where you can go to buy speakers that cost way more than $700.
00:35:05 ◼ ► And I think that might be what Apple's thinking, right? That if all these people are selling, you know, $3,000 speakers, and people are already buying $200 speakers, we can, you know, sell $300 speakers and convince people of how good they are because we really do believe that they're good.
00:35:33 ◼ ► I think sometimes Apple thinks that the way to win, and I think this is a good trait of them culturally, but I think sometimes they think the way to win is that they use their engineering and software prowess and they use their secret sauce to put it all together and make a better product and then people will buy it.
00:35:52 ◼ ► And in most categories, I think it's true. And that's how they've built their audience and their customer base.
00:35:58 ◼ ► But in some categories, adding in more high quality, high tech stuff doesn't create a product that a large enough number of people are willing to pay money to get the benefit out of it.
00:36:12 ◼ ► And, you know, that's, and I know that that's kind of squishy, but that's the trick is in this market, there are people who recognize quality, but are there enough of them?
00:36:23 ◼ ► And there are people who recognize quality in other kinds of products, but are happy to listen to an Amazon Echo in their kitchen and think it sounds fine.
00:36:32 ◼ ► And I think this is the challenge is that Apple's first cut at this, they're like, we're going to make these really good. And the market shrugged.
00:36:39 ◼ ► And with a mini, it's very instructive, right? Like the mini is okay. What else could we do?
00:36:46 ◼ ► And they threw out the auto detecting of the location and the tuning and they reduced the number of sound emitting objects in there and they made it smaller.
00:37:01 ◼ ► But initially, at least it sounds like it's a much more likely to be accepted kind of product.
00:37:10 ◼ ► And, you know, that's it seems like a much better deal. So it's fascinating to watch that, too, and just realize, see how Apple realized that their first, you know, first cut at this using the sort of traditional Apple playbook of we're going to make it higher quality.
00:37:25 ◼ ► It's not a market that's seeking that level of quality, not at volumes that they want to see.
00:37:30 ◼ ► But it is it's it's clearly much more fascinating to dissect than the very simple explanation of, hey, it was way too expensive. People don't want to spend three hundred dollars on each one of these things.
00:37:50 ◼ ► I think it's way more complex than that, because that, as you just alluded to, that's basically the knock against every single product Apple has ever made.
00:37:59 ◼ ► It was the knock against the Apple, too, compared to other personal computers. It was always been the knock against the Macintosh compared to PCs.
00:38:30 ◼ ► I thought the Zune, all of these things, and every time one of these things came out, they were always cheaper than the iPod for the comparable specs and people and all the killer killer.
00:38:45 ◼ ► Now the iPod. All right. Now we got it. Now Microsoft's in the game. We did it, everyone. We got them. Right. Finally got them. We finally got them.
00:38:52 ◼ ► It's the knock against the iPhone. Right. For sure. I mean, I don't want to. This is not a podcast where we talk about Samsung phones, but Samsung seems to be going through a bit of a rough stretch, you know, where now they're saying that they might cancel the note, which is one of their two flagship lines, or at least skip a year.
00:39:11 ◼ ► And they're whatever they call the Galaxy S21, whatever the, you know, talk about, wow, product names. Not doing that great, you know, in the Android world.
00:39:24 ◼ ► But it's only eight years ago where the consensus was that Samsung was going to really maybe stamp out the iPhone on the market because they, you know, it's Samsung and then the rest of the Android phones are cheaper and they do the same thing.
00:39:39 ◼ ► Who's going to spend all this money on an iPhone. It's the exact same argument. I think the truth is that Apple's Apple's game is value for money, right? It's value for money.
00:39:49 ◼ ► And when Apple fails, it's not because the product is expensive. It's because nobody sees why they pay that much like versus something else. Like, like, what do I get? Like, can you imagine if the HomePod had come out and the reviews and been like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:40:03 ◼ ► I know you can get one cheaper, but have you heard these? And it wasn't really that. It was like, yeah, they're maybe a little better. They're in the ballpark.
00:40:12 ◼ ► And I think, you know, for the amount of money that you're spending extra, you need to feel like, oh, but these are cut above. And instead it was like, yeah, Siri's not that great.
00:40:20 ◼ ► And the sound is fine, but the Sonos sound is fine too. And Amazon sound is pretty good too. And there and, you know, people are like, oh, well, and I don't really like the Amazon stuff sounds great.
00:40:31 ◼ ► Do I need this? What is the perceived value? And is it worth spending the extra money on it? And I think you, you end up in, in cases where maybe Apple's instincts are no, no, but if you listen to these, I mean, you were there, right?
00:40:43 ◼ ► You went through this. They had rooms where we listened to the different sounds from the different speakers and they're like, can't you tell it's different?
00:40:50 ◼ ► I was like, yeah, I can tell. And, and really knowledgeable reviewers would say, yes, they do sound good. But the truth is that on their own, just in a house where you've got some 200, $300 cheaper crappy speaker, people are like, yeah, it's fine.
00:41:08 ◼ ► And that makes it a harder sell. So it's that, it's a tricky thing of like, how do you get people to perceive the improved value and make it worth their money?
00:41:18 ◼ ► And there are some categories where Apple has a much harder time. I think AirPods Max is a real question here, right? Like the, and I'd say the reviews of AirPods Max have been more generous than of the HomePod and saying, yes, it's expensive, but it is better.
00:41:33 ◼ ► Like the noise cancellation is better and it does sound very good. Um, and, and so maybe it'll make it in a way that the HomePod won't, or maybe it won't. I honestly don't know.
00:41:42 ◼ ► And I've never used that product, but it is similar in that way. And the question is just, did they put enough value in it to make people justify spending the money on the more expensive thing?
00:41:56 ◼ ► Yeah. AirPods are the exception that we'll have to go back to in a moment, but I do think that maybe in a broad sense, the, there is a fundamental difference. Here's my spitball theory as to why Apple keeps failing with their Hi-Fi systems, but succeeding with, you know, watches, phones, computers, is that human beings are in the, in, on the, on the whole are far more,
00:42:25 ◼ ► far more visual than Aural and, and people, there's way more people who are willing to spend a premium for a thing that looks better and that they can see is better than something that sounds better.
00:42:45 ◼ ► Now, AirPods are the exception, but I would almost say that maybe AirPod success isn't about their audio quality, but just the convenience, you know, of the overall experience.
00:42:58 ◼ ► Well, I would also say what is the, what is the software, you know, the, the, and the synergy between software design and hardware design, you get a payoff with something like AirPods when you do that.
00:43:10 ◼ ► And I think the Apple's challenge with something like the HomePod is that so much of it rested on Siri and, and on audio quality, which is a harder sell.
00:43:20 ◼ ► And like, again, if Siri was the best and people are like, oh yeah, I know you can get these other ones, but this is the one with Siri.
00:43:31 ◼ ► And so that's, you know, the soft, if, if software is a big way, Apple differentiates itself, and in this case, the user interface is Siri, which is not Apple at its best, really isn't, then they're behind the eight ball.
00:43:46 ◼ ► You know, I don't think in the complicated, somewhat complicated list of reasons HomePod failed, I think the actual objective quality of Siri on its own.
00:44:02 ◼ ► Second, it's quality compared to competing products in the space, like Alexa and Google Voice and whatever else.
00:44:11 ◼ ► But I think primarily Alexa, especially for the audience of people who might buy a HomePod.
00:44:19 ◼ ► And then third, people's opinion of Siri, which in my opinion is far worse than the state.
00:44:28 ◼ ► I think that in that rundown, number one, the state of Siri is nowhere near good enough.
00:44:50 ◼ ► And then I think third, I think people's estimation of Siri is even worse than one and two objectively because of their previous experiences with it and the sort of egg freckles aspect of, you know, popular cultures take on how bad these things are.
00:45:09 ◼ ► You know, voice assistants are a little bit like a rental car company or an airline or a cable company, which is that sort of like once they fail you, you never forgive them.
00:45:17 ◼ ► Even if that's not rational and that all of the ones in that category are equally bad, but the one that wronged you, you just are going to put it on your list and say, forget that.
00:45:36 ◼ ► And then Apple actually has the additional problem, which is you have like five different devices that are listening for Siri commands.
00:45:44 ◼ ► And at various points it's been good or bad where the wrong device, like I can't tell you how many times I've tried to play music on my home pods and my phone has started playing music or my Apple watch has told me that I can't play music on my Apple watch.
00:45:59 ◼ ► And you know, again, there are months that will go by where it's all fine and then something will happen.
00:46:06 ◼ ► A software update will happen and then all the other Apple device, multi-device sync stuff falls apart again.
00:46:11 ◼ ► And you know, it's all, it's all in the mix, but yeah, I think Siri is properly blamed as one of the reasons that the home pod didn't do well.
00:46:19 ◼ ► But it also is fair to say that people probably have an even worse opinion of Siri than that.
00:46:25 ◼ ► And part of the issue is that the competition, although it's not great, is better than Siri.
00:46:58 ◼ ► It has a great display with, you know, great brightness and great color fidelity and the speakers.
00:47:20 ◼ ► They're apparently, you know, now that we're so many months into the new keyboard, as durable as anybody would want laptop keyboards to be.
00:47:33 ◼ ► The Apple Silicon models have performance that cannot be matched by any laptop of any kind.
00:47:55 ◼ ► But Mac OS is the best PC operating system and it has the best apps and it's just a great interface.
00:48:05 ◼ ► And it's, you know, you could buy it for the OS and get a great laptop or you can buy it because you think it's a great laptop.
00:48:12 ◼ ► And even if you're going to mostly just run browser tabs, even if you're just going to mostly run Chrome, it is a great laptop.
00:48:19 ◼ ► And you're not really in the Mac software ecosystem, but Mac OS is a great place to run Chrome.
00:48:26 ◼ ► And the HomePod, because Siri plays that role for the HomePod, and it's like, you know, where would MacBook sales be if Mac OS were of the quality and competitive quality of Siri?
00:48:44 ◼ ► Possibly, you know, if it had happened 20 years ago, it's possibly out of business. Really.
00:48:51 ◼ ► Right, I think that that's the thing that people who say like, oh, people just buy Apple stuff because it's cool or because they want to show off the, you know, that they've afforded an expensive computer.
00:49:02 ◼ ► That was always to me just one of the most furious arguments because, you know, I always saw the value in the Mac.
00:49:11 ◼ ► I never felt like I was using a Mac because I wanted to spite Microsoft and that I knew that it was better over on the other side.
00:49:27 ◼ ► And yeah, that's always the thing to think about is like where are the places where Apple is behind versus the places where they have some advantage.
00:49:36 ◼ ► And Siri has, I mean, Siri was first, so they were ahead then, but they have been behind with Siri for quite a while now.
00:49:43 ◼ ► Yeah, and I mean, and you can say that there are areas where the Mac falls short, you know, like a glaring one is that there is no way to buy a big screen laptop other than spending a large amount of money on a MacBook Pro.
00:50:07 ◼ ► You know, it's not like it's perfect, but overall, it's just a basic fundamental story of it is great hardware and it is a great software.
00:50:18 ◼ ► And it may not be for you. Maybe it's not your favorite software, but you can certainly argue that for many people it is superior to the options.
00:50:33 ◼ ► Maybe they knew it. Maybe they just had this sunken feeling the whole time like Siri is going to sync this product. This is great speaker system and the damn thing is going to be sunk.
00:50:41 ◼ ► And they're not like, I don't know, internally. Maybe they're not. Maybe they're as frustrated and angry about Siri as we are and they just can't figure out how to fix it.
00:51:00 ◼ ► I also wonder with HomePod particularly how clarified Apple's view was from the get-go on what exactly is the reason to buy this.
00:51:10 ◼ ► Is it for great sound from music or is it to have a smart thing to talk to and say, hey, Dingus, you know, what's on my calendar today and what's the weather and whatever else you can talk to?
00:51:25 ◼ ► And it's also a HomeKit hub and the new HomePod mini also has the Thread radio stuff in it.
00:51:37 ◼ ► That's right. I think you're right. I think there's a question of what is the actual story of the product.
00:51:42 ◼ ► And that's the opportunity for the HomePod and the HomePod mini in the future for Apple is this question of where do your products fit in the home?
00:51:50 ◼ ► Because, you know, there were those rumors originally that the HomePod was going to have a screen on top and it ends up with this sort of like shifty color thing.
00:51:58 ◼ ► But I think, you know, you could have a product called a HomePod that was a HomeKit hub and maybe had an actual screen on the top.
00:52:11 ◼ ► And then it was also a speaker and maybe it was also Wi-Fi like there's lots of ideas about how you could create a HomePod product that would be like a super Apple-y, smart home something.
00:52:42 ◼ ► I actually bought two more since they canceled it to get them while I could. I really like it.
00:52:48 ◼ ► I just wonder, like, if they had gotten the Apple TV pairing stuff right, which, you know, my pal Mike Hurley has HomePods attached to his Apple TV.
00:52:59 ◼ ► And like when it works, it's magical because it's like doing a whole home theater thing with a stereo pair of HomePods.
00:53:05 ◼ ► But he says it's kind of unreliable and obviously so late in the game that they finally enabled that feature.
00:53:11 ◼ ► And I wonder if even something like that might have been like, oh, you know, but this is why you get them is that you won't believe what kind of sound you get out of your TV when you do this.
00:53:21 ◼ ► Which is why I, you know, a couple of years ago, I think I wrote a piece and I keep running it up the flagpole, which is I wonder if Apple combined the HomePod with the Apple TV and made like a sound bar kind of thing that sounded great.
00:53:34 ◼ ► And streamed everything and you put it under your TV set, if that would be a more clear, clearly defined product that would make people say, you know, you got to buy this because it sounds so great.
00:53:47 ◼ ► But, you know, that was a sort of unique feature that is in those HomePods now, but it's sort of too late for that to be a selling point.
00:53:56 ◼ ► I've got two HomePods hooked up to my Apple TV in the living room, which is why I don't have any in the kitchen anymore.
00:54:15 ◼ ► And one of the reasons I had to buy two more is this right now we have, I have a black one and a white one because that's the only two I had in the house.
00:54:27 ◼ ► And I hooked the two up and I thought they sound so much better than the built-in TV speakers that we've been using.
00:54:35 ◼ ► Because I got the TV about a year ago at the beginning and I had plans to buy a whole, you know, some kind of soundbar thing, right?
00:54:45 ◼ ► But the built-in LG speakers were like good enough that it was like this actually isn't too bad compared to what we're used to.
00:54:53 ◼ ► And so we sort of went through most of the last year just using those and thinking, well, once this whole pandemic is over, I'll figure this out and have, you know, somebody come in and hook up soundbar, whatever.
00:55:08 ◼ ► But now we watch some stuff on TiVo and the TiVo stuff still has to go through the TV and everything else will go through Apple TV.
00:55:34 ◼ ► But we had the original Echo Show for a while, which is the sort of one with the screen.
00:55:38 ◼ ► And I would come out and find my wife cooking dinner or something with music playing on it.
00:55:55 ◼ ► And there's the sound of the, you know, the hood over the stove and the stuff sizzling in a pan or whatever.
00:56:02 ◼ ► And I think that that's fundamentally, that's one of Apple's challenges with that high end HomePod is like most people, I think, whatever.
00:56:11 ◼ ► Well, and then I think it parlays right into a discussion of what the hell is Apple's strategy with Apple TV.
00:56:16 ◼ ► And you and I have actually written quite a bit about it recently and think about it a lot, but it ties into it.
00:56:26 ◼ ► Right. Is maybe a better question, you know, or, you know, they've got the computers in your pants pocket down and the computer at your desk or kitchen counter or wherever you work down.
00:56:42 ◼ ► Yeah. So I have a theory and I want to know what you think of it, which is, I think maybe culturally Apple has a lot of people at Apple maybe have this roadblock, which is, but the iPhone is so good, but the iPad is so good.
00:57:01 ◼ ► And I felt like with for the longest time, that was their argument about doing a smart speaker was like, well, why don't you just talk to your phone?
00:57:08 ◼ ► And I wonder if maybe that gets in the way, like they're so focused on the pants pocket that they haven't thought about the, the living room as much.
00:57:19 ◼ ► I don't know if that's, I don't know if that's true, but I'm trying to honestly, I am struggling to try to figure out why it is that Apple has completely whiffed on smart home stuff that they have the Apple TV over here.
00:57:29 ◼ ► They have the home pod over here. They abandoned the wifi router market at exactly the time where they could have probably made a difference in the wifi router market.
00:57:39 ◼ ► And home kit has been this thing that's also sort of like very amorphous. First, it was very strict. Then it was very loose.
00:57:45 ◼ ► Now they're supposedly working on a new standard with their competitors. I don't know. It's all up in the air, but, but never has seemed coherent.
00:57:56 ◼ ► The home stuff, they seem to be working out. Right. And, and I think the, what are you, what's the, what's the phrase for all the stuff? Home kit, the home kit stuff.
00:58:06 ◼ ► And the knock against home kit was Apple is making anybody who wants to be home kit certified, go through XYZ, a big long laundry list of stuff to comply.
00:58:19 ◼ ► And it's, you know, they can say it's for privacy and they could say it's for security and they could say it's for whatever good reasons.
00:58:25 ◼ ► But Amazon just makes you do like one, two, three, and then you can have a device that talks to Alexa.
00:58:37 ◼ ► It seems like they've worked that through, through pure, just through pure diligence, right? That they've taken it seriously, have never let their eye off the ball.
00:58:48 ◼ ► And slowly but surely it's taken a long time, but now there are all sorts of things like security cameras and stuff that, that home kit was, didn't have options for, or had too few.
00:58:59 ◼ ► I mean, they also loosen their restrictions some because they realized that their original rules basically said that if you didn't ship your piece of hardware with home kit built into it, you could never add it later because they were so strict.
00:59:11 ◼ ► And they, they kind of loosened some of that. Although even there, there's some mysterious kind of bad decisions. They announced home kit secure video, but there were sort of no partners.
00:59:21 ◼ ► And when it did arrive, it was buggy and it didn't, you know, and, and you would have to sort of forgo the apps and then just use the home app.
00:59:29 ◼ ► And I, you know, it's still, it's better. You know, we talked about my report card thing that I do every year.
00:59:36 ◼ ► And like, I think the home kit stuff, like it's gotten better people who knock it, think back a few years, like it's way better than it was.
00:59:49 ◼ ► The slog to get to this point. And it still feels like, you know, there are so many other competitors out there where maybe it is that I just look at it and I think Apple could really done something special in here.
01:00:04 ◼ ► And instead it seems like a low priority and that Apple is just trying to work as hard as it can to get to the table stakes when it could have said, Oh, all of your home stuff is really bad and we're going to do a better job.
01:00:17 ◼ ► And they seem to have just said, we're not going to do that. We're just not going to do it.
01:00:22 ◼ ► Yeah. And it just seems like they just don't have a good answer for, well, okay. Let's say I want to get into this.
01:00:29 ◼ ► I want to get into having a smart home and have lights that I can turn off with voice commands and other stuff like that.
01:00:37 ◼ ► What do I buy? What am I supposed to do? How do I do it? And I don't think they have a good answer for it.
01:00:49 ◼ ► That is interesting because that's Apple saying there are lots of devices out there that are, this is a new standard. People are using the Thread Radio to talk to Internet of Things devices and we have it in the HomePod mini.
01:01:06 ◼ ► And for people who don't know, or people who haven't bought this stuff, like so many smart home things you buy,
01:01:13 ◼ ► there's also like this white plastic blob that you have to plug into your network or plug into a wall somewhere in order to get it to work.
01:01:20 ◼ ► And the idea of the Thread Radio is you buy these things and that little blob was a, you know, was a Thread Radio or it was a competitor to the Thread standard.
01:01:30 ◼ ► It was, you know, the Hue bulb radio or the Lutron Casita Smart Switch radio. I have those two in my house.
01:01:37 ◼ ► Right? And they're great, but you've got this little white plastic box that you got to plug into power and plug into Ethernet.
01:01:43 ◼ ► And the Thread Radio, like that's Apple sort of saying, OK, Thread is a thing. We're going to support it.
01:01:49 ◼ ► And if you buy an object that uses Thread, you don't have to buy that box. It's not necessary. It will go on this and it will work.
01:02:00 ◼ ► And that makes me think, oh, maybe they do have a vision for what the home is and they're just only now starting to roll out what it's going to be.
01:02:11 ◼ ► So if I, I'm not sure I'm that optimistic, but if I was going to give you the bullish case for HomePod or for Apple in the home in general,
01:02:21 ◼ ► that's probably what I'd have to hang my hat on is the fact that they shipped a Thread Radio in that thing and kind of made a big deal out of it.
01:02:28 ◼ ► Because that's Apple saying we are going to play well with all of these other objects and we want to make it easy.
01:02:34 ◼ ► Right. Because you don't want to have to buy those boxes and position them somewhere where you can get wired Internet or wired Ethernet and is close enough for that.
01:02:48 ◼ ► Wouldn't it be great if they could do that for Wi-Fi too? Right. Put a HomePod out. And not only is it a speaker and not only is it Siri, but it's going to extend your Wi-Fi.
01:03:00 ◼ ► And the other the other crazy part of the getting out of the Wi-Fi router business is the in addition to the just having the smart home when you're in the home is the how can you securely contact your home when you're out of the home.
01:03:15 ◼ ► Right. And the router is the point. That's the point where you would want to have this thing that you could trust.
01:03:22 ◼ ► Trust from the outside and actually knows how to integrate with all the stuff on the inside.
01:03:29 ◼ ► Exactly. And you could also argue that the Wi-Fi router home router thing is could have been part of Apple's security and privacy argument.
01:03:40 ◼ ► Right. Like they could have said, we are the ones who are going to going to control what's going on in your home.
01:03:44 ◼ ► Like Eero now has this setting where they will wall off all of your Internet smart home things on a separate network that doesn't see your network so that if they get hacked, they don't see the rest of your network.
01:03:57 ◼ ► And like, but Apple could have led there and potentially even offered like VPNs and things like that as add ons and and and said, we're going to protect your home network.
01:04:06 ◼ ► It's going to be us and you trust us. And, you know, instead, I get why they got out of the router business.
01:04:12 ◼ ► I think they felt like it was just a commodity business and they had nothing to contribute.
01:04:16 ◼ ► It's just unfortunate that like a year or two later, it became clear that there was this whole new wave of technology that was coming that they could have contributed to.
01:04:29 ◼ ► I mean, not not to go too far back down memory lane, but they had great printers, laser writers.
01:04:34 ◼ ► Laser writers were fantastic laser printers and the quality of the laser writer experience helped force HP to compete.
01:04:47 ◼ ► I remember it like being at the Drexel newspaper 25 years ago, and we wound up spending a lot of money on a great high end HP laser printer.
01:05:02 ◼ ► You know, but I totally the Apple getting out of the printer business makes it was regrettable, but it makes sense without the big.
01:05:13 ◼ ► But. With the getting out of the Wi-Fi business where it's like, I get it, where it's similar to printers, where they're commodities.
01:05:29 ◼ ► Right. Whereas the printer thing that there was no thing like that, it was just they just worked a little better.
01:05:35 ◼ ► And it would have been the perfect tie in to a smart home story for them to be at the center of your network, spreading it throughout your house.
01:05:47 ◼ ► But, you know, they there's something there's a story to be told at some point of the middle of the 2010s decade and decisions Apple made,
01:05:54 ◼ ► because there are a lot of interesting decisions that went in there because I'll throw onto the pile the we're out of the display business statement that they made,
01:06:03 ◼ ► which like Nile Patel heard and I was there that was in the piano bar across the hallway from town hall.
01:06:10 ◼ ► And, you know, they they basically said, no, we're not going to do we're not going to do displays anymore.
01:06:18 ◼ ► They were out of the Mac Pro business, basically. They came back out of the display business.
01:06:22 ◼ ► They came back and, you know, whether they come back into doing mesh networking or or whatever, like clearly they decided they were out of that business.
01:06:31 ◼ ► And that I would argue that was a huge mistake on their part to Apple doesn't need to be in every business.
01:06:36 ◼ ► But some of these things are core to their business and core to their customers technological lives.
01:06:40 ◼ ► And the Wi-Fi thing, not to harp on it too much, but like Apple literally seeded everybody's home networks to cable companies and failing that Google and Amazon.
01:06:49 ◼ ► Yeah, just seems like or or you buy one of these Netgear things that first off is easily hacked.
01:06:54 ◼ ► I'm sorry, Netgear, but like you hear stories about those things getting hacked and they look like they got like four antennas sticking out of them and stuff and they look horrible.
01:07:04 ◼ ► And then you look at something like Eero and you're like, oh, well, that's what Apple would have designed.
01:07:19 ◼ ► And the way you set it up is you hold a button and it creates its own Wi-Fi network temporarily.
01:07:26 ◼ ► And the instructions say and then log in with username, admin, password, admin, and then you can set it up and tell it how to get on your real Wi-Fi network.
01:07:37 ◼ ► And it's like it's not that insecure, I guess. But why even have the admin admin thing if it's just a temporary Wi-Fi network that you connect?
01:07:46 ◼ ► You know what I mean? It's like I don't know whatever thinking you had, but there's some line of thought that some engineers have that, well, we'll just give admin admin as the username and password.
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01:10:00 ◼ ► I always feel like if I write enough about something, I should talk about it when I do a podcast.
01:10:05 ◼ ► But on the other hand, it's like me having written about it, I don't have much more to add.
01:10:17 ◼ ► And I was thinking about it. I just saw it right when I was watching. I mentioned it also. I watched Drexel, Illinois, before we recorded today.
01:10:29 ◼ ► And there's like a young black teenager who is there telling you about the Microsoft Surface and the MacBook next to him.
01:10:39 ◼ ► And telling you that he likes the Surface because it's detachable and it has a touchscreen.
01:10:46 ◼ ► And the MacBook just has this weird touch bar. Why do they do that? And it doesn't detach.
01:10:52 ◼ ► And look at the price. $1300 for the MacBook versus $900 for the Surface. And it plays games better.
01:11:12 ◼ ► Some of the pushback I get from people on Twitter is that if somebody who writes a generally likes Apple products site like Daring Fireball takes issue with an Intel ad, it's like some kind of knee-jerk reaction.
01:11:29 ◼ ► And it's like, no, not really. These are just bad ads. And they're sort of embarrassing.
01:11:35 ◼ ► Yeah, you remember back in the bad old days, every now and then you see Apple get hit with a negative ad from somebody.
01:11:45 ◼ ► And as a user of Apple products, you're like, ouch. That stings. This is not that kind of ad.
01:11:53 ◼ ► These ads are like, what are you doing? Intel, what are you doing? First off, why are you spending your money on this?
01:12:00 ◼ ► Second, you've got problems already in your own space with more ARM products running Windows and with your competition outgunning you on the high end especially.
01:12:20 ◼ ► So it's not actually about Intel processors at all. It's more like, we just broke up and now I'm angry so I'm going to throw some shade at you.
01:12:37 ◼ ► That's the problem I have with it is that it's not really extolling the virtues of Intel even.
01:12:42 ◼ ► It's extolling the virtues of the Windows PC ecosystem, even though some of those Windows PCs are also not running Intel processors.
01:12:51 ◼ ► It's, I don't know, it's just like Intel's got so many problems right now and having Apple break up with it seems so low on the list that they would do a whole sort of spite campaign.
01:13:02 ◼ ► And yeah, it doesn't really sting. There are way better ways to advocate for what's going on in the PC market and the Intel ads just sort of seem sad. I don't know.
01:13:15 ◼ ► There's a part of me that wants to say that the bigger problem with Apple Silicon Max, the first round and the first reaction and the first, you know,
01:13:27 ◼ ► put them in real world reviewers hands, give them to real people selling to real people, have people issue their feedback and the resounding, wow, these things are really fast.
01:13:38 ◼ ► The system runs better. The battery life is truly, you know, almost twice what it was on Intel versions they were just selling a few months ago.
01:13:47 ◼ ► Isn't that Intel is losing the business of selling chips to Apple for four to five million Macs per quarter, which is, you know, it is a loss, but it's not that devastating.
01:14:01 ◼ ► It's that it's opened the eyes to the world at large to how far behind the Intel platform has fallen.
01:14:09 ◼ ► Yeah, because we have these ARM tablets running Android and iOS, iPad OS, and everybody has phones running Android and iOS.
01:14:21 ◼ ► And we see these, you know, wow, this seems so much better and performant. And it felt like, you know, and you can look at Geekbench numbers and say, wow, it really, you know, this is actually faster than a MacBook.
01:14:35 ◼ ► It seems like they could run a MacBook on this, but because the whole Windows on ARM thing and I know it exists, but it's never it just doesn't have they didn't solve all the compatibility issues in the way that Apple did with Mac OS where there's very little that doesn't run on a Mac, an M1 MacBook or and even when you when it runs not natively when you're running the stuff through Rosetta 2 for the most part, it's actually faster.
01:15:04 ◼ ► Then having run it on a recent Intel MacBook, that's how fast these are and how good Rosetta is.
01:15:11 ◼ ► Windows doesn't have that sort of you won't even notice story. Almost anybody who's very few people who aren't true computer experts are ever going to run into anything with an Apple Silicon Mac where it's incompatible with something.
01:15:27 ◼ ► It's something that doesn't run that they expect to run it. That's not true on Windows. And so therefore.
01:15:36 ◼ ► And also the ARM chips that they have shipped with certain Windows running on ARM products aren't great ARM chips, period.
01:15:47 ◼ ► So it's our it's the world's first look at a PC class operating system running on good competes with the high end of any chips, period ARM chips.
01:15:58 ◼ ► And it's like, wow, that whole Intel platform is behind. It's just that's to me is the reaction like the world's reaction to it.
01:16:07 ◼ ► And Intel's if this is their response marketing wise, it's like you don't even realize it.
01:16:13 ◼ ► Yeah, that's that's the thing that's disturbing about it, I would say, is that the the CEO saying we're behind to his employees behind closed doors and being like, we got to catch up, we got to work on this.
01:16:23 ◼ ► That makes sense. The you know, first off, Intel doesn't OK. Intel doesn't sell products. That's also part of this, right?
01:16:33 ◼ ► Intel doesn't sell products. You don't go out and say, give me an Intel that you buy a PC.
01:16:38 ◼ ► And so they're basically doing the heavy lifting for, I guess, Microsoft. But again, a lot of the exciting stuff that's happening in the PC market is not running on Intel processors.
01:16:49 ◼ ► And I don't know, is it just a smokescreen because they're so embarrassed by the M1 Macs? I don't know.
01:16:55 ◼ ► It just seems it's it's just sad. And I would like to see Intel Intel is one of the great companies in the technology industry.
01:17:03 ◼ ► They've lost their way. I would love to see them find their way. I would love a story where they decide they're going to fab other people's chips.
01:17:10 ◼ ► And at some point down the road, Apple comes back to them and says, we want to make some of our chips here in America.
01:17:16 ◼ ► And we're going to and we're using TSMC over here, but we're going to use Intel for this chip now.
01:17:26 ◼ ► I don't want them to fail, but whatever they're doing now is not working. And these ads don't.
01:17:34 ◼ ► Just why? Why? Why waste your money? I really I would really like to think that Justin Long really is making a lot of money from this.
01:17:43 ◼ ► Because otherwise, I'm worried that he needs work or something. You know, working actor. I don't blame him.
01:17:49 ◼ ► I don't blame him. They're paying him. Well, I don't blame him. You know, it's and he does the best with some bad material, in my opinion.
01:17:59 ◼ ► He is a very likable fellow. I do think that somebody raised this and I didn't really think of it, but I did.
01:18:13 ◼ ► what does it mean, though, that if you clearly have exhibited the fact that you might go to the competitor and do an ad that, you know.
01:18:22 ◼ ► You know what I mean? Like, does it reduce his hire ability to sell Coke later on if Coke has to then worry that as soon as his contract is up,
01:18:32 ◼ ► he's going to go to Pepsi and and talk about how Coke rots your teeth out or something?
01:18:39 ◼ ► I don't know. I mean, that seems to happen so infrequently, but at the same time, Justin Long at this point is recognizable enough that he's going to be hired because people want a "oh, it's that guy" kind of approach to their ad.
01:18:57 ◼ ► but it strikes me that he's kind of in this uncanny valley now where he's too recognizable to be an anonymous actor in an ad, but not recognizable enough to be a celebrity endorser.
01:19:12 ◼ ► Right. He's not Matthew McConaughey, you know, picking his nose driving a Lincoln down the highway.
01:19:23 ◼ ► So it's the rare it may be that it's the rare case where he can get a commercial job because most commercial people are going to be like, well, why would I pay?
01:19:32 ◼ ► Everybody's going to focus on that. It's Justin Long from, you know, those Apple ads and Galaxy Quest and Ed.
01:19:38 ◼ ► Right. Like he's in that Die Hard movie. Right. Like, oh, it's that guy. And that's not what you want in a lot of commercial casting.
01:19:48 ◼ ► He is a he's a likable actor who's been in a lot of stuff that I've liked and I'm glad he got paid. But yeah, it's sad.
01:19:55 ◼ ► Yeah. And it just comes down to the you know, you mentioned it, the Intel isn't really selling a product and like the original Intel inside campaign with the done done done done done.
01:20:05 ◼ ► You know, the little jingle that none of us will ever forget for the rest of our lives. There was a point to it.
01:20:10 ◼ ► I don't know that it was money well spent, but I don't think it was money wasted where, you know, whatever you think of competitors like AMD, there was something to be established for Intel saying, look, if your PC doesn't have this badge on it.
01:20:25 ◼ ► That's right. Literally stuck on it. It's a second. It's a second rate computer. This is the best Intel's the best for the sticker.
01:20:32 ◼ ► It's a symbol of quality. Right. Don't get a right which may or may not have been true arguable right in the in the mid 2000s, but it was a great ad campaign because it was basically like PCs that don't have the Intel label on them are like crab with a K.
01:20:49 ◼ ► Yeah, no buy some crab artificial crab meat at the store. Well, it's it smells like a crab. You like don't get it. It's bad. It's bad. Don't get the fake stuff. Get the real stuff like that.
01:21:00 ◼ ► I think that was very effective and also very smart on their part because if I were their competitor trying to make PCs with my chips in them, I'd be like, oh, Intel, like you're making your devaluing us.
01:21:11 ◼ ► And that was that was a brilliant campaign. And that's why there are all those stickers, by the way, which is why there was that guy in 2007 who was like, well, you put stickers on your Macs that are running Intel and Steve Jobs is like, no, no, no, I just rewatched it.
01:21:26 ◼ ► He was they laughed. Oh, she laughed a little bit. She'll realize it's a tough question. And he looks any and he looks at jobs and jobs is clearly you could see it on chillers face.
01:21:38 ◼ ► He's like, ah, Steve's going to handle this. Thank God. And he's like, well, what can I say? We like our own stickers better. And that's a perfect answer. Everybody laughed.
01:21:48 ◼ ► It didn't make a jerk out of the questioner and it didn't throw Intel into the bus by saying we're not going to put their ugly stickers on our beautiful Macs back in 2007.
01:21:57 ◼ ► I deconstructed this entire thing because of you, by the way, because of you. Yeah. Because jobs is don't get me wrong. We love working with Intel.
01:22:04 ◼ ► We're proud to ship Intel products and Macs. They're screamers. You know, we'd rather not tell them about the product that's inside the box.
01:22:09 ◼ ► Everyone knows we use Intel processors. And then you said, uh, will someone please tell me who asked this question so I can name him jackass of the week?
01:22:19 ◼ ► It's like a rare public Q and a with Steve jobs and someone asks why are they won't booger up their computers with horrid stickers.
01:22:25 ◼ ► And the answer is it's a guy named Bob Keefe who worked at Cox newspapers. And, uh, you know, he was very good natured when I, when I called him out about it, it was like, it's that guy.
01:22:37 ◼ ► But, um, but yeah, he was just like, I'm a business reporter. I was asking a question. Like he just didn't, he didn't like even get what it was about.
01:22:47 ◼ ► And it turns out he was actually writing a story about the Intel inside marketing program.
01:22:50 ◼ ► So he was really hijacking the whole PR campaign or the whole press conference so that he could write his, he could get a question for his story, which is a classic, uh, kind of bad reporter technique, I would say, or rude reporter technique where it's like, forget about all this stuff.
01:23:06 ◼ ► Give me a quote from my story, Steve. Uh, but it was, uh, that was a, it was quite a moment and people really thought like, is Intel going to make them put stickers on there?
01:23:16 ◼ ► And it's like, Steve jobs is never going to do it. He's never going to do it. Right. It was one of the, not even on the box. It's just not, there's no Intel logo anywhere. Not interested.
01:23:26 ◼ ► Right. And I wouldn't be surprised if Apple truly paid more per processor, because I'm sure Intel was like, okay, you don't want to put stickers on. You don't have to put stickers on, but if you do put the stickers on, we will cut 5% off.
01:23:39 ◼ ► Yeah. My understanding is there was like also like marketing money where they would like give you money for your commercials. If you put the little animation of the Intel logo and Apple is not interested.
01:23:47 ◼ ► The line, by the way, this is maybe the best line, uh, from the whole thing, which is at the end, Steve says, we put ourselves in the customer's shoes and we say, what do we want stuck in our product when we take it out of the box?
01:24:07 ◼ ► It was a Mac world. I put a link in our little notes. You can put it in the show notes. That story is still up there, which is great.
01:24:12 ◼ ► They just changed their CMS over at Mac world. And I'm glad all my, all my stories I've written in the last 20 years are still there. That was from 2007. Good times.
01:24:24 ◼ ► See, that's the, I, I regret it to some degree, but it also is the difference between where daring fireball is today in 2007. I would never consider calling somebody like that.
01:24:34 ◼ ► If we got a Q and a with, you know, Tim Cook and, and jaws and whoever else, I would never consider calling them jackass. It's just daring. Fireball's too prominent.
01:24:44 ◼ ► And I I've cringe a little bit that I did then, but also in 2007 during fireball was read by people only by people who, uh, knew exactly what I was talking about.
01:24:57 ◼ ► Like, Hey, we only have so much time with these guys. Don't ask a bad question, but it's not the worst question either. Um, yeah.
01:25:05 ◼ ► And, and my piece that, that we can link to basically says, although I wouldn't have asked this question and I think it was kind of a dumb reason to ask it.
01:25:12 ◼ ► It did get very interesting things from Steve jobs and Phil Schiller about their product marketing, you know, uh, philosophy.
01:25:21 ◼ ► And like, it's really actually quite good. And that last line about like, what do we want if we were a customer, what do we want stuck on our product?
01:25:28 ◼ ► And the answer is nothing. It's like, yeah, exactly. So it was in the end, I think it was worth what we got out of it, but it was a moment where everybody's like, who, who asked that question?
01:25:38 ◼ ► The answer is it's some guy from the Austin American Statesman who it was working on a story. It's chill, chill, everybody. It's fine.
01:25:47 ◼ ► They don't like to explain themselves. I always think of the line from, uh, there will be blood where the Daniel Day Lewis protagonist at one point just says, I don't like to explain myself.
01:26:00 ◼ ► And that's sort of, is sort of the theme of the whole movie. Um, uh, but Apple does not like to explain itself in most cases.
01:26:08 ◼ ► And it was interesting just to hear them actually, you know, the, the lack of stickers on the palm rest of, of a Mac book or a power book or an iBook or any of the laptops they've ever made speaks for itself mostly.
01:26:26 ◼ ► Yeah. Yeah. And in the jobs era, especially, I think Steve Jobs really liked the idea that Apple was a black box and you just couldn't understand what magic things came out of it.
01:26:34 ◼ ► And that was it. And you didn't, we're never going to explain our magic tricks, right? No good magician explains their tricks.
01:26:41 ◼ ► I honestly feel, I feel like in some ways it was more of a magic trick mindset with Steve Jobs in that era, but at that, in other ways, Apple today is even less communicative about the why of what they do.
01:26:56 ◼ ► And it's almost like now it's like institutionalized. It's like cultural as opposed to strategic.
01:27:02 ◼ ► Sure. Well, I think, I think Steve, when he wrote the book on what Apple's culture was going to be when he came back to Apple, a lot of stuff that Steve believed became part of that culture.
01:27:14 ◼ ► I don't think necessarily all of it was good. I think in the bulk it was good, but I think lots of quirks of his personality made it in there.
01:27:21 ◼ ► And that some of that stuff is getting unwound. I think that after Steve passed away and Katie Cotton left Apple and, and then, and now, you know, Steve Dowling has left Apple as well.
01:27:37 ◼ ► And, uh, you see it like your talk show interviews at WWDC. Hope we get those again someday, uh, in person, like, and the podcast interviews they do now, honestly, for a bunch of us podcasters, Apple is one comfortable with people who are not high level executives talking about products in detail.
01:27:57 ◼ ► And two, I would say more open, not wide open. They're all very well-trained, but more open about, um, some of the thought processes about a product.
01:28:09 ◼ ► Like I said, they're well-trained, but like there's a little more, I feel like there that they're willing to share. It's very clearly what they're willing to share.
01:28:18 ◼ ► But there is, I feel like there's more there when we went like a couple of years ago, we went to a, we were in the same briefing, I think, or at least on the same day in New York city.
01:28:27 ◼ ► And, you know, Phil Schiller is there and he's talking about the 16 inch MacBook pro and, you know, I didn't think I just got a product litany from Phil Schiller.
01:28:42 ◼ ► That was maybe a little bit more than they would have let out of the box before. They still weren't going to talk about the butterfly keyboard.
01:28:49 ◼ ► Right. But you got a little bit more. So I think they've, they've tweaked it and they've experimented with that.
01:28:55 ◼ ► And, uh, and we get more out of them out of the black box than we used to, but make no mistake. It's all intentional.
01:29:03 ◼ ► Yeah, definitely. Uh, all right. Let me take a break here and thank our next sponsor. It's our good friends at HelloFresh.
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01:31:58 ◼ ► hellofresh.com/talkshow12. All right, here we go. Okay. 20 years of Mac OS X. 20 years ago. Yeah. Today.
01:32:10 ◼ ► I have got a link in here to the, to the press release. I got the box in my hand. I don't have the box anymore.
01:32:19 ◼ ► I think I was on the side core technologies. Aqua is that a technology Darwin quartz with PDF imaging, open GL 3d quicktime five classic carbon and cocoa.
01:32:34 ◼ ► They are on one line. Java two standard edition, true type type one open type. That's all the font technologies on one line.
01:32:41 ◼ ► Apple script, color sync, you and Apple script to get some full point. That's nice. Unicode BSD networking, Midian multi-channel audio and CD burning.
01:32:49 ◼ ► That's just the core technologies. The list goes on and there's a little flap on the front that, that has like a introducing Mac OS X,
01:32:57 ◼ ► the super modern operating system that delivers the power of Unix with the legendary simplicity and elegance of the Macintosh.
01:33:05 ◼ ► Yeah. 20 years since they shipped the boxed copy of 10.0. It's muddy, right? Because in the fall of 2000, they shipped the public beta.
01:33:18 ◼ ► And in the fall of 2001, they shipped 10.1, which I would argue is sort of the first usable version of 10.
01:33:26 ◼ ► And we're kind of in the middle of these three anniversaries, but it is the, you know, 10.0 shipped date is, is now 20 years ago.
01:33:34 ◼ ► Here's their description from the press release. Mac OS X is slightly different than the box copies.
01:33:39 ◼ ► Mac OS X is the world's most advanced operating system combining, combining the power and openness of Unix,
01:33:45 ◼ ► spelled with all caps, with the legendary ease and use and broad applications base of Macintosh.
01:33:53 ◼ ► And the quote in the PR from Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO, Mac OS X is the most important software from Apple since the original Macintosh operating system in 1984.
01:34:03 ◼ ► That revolutionized the entire industry. We can't wait for Mac users around the globe to experience its stability, power and elegance.
01:34:23 ◼ ► When I wrote the 10.1, because I looked it up, I edited our big feature about the public beta at Mac world back in the day.
01:34:30 ◼ ► And then from that point on, I wrote the review, basically the feature of every release since then.
01:34:43 ◼ ► And over the years, every summer I end up sitting in my backyard under the redwood tree writing about OS X releases.
01:34:55 ◼ ► But 10.1, you talk about the speed, and that was my real clearest memory of the early days is we got to the 10.1 beta releases.
01:35:09 ◼ ► Like I could stay booted into this because the public beta and even 10.0, it was more like you booted in there and then you're like, oh, okay.
01:35:37 ◼ ► And in this era, there was the G3s and the G4s and really that you needed to have a G4 for it to really feel comfortable.
01:35:46 ◼ ► I had, I forget the exact model, but I had a PowerBook G3 because when it shipped 20 years ago this weekend, I was still working full-time at Barebone Software, makers of BB Edit.
01:36:17 ◼ ► And my home computer was a PowerMac 9600 350 that I had bought in '97 or '98 and never was able to run Mac OS X on because they originally said this would qualify.
01:36:31 ◼ ► And then as the years went on, they moved the cutoff date to like G3 or later, which was fair.
01:36:38 ◼ ► But I had a PowerBook G3 that always ran OS X, and I had my power, my 9600 that ran Mac OS 9.
01:36:48 ◼ ► And it was a slower computer because it was older, even though it was a fancy pants, you know, big ass Mac PowerMac from then.
01:37:06 ◼ ► Like, oh, my God, I could just like go through, I just go through emails down, down, down, loads an email, loads an email.
01:37:28 ◼ ► It's sort of, you know, but it worked out partially because they, you know, maybe they had to, maybe they didn't want to.
01:37:37 ◼ ► But they, you know, they kept Mac OS 9 going for a few more years until they had the ceremonial coffin.
01:37:48 ◼ ► Yet the truth is that the OS 10 transition was a multi-year transition and not just like from when they announced that Steve Jobs was coming back in January '97 and he was bringing Next Step with him.
01:38:00 ◼ ► And that was going to be the foundation of Mac OS 10, which was like, that's the starting gun, right?
01:38:07 ◼ ► But the truth is that even when they shipped the public beta in the fall of 2000, even when they shipped 10.0 in the spring of 2001, and even when they shipped 10.1 in the fall of 2001, they weren't really done even then.
01:38:22 ◼ ► Like, you could really argue that the public beta and 10.0 and 10.1 were more for developers.
01:38:28 ◼ ► To get all of the software over and to prove that there was momentum there to the user.
01:38:35 ◼ ► And I think honestly, part of Apple's strategy all along was not that they were going to make OS 10 more efficient, although they did.
01:38:46 ◼ ► And keeping in mind that they had to build like all these features, the compatibility features with the Mac, like it was an enormous undertaking.
01:39:06 ◼ ► Like 97, all of 98, all of 99, all of 2000, and probably even if 10.1 is the finish line, that's almost five years.
01:39:26 ◼ ► It feels like it would be a long time if Apple announced some new product now, preannounced, and said it'll be here in two or three years and it winds up taking five.
01:39:42 ◼ ► Because even along in the early years when they didn't even have a beta to show yet, it's like, well, this is obviously big enough that taking at least two to three years is reasonable.
01:39:53 ◼ ► They had the Mac OS X server released that still looked like Mac OS 9 and used the platinum interface.
01:39:59 ◼ ► And I think that that is still part of Apple's engineering and product development culture, which is that you've got to make something that you're willing to put out in the world and say this is real.
01:40:13 ◼ ► You can't just idly work there for years because that is how Apple got into the mess that it was in in the '90s where they kept announcing these big, new, bold operating system initiatives.
01:40:28 ◼ ► And we'll just go off and work on them, and we'll work on this one in partnership with IBM and, you know, Taligent.
01:40:35 ◼ ► And then there was Copeland, which never shipped, which was their thing that they talked about for a long time.
01:40:53 ◼ ► Honestly, the sequel was literally the stuff that they originally promised for Copeland and realized they couldn't deliver before they realized they couldn't deliver any of it.
01:41:14 ◼ ► This is one of the ways that Apple is so much different from Microsoft, I would say in a better way, but certainly in a different way, is that it was clear that this is where they were going.
01:41:40 ◼ ► The Mac was going to die because there's no way that Classic Mac OS was going to survive for any longer.
01:41:56 ◼ ► So after demonstrating that they were serious about this OSN server, public beta 10.0, 10.1, there also came that moment where they said no new Macs are going to ship.
01:42:12 ◼ ► And they, again, five year span and at least a couple of years where they're actively publicly releasing OS 10.
01:42:19 ◼ ► But at some point it had it was either going to work or that was going to be the end of the Mac.
01:42:40 ◼ ► After taking a brief hiatus from outdoor activities and routine workouts, it's time to get back to the grind with the new spring essentials from Mack Weldon.
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01:43:07 ◼ ► Perfect for everyday wear or to be layered underneath workout gear and for sweatpants you can wear outside without feeling like you're wearing sweatpants.
01:43:19 ◼ ► Now, when John Siracusa was on this show an episode ago, I told him I ordered a pair of those.
01:44:01 ◼ ► They got the men's essentials, socks, shirts, hoodies, undershirts, all that sort of thing.
01:44:06 ◼ ► Polos, stuff that you can wear as we enter the world and go back out and see people other than the people we live at, live with.
01:44:26 ◼ ► Once you reach level two, and level two, all you have to do is spend a grand total of 200 bucks.
01:45:00 ◼ ► So, you can get 20% off your first order by going to Mack Weldon, M-A-C-K, Weldon, W-E-L-D-O-N, dot com, slash talk show.
01:45:34 ◼ ► Dynamic memory management, eliminating out of memory messages, or needing to adjust the memory for applications.
01:46:01 ◼ ► And if you cared about the Mac for the reasons I did, because of the elegance of the user experience, this was crazy.
01:46:09 ◼ ► If DOS and Windows were the one that worked like this, we would have been merciless about it.
01:46:20 ◼ ► This is one thing all Mac users knew how to do then was get info, because what you do is you have an application, you would get info, and at the bottom, there was like suggested memory.
01:46:36 ◼ ► Like the maximum memory and the minimum memory, and you could change how many kilobytes of memory the application would get when it launched.
01:46:46 ◼ ► And then when you'd launch the application, let's say you gave it an even one megabyte, it would get one megabyte of RAM, and that's all it got, and that's all it would ever get.
01:46:57 ◼ ► And then it would have to do everything it wanted to do with that allocation of memory.
01:47:03 ◼ ► If it wasn't using all of it and some other application needed more, well, tough luck, because that application's running, it's already gotten it.
01:47:15 ◼ ► Usually, and then it would tell you, it would suggest, quit, get info, try giving this application more memory, and then try again.
01:47:31 ◼ ► Not really the Mac experience that you would think, and certainly by the year 2001 seemed a little antiquated.
01:47:43 ◼ ► Yeah, and so you would do the voodoo of like, oh, my app isn't working right, let's get info and just give it more memory.
01:48:16 ◼ ► BB Edit, which I've been using since 1993, did not require you to go through these shenanigans because it implemented its own memory management, and so you could open very large text files without assigning the application more memory.
01:48:41 ◼ ► And that was built into Photoshop from very early on, the idea that if it couldn't deal with the whole file, it would just start writing things out to the disk.
01:48:53 ◼ ► I was just talking to a friend who's, let's say, familiar with the matter with the source code of Photoshop.
01:49:01 ◼ ► There's a surprising amount of code that dates to around 1991 or 1992 that's still inside Photoshop.
01:49:20 ◼ ► Unprecedented stability and performance, Mac OS X features an industrial-strength Unix-based foundation that provides powerful advanced features such as true protected memory, preemptive multitasking, and advanced memory management, giving your Macintosh bulletproof reliability.
01:49:35 ◼ ► And I will say, the least reliable computer that I used day to day in my entire life was in the last couple of years of classic Mac OS.
01:49:57 ◼ ► Yeah, browsing the web was always dangerous because it just seemed -- I think because browsing the web has always been computationally very, very hard.
01:50:07 ◼ ► Even today, you know, testing the speed of web browsers is still a great way to test systems.
01:50:22 ◼ ► You would just be browsing the web, going to a page that you've been to before, and then your whole computer would just lock up because some kind of memory error, corrupted memory outside the browser.
01:51:02 ◼ ► That was why the memory thing -- and even if it didn't die, you're like, "I better restart now because this is dangerous."
01:51:24 ◼ ► The other thing I recall is, like, when I went off to college, I got a Unix account -- I guess it was VMS originally, but, like, a Unix account.
01:51:33 ◼ ► And I learned how to use VI and, you know, command line stuff that I'd never learned before.
01:51:41 ◼ ► And then there was this period where I became a Mac user and I never thought about it again.
01:51:52 ◼ ► It was a real Jurassic Park kind of moment where it was like, "It's Unix. I know this."
01:52:00 ◼ ► It's like I had no idea that would happen when I learned it in, like, the fall of 1988.
01:52:19 ◼ ► So for most of my years there, I did it from a Mac, either on the campus, on the network, and -- forget the terminal program we used over the network.
01:52:52 ◼ ► It's possible. That was a great app, because not only was it just basically a dumb terminal where, you know, your modem is connected to the network, and then you're just doing command line stuff, and the individual characters are flying over the modem.
01:53:04 ◼ ► But the nice thing about it is that that Zmodem format that they had there, there was a command line command you could give on the other end that basically said, "Hey, that file there, send it to me."
01:53:23 ◼ ► And it would just pop up a window that said "Transferring File," and it would save onto your Mac, and it was like magic.
01:53:30 ◼ ► And if your Macs were officially on the Internet themselves, that's how you would move files around.
01:53:35 ◼ ► Yeah. Either that, or if it was a text file, I would just LS it, cat it, copy and paste it into BV edit.
01:53:49 ◼ ► But that is partly why, to me, this 20-year anniversary is pretty interesting, because it's not exactly halfway, but we've had 20 years of Mac OS X being the Mac operating system, and then 1984 to 2001, the only one was the classic Mac OS.
01:54:06 ◼ ► But because of that transition, that at least three-year transition, like 2004 was maybe where we could really say Mac OS 9 and classic was dead, and you were really hanging on to a legacy machine at that point.
01:54:20 ◼ ► There were 20 years of relevance for the classic Mac OS from 1984 to maybe 2004. There's that three-year overlap.
01:54:34 ◼ ► Here's one. The Aqua combines superior ease of use with amazing new functionality, such as the dock, a breakthrough for organizing documents and document windows.
01:54:47 ◼ ► There's a whole page about explaining the dock inside the box here in the little manual that they have.
01:54:53 ◼ ► Because the dock, yeah. I wonder how much of the dock thing was also like Next Step Pride, because that was like similar to stuff that had been on Next Step, and there were so few Next Step UI conventions that came over, because obviously the message came down that the Mac users wanted to look like the Mac, and the Next Step people, I suspect, were maybe a little unhappy with that.
01:55:18 ◼ ► And of course, our friend James Thompson worked on a version of that that I think never shipped, but he was one of the people who was writing the dock.
01:55:25 ◼ ► They literally hired the guy who wrote a dock for classic Mac OS drag thing and put him on the dock team, which I find hilarious.
01:55:32 ◼ ► Like, hey, there's the shareware guy who's doing something kind of like this. Bring him in. Get that guy in here.
01:55:39 ◼ ► It was very controversial for long-term Mac users, because it didn't seem to work in ways that we expected things to work on the Mac.
01:55:50 ◼ ► And some of that is sort of hard to put to words. But the, you know, like drag thing wasn't necessarily something that anybody would have endorsed.
01:56:08 ◼ ► Yeah. I mean, the closest is that there was the application switcher that you could drag out of the menu bar.
01:56:18 ◼ ► But the Mac OS 10 doc was running apps, not running, like it is now, running apps, not running apps, and then whatever you could drag in, like a folder, a file, whatever.
01:56:34 ◼ ► Well, let's get to that. But the thing that made drag thing feel Mac-like and made the pull-off application switcher feel Mac-like was that they were pallets.
01:56:51 ◼ ► And it was also legitimate in the Mac universe of classic Mac OS for a pallet to be system-wide as opposed to application-wide.
01:57:04 ◼ ► And in fact, that was all considered very normal. And it's in a way that idiomatic, like you just idiomatic understand, "Oh, this is totally acceptable."
01:57:22 ◼ ► And when I switch away from QuarkXPress, I can still see my document window in the background, but the pallets all disappear because it's no longer the active application.
01:57:31 ◼ ► So an application pallet would appear when the app was active and disappear when it was inactive automatically.
01:57:41 ◼ ► Global pallets like drag thing or the application switcher were also pallets and they look the same, but you just understood, "Well, that's my drag thing pallet.
01:57:53 ◼ ► The dock isn't a window. It's this thing, right? And it's stuck on the side of your screen.
01:58:00 ◼ ► Exactly. Not a window. It's something different. It doesn't follow the rules. Stuck in one particular location or other.
01:58:17 ◼ ► Right. And that offended my sensibilities of wanting Mac OS X to be more of just a modern...
01:58:38 ◼ ► And it certainly, however much the fancy transparency and everything is in the shadows that are actually shadows as opposed to just a one-pixel black line drawn around whatever you want it to.
01:58:49 ◼ ► I get it that these shadows are computationally expensive and that's what's making everything slow when you move windows around and just drag menus down from the top.
01:59:06 ◼ ► And in a way that Next and Mac were very copacetic in that way, even when they were separate products.
01:59:13 ◼ ► Next never had the weird windows thing where there's the application window and inside the application window were the document windows.
01:59:29 ◼ ► I mean, the weirdest thing they tried to do early on was maybe put the Apple menu in the middle.
01:59:41 ◼ ► That's right. And it's funny because now you listen to John Saricusa talk and he's made a little second career for himself as developer of apps that bring back OS 9, classic Mac OS features to Mac OS X, which DragThing did for many years, like the trash can.
02:00:00 ◼ ► Like the windowing, for me, the big change in Mac OS X was how the rules of windowing worked, where if you clicked one window in an app, all the windows from that app came forward by default, which on the old Mac OS, it didn't work that way at all.
02:00:19 ◼ ► And they did rethink a whole bunch of those things that, you know, you can now buy software written by John Saricusa to make it revert back the way it was in 1991.
02:00:28 ◼ ► Like if you had three BB Edit windows open and three web browser windows open, when you clicked on one of the BB Edit windows, all three windows would come forward and all three of them would be in front of all three of your web browser windows.
02:00:54 ◼ ► You know, I think I was opposed to this at first, but never as, I also saw the logic of it.
02:01:02 ◼ ► Like I could see, I was like, well, I see it both ways and you still could bring a way to this day.
02:01:08 ◼ ► You still can't, if you click the application in the dock, it's still the windows come forward.
02:01:17 ◼ ► And in classic Mac OS, because again, because classic Mac OS originated as a single application interface, kind of like the iPhone and the iPad really when you think about it, originally you could only run one thing.
02:01:30 ◼ ► And when they went to multi finder and then to multitasking and system seven, they kept the concept that when an app was front most, it was front most like those pallets, right?
02:01:40 ◼ ► It's like when you're in the app, all its windows come forward because you're in an app.
02:01:49 ◼ ► Yeah, it was always, I guess in the, I think maybe, and I think maybe in classic Mac OS, it had to be this way, maybe just for technical limitations, but any way of activating an application, any way always brought all of its open windows forward.
02:02:04 ◼ ► Whereas Mac OS 10 drew this distinction between activating a window by just clicking on it.
02:02:10 ◼ ► I kind of see the logic that the Mac OS 10 way is actually more sensible because at least then if you want to interleave one app, one window from this app with another window from another app and not have them always bring forward all the windows, you can do it whereas you couldn't before.
02:02:35 ◼ ► But the dock, oh boy, the dock I felt was a foreign invader in the Mac interface for at least a decade.
02:02:46 ◼ ► I guess very early on I tried to hide it and there were command line tricks to kill it permanently and replace it with third party utilities.
02:02:55 ◼ ► But I gave up on that at some point and lived with it, but I always felt it was like a grain of sand in my eye.
02:03:02 ◼ ► But at some point, maybe halfway through, maybe 10 years ago, I just sort of accepted it and see it.
02:03:09 ◼ ► And now knowing that it's 20 years and how little the dock has actually changed, the dock of today is remarkably similar to the dock of Mac OS 10 1.0.
02:03:22 ◼ ► And if you take cosmetic differences aside, like how is the glass look of the dock styled, you take that aside.
02:03:36 ◼ ► I mean, they still have the zoom effect so you can scrub your mouse over and have the icons jump in size underneath your Mac.
02:03:44 ◼ ► They still have the then incredibly impressive demo of the genie effect of a window getting sucked into the dock.
02:04:00 ◼ ► There's more organizational structure for having folders in there than there was before.
02:04:10 ◼ ► Right. And at this point, 20 years in, it is clearly this is this is I guess where I'm going with this whole point on the dock.
02:04:17 ◼ ► It is clearly as much a fundamental can't go anywhere, can't really change it at this point, part of the Mac as the menu bar.
02:04:32 ◼ ► Like I saw it as this foreign invader that should hopefully somebody will distract Steve Jobs and take it out and get him not to notice and replace it with something that's Mac like.
02:04:45 ◼ ► And now I realize the dock is now by definition Mac like it's it's redefined what it means to be a Mac like interface.
02:05:00 ◼ ► So another big difference for me was Mac OS 9 had support for what they called window shade.
02:05:08 ◼ ► And you could double click the top of a window and the entire window would disappear except for the the title bar.
02:05:16 ◼ ► And it was a quick way that you could you could just double click the title bar and then you could look behind a window and then double click again and it would zap back down.
02:05:26 ◼ ► So if you needed to check something behind the window, you were working on double click the top.
02:05:30 ◼ ► It would window shade up, see what you were looking at, double click again without moving the mouse and it would jump jump back down.
02:05:38 ◼ ► I used it all the time. It was one of my favorite late era classic features because it wasn't I forget when it was introduced.
02:05:47 ◼ ► And it was one of those features that was originally in some third party in it, but then was eventually adopted by Apple as part of the system.
02:05:55 ◼ ► But I took to it like water, you know. And the thing that always annoyed me about minimizing windows to the dock as opposed to window shade was that you couldn't undo it immediately.
02:06:07 ◼ ► Right. You'd with the dock or with window shade, you double click, see behind it. You could double click again without moving.
02:06:14 ◼ ► When you when you jump a window into the dock, if you want to open it back up, you've got to move your mouse all the way down to the dock and jump it back up.
02:06:25 ◼ ► You know, you can't just double click, double click, double click, double click to do it. Undo it, do it, undo it.
02:06:30 ◼ ► But now that I've learned to live with it, I see the logic of having this special system place, the dock that's not part of an application, but is just there in the system.
02:06:47 ◼ ► Well, my argument would be, one, having because I used to see people who had this, having window shaded windows all over your Mac was really not aesthetically pleasing, right?
02:06:58 ◼ ► There are these weird floating severed rectangles. Right. And secondarily, so the dock is better for that, I think.
02:07:04 ◼ ► Secondarily, when I hear you describe how you're using them, which is to find something, my answer is, well, see, that is a problem that is better solved by either.
02:07:26 ◼ ► Or another thing that I really love that the classic Mac OS didn't have, which is the old command tilde, the command tilde feature that basically cycles through windows.
02:07:38 ◼ ► The keyboard shortcut where you're just like, okay, I've got 18 windows open, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, and you just cycle through all of the windows in that app until you find the one you're looking for.
02:07:48 ◼ ► And both of those are like, here are other ways to find a thing other than like window shading everything until you find it.
02:07:56 ◼ ► But, you know, there's different ways to do this. So Apple, it's interesting that Apple sort of like was like, okay, don't do that.
02:08:04 ◼ ► Use expose. This is for this other thing, which I just used today. I actually put, I was watching a video and it was in a YouTube window or a Twitch window, actually.
02:08:14 ◼ ► And I popped it into picture in picture on my Mac, but you can't close the window, the web browser window, or the video stops playing.
02:08:21 ◼ ► So then I minimized it to the doc and I'm like, aha, minimize it to the doc. How nice, how convenient. So I just did that today.
02:08:27 ◼ ► Here's another one of the bullet points from Mac OS X 1.0. And this is one that's still with us today.
02:08:34 ◼ ► It is. It was a great revolutionary feature, full PDF support and PDF integration into the operating system so that 10 applications can generate standard PDF documents to be shared with any platform.
02:08:51 ◼ ► Every time I went back to Mac OS 9 or used my Mac OS 9 system, I would miss it immediately because one thing that's true PDF is great format.
02:08:59 ◼ ► It's a great success story from Adobe and Acrobat has always been a terrible application, like right from the start.
02:09:18 ◼ ► The whole idea was what if we took this resolution kind of independent lossless output that you send to a laser printer?
02:09:26 ◼ ► What if we do a version of that that's essentially on the screen? And that's why next step looked so good.
02:09:32 ◼ ► And so then they brought it to the Mac and they're like, well, we're going to do this compositing thing.
02:09:46 ◼ ► And what did from the very beginning, it looked better. It allowed them to do all those translucent see effects that were impossible on classic Mac OS.
02:10:01 ◼ ► And in the end, you know, it was actually a real asset, but the knock on it was always that there was so much overhead because it was built to this kind of a little bit more of an ideal of of postscript format.
02:10:21 ◼ ► And so, like, it's a perfect encapsulation in some ways of like, we get all of this by using this technology.
02:10:32 ◼ ► And I you know that all that stuff, the whole kind of windowing system and and everything about it and all the built in stuff that they inherited from next that they used had great advantages.
02:10:47 ◼ ► Here's a here's a story I can't say who, but somebody told me this story and I believe them that they had.
02:10:54 ◼ ► And there weren't a lot of people at Apple who knew about it. But Apple had a lab where they set up side by side Mac and comparable Windows machine running Windows XP.
02:11:09 ◼ ► And they I don't know if I don't know the details of how they measured the time, but whether it was like cameras pointing at the screen or if they wrote software on both platforms to measure it.
02:11:22 ◼ ► How long it took to drag a window. How long it took to pop a menu down and have the full menu draw.
02:11:33 ◼ ► How long when you move the mouse over an item like a menu item with a hover effect, how long from when the pointer gets there?
02:11:41 ◼ ► Does the hover effect render on screen, you know, resizing windows, all sorts of stuff like that.
02:12:18 ◼ ► And that's that's what they used to build 10 one and 10 two and 10 three and 10 four as they got closer and closer.
02:12:36 ◼ ► And they didn't know what to do. And there were people who are like, well, our our job is done.
02:12:46 ◼ ► But there were other people who are like, well, we should just pretend Vista doesn't exist and keep testing against XP.
02:12:52 ◼ ► Because that's still the gold that that was our established gold standard for how snappy things should be.
02:13:03 ◼ ► And they just their lab where they tested that just pretended Vista didn't exist because they still wanted to keep making the interface faster.
02:13:11 ◼ ► Hardware for hardware. Don't just count on Moore's law and faster hardware to get us out of this.
02:13:18 ◼ ► And I think part of the payoff was that then was that, you know, it wasn't that many years from this 2001 really, really slow desktop operating system to 2007 when they were doing a lot of the same things on a tiny little phone using a terrible little ARM processor.
02:13:40 ◼ ► You know, but I think that at some point in that era where they decided that we need to keep making Mac OS 10 faster, even though it's not really painfully slow anymore, paid off in their ability to make iOS 1.0 when they did.
02:13:54 ◼ ► Yeah, I mean, also, realistically, Windows users were still using XP, right? Like Vista kind of crashed and burned.
02:14:00 ◼ ► So it turned out that people were comparing everything to XP and they including Vista didn't measure up.
02:14:06 ◼ ► But you're right. The history, like as Mac users, we're looking at the 20 years of Mac OS 10 and saying, oh, well, you know, it has all these important milestones and all of that.
02:14:16 ◼ ► Its most important legacy to the world is probably that it was the source material from which iOS was created or the iPhone OS was created.
02:14:26 ◼ ► And that is on, you know, the most successful individual consumer technology product of the last 20 years at least.
02:14:38 ◼ ► Like the source for the iPhone is, it's funny to think of it this way, but that that may be like the number one fact about Mac OS 10.
02:14:47 ◼ ► In fact, to the fact that they used it to reassure people that it was a good operating system running on the iPhone because they said it had OS 10 inside,
02:14:58 ◼ ► They wanted to reassure people. And by 2007, it was reassuring and impressive to hear that the iPhone essentially ran OS 10 underneath the hood.
02:15:09 ◼ ► Right. I just remember the one thing that I think they said OS 10 on stage, but then there was always the word salad slide, which is still, I hope Apple never gets away from it.
02:15:22 ◼ ► It's the slide where they just put up a slide on an event and it just has 50 or 60 different things all on screen.
02:15:30 ◼ ► And one of them, it just said, "Coco." And that was like the moment in the thing that Mac developer friends of ours froze.
02:15:38 ◼ ► And they were like, "Holy crap, it's Coco." You know, and they never mentioned that on stage because they weren't talking about people developing,
02:15:44 ◼ ► famously weren't talking about people developing third party apps for it yet. But it was, you know, this is the real deal.
02:15:50 ◼ ► We're making all this stuff to run on the phone the same way you guys are making apps to run on the Mac.
02:15:58 ◼ ► Right. I think something similar was in there. I don't know if we have a name for it, whether it's like the Parfait or the Layer Cake, but you know that slide where they're like,
02:16:06 ◼ ► there's the subsystem and then there's a layer for it and then there's a layer on top of it.
02:16:09 ◼ ► And that was another one of those reassuring layers of like, it's a Unix subsystem underneath. Darwin is underneath. Don't worry. It's OK.
02:16:18 ◼ ► Yeah, because, you know, you didn't know from the demo alone whether it was some sort of thing that was more like iPod.
02:16:30 ◼ ► Right. And by that time when iPods got color screens and, you know, as much as I love the black and white screens and the, you know, let's just use Chicago 12 bitmap again,
02:16:40 ◼ ► you know, it looked cooler when they went to color screens and they were rendering everything in anti-aliased Myriad and it looked like OS 10 sort of styling and lickability and cool 3D effects on selected items and stuff like that.
02:16:56 ◼ ► But it was all just sort of a thin veneer on a consumer electronic device operating system, not a true computing operating system.
02:17:13 ◼ ► Yeah, I don't think I mean, I know somebody somewhere is clever enough to make it happen, but it was like a script that you could rip the text out and put it into an iPod note and then stick it on the hard drive or something.
02:17:44 ◼ ► It really blows my mind when I think about how we have outpaced the classic Mac OS, that Mac OS 10, which was this new thing that was replacing this monolith, this incredibly like a granite mountain of classic Mac OS.
02:18:05 ◼ ► But I guess what I would say is the other funny thing that I think about sometimes is is how I don't feel like there is a replacement for Mac OS at this point, like where we were after all those years was desperately needing a replacement for classic Mac OS.
02:18:24 ◼ ► And because I think of the side effect of Apple developing iOS and the iPhone and the iPad over the last decade and then them spending the last two or three years in what I don't think people talk about enough when they when they made that statement that they were actually spending a lot of time getting the drift out of the operating systems that they had drifted apart.
02:18:45 ◼ ► And then I think they announced maybe for Catalina or maybe it was before maybe it was it was Mojave.
02:18:57 ◼ ► And obviously the reason for that was catalyst and and ultimately running iOS apps on the Mac that you can't you had to have the subsystems and the frameworks and stuff kind of all be back in line and they are all drifted apart.
02:19:08 ◼ ► But as part of that and as part of going forward, having Swift and Swift UI and having catalyst and having all of these things that are in common, basically that's the infusion of the next generation operating system with the Mac OS.
02:19:22 ◼ ► So instead of them sort of throwing away Mac OS and saying, here's new Mac OS number three.
02:19:27 ◼ ► Instead, what we're in the middle of now is this sort of reinfusion of this thing that was created out of Mac OS developed on its own, became insanely popular and now is being kind of re-imported back into this kind of a hole that's maybe greater than the sum of its parts because it's it's sort of the only platform that can run Mac stuff and run iOS stuff.
02:19:49 ◼ ► And I think that's fascinating because, you know, 20 years, it's like a good amount of time to sort of say it's over. What's what's next?
02:19:57 ◼ ► And the answer is what's next is actually this plus that that we've been working on for the last 10 or 15 years.
02:20:04 ◼ ► And I can't envision a scenario where this just doesn't keep on going for, you know, a decade more at least.
02:20:14 ◼ ► There was a quote that Steve Jobs had, I don't have it handy and it doesn't really matter because I know we're past it.
02:20:19 ◼ ► 20 years has definitely passed it. But when he was introducing Mac OS X and he said, this is the foundation for Apple and the Mac for the next 10 years.
02:20:29 ◼ ► Or maybe he said 15 years. You know, maybe let's say 15. I'll find I'll try to find a quote for the show notes.
02:20:34 ◼ ► But it was 15 at the most. And it felt like a bold statement. And Steve Jobs liked to do things, say things like that, like when he said the iPhone was five years ahead of the competition.
02:20:47 ◼ ► But that seemed, you know, again, that seems fair in hindsight. It really did seem like Android phones took at least until 2011 or 2012 to be to do some of the things that the original iPhone could do display wise.
02:21:02 ◼ ► Right. To be fair, he also said the iMac G4 was setting them up for the next decade and that to be very much not true. Didn't always nail it.
02:21:09 ◼ ► But I think there was a weird thing that Steve Jobs, part of his genius was this ability to always be looking for the next thing, but to be building things to last as they go along.
02:21:25 ◼ ► And that the, you know, that the foundation of the next system really was sound in terms of the way that things are layered.
02:21:35 ◼ ► And this idea of a system directory for the operating system and a library directory for stuff that was system wide, but the user could put stuff in and it's there for all users.
02:21:46 ◼ ► And then the user's home folder has a library folder where there's just these items just for that user so that another user on the same system wouldn't be bothered with those preferences.
02:21:56 ◼ ► You know, they could have their own. That's a foundation that is sound and built to last.
02:22:01 ◼ ► And it's elegant and it's graceful and it's when you learn how it works under the hood, it's nothing at all like the Windows registry where it's just this garbled mess of things.
02:22:15 ◼ ► And, you know, I've mentioned this on podcasts before, like with my son with his gaming PC and looking into certain problems with it, you find out that on modern Windows, there's still there's like three different display preferences where there's like the new one that looks new.
02:22:31 ◼ ► And then there's one that looks a little bit older. And then there's always like a little options or advanced button in the bottom corner.
02:22:44 ◼ ► Apple doesn't get enough credit for the moment where Apple just ruthlessly says it's dead. It's gone. We're moving on and we're not.
02:22:52 ◼ ► And people complain and they're like, oh, you're making my thing incompatible and I'm going to have to buy a new computer.
02:22:56 ◼ ► But like Microsoft is the other side of that, which is their great benefit is their huge user base.
02:23:16 ◼ ► but for years you go one level down in the interface in any direction and you're in standard definition four by three.
02:23:27 ◼ ► We had a weird we had a weird problem a couple months ago where the TiVo couldn't get the TV guide directory stuff and troubleshooting.
02:23:42 ◼ ► It's like, oh, my God. Yeah. And it reminded me that that's very much like the Windows thing where whenever I'm in Windows 10 and I suddenly find myself in a very familiar Windows XP style control panel interface.
02:24:00 ◼ ► Don't don't don't open up the walls and look inside there. No, you don't want to look in there.
02:24:09 ◼ ► But in some ways, Mac OS X is still a single building and the building it's one building and XP is sort of like at some point they built a new build.
02:24:23 ◼ ► And if you go down to the first floor, you can still find this entire old building inside it.
02:24:32 ◼ ► And now it's like like three levels of of again, here I am mixing metaphors, like three Russian nesting dolls of buildings, a building and a building and a building.
02:24:41 ◼ ► And sometimes you really need to go into the old building in the old building down in the basement of that building to fix something.
02:24:47 ◼ ► Whereas Mac OS X, not that it has no historical baggage, but it has so little that you'd never really find yourself like looking at something like, oh, this part looks like it's 20 years old.
02:25:03 ◼ ► Right. The only so here's the one place where I'm going to say OS X, if I had to pick one thing where it's the old building, it's system preferences.
02:25:21 ◼ ► I hadn't really thought about it. And you look at system preferences and you think to yourself, why hasn't this been changed?
02:25:27 ◼ ► And the answer is that either they think it's fine. I don't think they think it's fine.
02:25:43 ◼ ► Like it's still the shape of the smallest display that was available when OS X was released.
02:25:53 ◼ ► And I know if you click an individual ones, the size changes a little bit, but essentially they're all within this little block.
02:25:59 ◼ ► And there aren't that many places like that. I could still say like they've even things like font book they brushed up.
02:26:06 ◼ ► I would say if you do command T in apps and the font picker comes up, that feels very much like old Mac OS X next interface from the early days.
02:26:17 ◼ ► And even the ones that are like that, they've all gotten a new coat of paint, like they've changed the energy saver icon like five times over the years as light bulbs evolve.
02:26:26 ◼ ► Seriously. Seriously. They keep changing the light bulb and the energy saver icon to me.
02:26:35 ◼ ► And now it's an LED like somebody is paying attention to that stuff, but they still haven't said, you know, what we need to do is really rethink system preferences.
02:26:44 ◼ ► They just nobody wants to go there. So that maybe that's the Windows XP hidden layer on on Mac OS X.
02:26:51 ◼ ► And I think that the version numbers sort of belie that and show that sort of thinking where like from 1980 or '79, '78,
02:27:02 ◼ ► wherever you want to draw the origins of the modern, you know, the Apple personal computer to 2000, there's you know,
02:27:15 ◼ ► When you'd make a new operating system, it would have a shelf span where it would eventually you know,
02:27:21 ◼ ► it would either never take off in the first place or if it did, it would go seven, eight, nine, 10 years and then be antiquated.
02:27:33 ◼ ► And so saying, hey, this is built, this is our foundation for 15 years was a bold statement because, you know, 15 years from 2001 took you back to 1986.
02:27:49 ◼ ► Where I think that the version numbers sort of, you know, the 10.1, 10.2, 10.3 were really those were versions 2.0, 3.0, 4.0.
02:28:02 ◼ ► Like, so what we call Big Sur, macOS 11 should be macOS 10, 16.0 or 17.0, I guess 17.0 because macOS 10.1 should have been 2.0.
02:28:25 ◼ ► Version 16 because Catalina was 10.15. So yeah, version 17. If there was no version zero. Version 17.
02:28:35 ◼ ► And I think it was kind of crazy even to the biggest optimist at the time. Like, you know, who knows?
02:28:42 ◼ ► Maybe Steve Jobs or Bertrand or, you know, I don't know who had the most optimistic outlook at the length of time that this thing they called macOS 10 20 years ago would have a shelf span.
02:29:06 ◼ ► And yet in hindsight, it worked out that way and I still has as bright a future as it's had at any point in the era.
02:29:15 ◼ ► Like, I think that we, you know, they built a thing that was truly built to last and for certain tasks which aren't going away and for certain form factors which aren't going away, like the laptop, it's or the desktop computer where you have a big display and the most powerful computer you can build in a box connected to it.
02:29:43 ◼ ► Yeah, I think so because it's gone beyond what it was ever originally intended to be because of the iPhone and the iPad and now that they are getting mixed back together.
02:29:52 ◼ ► It's yeah, I just I don't see the end of it, which is a remarkable and everything does have an end, but it's a remarkable thing to be standing 20 years forward from that saying it's still here basically more or less.
02:30:13 ◼ ► I appreciate you being here as always and again, it was good to talk about software and not really talk about any particular hardware.
02:30:21 ◼ ► We can mention throw out the toss out if you love and you want to hear me and Jason talk for three more hours.
02:30:58 ◼ ► Is of course the website you write with Dan Morin and the incomparable where you have a bunch of other podcasts and upgrade with Mike Hurley and at what else you do.