PodSearch

The Talk Show

210: ‘Australian Battery Scam’ With Jason Snell

 

00:00:00   So the rewards of procrastination never, never cease to end. We were,

00:00:05   we were all set to record yesterday when I got wind that Apple was going to

00:00:10   issue a statement on, uh, or more than a statement really,

00:00:13   which we'll get into in a moment on the battery thing. So we,

00:00:16   we narrowly avoided having an entirely moot,

00:00:21   just moot point discussion on the iPhone battery thing, uh,

00:00:26   in the can and instead here we are recording on Friday the 29th of January and we've got

00:00:32   it all all laid out in front of us. It's the future and it's still December still 17. Let's

00:00:38   get right into it. The the the story has got to be the iPhone. It's funny because it's

00:00:46   it's even just summarizing it. It's complicated enough. Like I've had trouble writing headlines

00:00:50   because I keep wanting to just use the word iPhone battery throttling, but they're not

00:00:55   throttling the battery they're throttling the CPU but they're not

00:00:59   actually just throttling the CPU they're throttling all sorts of things they're

00:01:03   throttling yeah even the speakers they're quieting the speakers they're

00:01:09   dimming the the screen they're doing did you see Apollo 13 you see them yes I

00:01:15   actually just rewatched it recently okay there is a great so one of the dramas in

00:01:20   Apollo 13, and I swear this actually ties in perfectly with this story, is given after

00:01:27   the explosion and they're trying to figure out how to turn everything on when they get

00:01:30   back to Earth so that they can re-enter the atmosphere and splash down and survive. And

00:01:37   they've been going for days with almost everything shut off because otherwise they wouldn't have

00:01:43   enough resources to get back. So they've shut off a bunch of stuff, but they have to turn

00:01:46   it back on. They have to turn on the main module, the command module, in order to land.

00:01:53   And what they do is Gary Sinise, who isn't in the ship even though he was supposed to

00:01:59   be, is back in Houston. And what they do, and it's a very dramatic part of the movie,

00:02:04   is they're trying to figure out a startup sequence. It's literally what do we turn on

00:02:08   and in what order, because they know how much power they can get out of the battery. And

00:02:14   If it goes above a certain number, the needle kind of pins and everybody in the control

00:02:19   room goes, "Oh, no, that failed."

00:02:22   And Gary Sinise basically says, "All right, let's try it again.

00:02:25   Let's try another one."

00:02:26   And they keep going through that.

00:02:27   And I kept thinking about that scene this week because it's basically the same where

00:02:32   Apple's engineers were looking at a battery and the limits of a taxed battery, an older

00:02:39   battery and asking themselves, "What can we shut off? What can we turn down the power

00:02:46   on in order to stay below that moment where the system looks at the battery and realizes

00:02:54   it cannot get enough voltage?" and goes, "I'm shutting down," which is what this is all

00:03:00   trying to avoid is a different annoyance, which as it used to be, it would just hit

00:03:04   that hit that number where the the battery couldn't supply enough juice and

00:03:08   the phone would be like it jig is up I'm out of here and and but it is it's just

00:03:13   like Gary Sinise flipping switches in the in the Apollo command module it's

00:03:16   like how do we get under the limit and it speaks to the complexity of what

00:03:25   these batteries do in these devices that it I I think I'm as guilty of it as

00:03:33   anybody that I tend to just think of it as effectively as like the graphic

00:03:40   representation of the battery on screen that it's like a tank of energy you know

00:03:45   it's a it's a cylinder of energy and you can assign it a percentage in terms of

00:03:50   how full it is and when there's plenty of energy it runs and when it gets low

00:03:56   you can optionally go into the low power mode where the battery goes from green

00:04:02   to yellow and certain things are turned off like animations are tuned down to a lower

00:04:08   frame rate. Who knows what else they do? I don't know. Among other things, they haven't

00:04:14   fully documented. I'm not quite sure they fully documented exactly what low power mode

00:04:18   does. And then it goes to red when you're in critical danger and then when it runs out

00:04:22   of energy, the device turns off. But it's really more complicated than that. And the

00:04:27   thing that that this whole saga seems to be about is that when certain things are happening

00:04:35   on the iPhone that need more energy, like the CPU is performing at a peak level for

00:04:42   a sustained amount of time, it needs to draw more energy from the battery than it does

00:04:48   when it's doing something idle. And older batteries that are depleted, it's not just

00:04:55   that they you get less that like the easy way to think about it is that I have an older

00:04:58   iPhone the batteries depleted I get less battery I have to charge more throughout the day to

00:05:03   keep it going but it's not as simple as that it it's no longer able to provide a peak sustained

00:05:10   level of energy like a fresh battery could yeah the the term I think the key to all of

00:05:18   this actually and I talked to somebody who understands these issues and not a little

00:05:26   birdie but I did talk to somebody who understands electrical stuff and batteries and who said

00:05:29   it's about it's all about impedance and if you look at the tech note which Apple posted

00:05:35   it gets into the nitty-gritty the word impedance is never mentioned in the letter to customers

00:05:39   right but in the tech note it says one attribute that affects instantaneous power delivery

00:05:45   is the battery's impedance, which is basically like how hard it is to get electrons out of

00:05:50   the battery. And the older a battery is, also the colder a battery is, or if it's got a

00:05:57   low charge, the impedance is less, which means that the electrons flow slower, and when you

00:06:05   need to pull power from it, the voltage drops like that, just because, just by definition,

00:06:14   power can't flow out as quickly. And that's what this is all about is in an older battery,

00:06:20   but also in a cold battery if you're in someplace where it's, you know, minus 10. If you've

00:06:25   ever had to deal with battery-operated stuff in the extreme cold, it's the same thing,

00:06:30   which is that that's like your battery's acting like it's old, whether it is or not. And that's

00:06:35   what this is all about. Batteries get older, the impedance rises, and it becomes harder

00:06:40   to maintain a higher voltage and that totally goes against the metaphor that we've all kind

00:06:45   of I think I don't want to blame us for this because it's the makers of electronic devices

00:06:50   have sold us this metaphor because this metaphor is easy to understand for people who are not

00:06:56   electrical engineers like Apple Apple wants everything to be a black box right Apple wants

00:07:01   everything to be magic but the blackest black box of all I think is maybe the battery where

00:07:05   like we all just want to think, "Oh, it's at 83% or it's at 21%." And that works great

00:07:13   sometimes. Like there's a story about how the iPhone when it gets to 100%, you know,

00:07:17   you can't keep charging a battery that's not, that's full. And if you keep trying to charge

00:07:23   it, it's bad for the battery. So Apple like fudges on what your battery percentage is

00:07:29   at a high degree. Like when it gets to 100%, it stops charging and there's a certain amount

00:07:33   it's allowed to drop before it starts charging it again, but it always says it's 100%. And

00:07:39   that's because if it said if you left your phone overnight and you unplugged it and it

00:07:43   said 94%, you'd be like, "What the hell, Apple?" But they're doing that in the background because

00:07:48   of battery health issues. So this is a little bit like that. And up until this point, the

00:07:55   biggest controversy about this, and I don't know if people in your family saw this, I

00:07:59   it with people in my family a lot, which is on an older phone, you are at 40 percent and

00:08:07   it shuts off. And you say, "What the hell? Why did it just shut off if I've got 40 percent?

00:08:12   If the tank is 40 percent full, I should be able to use it." And the answer is, well,

00:08:17   it's older, it's getting low on charge, and it reached a point where it couldn't provide

00:08:21   enough power for the system, and so your phone shut down. And, you know, that's bad, right?

00:08:27   So instead we get we get this and this is technically this is what Apple is trying to

00:08:32   do to keep that phone from from shutting down by flipping all those all those switches.

00:08:37   Yeah, I I definitely saw that I saw it personally once or twice. It was long enough ago and

00:08:48   the fix that they shipped a year ago in 10 to 1 like all all of a sudden iOS 10.2.1 is

00:08:56   is in the news. I think if I'm recalling correctly, it was my wife Amy who was seeing it more

00:09:07   often and she was an adherent of the display, the percentage in the status bar alongside

00:09:15   the icon and knew. And that's a popular feature. It's almost to me like it was always a curious

00:09:25   thing to see people in my family who had that on as as just like I often say on the on the

00:09:33   podcast that I'm an inveterate snoop at looking at people's screens like on airplanes you know

00:09:40   like I don't like want to read their email I just like to see what they're doing and I one thing I

00:09:46   would I always look at is like do typical people have that battery percentage on because a I think

00:09:51   think it's an interesting feature. We can talk about it. But B, it's proof that typical

00:09:57   people do turn on non default settings, you know, like there's a lot of people, and there

00:10:02   are people who don't like typical users who just really never go into settings. But I

00:10:07   think the iPhone has a couple of features that that make it obvious at a glance whether

00:10:10   somebody has done something that battery percentage is one. The scaling factor is another I found

00:10:17   I noticed that my mom who has a six, either six or success, I forget. But she has it set

00:10:23   to the zoomed mode where it's running like the se sized user interface system wide, you

00:10:29   know, and she's older, and it's obvious why. But I thought that was interesting, because

00:10:33   that wasn't something I helped her set up. And the battery percentage is one. But anyway,

00:10:38   that meant that when you hit this shot, as my long, long way of saying that, when people's

00:10:43   phones would shut off, they often knew exactly what the percentage was before it shut down.

00:10:47   And they knew that it was at like 40% or something like that. Exactly. And it just felt like

00:10:53   it felt like they were robbed. And again, it completely breaks the metaphor of it's

00:10:58   just a gas tank that I'm draining. Yeah, the gas tank metaphor really is it there's no

00:11:02   better way of putting it that that's what we think of. And your car, a gas gasoline

00:11:09   powered car runs exactly the same with a full tank of gas as it does with the last gasps

00:11:18   of gas. Until you're literally using the last few drops of gasoline, your car goes

00:11:24   the same speed with the same amount of energy in the pedal and the volume of the radio is

00:11:31   exactly the same. The headlights are the same brightness. It is an easy metaphor, but it

00:11:39   really is wrong. And I think the other factor that shows this with that when the iPhones

00:11:44   were unexpectedly powering down, is that it, to my knowledge, it was never happening to

00:11:52   people with like a full charge. It was always like, "Oh, I had like 50% left or 40% left."

00:12:00   And it's it's what you mentioned before, which is that at that point, when the batteries

00:12:04   at 40%, it's it's not just that it only has half the storage that you know, half the energy

00:12:09   that it had at a full charge, it's that it's no longer able to provide as much energy and

00:12:14   a burst as it used to.

00:12:15   Right.

00:12:16   And you get voltage droop, which is basically under load, it's trying to pull a lot of power

00:12:21   from that battery.

00:12:22   And the battery is voltage drops.

00:12:25   And at that point, it's red alert for the system.

00:12:28   I can't can't can't operate without voltage right it can't so what does it do it either shuts down or it reduces

00:12:35   aggressively reduces power consumption, which is very clearly what the mandate was for the

00:12:39   the electrical team at Apple on the iPhone

00:12:42   And and if anything I think it's hard for people to get there to come to grips with this because

00:12:49   If anything we think of gasoline powered cars as a messy

00:12:55   literally, you know, it pollutes the air, a messy analog system. And we think of these digital

00:13:07   devices as being so neat and clean, you know, that it's either providing energy or not the battery

00:13:15   either has, you know, it's all binary, it's, it's, it is, you know, that there are no shades of gray,

00:13:20   the battery either has a charger, it doesn't have a charge. And if it has a charge, it's on and

00:13:25   everything runs and if it doesn't then everything nothing you know it needs to be charged that's it

00:13:31   but that's not the truth it's actually really more of an analog ugly you know what does apple

00:13:39   say in the tech note a couple times they use the word chemically chemically degraded is that what

00:13:45   they say chemical chemical age happens a lot yeah like a high chemical age where it's just that's

00:13:54   what we think of as it's an old battery. It's not as good. And these are rechargeable batteries,

00:13:59   which is also different chemistry from back when we just used sort of like single-use batteries.

00:14:02   So the chemistry is different. And even as people, you and I, who have been using Apple laptops for

00:14:09   a while, the battery technology being used in them has changed over time. We used to be told

00:14:16   every so often you needed to deplete your battery and then recharge it because otherwise it would

00:14:23   would be like it would have a battery memory and it would and then at some point they're

00:14:28   like no no no don't do that anymore. That's no longer the case right because they changed

00:14:32   to a different method of storing energy, a different battery type and so you know this

00:14:37   does change over time but in the end yeah would it I remember reading a story at some

00:14:42   point where somebody was trying to make a fuel cell for mobile devices which I think

00:14:48   never went anywhere but the idea there would be like literally you're putting hydrogen

00:14:53   in your phone and then it uses it.

00:14:56   And that would be like a gas tank, right?

00:14:59   That would literally be like a gas tank.

00:15:01   But, you know, right now these chemical batteries

00:15:05   are the way that we get to have these light computers

00:15:09   that we take with us everywhere.

00:15:11   And like I said, we wanna think of their magic

00:15:15   and the manufacturers encourage us to think

00:15:17   that they're kind of magic and simple, but they're not.

00:15:21   it's actually kind of messy and ugly underneath the surface.

00:15:24   - Yeah, and I think that that is one of the traps

00:15:28   that Apple fell into, which is,

00:15:31   you know, my take on this from the outset

00:15:35   has been that this is primarily a communication problem.

00:15:39   And I actually think that even in Apple's letter

00:15:43   to customers yesterday,

00:15:44   that that's pretty much what they acknowledged.

00:15:46   I mean, even, you know, the sentence,

00:15:48   "We apologize," is in there.

00:15:50   It is a genuine, I think, a genuine apology.

00:15:56   But what they're apologizing for is not what the iPhone is doing and was programmed to

00:16:03   do.

00:16:04   It's for not communicating what was going on and why and leaving customers to be confused

00:16:15   or think they're imagining things.

00:16:20   such a perfect storm of things where there's been this trope for years that Apple purposefully,

00:16:27   you know, as part of planned obsolescence when a new iPhone runs out, and it's, it's

00:16:32   true because new versions of iOS tend to come out, always come out, the major new versions

00:16:37   of iOS are tied to the release of new iPhones, iOS 12 will come out next September when new

00:16:42   iPhones come out. I mean, you can pretty much, you know, make a pretty safe wager on that.

00:16:50   But the theory, you know, is that app when new iPhones come out, Apple issues a software

00:16:55   update that purposefully slows down two year old iPhones, so that owners of two year olds

00:17:01   old iPhones think, well, I should go buy the new iPhone because my now my iPhone is slow.

00:17:06   And, you know, I've been saying no, this isn't what they do or that, you know, I'm not denying

00:17:11   that your phone might be slow after an update. If you know, I'm not, you know, you're the

00:17:15   one with the phone, you say it's slow, it might be slow. But that's not why it's slow.

00:17:19   For years, we you know, we in the Apple punditry industry have been saying no, Apple doesn't

00:17:25   do this. And now the story comes out that here's this thing where iOS is slowing down

00:17:31   your iPhone deliberately sounds an awful lot like the thing that everybody was paranoid

00:17:35   about. And even though it's not quite the same thing, it sounds an awful lot like it.

00:17:39   And, and I mean, Apple, okay, so I think there are two, so one side of this is, look, the

00:17:47   chemistry is the reality here and voltage and something needed to be done because, you

00:17:52   know, take your pick, sudden shutdowns or degraded performance.

00:17:56   But Apple, Apple bears a lot of this blame for a few reasons.

00:18:00   I want to take you back and I want to thank Nili Patel for finding this link yesterday

00:18:05   and tweeting it out.

00:18:06   I wrote a story at Macworld in 2007 where basically Greg Joswiak called me up to try

00:18:11   and do some damage control over this story that was people, there was a story that had

00:18:17   gone around that basically said after 400 times you plug in and unplug your iPhone to

00:18:24   charge it, the battery won't work anymore. And of course this is when at the peak of

00:18:28   like phones without removable batteries were new and terrifying and it was one of the knocks

00:18:34   on the original iPhone. And they said, "Okay, it's like a complete cycle. It's very different."

00:18:40   They said a lot of things that are completely accurate in the story from July 2007. You

00:18:43   know, I say the iPhone, like every battery ever made, it's going to lose the ability

00:18:47   to hold the charge over time. It won't necessarily evaporate in two years, but the fact is that

00:18:53   sooner or later the iPhone's battery will die. And that's not wrong. But what Jaws said

00:18:59   to me in that story and I quote him directly is, "Most iPhone users will realize, as most

00:19:05   iPod customers realized, that they never needed to replace their batteries." And what he's

00:19:10   really saying is, "You're going to be able to use this even two years from now and it'll

00:19:15   be fine, but we will also offer a battery replacement program." And this is, I think,

00:19:20   one of Apple's challenges is they didn't communicate what they were doing in degrading performance

00:19:23   and why it was actually a good thing because it meant, "Congratulations, your phone's not

00:19:26   going to automatically shut down. But I think Apple, with its design philosophy of trying

00:19:32   to hit that battery number of a brand new phone, but be as thin and light as possible,

00:19:38   maybe didn't give themselves enough headroom for batteries to age and still be able to

00:19:42   kind of operate gracefully into a third year. I think Apple is guilty of thinking of how

00:19:49   they have people at Apple use phones, which is that they get a new phone every year. I

00:19:54   look at the performance problems people report in a two or three year old phone when they

00:19:59   do an iOS update and I feel like I don't think Apple is intentionally sabotaging old phones,

00:20:04   but I also don't think Apple makes it a priority to make sure that new iOS versions run well

00:20:09   on old phones. Like they could do more. And so, you know, they made some decisions in

00:20:15   terms of prioritization. And leaving aside Apple retail, which is absolutely has incentives

00:20:22   to sell more phones rather than fix phones. And that's just, unless, I mean, it's just

00:20:26   sort of natural. They would have to do a lot to kind of push away that basic incentive,

00:20:31   which is there people at Apple retail, I mean, it's their job to sell products, right? And

00:20:35   because they're also the manufacturer, that all gets mixed up. So I guess what I'm saying

00:20:39   is Apple bears blame here in the short term because of, I think, how this was not communicated.

00:20:46   But in the longer term, they made some prioritizations and they made some design decisions. And what

00:20:51   we've ended up with is a world where a three-year-old iPhone, that third year you own an iPhone.

00:20:57   I can say this because lots of people in my family use, I generally use a new iPhone or

00:21:02   a one-year-old iPhone, but I got kids and even my wife will only buy a new phone maybe

00:21:07   every three years, and I've seen the performance on a three-year-old iPhone and it's bad. Like

00:21:11   the battery goes bad, the performance slows down, and Apple's decisions kind of have led

00:21:19   to that point. So, you know, it's not just the communication issue, it's some priorities

00:21:24   that Apple has had where they're not, you know, they're not sabotaging old phones, but

00:21:29   they're not trying really hard to have that third and fourth year with an iPhone be a

00:21:32   great experience either. Yeah, and it, I, the replay, replaceable user replaceable batteries

00:21:41   used to be, there was no such thing as a phone that didn't have one. I mean, it was, it was

00:21:46   always you know, you take off the back plate of the phone and there's a battery and that's

00:21:50   where the SIM card holder would be. And it was a big deal that the iPhone was like an

00:21:58   iPod iPods never had user replaceable batteries either. Totally. And again, the conspiracy

00:22:06   theory is that Apple does this out of some sort of design spite that they don't, they

00:22:13   find like the little access hatch for a battery to be ungainly. And they enjoy, they enjoy being able

00:22:21   to, I mean, they can't prevent third party battery replacements. In fact, people, you know, do it

00:22:28   every day. But by having it be sealed up, it certainly encourages people to only replace the

00:22:34   battery through the Apple Store. And that the $79 charge that they were charging for it for years

00:22:41   was that one of the reasons they seal it up is so that they can make $79 on replacements.

00:22:48   Tim Cynova Yeah, and it makes it that easier to just upsell somebody to a new phone and

00:22:52   here's a trade-in and we can get you in a new phone. If I was running an Apple store,

00:22:59   that's what I would do, right? I'm much more inclined to sell a new phone than to

00:23:02   sell even a $79 battery replacement.

00:23:05   But the truth is that a big part, I think the primary part of it is that it makes it

00:23:11   possible to design bigger batteries, smaller devices. And it's because if it's user replaceable,

00:23:20   it has to be a somewhat regular shape, meaning some kind of rectangle, and there's contacts

00:23:27   and the type of contacts that would connect the battery to the system are going to be,

00:23:34   I think, you know, there has to and there has to be some slack so you know, you can get a finger

00:23:40   in there to pop it out and stuff. Whereas if you seal it up, and you if you look just go to the

00:23:46   iFixit teardowns for like the iPhone 10. And you can see the battery is like an L shape. It's not

00:23:51   a regular shape because they, you know, figured out it's almost more like a liquid thinking of

00:23:58   it as a liquid where they any air gaps in there is a possible space where they can put more battery.

00:24:04   Famously, they even showed they had one of those nice 3d teardown fly throughs of I think it was

00:24:13   a MacBook Air, but one of the MacBooks of recent years where they showed how they created this

00:24:20   battery in almost like a theater like stair step design that right that's right literally

00:24:27   it's it's molded around every every bit of open space that's left in the product in order

00:24:33   to fill it up and so it's not a single module it's like a whole bunch of things in a stair

00:24:37   step and I just I just replaced a battery on a MacBook Air because my my old 2010 MacBook

00:24:44   Air that my son uses just had the expanding battery thing where he came to me and he's

00:24:48   is like there's a huge bulge in my MacBook Air,

00:24:50   what happened?

00:24:51   - Wow.

00:24:52   - And I popped it open and took it out.

00:24:54   And I got a replacement for my Fixit, actually it was great.

00:24:58   But in lifting that out from 2010,

00:25:02   it's a plastic thing with like five

00:25:04   differently shaped battery modules on it.

00:25:07   This is why you can have a MacBook Air that's that thin,

00:25:13   is that there's no place to slide in a big chunky battery

00:25:17   like the old days.

00:25:17   and the iPhone it's even even more like that. Yeah. And you know, batteries are better than

00:25:23   they used to be. You know, like you spoke about the old days when there was like, almost

00:25:27   like an exercise regimen for your MacBook or I guess, old enough, you know, your powerbook,

00:25:32   our book, yeah, power book batteries where you you're supposed to deplete it every once

00:25:36   in a while. And you I remember the other thing too, is you were you. And I ran into this,

00:25:43   I ran into this with a power book that I kept mostly at my desk connected to it. It just

00:25:49   was the, you know, I had a great power book. I almost never needed to take it away from

00:25:55   the desk and it had a nice big display. So I was running it on power. And, and it actually

00:26:02   wrecked the battery like by never running it on battery power. When I didn't then needed

00:26:07   to, I got like an alert in the up in the system bar that, you know, up in the menu bar that

00:26:12   It was like, "Hey, you need to get this battery replaced."

00:26:16   And I was like, "Aw."

00:26:18   - Well, and Apple has, and so what Apple has done

00:26:21   to avoid stuff like that is, and other men,

00:26:23   not just Apple, but software makers and hardware makers

00:26:26   in general working on this stuff,

00:26:28   what you have to do if you want to avoid that

00:26:32   is lie to the user and risk putting them in a bad situation,

00:26:36   but not kill their battery.

00:26:38   So the right way to do it, and I think a lot of computers

00:26:40   phones do this now, the right way to do that in your old time would be to surreptitiously

00:26:46   take you off power and drain the battery and tell you everything's fine and you're plugged

00:26:52   in but it's actually running on battery and draining the battery and it gets to the bottom

00:26:55   and then it flips it back on and charges back up and you are none the wiser, which is great

00:27:00   except for one scenario which is that moment where you need to unplug and take it. If it's

00:27:05   down at 10%, you're going to be very angry, right? Even though it's doing it for good

00:27:11   reasons. And that's always been a challenge with this kind of intelligent battery stuff

00:27:16   in the background is users want to know what's up and if you lie to them and they notice,

00:27:23   it can be bad. And it's a little bit like that with this, which is like we're trying

00:27:26   to make it all seem easy, but there's actually, it's really complicated in the background.

00:27:32   And you know, the fact is that if you're a user and you get surprised, that's not good,

00:27:36   right? Like users don't like surprises of Oh, turns out 50% battery, I actually need

00:27:40   to shut down now. Nobody wants to see that.

00:27:42   All right, let me take a break here. I want to run nowhere near done with this. But there's

00:27:47   no reason not to take a break. I think one of our good friends and it's our good friends

00:27:52   at fracture fracture makes beautiful, thoughtful prints from your photos. They print them directly

00:27:59   on glass. Ship them to you. They're made handmade with care in Gainesville, Florida from US source

00:28:06   materials. Look, it's we're recording after Christmas. Christmas is over. Last time fracture

00:28:12   sponsored the show. I think it was back at the end of November and I pleaded with you I pleaded with

00:28:16   you. I said order them now because they get backed up. There's really no reason to talk about fracture

00:28:22   like in the two weeks before Christmas because they get backed up. It's too late. Everybody

00:28:26   because they are. They're fantastic gifts. They really are. But there's gifts, you know,

00:28:30   holidays aren't the only time of the year you give gifts. So keep them in mind, you know,

00:28:33   Mother's Day, it's months away. All of these holidays, people's birthdays, really, it's such

00:28:39   a great gift. And it I'm a terrible, terrible gift giver. I really am. I never know what to get

00:28:47   anybody. I really don't like buying like, retail products for family members. I really don't know.

00:28:55   if my wife weren't good at it, honestly, people would probably just tell me to stop

00:28:58   giving them gifts other than fractures, fractures, like pictures of my son for grandparents.

00:29:05   And it never gets old. That's the best thing about it. Like, like,

00:29:11   if you've ever given a gift to somebody and it was a great gift and they loved it.

00:29:14   It's like, well, what do you how do you top that? You know, because you can't give them the same

00:29:20   thing you know give somebody I don't know a bracelet and they love it well we're going

00:29:25   to do you can't get another bracelet or can get the same bracelet at least fracture though

00:29:30   I'm telling you you can like give these things over and over and over again and as long as

00:29:35   you're choosing new photos to print they go over really well each time ordering a simple

00:29:42   your fractures come ready to display right out of the box they even include the wall

00:29:47   hanger. They have so many sizes to choose from. It's really just great. It's a green

00:29:52   company operating carbon neutral factory. So you can you can feel good about that. So

00:29:57   visit fractured.me. That's their website fractured.me and you will save 15% on your first fracture

00:30:04   order with the exclusive code talk 15 ta lk one five talk one five. Don't forget to mention

00:30:15   this podcast in their one question survey, which is literally where did you hear about

00:30:19   fracture? It does help support the show. It helps them know that you're coming there from

00:30:23   the talk show. So my thanks to fracture. So here's the point I spent this entire, that

00:30:28   entire sponsor read with my iPhone in my hand to remember that where I wanted to go when

00:30:33   I came back, which is that when we're talking about where Apple has to take the blame in

00:30:39   this is in their pursuit of ever thinner phones and there's a reason why this is

00:30:49   an iPhone issue and not an iOS device issue it as far as I know it does this

00:30:56   does not seem to affect iPads I mean maybe there's there are iPads that are

00:31:00   really old that have significantly degraded batteries but I would suspect

00:31:06   that most iPads that might be that old aren't even eligible for iOS 10 because they have

00:31:14   bigger batteries. I mean, obviously they have bigger batteries because they're much bigger

00:31:18   devices. But because they're bigger devices, even when the battery has two years of decline,

00:31:27   still has enough. It's still can provide, you know, the peak sustained energy that you

00:31:36   need so that you don't, you know, the device doesn't shut down. And I think the conclusion

00:31:43   and I don't know, I'm not an electrical engineer, but I think it seems obvious that if iPhones

00:31:49   were to some degree thicker, and that thicker, thicker structure was used to put bigger batteries

00:31:56   in the iPhone, this would be mitigated to some extent. Yeah, I mean, I think the way

00:32:03   I think of it is Apple is obviously Apple has some very clear battery philosophy. Like

00:32:11   the iPads quoted battery life has been 10 hours forever and iPhone. They clearly have

00:32:15   like a window they're shooting for in terms of when you take this thing out of the box,

00:32:21   how long can you use it on a charge like they have and they have user data to back that

00:32:25   up. They know they've got some people who always leave their phone plugged in. There

00:32:27   are other people who will leave in the morning and work a long day and are working it hard

00:32:31   and want to run it all the way through. And they have some somewhere in there, they have

00:32:35   a profile that they're trying to hit. It's very clear. They will try to hit it with every

00:32:39   phone. Now new phones have a little bit more, but for a while there, they were really like

00:32:44   they had a it was not not something you could use heavily all day and get through the day.

00:32:50   But if you used it lightly, you could get through the day. And I think that was sort

00:32:53   of what they were counting on. The so the more battery you put in the more weight there

00:32:58   is and the more space it needs which means potentially the thicker it needs to be and

00:33:04   I think you're right what the way I think of it is they were shooting to hit a minimum

00:33:10   that served them well even though not great I think iPhone battery life always there could

00:33:15   always be more but like well enough they wanted to optimize for thin thinness and lightness

00:33:21   But when you get two and a half years out and the battery is fatigued,

00:33:25   there's no headroom there. It's like an Apple Watch. I feel this way about my Apple Watch

00:33:31   Series 3, which is I can use it all day and do a couple of workouts and do all sorts of things.

00:33:36   It's like I can't kill that battery in a day. It takes me a day and a half to kill that battery.

00:33:41   That's good because in three years that battery is not going to be as good, and I'm still going

00:33:44   to be able to get through a day. And the iPhone hasn't had that kind of headroom. Very clearly,

00:33:48   they're right on the edge where as soon as the battery starts to degrade after year two,

00:33:52   it becomes a problem because there's just no room for for for uh you know for error. Yeah and I'm

00:34:00   I've been thinking about this as this scandal I don't know if scandal is too strong a word but

00:34:06   let's say scandal has has been uh erupting over the last two weeks and I the thing I one of the

00:34:14   of the things I keep coming back to is that my simplistic gas tank analogy, it just trying

00:34:23   to flush it from my brain because it doesn't work. And one of the ways is that and I think

00:34:29   what Apple has run into here is it's not just that iPhones have gotten thinner in recent

00:34:35   It's also that the CPUs have gotten more powerful.

00:34:40   And it doesn't seem like this was a problem

00:34:46   in the early years of the iPhone.

00:34:50   Like the first few generations of iPhone

00:34:52   didn't have this two year old model shuts down problem.

00:34:57   And I think part of that is that

00:35:00   the maximum sustained energy the CPU could use

00:35:04   wasn't high enough that the battery didn't run into it.

00:35:08   You know, like it--

00:35:09   - Yeah, my gut feeling is that the dynamic range

00:35:11   wasn't even that much in terms of power draw.

00:35:13   Like there was only like a certain range.

00:35:16   I get the impression modern smartphones have way more,

00:35:19   they crank up the high performance cores

00:35:21   and they also run the extra cores in the A11.

00:35:24   And the range of power that thing can draw

00:35:27   is pretty wide from sipping to completely killing it.

00:35:32   And yeah, I get the feeling that early iPhones,

00:35:34   and let's not forget the iPod,

00:35:35   like JAWS used that example, right?

00:35:37   Did the iPod battery get old and less effective?

00:35:40   Absolutely, but I'm not sure the iPod battery draw,

00:35:44   you know, it was either spinning the disc

00:35:47   if you were using a classic iPod,

00:35:49   that was a lot of power,

00:35:50   but it would spin the disc, read a lot into memory,

00:35:53   and then spin the disc down again.

00:35:55   And on the SSDs, like,

00:35:57   there could not have been much power usage range in there,

00:35:59   maybe a little, but not a lot.

00:36:01   But the modern phone, like,

00:36:02   The A11 has what, three high performance cores and three efficiency cores and it can run

00:36:08   all six if it needs to in the most stressful.

00:36:12   And that's leaving aside driving the screen, you know, heavy graphics performance, having

00:36:20   an LTE radio going, having Bluetooth going, having Wi-Fi going.

00:36:23   There's a lot of power draw that can come out of that thing in extreme circumstances.

00:36:27   My guess, and again, I'm not an electrical engineer, so I could be way wrong, but my

00:36:32   guess is that with the iPods, that the only significant power drain was the color LCD

00:36:40   once they went to a color LCD.

00:36:41   That just having the display on was, my guess, it was the biggest power drain.

00:36:47   But since they were primarily audio players, I mean, obviously, once they could play video,

00:36:52   that would drain the battery.

00:36:55   but I think it was the display being on that was taxing,

00:36:57   not the video playing.

00:36:59   Because the video and audio never taxed the CPUs

00:37:02   because they always had custom chips to decode them.

00:37:06   Right, it was never a CPU intensive device at any stage.

00:37:11   So I just don't think there was ever that issue.

00:37:14   Like I really do think the gas tank analogy

00:37:16   held up with iPods where the only,

00:37:18   if you had your trusty beloved five year old iPod,

00:37:22   the only real difference from when it was new

00:37:24   maybe that it just you got fewer hours of playback between charges you know I

00:37:29   don't think there was and I think that's one of the reasons we all fell into this

00:37:33   trap of thinking of the batteries as a gas tank because it used to work the

00:37:37   analogy did work back then maybe not you know at the implementation level like

00:37:42   the you know the engineers who were making the devices couldn't think of it

00:37:45   that way obviously but as a user you could get away with it and never never

00:37:49   be wrong. Right, and it's easier. It's a better metaphor. It's a good metaphor. People understand

00:37:57   it. Apple and tech companies in general, they have to trade in metaphors because a lot of this stuff

00:38:04   is way too complicated for people to understand who are just lay people. And they don't want to

00:38:10   understand it. And so if you can find a good metaphor and you can hang your hat on it, then

00:38:15   do it, right? The problem is that this phenomenon forces us to understand that that metaphor

00:38:23   is broken.

00:38:25   Yeah. Boy, did Apple take it on the chin from the press and continues to. Even the apology

00:38:36   yesterday, you know, has generated some really interesting coverage from the mainstream media.

00:38:48   Somebody on Twitter sent me a screenshot. This is a guy named Christopher who lives

00:38:53   in Australia and on Australian TV. What do they call those banners at the bottom of the

00:38:59   screen? There's like a word for it, like chyron. Like the little scrolling banner at the bottom

00:39:04   of TV news had this headline, I swear to God, not making this up. US colon Apple apologizes

00:39:12   for iPhone battery scam. Wow. That's the actual Chiron at the bottom of the TV. And again,

00:39:25   I we I think we're being very adamant here, you and I that Apple is there are things you

00:39:31   can fault Apple for in this whole saga. Communication and design choices. It is not a scam. Rightly

00:39:42   or wrongly, whether you disagree with the decisions they made, I really do think that

00:39:46   even if you disagree with the decisions they made and you think that they should have done

00:39:50   X, Y, or Z different at a technical level, I do think that the intent was genuinely to

00:39:56   actually, that's part of what I think frustrates the people at Apple is that their intent was

00:40:01   actually the opposite of sabotaging an old iPhone. This was their genuine attempt to

00:40:06   extend the useful lifespan of older iPhones.

00:40:09   David Tompa Right. I think the thing to criticize Apple

00:40:12   for here is, yes, a lack of communication, but also all of the decisions and corporate

00:40:17   culture that led to the fact that a three year old iPhone would suddenly shut down with

00:40:22   50% battery. But the solution, which was very clever, which was, boy, we need to do a better

00:40:28   job of reducing power because this is a bad user experience. Like, that was a good engineering

00:40:34   decision to solve a problem. We should debate the way they didn't communicate it and how

00:40:42   they got in that position. Those are both, I think, fair places to criticize Apple. But

00:40:46   like, this specific engineering challenge that they solved by throttling things so that

00:40:52   your phone didn't die, that's absolutely done in the best interest of the users. They

00:40:57   know that everybody was getting very upset with older phones that were just spontaneously

00:41:02   shutting down. I can't tell you how many times my daughter and my wife, in the last year

00:41:08   before they got newer phones, would be like, "My iPhone just shut down again." They're

00:41:12   like furious about it. And people grouse about slow iPhones, and I don't want to make light

00:41:17   of it because I've seen some impossible-to-use iPhones that were incredibly slow, but at

00:41:22   least they're up and you can take a phone call and you can take a picture. And, you

00:41:27   know, I did, I experienced this once where I was, we were skiing with my wife's family

00:41:34   and I had my iPhone out and was taking pictures of, taking video, HD video, maybe even 4K

00:41:40   video of my kids coming down the ski slope. And the phone just went, "Nope, I'm off. I'm

00:41:45   turning myself off." And I think it was the cold that was doing it in that circumstance,

00:41:48   But there's nothing worse than that. So, you know, full credit to Apple's electrical engineering

00:41:54   and software power management teams for figuring out this problem that, you know, that's not

00:41:59   it's not on them here, right? It's on how it was not communicated and why they had to

00:42:05   do it in the first place.

00:42:06   Yeah, there's a and I think there's a culture within Apple of never wanting to say anything

00:42:13   negative about any of their products. And I think that's true for most companies. I

00:42:18   mean, who, you know, you know, you go to a restaurant and how often does the waiter tell

00:42:23   you, you know, the fish, you know,

00:42:28   most what they'll say is, I know our fish didn't used to be good, but now it's good.

00:42:32   That's when you admit, you admit the failure once it's done. And in the, in the rear view

00:42:36   mirror,

00:42:37   I funny story. One time I was in Denver, a great city. I was only there at one time,

00:42:41   We had a dinner and it just happened to be

00:42:43   it was during the development of Vesper and Dave whiskers lived there at the time and

00:42:49   I

00:42:51   Forget even why but Brent and I both could make it and so we had like a weekend to work together

00:42:56   We did a podcast and then there were some other friends in the area

00:42:58   we had like six people go out to dinner and we went to some like a steak place and

00:43:02   They had prime rib on the menu as well and I like prime rib

00:43:06   but prime rib in my opinion is usually either excellent or it is terrible very tough and

00:43:13   a waitress came by and somebody asked a question and she said that she recommended you know

00:43:17   somebody's like which steak should I get and she was like I recommend the ribeye and then

00:43:21   I said hey what about the prime rib is the prime rib good here and she said I recommend

00:43:25   the ribeye I was like okay I'm gonna get a ribeye yeah but you know Apple takes it

00:43:32   But, you know, Apple takes that to an extreme where they, in their prepared remarks for

00:43:40   like a post-event product briefing, and it always amazes me how I think I've come up

00:43:46   with, "Ooh, I'll bet nobody else thought of it. I've got a really good question and I'll

00:43:49   bet nobody else has thought of it." And I ask the question and I get a response that

00:43:54   is canned, you know, like they were ready for it. You know, like I've still never stumped

00:43:59   anybody to my recollection.

00:44:05   It's because you get the briefings a little earlier than I do. I will tell you

00:44:08   they're a little more punchy at the end of the afternoon when

00:44:10   you're at the last briefing and they just want to go. They loosen up a

00:44:14   little bit. That's the trick. I usually go... I've started going

00:44:18   early recently. I don't know. Somehow I got bumped up. But I used to go dead last.

00:44:22   I used to be... Oh, well, that is the best time then. It was.

00:44:26   It was like you got the most out of them you're ever going to get out of them.

00:44:28   when it's when it's 445 and they really want to go away. Yeah, because it was a combination of

00:44:34   them knowing that I'm not on deadline. And right. Be that I think that they, you know,

00:44:42   sound self serving, but I think that they, you know, maybe like talking to me more than other

00:44:48   some other people. And that if, you know, it could be more leisurely, like instead of getting,

00:44:54   you know, having somebody tapping their watch at 20, 29 minutes in, it could go 35, 40,

00:45:00   45 minutes and doesn't matter because there's nobody after. But anyway, yeah, I know exactly

00:45:03   what you're, you're right. That's totally locked down. Like I've gotten answers that

00:45:07   I thought were very, obviously they're going to be totally locked down. They know what

00:45:12   they're going to say. They know how they're going to phrase things. They know how you're

00:45:15   going to address it. I will try to ask a clever question. I'll get an answer. I'll be like,

00:45:18   okay, that's interesting. I have heard that that's new. And then I will read somebody

00:45:22   else's article like, you know, and it'll be you or or like neelay or you know, just somebody

00:45:27   Matt hone and I don't know, I mean, whoever it is, and you'll see the exact same phrasing

00:45:32   and you'll be like, God, that was on their talking points do they're very well trained

00:45:38   and buttoned up.

00:45:41   So I think, you know, this whole issue with batteries, you know, is industry wide, there

00:45:46   is nothing worse about iPhones batteries than competing products and if anything I genuinely

00:45:52   believe that Apple's battery life and the technology they use is better than most of

00:46:00   the competing products on the market. So it's not like the problems inherent to lithium-ion

00:46:05   batteries are specific to the iPhone. It's just the way it is but Apple doesn't like

00:46:09   it's not within their character to talk about it like that this technical note that came

00:46:14   out yesterday explaining all of the various ways that lithium ion batteries suck are just terrible.

00:46:22   And surely, you know, this is one of those things where probably not next year, you know, but it's

00:46:28   one of those things where like one or two years isn't going to make a difference. But at some

00:46:31   point, you know, 1015 years from now, we're going to have a totally different technology powering

00:46:36   these devices. And we're going to look back at lithium ion batteries. And, you know, it's going

00:46:41   to seem anachronistic. It's going to seem ridiculous. Yeah, but it's not within their

00:46:47   character to talk about these things. And it really, I really think it painted them

00:46:53   in the corner on this and I, you know, I think they regret it now. But for example, in iOS,

00:46:59   you go to settings app, go to the battery section at the top. If your battery iPhone

00:47:04   battery is truly in dire condition, when you go there, it will say your battery may need

00:47:09   to be serviced. Learn more and learn more, I think takes you to, you know, like a web

00:47:17   page where there's information about how to, you know, more or less telling you to go take

00:47:22   it to an Apple store or otherwise, some other authorized dealer. So I was tweeting about

00:47:26   this, and somebody on Twitter was like, you keep mentioning this, but I've never heard

00:47:30   anybody get this. And then somebody thankfully, because I hadn't seen it personally. And I'm

00:47:38   And I'm very kind, as an aside, I'm conscious of the fact

00:47:40   that me personally, I use a new,

00:47:42   I buy a new iPhone every single year.

00:47:44   And so I don't run into the problems

00:47:48   that people run into with two or three year old iPhones.

00:47:50   I am fully, I recognize that that is a position

00:47:54   of absurd privilege in that, you know,

00:47:58   it is a, you know, something that most people

00:48:02   have the common sense not to do.

00:48:04   It's a combination of me having enough money to do it

00:48:06   and be lacking the common sense of putting my money in a...

00:48:11   - And the Apple benefits from the fact

00:48:13   that most of the people who write about their products

00:48:15   don't use them after they're a year old.

00:48:18   - Right. - Right?

00:48:19   I mean, they don't, there are not a lot of tech writers

00:48:21   out there rocking a three-year-old iPhone.

00:48:23   There are some, but not a lot, and that benefits them.

00:48:26   - Right, but somebody who had seen it,

00:48:28   took a screenshot of it and posted it,

00:48:30   and it was like, wow, you know,

00:48:32   a couple people on Twitter are like, I've never seen that.

00:48:34   And it's because that warning isn't tied to the threshold of where these throttling features

00:48:40   kick in. It's truly, I don't know where it is, but like, you know, it, it, it seems like

00:48:45   there's some kind of test that Apple can perform in the store and it gives Apple a number from

00:48:51   like one to a hundred of the health of your battery and they won't, they will refuse to

00:48:56   replace a battery that is at 80% or above on this test. So if you come in, you think

00:49:01   your iPhone battery isn't good enough and they run this test and it says 81 they won't take your

00:49:06   $79 and replace the battery. And I that's interesting. And I've had you know, there's a

00:49:12   I've heard from a bunch of people during this whole saga, who said I you know, I'm so frustrated

00:49:18   because it said 83 I know that the battery isn't as good as it used to be. I have the $80 I just

00:49:24   want you to take it and have me come back in an hour and have right I just want to keep using this

00:49:29   phone and I want the extra battery life you know what am I supposed to do go and

00:49:34   and you know shoot 4k video continuously for two days to degrade the battery

00:49:39   before I come back so I get that but that that warning in iOS only kicks in

00:49:49   at something like I don't know let's just I'm pulling this out of my hat but

00:49:52   like 20 you know like a battery that is seriously seriously problematic like

00:49:57   - Right, and Apple said that they're gonna make an OS update

00:49:59   to change that threshold,

00:50:00   which is probably a really good idea, right?

00:50:05   But it goes, this and the $79 charge,

00:50:08   which is being reduced to $29,

00:50:10   seemed to me like easy fixes in a way on Apple's part

00:50:14   in terms of making this happen quickly.

00:50:18   But it also says something like

00:50:19   how this was really a cultural thing

00:50:21   more than anything else.

00:50:22   It's like these were reasons to dissuade you

00:50:24   from ever thinking about replacing your battery.

00:50:27   - Yeah.

00:50:29   So one of the questions that I've seen

00:50:32   and I didn't really have good answer to,

00:50:33   somebody just asked me literally just like half an hour

00:50:36   before we started recording on Twitter,

00:50:37   like what's the story,

00:50:38   what's the deal with Android phones and batteries?

00:50:41   Do they throttle?

00:50:42   Do they degrade over time?

00:50:45   And I do think, I didn't have a chance to read it in detail,

00:50:50   but I posted it in the note

00:50:53   I'll put it in the show notes. There's an article on seeking alpha from someone who

00:51:00   looked at in a non tech article, and it does seem like Android at a system level has built

00:51:06   in throttling, where certain things just naturally, you know, like the CPU doesn't run at peak

00:51:12   performance, you can't just run the CPU at peak performance for as long as you want until

00:51:16   battery dies. It will kick in, like benchmarks show it. More or less, the answer is it's

00:51:25   complicated. Android phones don't run on the battery like a tank of gas. There's all sorts

00:51:32   of stuff going on in Android 2 to make these things work. But the thing I did find interesting

00:51:38   too is—and I think I put it in the show notes—this link to a Reddit thread about this. And it's

00:51:45   HTC and Motorola say they don't slow iPhones like Apple does.

00:51:50   These companies are trying to make a bit of hay out of this,

00:51:54   but they're saying they don't do exactly what Apple is doing. They're not saying that your phone

00:52:04   doesn't throttle the CPU. Here's the statement from Motorola, "We do not throttle CPU performance

00:52:11   based on older batteries, but they do throttle CPU performance. In general, it's they just

00:52:18   have to. And on this Reddit thread, there's comments from a bunch of people. Like, here's

00:52:26   somebody with a Nexus six p who says that it shuts down whenever it feels like so it

00:52:30   seems like it runs into the problem iPhones had that it just shuts down. And then there's

00:52:34   also a problem. I think iPhones can get into this too, with a bad enough battery. Where

00:52:40   it's a never-ending boot loop where it's the boot loop of death where the battery is in

00:52:45   such bad shape that as you power it on while it's starting up it hits the point where it

00:52:51   needs to shut down because it's not getting enough energy from the battery and shuts down

00:52:54   and you never you can't get out of it. Here's somebody who claims to be a Verizon employee.

00:53:03   It is most definitely LG's fault. It's been happening on the G3, G4, G5 and V10 models.

00:53:09   They all happened after their one-year warranty expired, but before their upgrade periods.

00:53:14   The response has been horrendously shit, and we are currently dealing with their own class

00:53:18   action lawsuit.

00:53:21   Those who cry about their iPhones slowing down because their battery is starting to

00:53:24   suck, at least your phone still works.

00:53:27   Who knows?

00:53:28   This is a random person on Reddit.

00:53:32   But there's enough people in the thread with stories like this that the idea that this

00:53:36   is specific to iPhones and that there aren't problems with Android and that it may or may

00:53:40   not be worse with Android phones, you know, is all on the table.

00:53:44   Yeah, it depends on what, you know, how much batteries in the phone and how power, what's

00:53:49   the power draw. And like Apple has these incredibly fast processors now, but I imagine that, you

00:53:55   know, they're already trying to regulate the power pretty severely. So it may come down

00:53:59   to just like how big is your battery? And maybe Apple has been, my gut feeling is Apple

00:54:06   maybe has been optimizing a little bit too aggressively.

00:54:09   And I would say that maybe this is gonna be a reason

00:54:12   to motivate them to do that a little less,

00:54:14   but I feel like Apple has reached maybe the bottom

00:54:19   in terms of like their attempts for super thinness

00:54:24   on phones, especially since they've got the camera bump now.

00:54:27   And they know the value of having more batteries.

00:54:30   So I think, already with the iPhone 10, we've seen that,

00:54:33   where they're kind of embracing having more battery and obviously the plus models. So,

00:54:39   you know, maybe they are already turning this and stopping the like hyper aggressive, you

00:54:44   know, let's do as little battery as we can and get away with it because we want to keep

00:54:48   it thin and light.

00:54:49   Well, I think the most telling thing is that the iPhone 10 is actually slightly thicker

00:54:54   than the iPhone 8 and 7 and 6. It's, you know, it's just a few millimeters, I want to say,

00:55:03   maybe one millimeter or something. It's not significant, but it certainly is significant

00:55:08   enough that if you lay them down side by side on a table, you can see that it's thicker.

00:55:12   So that's, you know, certainly it's a strong suggestion that Apple has gotten to a thin enough

00:55:21   for now. Eventually, you know, we will laugh. Another thing, you know, on the 10-year

00:55:28   timescale 10 years from now we will look back on the iPhone 10 and think my god wasn't that

00:55:34   exciting when that phone shipped but look at how thick it is it's so heavy. Sure I mean there is a

00:55:39   point where you're going to give yourself a paper cut with your phone if it gets super thin right

00:55:43   it is you know you can get everything can get thinner at the exact same rate except with if

00:55:50   you set your battery target at 14 hours instead of 10 hours right you know it's going to get thinner

00:55:55   from a thicker starting point.

00:55:57   And that's, I think that's the question here is just,

00:56:00   you know, has Apple stopped being quite as aggressive

00:56:03   with what battery it puts in?

00:56:05   I mean, it still doesn't matter though.

00:56:06   Still old batteries are still gonna suck though,

00:56:08   that there's just, until there's new battery tech

00:56:11   that does, that works more like a gas tank,

00:56:14   but they don't have that yet.

00:56:16   - All right, let me take a break

00:56:17   and thank our next friend of the show.

00:56:21   It's our good friends at Squarespace.

00:56:25   Make your next move with Squarespace.

00:56:27   Look, do you ever need a website?

00:56:29   You do something new, I don't know.

00:56:31   Maybe you need a new personal website.

00:56:33   Maybe you're gonna start a podcast.

00:56:34   Maybe you're gonna start a blog.

00:56:36   Maybe you are opening a restaurant

00:56:39   or something exciting like that.

00:56:40   You needed a website.

00:56:44   The easiest way to make your website is Squarespace.

00:56:49   I am blown away.

00:56:51   I always say this.

00:56:53   The number one reason, in the back of my mind,

00:56:54   that I would think, well, I wouldn't want to go with Squarespace because I don't want

00:56:57   like a cookie cutter website that looks like every other site, you know, and it sounds

00:57:02   to me like if you Squarespace is the sort of thing, we're sure they have a bunch of

00:57:05   templates to choose from, but it's, you know, there's going to be like 10 looks and my website's

00:57:10   going to look like all these others and there's thousands and thousands of Squarespace sites

00:57:14   out there. So surely it's, it's really not like that at all. I mean, you really can get

00:57:19   started and pick a template and without doing any design work on your own, maybe because

00:57:23   you're not a designer, or maybe because you don't have time, you can really just have

00:57:26   a beautiful website that's right out of their templates, but you can design it to be customized

00:57:32   right out the wazoo. And I'll give you an example. I just this week linked to a fantastic

00:57:40   story by a guy named Jason Justin O'Byrne, who was a he's a cartographer. Oh, yeah, used

00:57:46   to work. He used to work at Apple, and has a series, he's more or less writing a book.

00:57:53   chapter by chapter on the web.

00:57:55   I don't know how the book is gonna be though,

00:57:57   because his examples are animated.

00:58:01   Like he'll have a, here's an example of this block

00:58:04   of this city at this scale in Google Maps.

00:58:07   And here's the same block at the same scale in Apple Maps.

00:58:10   And he uses animation so you can see them

00:58:13   one after another and see the differences.

00:58:16   It inherently, you know, it's sort of thing,

00:58:18   you can't do animation in a printed book, at least not yet.

00:58:22   maybe like with a flip book or something.

00:58:23   But anyway, his website,

00:58:25   in addition to being a fantastic article, fantastic.

00:58:28   If you didn't read it, you really should.

00:58:30   I will put it in the show notes, but it's a beautiful,

00:58:35   it's just a beautiful, beautiful design too.

00:58:38   And once you see it, you'll say, yeah,

00:58:40   I can see why Gruber likes this design.

00:58:42   It's just one column, beautiful type,

00:58:45   some Futura bold for the headlines.

00:58:48   So of course I got nosy and viewed source.

00:58:51   guess what? Squarespace. He said it on Squarespace. So, uh, really, it's just a terrific example

00:58:58   of something. And I can imagine why he did it is why he's using Squarespace is, is so

00:59:03   much work and research goes into the article and when you see it and you think about it,

00:59:08   and he's got examples from like years ago, uh, where he's been collecting these examples

00:59:12   over the years so he can compare the rate of improvement. Guess what? All he has to

00:59:16   do is focus on his research and his writing and his comparison and doesn't have to worry

00:59:21   about web hosting and all of that stuff. Squarespace just takes care of it. I really can't emphasize

00:59:27   enough just how much Squarespace can just make it easy, as easy to make a website as

00:59:33   it is to just make a new document in a word processor and have it be beautiful, have it

00:59:40   be unique to yourself with your domain, your name, your design, everything you want. So

00:59:45   next time, everything's going to look professional. It's easy to use, easy to set up. You do it

00:59:51   all through the web browser and you can start with a free trial today at squarespace.com.

00:59:56   And when you decide to sign up, all you have to do is remember the code talk show T A L

01:00:01   K S H O W and you'll get 10% off your first purchase. So my thanks to Squarespace. Go

01:00:07   check them out next time you need a website. Do you love that? You love that article from

01:00:12   Justin O'Byrne, right?

01:00:13   Yeah, I mean, I remember I've been following them, and I remember linking to them before

01:00:18   because they are so detailed. And, you know, that requires commitment because he's taking

01:00:23   screenshots over time of the same things so you can see the progress. I think it's really

01:00:29   interesting. It led to a really interesting conversation I saw on Twitter, a lot of things

01:00:33   going back and forth about, you know, there's a constant debate about like, what's the

01:00:38   state of Apple Maps? And what's the state of Google Maps? And I think the latest post

01:00:41   by Justin O'Byrne was interesting because he's pointing out he's pointing out features

01:00:45   like Google is turning its machine learning onto satellite photos and drawing the shapes

01:00:49   of buildings base basically automatically based on pictures of buildings from satellite

01:00:55   photos which is cool. Although I saw somebody use it as an example of why Google Maps is

01:01:01   way ahead of Apple Maps and I'm not quite sure that as cool as it is it's as it's a

01:01:07   vital feature like that I would put into the hopper for like reasons why to choose one

01:01:12   over the other is a is a the shape of a building especially since in my neighborhood they've

01:01:17   got the shape of my my kids old elementary school from five years ago and they knocked

01:01:22   that school down and built a new school and it hasn't been updated so it's not current

01:01:26   shapes but you know but I appreciate that they've got them and that Apple doesn't I

01:01:29   just I'm not sure if I was to say where in Apple Maps do I want Apple to invest more

01:01:34   of its resources. I'm not sure I would say building shapes, but you know, but it is amazing

01:01:38   to see the evolution and what Google pours into to maps from seemingly like all sorts

01:01:44   of different parts of their their company and their set of technology. Well, one of

01:01:48   the things that was interesting about his recent comparison was comparing what they're

01:01:54   getting out of the satellite images versus Street View and Street View is inherently

01:02:01   labor intensive. It's, you know, it requires actual humans for now, you know, again, that

01:02:08   might change, you know, coming years with self driving cars. And certainly, the street

01:02:15   view thing would be one of the first things that would get, you know, have the human removed

01:02:20   from it, right? Like it. In Uber type situation, you can think of more scenarios where you

01:02:26   you need human interaction with some kind of dilemma or a complicated route to take,

01:02:33   or I need you to stop at three places, whereas Street View just set the car going and let

01:02:38   it go. So even taking out the human labor, though, it's just you need a number of cars.

01:02:44   The cars can only go so fast. So his example was a small town where he grew up that still

01:02:52   hasn't been street viewed, but all the roads are mapped because the satellite images can

01:02:59   be processed by computers, and computers keep getting faster and faster and faster. They

01:03:07   show buildings on maps in new developments where the roads aren't even there yet because

01:03:11   they haven't updated the roads, but they've already identified through machine learning

01:03:15   the buildings and have the houses on the map, which is kind of crazy.

01:03:19   - Right, right, absolutely.

01:03:21   And I think maps as a design challenge

01:03:26   are fundamentally interesting.

01:03:28   I think they've been, are historically interesting.

01:03:30   And so obviously, you could argue the cutting edge

01:03:33   of cartography is these map services,

01:03:37   is how Apple and Google,

01:03:39   not just like the technology behind it,

01:03:40   but like how they choose to depict all this information

01:03:43   and how much is too much.

01:03:44   One of the things that he's written about is like,

01:03:46   at what point do you kind of hide the information

01:03:48   or degrade it because it's overwhelming.

01:03:50   How do you label neighborhoods,

01:03:52   Google labels neighborhoods more aggressively

01:03:54   than Apple does, it's all, it's fascinating stuff.

01:03:56   - Yeah, but, and where it kicks in,

01:03:58   and I, you know, this drives some people nuts, you know,

01:04:01   that who, you know, but I use Apple Maps,

01:04:04   I like Apple Maps, I find it good enough.

01:04:06   And I like, one thing I like about Apple Maps

01:04:10   more than Google Maps is I like the user interface

01:04:13   of the app itself better.

01:04:15   and the places I tend to go and where I need navigation to,

01:04:20   Apple Maps does a terrific job of it,

01:04:22   but I don't go many places.

01:04:25   And I get it that there's more places,

01:04:26   a lot of places throughout the world

01:04:27   where Google Maps has better data

01:04:29   or has data where Apple doesn't, et cetera.

01:04:31   But I also fully acknowledge,

01:04:34   and everything in his article about Google,

01:04:37   Google being years ahead of Apple Maps,

01:04:40   it's really interesting to me,

01:04:41   as somebody who doesn't drive often,

01:04:43   And when I do drive, I tend to just not go far and I don't need navigation.

01:04:48   But I used navigation recently.

01:04:51   Just like the most recent example I can think of is going to see the last Jedi

01:04:58   because rather than go see it here in the city where the theaters,

01:05:00   there's some good theaters here,

01:05:01   but the best theaters in the area are in the suburbs outside Philadelphia.

01:05:06   And so for a special movie like the last Jedi, I want to, you know,

01:05:09   where I buy like a reserved seat and a place with reclining seats, like I go,

01:05:13   outside the city. And I used Apple Maps just to, you know, route me around. I know how

01:05:20   to get there, but just take me around traffic and stuff like that. And I think it's gotten

01:05:25   so much better, so much obvious, Apple Maps has gotten so much obviously better in recent

01:05:30   years about little things like telling you ahead of time which lane you want to get into

01:05:35   for an exit and explaining the words that are used to tell you about like a complicated

01:05:43   like an exit with like two exits, you're right, like, you can make the the sharper right to go

01:05:49   one way, and a lesser sloping right hand turn to go a different way. It's described better than I

01:05:58   just described it, you know, telling you which which one you want to take it, they're obviously

01:06:03   improving Apple Maps terrifically. But it's also the case that Google Maps is being improved at

01:06:08   at the same rate, if not more, and so is remaining ahead overall.

01:06:15   I think -- -Right, because Google tends

01:06:17   to have done lane guidance sooner and, you know, all of those things.

01:06:22   I use Apple Maps most of the time, but I use Google Maps sometimes, too.

01:06:24   And it's fun to watch because it is an arms race,

01:06:29   but I agree that Google is ahead,

01:06:32   but it's not true that Apple is not improving that service.

01:06:37   they are improving it all the time.

01:06:39   - I think that to tie it all together though,

01:06:41   and again, I'm with you,

01:06:43   putting the building shapes on the map.

01:06:45   I think it's interesting, I am a very visual person

01:06:48   and so I do tend to navigate by landmarks

01:06:52   and I know a lot of people do

01:06:53   and I think I do find it useful.

01:06:56   I would find it useful to have

01:06:58   a recognizable building shape on the map.

01:07:00   Is it essential?

01:07:01   Probably not.

01:07:02   But I think where the magic would tie it together

01:07:05   is with self-driving cars. And I know Neelai Patel has to mention him again, has mentioned

01:07:12   this a lot of the times that it's like the biggest problem with like Uber and Lyft and

01:07:18   other car companies is often getting the exact right spot to get picked up. And there's so

01:07:25   many buildings like in New York where Neelai is and here in Philadelphia, where the address

01:07:31   of the building you're in doesn't correspond exactly to where you are to get picked up.

01:07:37   Maybe you're on a side street. And the example that Justin O'Byrne gets into is that combined

01:07:48   with Street View, where the machine learning can pick up doors, you can combine this with

01:07:56   the map data to not just know the address and the location of a building, but the location

01:08:00   of the doors at a building. And that that's a huge that, you know, that that could really

01:08:06   change things in the car service business, right?

01:08:11   Right. I feel that way. I mean, Google has gotten much better about where businesses

01:08:17   are in like, shopping malls and strip malls where if you've ever done that I do that sometimes

01:08:22   when we're taking a long drive to LA or something and we're, we're getting dinner in way out

01:08:27   in the extreme East Bay where we used to live. We don't live there anymore. And there's a

01:08:30   there's a, you know, let's go to the burger place here on our way out. And, you know,

01:08:36   map apps can are like, oh, it's in that center, right? But some of these places are huge.

01:08:41   And that's the thing that I think I've noticed getting better, especially with Google. But

01:08:45   Apple is catching up again is instead of just sort of sending you to the center and then

01:08:49   saying good luck. Look for the sign that I've noticed now that these services are much better

01:08:55   at like, no, it's in this corner.

01:08:57   Like, you know exactly where to drive

01:08:59   to get to the thing you wanna buy.

01:09:01   And that didn't used to be the case.

01:09:02   They used to just kind of use your street address

01:09:04   and mark it on a map and then kick you out.

01:09:07   And that isn't happening anymore.

01:09:09   So it's all getting better.

01:09:10   I think it's really exciting.

01:09:13   And yeah, so people should read those articles

01:09:17   and look at those animations.

01:09:18   They're amazing.

01:09:18   - Yeah, Apple's made a big push

01:09:20   at mapping the interior of airports.

01:09:22   And I know they just added a bunch more.

01:09:25   Super useful. Very, very useful. Because again, knowing that there is a, you know, like a five

01:09:34   guys in the airport and yeah, we everybody I'm with, yeah, we can all go for five guys, but where

01:09:41   we know it's somewhere in the airport, but is it even vaguely near our terminal? You know,

01:09:46   knowing stuff like that. You used to have to like find the airport website or like maybe your

01:09:51   Airport app has the map and all of that and now Apple Maps and Google Maps have

01:09:56   they generally have that stuff now where you can I both of them where you can

01:10:00   look and be like oh that's where the that's where the burger place is we can

01:10:03   just walk down there anything else on the iPhone battery issue there's I how

01:10:11   about the $50 discount on battery replacement that's pretty interesting it

01:10:15   It reminds me, I'm surprised by it, but now that I think about it, I'm not surprised because

01:10:22   it's a typical Apple move when they actually recognize that they've made a mistake. Like,

01:10:28   didn't they give out bumpers with the... Bumper cases during Antennagate. Yep, that

01:10:33   was it. That's what it reminded me of too. Same thing, which is like, "Oh, right. Okay.

01:10:37   We're sorry you feel bad." Of course, they only say it's 2018. I mean, let's see where

01:10:42   this goes, I kind of feel like maybe they ought to do like a battery warranty or offer

01:10:47   some sort of like extended battery replacement in general. But regardless, offering it for

01:10:54   $29 instead of $79, this is the difference between sort of, "All right, if you really

01:10:58   want a new battery, we'll put it in there," to saying, "Look, if you're having problems

01:11:02   and we can check and see that your battery is aging, then, you know, and we agree, yes,

01:11:09   $29 you get a new battery." That's good.

01:11:11   You know what? The word that they used is consumable, that batteries are consumable

01:11:16   components. And part of the communication problem up till now is that Apple has never

01:11:22   said that before. And the entirely sealed design of the iPhone certainly suggests that

01:11:29   it's not a consumable component. You know, your iPhone is sealed up, you can't get it

01:11:36   anything in there. And so it's reasonable to expect that like the CPU, which doesn't,

01:11:41   you know, wear out over time, or the RAM or the SSD storage or anything else that's in

01:11:50   there, you know, you don't have to get your speakers replaced after two years, because

01:11:54   they're at 50% capacity. Right, the battery is the odd consumable component. It, you know,

01:12:04   reading it differently than other things, I think is justified in the replacement. I

01:12:10   forget what it costs now to replace a screen, but screens are obviously something that needs

01:12:14   to be replaced often because they're made out of glass, phones get dropped, and the

01:12:18   screens crack. It's one of the top issues related to these devices industry-wide. Another

01:12:28   one of those things that someday Scotty's going to come back from the future and invent

01:12:33   clear aluminum for us and we're going to have some kind of display that doesn't crack

01:12:39   and we're going to look back at the decades where cracking your phone was a common problem

01:12:46   and think, "My God, we were living in caveman times." But for now, it's there. But people

01:12:53   get that, right? And I think that the way—I think the price is around like $100 now for

01:12:58   an authorized screen replacement?

01:13:00   It varies based on what the device is. It's certainly a major reason why people

01:13:06   get the extended warranty, they get the extended AppleCare on their phones because they either

01:13:10   have first-hand experience breaking the screen and wanting to get it replaced as cheaply

01:13:15   as possible or even if they haven't done it, they're just worried about it because they

01:13:19   know it's an issue. I think the battery needs a different treatment because it wears out

01:13:26   through you know if you drop your phone you at least know you've you're at fault well

01:13:29   I dropped it I did you know I wish that it was made of different materials so it wouldn't

01:13:34   break when I dropped it but I did drop it whereas the battery wears out if you treat

01:13:38   the phone perfectly like you can do nothing wrong except use it and the battery will wear

01:13:44   out 79 bucks isn't a lot but it's a big difference from 29 bucks 29 bucks is great I mean and

01:13:53   And for an authorized battery replacement, I really, I think that's a great move on

01:13:57   Apple's part. I can only guess that that's actually a bit of a loss for Apple. I mean,

01:14:02   I don't know what the actual battery costs them component-wise. But the labor alone,

01:14:08   if it takes, you know, however long it takes the tech person in the store to do it, 29

01:14:15   bucks is pushing the limits on just what the labor alone would cost, I would think.

01:14:19   Yeah, it's, I mean, maybe it's break even, maybe it's not, but I think there's this,

01:14:26   I went back and forth with a bunch of people on Twitter and including Nile about this after

01:14:31   he tweeted that link to my article, which did, I mean, to be fair, in 2007, in that

01:14:37   interview, Greg Joswiak basically says they're not consumables. Don't think of them that

01:14:43   way. Don't worry about it. And this is a shift in Apple saying, "All right, let's just be

01:14:47   clear and not pretend. But anyway, in the Twitter back and forth, there was this question

01:14:52   of like, you know, Apple wants to make money totally, they're a profit-making company,

01:14:57   but what's the value of feeling like they're taking care of you and providing good customer

01:15:03   service and looking out for their customers? And I firmly believe that at the highest levels

01:15:09   inside Apple, they believe that taking care of that person who bought an iPhone three

01:15:15   years ago is absolutely imperative and that what they don't want is anybody to Apple to

01:15:21   have a reputation that if you, you know, use your phone for more than two years, it's going

01:15:25   to be terrible because Apple hates you. Like they want that. They legitimately want that

01:15:29   to be a good experience even if you're using an older phone. And I think, you know, that

01:15:33   is so because of that, like saying, okay, it's going to be 29. It's going to be easier.

01:15:39   going to that's the value of investing if this even if it is a loss or if it's a break-even

01:15:45   in investing in your customers and making them feel happy because they're going to feel

01:15:49   it's the miracle on 34th Street thing right it's like you the good customer service isn't

01:15:54   always looking at to sell you your next thing it's to it's to make the customer feel like

01:15:59   they're happy to be a customer of yours and that that builds loyalty so I think this is

01:16:04   case where, you know, Apple retail not necessarily structured to see the forest for the trees,

01:16:12   and it's like we can make a profit on this, and we can also drive people to new sales,

01:16:16   which we want, and that's great. I mean, I don't want Apple to stop selling iPhones because

01:16:22   everybody can use them for seven years. You know, people want new iPhones and want to

01:16:26   push it forward, but I do think this is a case where, you know, Apple is pushing back

01:16:31   a little bit and saying, "No, no, no. We should make it easy for people with a three-year-old

01:16:37   phone to get their battery swapped out. We should not get in their way." And by lowering

01:16:42   the price by 50 bucks, at least for 2018, that does that. And I also think this story

01:16:48   just helps in the sense that it makes everybody understand that you can take your phone to

01:16:51   an Apple store or an authorized or even unauthorized person and swap out your battery and get a

01:16:57   a new battery, which I think a lot of people don't think about that. So this has educated

01:17:01   people in that way, too.

01:17:05   Another thing I wanted to bring up is that it seems like somehow in the course of this

01:17:13   story, everybody with a slow iPhone—not everybody, but a lot of people with slow iPhones—are

01:17:18   now convinced that this is the one and only reason that an iPhone can become slow.

01:17:23   Right. Aha! This is it.

01:17:25   right. Aha, I knew it was something and it's this deliberate scheme. And it's not it really

01:17:31   isn't. And especially if you got a fully charged, your phone is fully charged, and you've just

01:17:37   restarted it and you open it up and it takes five seconds for the camera app to go from

01:17:42   when you tap the icon to when you actually get it. That is almost certainly not this

01:17:47   throttling feature in the OS, you've something else is wrong with your phone. And I've linked

01:17:53   to it on during fireball. It's just one anecdote. But I had tons of people on Twitter, I've

01:17:58   said the same thing where somebody wrote a blog post and they went to the they saw that

01:18:03   they have a slow iPhone success or six and they took it to the store because aha, it's

01:18:07   the battery issue and the guy plugged it in and said, Nope, your batteries at like 85%.

01:18:11   It's you know, well within normal range, nothing wrong with the battery. But his iPhone was

01:18:16   truly slow and exasperated. He went home and erased it, you know, sit back to factory settings,

01:18:23   restored from a backup and wow his phone was suddenly like it was he remembered when it

01:18:29   was new it was fast again. I keep mentioning it because I just wanted it I think there's

01:18:37   more people with slow iPhones for other reasons than this battery issue than there are who

01:18:41   have the battery issue or at least it's as many and I almost think it's a problem you

01:18:47   mentioned it before I almost think like the thing we're not talking about is the bigger

01:18:51   problem is that iOS seems to have a systemic year after year problem of

01:18:59   needing to be wiped and reinstalled you know which was always the knock against

01:19:04   Windows as compared to Mac you know that max you can have you know just upgrade

01:19:11   to new versions and keep going and you don't have to you know wipe and

01:19:15   reinstall is not part of the normal lifespan of a Mac and it's not normal

01:19:21   for iPhones either. I honest I've been thinking about it and I can't prove it

01:19:25   but to my the best of my recollection the iPhone 10 in my right jeans pocket

01:19:31   right now has a chain going back to the first iPhone that I bought it at the end

01:19:38   of June July 2007 I believe that my personal iPhone has been upgraded every

01:19:46   single year since then through multiple devices sometimes by you know putting a

01:19:50   review unit in the mix before I bought my own phone. And there's nothing on, you know,

01:19:57   if I thought my phone was running slow, I would certainly wipe and reinstall. But it's

01:20:01   obviously not everybody. And, you know, my upgrade chain goes back to 2007. I'm almost

01:20:08   certain. But obviously, some people it does. And that's, you know, I feel like and it's

01:20:15   happened been that case for years that people and it's all over the place, too. I've heard

01:20:20   people say, like, I've seen this too, where my wife's phone was running slow and she

01:20:25   got a new phone and we were going to hand it down to my daughter and I, and I, but I

01:20:29   was concerned about the slowness and I wiped it and restarted it and it was far more responsive.

01:20:36   It was fine. And I had that moment like, well, that's weird. And I've heard from

01:20:40   people who, well, that can happen, but if you, you know, if you wipe it, but don't

01:20:46   restore, but I've also heard from people who, if you wipe and restore, it's fine.

01:20:49   And I've also heard from people who say, "Well, it's fine for a while, and then maybe it slows

01:20:52   down again."

01:20:53   So I feel like there are bugs here, though.

01:20:55   I feel like something is absolutely here.

01:21:00   And this, combined with sort of the general trend, whenever you have a new operating system,

01:21:04   to optimize it for the latest and greatest hardware and not worry so much about the old

01:21:08   hardware, I feel like these are similar in the sense that, again, Apple's not sabotaging

01:21:14   your phone, but I don't think enough attention is paid at Apple to issues with two or three

01:21:24   year old hardware. Yeah, I think on iOS and it's been years it really is. And I do I think

01:21:32   it actually works against Apple's own interests like Apple genuinely wants people to be running

01:21:39   the latest version of iOS. I don't even see how anybody could say the contrary, given

01:21:47   the way that within a few weeks of it coming out, everybody who hasn't upgraded gets a

01:21:52   very prominent alert saying, "Hey, wouldn't you like to upgrade to the latest version

01:21:58   of iOS? Just click this button and we'll do it overnight." It's very easy to almost accidentally

01:22:05   agreed to upgrade to iOS, you know, iOS, whatever point of the new version. And right, I feel

01:22:14   like there's a lot of people out there who at some point, a year ago, two, three, whatever

01:22:20   years ago, had an iPhone that they thought was working great, and got a prompt to upgrade

01:22:26   and said, Sure, why not? And then felt like their phone degraded significantly and thought,

01:22:33   Well, I'm never doing that again.

01:22:35   I really do.

01:22:36   I mean, I hear from people.

01:22:37   I think people who read "During Fireball"

01:22:39   and read "Six Colors" and listen to the show

01:22:41   are less likely to do that.

01:22:43   I mean, but I feel like there's an awful lot

01:22:46   of normal people out there who got burned once

01:22:48   and then won't do it again.

01:22:49   And I really do.

01:22:50   - My mom, and I think a lot of people are like her,

01:22:56   when iOS 7 happened,

01:22:57   which was such a dramatic change in the interface.

01:23:00   And she still feels burned by that.

01:23:03   like to the point where she used to,

01:23:05   I got her in the habit of,

01:23:06   she would ask like, "Oh, there's an update."

01:23:07   I'd say, "Yeah, just, you should always install the updates."

01:23:10   And after that, not only didn't she not ask,

01:23:12   until I visited her or she visited me,

01:23:16   she would not upgrade.

01:23:17   And then she'd say, "Well, while you're here,

01:23:18   you can decide if you want to do this or not."

01:23:20   And it was entirely because iOS 7

01:23:23   was so dramatically different.

01:23:25   And again, lots of good reasons why iOS 7 was different.

01:23:28   But this is about taking something that seemed familiar

01:23:31   and making it seem completely foreign

01:23:33   and people felt burned.

01:23:35   And so they're like, no, forget it.

01:23:36   I don't trust Apple anymore with updates.

01:23:38   And it's been years now.

01:23:40   - And I don't think that took Apple by surprise.

01:23:42   I think Apple knew that there's,

01:23:44   some people would have that reaction to it.

01:23:46   And it's one of those things that separates Apple

01:23:49   from other companies.

01:23:50   Like that's why most other companies

01:23:52   never do something like that.

01:23:53   Like issue a, this year's iPhone iOS

01:23:57   looks entirely different.

01:23:59   Like literally every single pixel,

01:24:01   you encounter from the time the screen turns on to when you power it down will look different.

01:24:08   That's why other companies don't do things like that because some people object to it.

01:24:15   And you can't please everybody all the time, right? And so like the people who prefer the

01:24:20   way iOS 7 looked to the way iOS 6 looked didn't know what iOS 7 looked like and therefore

01:24:26   weren't complaining while iOS 6 was the current version because they hadn't seen

01:24:30   it, right? It's the nature of human beings, that it's a lot more likely to complain

01:24:37   about something that changed than to complain about something that hasn't changed. So

01:24:43   I definitely think that's the case. And I think you're exactly spot on that there's

01:24:47   something systemic in Apple where they're not looking at enough of what goes on when

01:24:52   a phone gets updated under less than factory conditions.

01:24:58   I sort of feel like what Apple should do, and maybe they are doing this, I don't know,

01:25:03   but I feel like when people come in to the store with a fairly recent iPhone, like let's

01:25:09   say an iPhone 6 or a 6s that should be running fine, and they can show the Genius Bar tech,

01:25:16   "Look, this is really slow."

01:25:18   And before you even plug it in and run any diagnostics, I feel like if you can, you know,

01:25:23   like, "Yeah, if the camera app takes seven seconds to load, that's a problem."

01:25:26   I feel like Apple should be collecting those phones as like evidence, sealing them in a

01:25:31   bag, give the customer a replacement, eat the cost of just swapping it out with a different

01:25:39   phone and sending that to Cupertino for like a dissection and figure out what the hell

01:25:46   is making this phone slow.

01:25:49   Or at least pull off like logs and diagnostics and things and see if you can do it.

01:25:53   I would go one better and I know that they again they made they may have a team that

01:25:57   does this but like when so obviously they're working on iOS 12 now that process is starting

01:26:03   and they'll have a beta in six months and they'll ship it in nine months. They should

01:26:09   have people on that team whose job it is to be worried and I'm sure they do about compatibility

01:26:15   issues at some point people working on iOS 12 ought to be forced essentially to have

01:26:22   their main phone be a 6 or a 6S?

01:26:24   - Yes, I do.

01:26:25   - For during the development period, right?

01:26:27   And be like, your job, one of your jobs is to see

01:26:30   what is wrong on this lower end hardware,

01:26:33   not just sort of like abstractly or with a unit

01:26:35   that you keep floating around the lab,

01:26:37   but like our customers are gonna live with the 6 on iOS 12.

01:26:42   You know, we need to make sure that experience is good.

01:26:44   And if that means aggressively turning off features

01:26:46   or muting features, reducing their effectiveness

01:26:49   on older hardware like they do on the Mac, right?

01:26:52   Where you can run High Sierra and on older Macs,

01:26:55   you can't do AirDrop, right?

01:26:56   I think maybe Apple needs to be more aggressive

01:26:58   in doing that in older phones.

01:26:59   'Cause the goal is they want for security reasons,

01:27:02   they want them all on 12 for a long way back and great,

01:27:05   bless them, fantastic.

01:27:07   They're not gonna abandon them

01:27:08   like a lot of Android phone users get abandoned.

01:27:11   But the trade off there is if you want them

01:27:14   to come along to iOS 12 next year,

01:27:17   you gotta make it usable for them.

01:27:20   Otherwise you shouldn't migrate them.

01:27:22   - Yeah, the cutoff for what phones are eligible

01:27:27   for iOS latest should correspond directly

01:27:30   to which phones are capable of running it well.

01:27:33   Like well enough that you, somebody at Apple

01:27:36   who knows what it's like to use the newest iPhone

01:27:40   can live with it for two weeks, you know.

01:27:42   So I feel like there's two levels of it.

01:27:46   Like the first level is when iOS is functioning perfectly

01:27:50   on the device, like let's just say after a factory reset

01:27:54   and you install iOS 12 beta one on it, is it fast?

01:27:59   Is it fast enough?

01:28:00   Is it as fast as iOS was when this phone was the new phone?

01:28:05   And then the second level is the bugs

01:28:11   that are obviously not intentional

01:28:13   aren't going to show up after a factory reset that only seemed to occur after an upgrade

01:28:19   from a previous version and identifying those bugs. Because it's two levels of complaint,

01:28:25   right? And they're both legitimate. But the one is that even after a factory reset,

01:28:32   these animations are clearly stuttering in a way that they weren't when I was running

01:28:37   the previous version of iOS. And how can you not feel burned that your phone a week ago

01:28:43   had smooth animations when you go back to the home screen and now you've taken Apple's advice

01:28:48   and upgraded and now it's all stuttery and takes longer. That's a problem. But then these bugs,

01:28:55   that's the thing that I find worrisome is that these bugs with major upgrades seem to have been

01:29:01   around for, who knows, it could be 100 different bugs and different bugs every year. But still,

01:29:08   I really feel like there's way too many instances every single year of people who follow me on

01:29:14   Twitter saying, "Oh, man, I just upgraded my two-year-old iPhone and everything sucks."

01:29:19   Yeah, and the thing that really mystifies me is that when it is solvable by wiping and restoring

01:29:28   from an iCloud backup or an iTunes backup, when that solves it, then it's like, "Okay."

01:29:35   So it's not any of the files that got backed up.

01:29:38   It's something else that's getting reset

01:29:40   and not being backed up that is apparently causing this.

01:29:43   And again, I'm sure there are people at Apple,

01:29:46   I'm sure there are radars,

01:29:47   I'm sure people have filed bugs on this,

01:29:49   I'm sure there are people at Apple

01:29:49   who have investigated this stuff.

01:29:51   And they may know some of the details and they may not,

01:29:55   but I have to ask, has it ever really been a high priority?

01:30:00   Because that's one of those things where Apple,

01:30:02   I believe Apple that it cares about the users of its products, even the old ones, but I

01:30:07   also believe that maybe the new hardware gets prioritized and the old hardware just kind

01:30:13   of comes along and they don't worry about it too much. They don't sweat the details

01:30:17   on if you've got a 6 or a 6s.

01:30:19   Right, whatever the minimum hardware is for iPhone 12 or iOS 12, Phil Schiller should

01:30:24   be able to use that phone running iOS 12 for a week and not call the engineering team up

01:30:30   and scream at them.

01:30:32   - Right, I mean, it doesn't have to be the best.

01:30:34   It's not gonna be an iPhone 10, but it should be usable.

01:30:37   Like it should be usable.

01:30:38   And I've seen like my wife's phone before we wiped it

01:30:43   and gave it to my daughter.

01:30:45   It was amazing.

01:30:47   Like I would tap apps and then it just was like molasses.

01:30:52   Just like, it was not usable.

01:30:56   It was really bad.

01:30:58   And it just, you know, wipe and it was fine.

01:31:01   And it just, I don't know, you know,

01:31:02   there's obviously something there anyway.

01:31:04   - Yeah. - We've said enough,

01:31:05   but Apple should fix it.

01:31:06   Anything else, what else do we have on this battery issue?

01:31:09   Have we expanded everything? - I don't know.

01:31:12   - I think it's pretty close.

01:31:14   - I feel like it.

01:31:16   I mean, this is one of the challenges with the internet

01:31:18   is that there's a lot of nuance to this story

01:31:20   and it can be ironed out to be

01:31:22   the Australian battery scam. - Right.

01:31:26   - If you wanna flatten it to that,

01:31:27   but it's way more complicated.

01:31:29   Apple is complicit in some things, but not the things people think they are. And so,

01:31:34   you know, you get accused of sort of like whitewashing and forgiving Apple. And it's

01:31:37   like, no, Apple made a lot of mistakes at various points in this. It's just not necessarily

01:31:41   the mistakes that they're being accused of. So yeah, it's the internet. Everything gets

01:31:46   flattened down to the battery scam.

01:31:48   All right, let me take a break here and thank our third and final sponsor of the show. Our

01:31:55   good friends at Eero. Eero makes Wi-Fi systems for your home or your office and they are

01:32:06   just terrific, terrific products. They offer more speed and more range than competing products

01:32:13   and with really nice elegant design that I hate to say it but really almost Apple-like

01:32:19   design in terms of just being little white devices that you just don't mind having

01:32:24   invisible in your house. They've got the brand new second generation product. Now the second

01:32:30   generation ERO, which just came out a few months ago, has a third 5 GHz radio. So it's

01:32:36   now tri-band and it's twice as fast as its predecessor, which was a plenty fast system.

01:32:42   So it's really a terrific upgrade of something that already was terrific. And the whole idea

01:32:48   with ERO versus a traditional router is that instead of having one router that has a powerful

01:32:54   antenna that tries to extend the Wi-Fi throughout your entire house or office or wherever you're

01:32:59   trying to provide Wi-Fi, you get multiple devices and they work in what's called a mesh network

01:33:05   together to blanket your house with Wi-Fi. So if you're like me and you live in a townhouse

01:33:11   and right now I'm recording a podcast in the basement and I'm talking to you—I don't have

01:33:16   Ethernet down here—I'm talking to you over in the Eero Wi-Fi system. If you can hear me and Jason

01:33:22   Jason can hear me. It's thanks to Eero. And I've got a fourth floor bedroom where

01:33:27   we've got another Eero up there. And before I had Eero, our bedroom had terrible Wi-Fi,

01:33:35   really did, because I worked downstairs and so that's where—and we tended to live

01:33:40   downstairs and so that's where I had it configured to have the stronger Wi-Fi. Now

01:33:46   it's terrific. We have strong Wi-Fi every single floor of the house. Really great.

01:33:50   Now the other thing that they've got in the new second generation system is what they

01:33:53   call "hero beacons."

01:33:54   And the "hero beacon" is half the size of the regular "hero base station" thing,

01:34:00   which is pretty small, sort of like an Apple TV-sized thing, but the beacon is even smaller.

01:34:05   And it just plugs right into the wall outlet like a nightlight, and even has an actual

01:34:12   LED nightlight.

01:34:14   So you can use it as a nightlight.

01:34:15   And if you don't want it to work as a nightlight, you can turn that off too, using the absolutely

01:34:20   terrific Eero app. You just put the Eero app on your phone. You can manage the whole network.

01:34:27   And it's really, really consumer friendly. It's not like managing, you think like, "Ah,

01:34:31   if I've got like three of these devices around my house, aren't I turning into a network

01:34:35   manager?" It's not like that at all. The configuration all happens automatically. Super simple. You

01:34:41   just look in the app and it tells you everything that's going on. It's so easy. It's easy to

01:34:46   to add another one later on if you want. If you've already got an older Eero system, you

01:34:51   can just buy the second generation stuff and just plug them in. Really, really great. Easy

01:34:57   to manage. Everything's protected with state-of-the-art WPA2 encryption, so you're safe. It's the

01:35:03   state-of-the-art for consumer Wi-Fi security. I love the product. I really do. I think it

01:35:12   only works in the US and Canada, you got to check that out. For more information on that.

01:35:21   And we've got a special offer here for you. The talk show use that code, the talk show,

01:35:28   and you will get free shipping to the US or Canada. You can visit Euro com at check out

01:35:35   select overnight shipping and then enter that code the talk show to make that free. So you're

01:35:40   listening to this now you could have one at your doorstep tomorrow for free. It's really,

01:35:45   really amazing. So my thanks to hero go to hero.com. And remember that code, the talk

01:35:51   show. What else is going on this week, Jason?

01:35:58   I got my iMac Pro. Oh, interesting. So I did I have not ordered I am not going to get one.

01:36:07   So what did you order?

01:36:08   Well, I had to talk myself into getting one because I had the first 5k iMac. So it's three

01:36:14   years old and I thought they made a lot of progress since then. I'm doing a lot more

01:36:19   kind of audio processing for podcasts and stuff like that. I could really use the faster

01:36:24   and more processor cores of the iMac Pro, but I could only remotely justify the base

01:36:29   model. So I have the base model that arrived on Boxing Day. So a little late Christmas

01:36:37   present I guess. So it's $8, $8, $8, $8, 32 gigabytes of RAM. Yeah, and one terabyte SSD.

01:36:46   As I, you know, sat there, I'm not getting one. I'm not Marco Arman. I don't just say I'm not

01:36:52   going to get something and not get one. I've still got the 2014, the original 5k iMac. Yeah,

01:37:00   which is right behind me. That's the one that I'm replacing. Yeah. And I and it's an i7 I built,

01:37:05   like I got the higher processor. It's a really great computer. I'm gonna sell it. It'll sell

01:37:10   well. It's a great computer. As I configured the imaginary iMac Pro that I would get,

01:37:16   I thought, well, I never get a Mac with base RAM. I always, for the last few years, I've maxed

01:37:22   whatever my MacBook Pro has the most RAM I could possibly put in it, which is 16 gigabytes. And my

01:37:27   iMac has the most RAM I could put in it, which is 16 gigabytes at the time. I believe the 5K iMac

01:37:33   right now you can get 32. But I have never I don't think I've ever bought base RAM on

01:37:39   any Mac ever. And so I was configuring it like well, I'm not going to get the base RAM

01:37:42   I'm gonna and then all of a sudden I have got like an $11,000 thing. Yeah. And I'm like,

01:37:47   I never get the low I never get the base. I always get like a middle config. But with

01:37:51   this I got the base and I feel I feel like I'm pushing it but I tried to configure you

01:37:55   know what I did I tried to configure the 5k iMac with terabyte SSD 32 gigs of RAM and like

01:38:03   the i7 and you know, it was like $1,000 away

01:38:07   from the iMac Pro and I thought,

01:38:09   all right, I'm just gonna get the iMac Pro.

01:38:10   - I did the same thing.

01:38:11   I configured a brand new, whatever the, you know,

01:38:13   the 5K regular iMac, the silver iMac.

01:38:16   And when I got it the way I liked it,

01:38:18   it was like $4,100 or $4,200.

01:38:20   So it was within spitting distance

01:38:22   of the $5,000 base config.

01:38:25   The thing I had to bang into my head

01:38:26   is that the base config iMac Pro

01:38:29   is nothing like a base config regular iMac.

01:38:32   It's already a seriously pro machine.

01:38:37   - Yeah, it's not, I actually wonder about the Mac Pro.

01:38:41   This is something that, I think I wrote a piece about this

01:38:44   the other day that I wonder where the Mac Pro will start.

01:38:49   'Cause my guess is that the Mac Pro will start

01:38:51   below the iMac Pro and maybe even be less capable,

01:38:55   but will scale up to be way more capable.

01:38:57   And whereas with the iMac Pro, like, yeah, this is,

01:39:01   There's the 5K iMac is already basically a pro system.

01:39:06   It doesn't have a Xeon in it, but it's so powerful

01:39:10   that they didn't need to go lower with the iMac Pro.

01:39:14   Like this is any lower than this

01:39:17   and they're basically scraping the top of the iMac line,

01:39:20   which why would you do that?

01:39:21   So I felt like the base model here was pretty good.

01:39:25   It is dangerous to listen to people like Marco though,

01:39:27   because you end up in a situation where it sounds like

01:39:30   if your budget is a little bit larger than mine,

01:39:33   that the 10 core model is sort of a sweet spot

01:39:37   in terms of single and multi-core performance.

01:39:39   And then of course, if you're a monster

01:39:41   who just devours computer processing power,

01:39:44   you can scale it up from there to 14 cores

01:39:47   or whatever you wanna do.

01:39:48   But for me, it was like, I was either,

01:39:50   I made a deal with myself.

01:39:51   It's like, if I do this, it's gonna be the base model

01:39:53   or not at all, because my old 5K iMac had 16 gigs of RAM

01:39:58   and it had a 512 SSD, right?

01:40:01   So I, and so for me, it was like all of the base config stuff

01:40:05   is still way better than the computer that I have.

01:40:09   So let's just, and so I did, the only accessory I bought

01:40:11   was I like to have my iMac on a, on an arm

01:40:15   instead of sitting on the desk.

01:40:17   And this one is adaptable to that,

01:40:20   but you have to buy out like a $79 Visa mount adapter

01:40:25   that is coming tomorrow, I guess.

01:40:27   and then it'll be floating above my desk as it should be.

01:40:31   - The thing that made me laugh

01:40:32   as I was configuring my imaginary iMac Pro was that,

01:40:35   and as I upped the RAM to 64,

01:40:38   'cause I don't want base RAM,

01:40:39   is I realized that I'm not buying this

01:40:41   because my current three-year-old iMac is fast enough.

01:40:46   Really, truly, I don't feel like there's anything I do

01:40:49   on it that's slow.

01:40:51   - Yeah.

01:40:52   - And it has 16 gigs of RAM.

01:40:53   So obviously 32 gigs of RAM,

01:40:56   it would actually clearly be quote unquote enough for me.

01:40:59   I really did have to laugh at that.

01:41:03   And the other thing I would like to--

01:41:04   - I wrote something the other day where I said like,

01:41:06   look, as a writer, I can use a PowerBook 160

01:41:09   with right now running OS 8, like Mac OS 8.

01:41:13   Putting letters into a computer

01:41:16   does not require a lot of processor power.

01:41:18   That is not a reason.

01:41:19   As a writer, you don't, I mean,

01:41:21   you start giving graphics and things like that,

01:41:22   but as just putting words on a page,

01:41:25   You know, we don't need this stuff.

01:41:27   It's the only reason I went here

01:41:28   is because I'm doing more audio and video stuff.

01:41:30   And that's where having a computer that's twice as fast,

01:41:33   and I measured on multi-core stuff,

01:41:36   it's almost twice as fast as the old model.

01:41:38   It's like, okay, for video encodes

01:41:42   and audio denoise processing and things like that,

01:41:45   it's gonna make a big difference.

01:41:46   That's why I bought it.

01:41:48   - Yeah, and I think for anybody, I don't edit my podcast,

01:41:52   good friend Caleb Sexton does typically 99% of episodes. But I don't think I don't know

01:42:00   if everybody who listens to podcasts realizes how CPU intensive the export process is. Like

01:42:08   it's not just like hitting command s and now you've got a mp3 that saved like, you know,

01:42:14   when you hit command s and a text editor or something like that, or like in QuickTime,

01:42:18   if you open up an audio file in QuickTime and trim and you can just hit Command-S and

01:42:24   it saves instantly as a file. The export process for a podcast is pretty intensive. You've

01:42:30   got multiple tracks and it's long.

01:42:33   And probably applying plug-ins to them and they're long and it adds up. Yeah, I have

01:42:39   these occasionally. I'll have a three-hour recording session and it's got five people

01:42:44   on it and three of them have like their heater going in the background or their laptop fan

01:42:49   has spun up and so there's white noise behind them and you know denoising and there's there's

01:42:55   software there's this amazing software called isotope RX6 that can take out room noise and

01:43:01   it takes out echoes in rooms it's amazing when it works it is like magic but that stuff

01:43:07   is super processor intense so if you can imagine denoising a three hour audio file and then

01:43:14   and de-echoing it on top of that.

01:43:16   Like, that takes a long time.

01:43:17   And if you've got eight of those,

01:43:19   this is why I bought an iMac Pro.

01:43:21   It's like, you know what?

01:43:22   I'm gonna spend the extra money

01:43:23   and I'm not gonna have to sit there

01:43:25   while I watch this stuff render or denoise or whatever.

01:43:30   Yeah. - Right.

01:43:31   And it's the sort of thing,

01:43:32   it's just fun having used computers for so long

01:43:37   where you can remember like 25 years ago

01:43:41   where you could maybe read an article

01:43:43   and somebody could have like a theoretical,

01:43:44   like, you know, in theory,

01:43:45   you could take the noise out of an audio recording,

01:43:48   you know, here's like a layman's explanation

01:43:51   for the algorithm and you're like,

01:43:53   oh, that would be pretty clever.

01:43:54   And it would be like, yeah, it would take, you know,

01:43:56   take 10 years.

01:43:59   - Our fastest supercomputers could do it

01:44:01   in less than a month.

01:44:03   Like, great, that's wonderful.

01:44:05   iZotope came in for a demo back when I worked at Macworld.

01:44:07   So it was a long time ago now.

01:44:08   And when they had just released their D Reverb feature

01:44:11   And the way they do it is they sell a bundle for like $1,000 and another one for $300 and

01:44:16   another one for $50.

01:44:18   And like the older stuff goes in the $50 one and it slowly comes down.

01:44:22   And the D Reverb is now in the $300 one, which I have, but when they announced it and when

01:44:26   they were demoing it for me, it was in the like $1,000 package.

01:44:28   And it was hilarious because they're like, "Well, we have people who are really good

01:44:32   at math and they built this algorithm that like detects the reflections with the delays

01:44:39   the sound bouncing off of the walls and does a transform. And they told me this whole story

01:44:44   about how it works. And it's true. It can do some amazing things, but the amount of

01:44:53   processing that is required to do that is incredibly intense. It's amazing that a computer

01:44:57   sitting on a desk or on the end of an arm, in my case, can do that at all in our homes.

01:45:04   But it can now, it's just super processor intense and fortunately also parallelized

01:45:11   so that they can send it to all those different processor cores because that makes a difference.

01:45:14   I'll tell you the big difference between this one and the iMac when I was testing it, my

01:45:18   5K iMac is when I do heavy processor stuff on the iMac, and you'll know this too if you've

01:45:23   ever done like a video in code, like the fan turns on and you can hear the fan, the fan

01:45:28   starts to blow.

01:45:29   And as far as I can tell on the iMac Pro, the fan's always blowing, but it's incredibly

01:45:34   quiet. You have to be listening for it and you kind of have to turn the iMac around and

01:45:37   stick your ear down there and then you can hear it. And when I started an intense encode

01:45:42   or denoise, what happens is I don't hear any change to the fan sound. It just the air blowing

01:45:49   out is hotter. That's it. It's pretty cool. I was really impressed at the hands-on thing

01:45:54   at Apple when they in New York a couple weeks ago where they were running these high intensity

01:46:00   demos over and over and over again, you know, it was, you know, sort of around round robin,

01:46:06   you know, you go from one demo 10 minutes, next one 10 minutes, next one 10 minutes,

01:46:10   and they're just doing the same thing over and over again. And after every one, I'd put

01:46:13   my hand back there and and get my ear closer to see if I could hear and I know what my

01:46:17   iMac sounds like when in my iMac is generally very, very I would, you know, maybe Syracuse

01:46:23   who would obviously disagree, but I would define it as silent to my ears most of the

01:46:28   time, but I know what it sounds like when it's taxed. In a perfectly silent room and you listen

01:46:34   very carefully, you can hear something, but it has to be like that. Like most of the work I do,

01:46:40   I could work with music playing and when my iMac, 5k iMac fan blew on, it was like, even with the

01:46:49   music playing, it's like very clearly, "Oh, there goes the fan. Now it's really working hard." And

01:46:54   just that level of background noise or having the door open to the to the dining room in the

01:46:59   kitchen here, forget it. Like, forget it. I had to lay my head down on the desk with my ear sticking

01:47:05   kind of like back behind to get any hint that that noise was going on. And so that's that's pretty

01:47:11   impressive. And that's because it knows, I mean, this thing is engineered for for all the thermal

01:47:17   dynamics of these of this powerful GPU and the powerful processor. And so and it's got to work

01:47:22   work for a 14 core, right? So my little 8 core thing, it's not a problem. It just gets

01:47:28   warmer, but it's a good fan, a good quiet fan. So I really prefer it. I much prefer

01:47:35   to have that than the, "Oh, there goes the fan. Now everybody can hear the fan." And

01:47:41   I, you know, ironically, as a podcast denoiser, I mean, that's what I'm doing that makes

01:47:48   my fan go is I'm taking out everybody else's computer fans because that's like one of the

01:47:52   noisiest thing on a podcast is people are right next to their computer and they're running

01:47:57   they're on a laptop and after like 20 minutes the laptops like okay I gotta turn on the

01:48:01   fan now and then there's fan noise for the rest of the recording. There's sort of a beautiful

01:48:05   symmetry to that. That's right. Using a quiet computer to computationally ex-denoise noise

01:48:14   created by other noisy computers slower noisier computers yeah I'll take it on

01:48:19   you do have it set up you're already are you using it right now are you like

01:48:22   talking to me I am using it I am talking to you through it right now I have

01:48:26   migrated I migrated on the day are you do you use the trackpad or did you have

01:48:31   the mouse which one did you get both I got I got I should have gotten both

01:48:35   because I could have sold them both I know I didn't I just got the trackpad I

01:48:39   And apparently Casey Liss is buying my keyboard

01:48:43   'cause I have no need for that keyboard for many reasons.

01:48:46   The Magic Keyboard's okay,

01:48:47   but it's also the one with the number pad.

01:48:48   And like, I do not want that.

01:48:51   I've got my mechanical keyboard here.

01:48:52   I can go down a path that'll terrify people.

01:48:55   But I do love the Magic Trackpad.

01:48:57   And so I'm keeping that.

01:48:58   I think the Magic Trackpad is great.

01:49:00   - Yeah, I've got a Magic.

01:49:01   That's the only modern Apple input thing I use.

01:49:04   I still have got my extended keyboard too.

01:49:06   I've got my old 1999 Logitech mouse with a ball in it that I use as my mouse.

01:49:12   Oh yeah.

01:49:13   I used to use that.

01:49:14   So that's exactly what I used to use was a trackball, but I finally did convert it to

01:49:18   use a trackball.

01:49:19   No, not a trackball.

01:49:20   I have a mouse.

01:49:21   The mouse has a ball in it.

01:49:22   Oh, you've got the old school mouse.

01:49:24   Yeah.

01:49:25   Wow.

01:49:26   Because it, for some reason, every time I've tried one with a laser, I have it set and

01:49:29   I have a third party mouse driver to run my mouse at super speed for RSI issues.

01:49:34   So I really only just put my fingers.

01:49:35   - That makes sense.

01:49:37   - And the ball actually seems to work better

01:49:40   at the insane mouse speed that I use.

01:49:43   - That's cool.

01:49:44   - And it just--

01:49:45   - All right, so you're as old school

01:49:46   as it gets for input devices.

01:49:48   - Except that I have the magic track pad,

01:49:49   which I do love for various things.

01:49:52   - Yeah.

01:49:53   - I don't know, I don't have any other questions

01:49:56   about the Mac though.

01:49:57   - I mean, it's a really fast iMac.

01:50:01   I mean, that's the thing.

01:50:01   I said on Twitter when I got it, I'm like, yeah, it's fast.

01:50:05   and people are like, oh boy, you know,

01:50:07   that's really great, thanks for the first impression.

01:50:09   But like, if you know what a 5K iMac is,

01:50:12   you know what this thing is.

01:50:13   It's just darker and faster.

01:50:17   But like, it's the screen, it's got the beautiful screen.

01:50:20   It's got, I haven't had a computer with Thunderbolt 3

01:50:24   USB-C ports on the back, and I've got those now.

01:50:27   And I had to, I took my first trip to Dongle Town

01:50:30   as part of the migration, 'cause I had to dig out,

01:50:32   I did have one, I had to dig out a Thunderbolt 2

01:50:34   Thunderbolt 3 adapter so that I could put my old iMac in target mode and copy the data

01:50:41   over to the new iMac. So I had to get a dongle out for that one.

01:50:46   What do you use? Here's a question. I've been reevaluating my external drives recently because

01:50:51   it's gotten to the point where external USB 3 SSDs are at the price that I would consider

01:51:00   paying for for just like my super duper clone of my startup drive. So like I'm it's like

01:51:06   I've I don't use it. I haven't used a computer with a spinning hard disk as like the startup

01:51:10   disk for a couple of years now ever since my iMac I guess I got the iMac in this MacBook

01:51:17   Pro both in 2014 I think and they both have SSDs. But you can get I think you can get

01:51:25   a one terabyte USB 3 SSD for like $500? I forget, but it's a reasonable price.

01:51:34   I have a Samsung USB SSD, I think it's a 512, and it's impossibly small. And I use that

01:51:42   sometimes for offloading things, although now my internal storage is twice as much,

01:51:46   so I won't have to do that as much. I have a Mac mini server that has a RAID hanging

01:51:54   off of it. And it's, you know, I've got like nine terabytes of stuff on there. I've got

01:52:02   a bunch of podcast archives and it's a Plex server, so I got movies and TV shows on there

01:52:07   that I've read from Blu-rays. I like it. I love having that space. I am starting to think

01:52:15   Like at what point could I move to SSD for that?

01:52:20   Because I don't like spinning disks, right?

01:52:25   I mean, they're unreliable, they're hot, they're loud.

01:52:29   - They're so loud.

01:52:30   - I really would like to kill them.

01:52:31   But at the same time, I really like having,

01:52:35   I mean, I have seven terabytes free.

01:52:37   I like having 16 and a half terabytes of storage

01:52:40   kind of on my gigabit ethernet network

01:52:43   over, you know, around the corner where I can just dump big files when I'm done with

01:52:46   them and keep the one terabyte on my iMac relatively lighter back in the day, the 512.

01:52:52   And so I don't know, I'm, I'm, we're, we're getting there, we're getting close. But the

01:52:56   fact that Apple still makes the iMac where by default you get a spinning disk drive.

01:53:03   Yeah, it's, I think it's not even by default you get a fusion drive by default. You just

01:53:07   get a spinning disk drive that shows you how much more expensive SSDs are and on products

01:53:14   where Apple wants to make the price as low as possible within their margins. You know,

01:53:21   I guess what I'm saying is I really want the iMac to be redesigned like the iMac Pro was

01:53:24   to remove the option of a spinning disk, but I understand why they haven't done it because

01:53:29   it is way cheaper. It's just it's so much worse technology in so many different ways.

01:53:35   So I hope one of these days I can move my outboard storage, but as it is, I've got sort

01:53:40   of like five feet away from me in a little sort of in a drawer of some old IKEA furniture

01:53:47   is a raid that ticks along.

01:53:51   I can hear it ticking every now and then when the time machine backup goes on, but I'm willing

01:53:55   to deal with that because I just having all that storage is too good.

01:53:59   There's like a life hack that I've never followed, but I understand the logic of it,

01:54:05   but I've heard numerous times over the years that some people say what you should do is

01:54:09   throw out all of your socks and buy like 10 pairs of the exact same sock, like a dark

01:54:20   gray sock that you could wear in all situations, and then once a year throw them all out again

01:54:26   and buy however many more you need.

01:54:28   And then you never have to pair socks.

01:54:30   You could just throw all your socks in a sock drawer

01:54:33   and just take them out.

01:54:34   I do the same thing sort of with my external drives

01:54:38   where I tend to buy, like, if I feel like I need

01:54:40   like four external drives for various things,

01:54:43   like a super duper clone and an external storage

01:54:46   for media that I can't fit on my,

01:54:49   or don't want to fit on the internal drive on my iMac.

01:54:53   But I tend to buy like four of the exact same drive

01:54:56   or the same drive from the same company,

01:54:59   but maybe with different capacities.

01:55:01   Just so that I don't know why.

01:55:06   I don't really, it's a little illogical, I guess,

01:55:08   but I kinda like the idea that if I know

01:55:10   they're all have the same thing

01:55:11   and they use the same technology to connect,

01:55:15   like going back decades, FireWire or whatever,

01:55:20   that I know they're all gonna work with this Mac.

01:55:23   because it seems like that's one of the little things

01:55:25   that still changes every couple of years.

01:55:27   Like you said, you had to get a Thunderbolt 2

01:55:29   to Thunderbolt 3 adapter.

01:55:30   It's like one of those things where like these,

01:55:33   the drives last so much longer than they used to,

01:55:35   especially SSDs, SSDs, you know.

01:55:37   But I've run into the situation where it's like,

01:55:41   I've got like something, you know,

01:55:43   a bunch of old movies or something on a hard drive

01:55:45   and I can no longer connect it to my Mac

01:55:47   because the adapters have changed so much.

01:55:49   So I've gone and bought-- - Yeah, I just--

01:55:51   I bought these Samsung T fives there. I just looked up the prices. So one terabyte Samsung

01:55:56   T five portable SSD is only 350 bucks and the two terabyte is $700. So you don't even

01:56:02   pay any kind of premium. You know, it's exactly the same dollar per terabyte USB 3.1.

01:56:08   Yeah, I've got I've got one of those here. I think mine's a 512 but it's a T three. And

01:56:16   And it's, you know, it's kind of a joke how, how small it is like on with the with the

01:56:21   visa mounting bracket on the back of my iMac. I was actually able to just stick the drive

01:56:27   in the little kind of Ridge of the mounting brackets, because there's enough room for

01:56:32   the for the SSD to just sit there. Like, it's just it's nothing.

01:56:36   Trenton Larkin It actually it's so small that my biggest

01:56:39   complaint about it is that it's I can't really get it to lay flat on my desk.

01:56:43   It's like the tension of the cable will lift it or rocket. Yeah, it's it's yeah. So I have

01:56:50   a vision of that of having like a at some point being able to have like a raid that

01:56:55   is just like 10 terabytes of SSD but that right now would cost a lot of money that would

01:57:02   be that would be thousands of dollars but we'll get there.

01:57:05   Yeah, it's like I've never used an SSD for time machine. But now it's like I want to

01:57:12   SSD only. So that's why I bought one of these one terabyte things to replace my time machine

01:57:17   drive with USB. The only thing that's a little—like, I've got enough slots on my—or USB ports,

01:57:24   I should say, not slots, but ports that I can plug these things in. And it's like,

01:57:28   I'm never quite sure what's okay to put through a hub. You know, like, my keyboard

01:57:33   and mouse, I go through a USB hub because it's obviously not super—you know, you

01:57:37   You don't need high-speed performance, but I feel like an SSD you want plugged right into the computer. Maybe that's not logical

01:57:44   I guess I could benchmark it

01:57:46   But one thing about these modern like the USB 3 drives is that you can't daisy chain them

01:57:53   You know like in the old days with firewire and with Thunderbolt

01:57:56   You could like use one port on your computer and have like a drive

01:58:00   Plugged into it and then a next drive gets plugged into the first drive and a third drive could go in the second drive

01:58:07   Right. That's not a thing anymore. Yeah, I mean, at one point I bought a bunch of

01:58:16   thunderbolts or maybe they were Firewire 800. Yeah, I think that was at Drives and they were

01:58:22   like terabyte drives and I could chain them and they all had external power bricks and it was

01:58:26   awful, but at least they were all, like you said, all of the same kind. But that was, you know,

01:58:32   And so that was that was something I had to do and now you're right

01:58:35   I mean one of the things I always hated about having a local time machine

01:58:39   Drive is that then you have your computer attached to this drive that is big and hot and has a power brick and all that

01:58:45   And one of these Samsung SSD is you're absolutely right you could you just plug it in there

01:58:49   And I mean you could basically tape it to the back of your computer and never see it and it would just sit there

01:58:54   Yeah

01:58:55   I almost feel like I would almost have rather have it like have the USB thing connected to it and just plug it in the

01:59:00   USB port is a dongle in the back, you know, just have the whole drive sticking out back

01:59:04   there. Anyway, that's my advice to everybody is get rid of your spinning disks and get

01:59:08   these SSDs.

01:59:09   If you can afford it, get off the spinning disks.

01:59:12   Yeah, the only really, it's, I don't know, it just feels good. I feel safer getting

01:59:18   my, getting them out of there, even if they're backup drives. One last thing I've definitely

01:59:23   wanted to talk about is you and I had a Twitter conversation a few weeks ago, speaking of

01:59:27   I forget how it started, but we were talking about—somehow on Twitter we got into a conversation

01:59:33   about that in iOS they've added a files app to iOS 11, and it's really useful in

01:59:39   many ways, but it's entirely cloud-based. So you can get your Dropbox in there or your

01:59:47   Box account, and your iCloud Drive, of course, shows up in there. But if you plug an SD card

01:59:55   into your iOS device using the adapter that Apple itself sells to connect an SD card to

02:00:02   a lightning port. The SD card does not show up as a destination in the Files app, and

02:00:09   that seems like madness to me.

02:00:12   Yeah, it's in fact, it's something, so you linked, you did a link list or do a thing

02:00:17   I did on Six Colors about this gadget, this Kensington Mobile Lite thing that was—there

02:00:28   is what I use now when I'm traveling with an iOS device and I want to use like a portable

02:00:32   flash recorder to record audio and then edit it. And how do I do that? I can edit it on

02:00:38   my iPad, but how do I get the files back? And even with Apple's SD card reading dongle,

02:00:43   it'll do is launch the photos app and say, would you like to import any videos or photos

02:00:49   on that card? So it will iOS will access an SD card, but only two file types. And that

02:00:55   dates back to I mean, it's a camera thing. It's like just thinking of it as as for camera

02:00:59   imports. And I thought when files came, it would be like the moment where Apple's like,

02:01:03   all right, you want to attach an SD card or USB hard drive or connect to a an SMB server?

02:01:11   fine. If you want to do that, the Files app will do that, go ahead. And it just hasn't

02:01:18   done it. And it kind of baffles me. And I got a lot of pushback. You saw some of it

02:01:23   where people are like, no, no, no, but the future is wireless and cloud and all those

02:01:27   things. And I just keep coming back to, you know, that's all true. But if you're somewhere

02:01:31   where you can't sync a file up and then back down from the cloud with slow internet or

02:01:35   no internet, if the iPad Pro is meant for business users and somebody's got a PowerPoint

02:01:40   on a keychain drive and they hand it to you and you have your iPad. It's like you can't

02:01:45   get that file. You can't. Not even with any adapter in the world, you can't do it. It turns

02:01:50   out there are adapters that do it, but they're like special adapters with third-party apps

02:01:54   on iOS that talk to the card and then you move it into the app and then the app can

02:01:59   send it to other things. It's just like this thing, which is a Wi-Fi base station basically

02:02:04   you plug your SD card into and then connect to the Wi-Fi and transfer it using its third

02:02:10   party. It's fast, which is why I use it. And there are other ones. There are little weird

02:02:15   adapters too. It just seems silly that it's a legacy of Apple kind of putting file systems

02:02:21   at arm's length in iOS, but they've kind of gotten over that. And yet, when I think about

02:02:26   the iPad Pro especially, it just seems a little bit silly that, you know, they're not forcing

02:02:34   the files app in people's faces. It's for people who need to access files. Why wouldn't

02:02:38   you kind of broaden it a little bit? Because the fact is, yeah, in the future, cloud, unlimited

02:02:45   internet everywhere at full speed. Like, I get it. But the reality of the present day

02:02:52   is it's gonna take a long time for, like, my audio recorder doesn't have wireless in

02:02:58   it. It's not gonna it can't auto upload to Dropbox and and like I recorded a podcast

02:03:03   out in the middle of the Nevada desert after the solar eclipse and like I didn't have good

02:03:08   internet there to upload that file. I, I, uh, you know, I just ran, ran it on my recorder.

02:03:13   And then when I got to wifi somewhere, I wanted to upload the final version and, and that

02:03:18   was not something I could do without a weird third party app. So it's just one of the strange,

02:03:23   strange gaps in iOS that still exists. It's just so super frustrating if you've got your,

02:03:28   You got it right there in your hand.

02:03:30   In your right hand is like an iPad or an iPhone, and in your left hand is an SD card with a

02:03:38   four gigabyte video on it or something.

02:03:43   If it's a video, that's the most frustrating thing.

02:03:46   You've got an SD card plugged into an Apple adapter or a USB stick plugged into an Apple

02:03:51   adapter and it's looking at that SD card or that stick and it sees all the photos and

02:03:58   all of the videos on it. But you know there's a PowerPoint file or a Word file or an audio

02:04:03   file on there. An MP3. And it's just like, forget it. It's just like literally the OS

02:04:12   doesn't want to know about it. And I don't know. I mean, I understand how we got here

02:04:17   and I understand why people had this tendency to say, well, you know, the future, like I

02:04:22   I get that too, but the practical present of this and I also I'm always amused when

02:04:29   people kind of come to Apple's defense for a missing feature by explaining how Apple

02:04:35   just can't do it. It's just too hard an engineering challenge, too hard a UI challenge. I'm like,

02:04:41   really? I have a great confidence in Apple to solve these relative like the implementation

02:04:47   details of this in order to they're already reading an SD card. They're already reading

02:04:52   USB media. They just don't want to show it.

02:04:54   Right. It's, yeah, there are security implications. I realize, you know, like if you talk to like

02:04:59   people who really know their, their stuff with security that, you know, USB sticks are

02:05:04   dangerous. They can be, you know, that there's, you know, there's reasons you shouldn't stick

02:05:11   a unknown USB stick into your, you know, laptop. But on iOS in particular, you know, it's up

02:05:19   to Apple to do it. It's not like I'm asking for any app to be able to read and write to

02:05:25   the file system, you know, and the way that files the files app works is very careful.

02:05:31   You know, it's not like you've got real access to the full directory structure of the the

02:05:39   startup disk in your iOS device. You know, they've they have even with the files app

02:05:44   maintain a difference between the file system that the actual system is running on and the

02:05:50   files that are exposed to the user. There's no reason they couldn't continue to do that,

02:05:58   take that approach to something like an SD card and that you can move it from the SD

02:06:02   card to some other safe location, not like willy-nilly, you can put it at the root level

02:06:06   of the startup drive.

02:06:07   Exactly, because it's already in a sandbox somewhere. And that's, you know, it's a, I

02:06:13   know it's a little thing too, but when I try to think, I, yeah, and I do hit this myself,

02:06:18   which is why I write about it. And whenever I write about it, I hear from people who are

02:06:22   like, "Oh, wow, I've also struggled with this for this reason." Or, "I bought this other

02:06:26   weird gadget with another really awful," because all these third-party apps for these things

02:06:30   are terrible. But they have to write them because it's the only way the product will

02:06:35   work because there's no system level stuff to do it. So obviously some people out there

02:06:40   are trying it. I think when Apple turned the corner to make the case with the iPad Pro

02:06:44   that like it's a device for getting work done, that's when these scenarios start to occur

02:06:50   to me which is like you know again I had this happen when I was in Yosemite where the internet

02:06:54   is terrible and somebody wanted to give me a file and I couldn't load it on my iPad and

02:06:58   we had to figure out whether we could get it on some other device that could maybe do

02:07:01   airdrop, but it got really complicated and it didn't need to be. And I've been on airplanes

02:07:08   and stuff too where it's like I'm not going to sync all of this data to Dropbox over the

02:07:13   internet from an airplane and then sync it back to the other device. It's just not going

02:07:18   to happen. And it's a little detail, but it's one of those things that when people get angry

02:07:24   when I talk about this, what blows their mind is the next thing I say which is I think maybe

02:07:28   the iPad Pro at some point should have USB-C instead of lightning because if it's a real

02:07:33   computer, maybe you should just embrace it. And maybe that's a bridge too far, but I think

02:07:39   it's worth asking the question like, "Why are there still roadblocks?" I think Apple's

02:07:45   iOS development, at least as far as the iPad concerned, should all be about like eliminating

02:07:49   those last roadblocks that people talk about when they're like, "I really want to use the

02:07:53   the iPad to do this but this thing and they've and they've eliminated so many

02:07:59   of them now that the ones that are still there really just kind of a stick out

02:08:02   that's that's one of them I know it's not ideal it's the same way I feel about

02:08:05   having to side load files onto the iPad using my Mac I because they're big files

02:08:12   their audio files and the people are like oh you can air drop them you could

02:08:15   use iCloud drive it's like but they would be so slow it's so much faster for

02:08:19   me to connect it with a cable but all of those file transfers have to go through

02:08:22   iTunes. That's stupid. It should just show up as a disk on my Mac. It doesn't have to

02:08:27   be a real disk. It could be a fake disk. But I should just be able to drag those files

02:08:30   in without launching iTunes. But I know why we're here, but it would be nice if somebody

02:08:35   at Apple could be like, "Okay, that's bad. Let's eliminate that roadblock now."

02:08:41   - Right. It's obviously exposed in some way because you can get to it through iTunes,

02:08:45   but doing it through iTunes is ridiculous.

02:08:47   - Yeah, you have to click on it. And especially now that we don't sync our devices very much,

02:08:52   if at all, in iTunes anymore. It's like my one obligatory trip to the iTunes device area.

02:08:57   I use iTunes all the time for music, but it's that moment of like, I plug in my iPad,

02:09:01   click on the iPad, click on apps, scroll to the bottom of the window, click on the right app,

02:09:06   and now I can drag files in like it's the Finder, except it's the worst Finder replacement ever.

02:09:12   Say what you want about the Finder, and we could do a whole two-hour podcast with Syracuse,

02:09:17   and we could do a four-hour podcast with Syracuse about nothing about gripes about the Finder.

02:09:21   today in 2017. But at least the Finder is primarily designed, the intent of the app

02:09:29   ever since 1984 has been to expose files and make it useful to move files and do things

02:09:36   like rename files and move them from here to there. That's what the app is meant for.

02:09:41   And you have that app and then you've got this other app that was designed primarily

02:09:44   to play music. And you've got to use that app to move files around. It's crazy.

02:09:51   And it's great you can do it, don't get me wrong. The moment when I discovered that there's

02:09:54   a secret place in iTunes in the apps tab down at the bottom where you can literally just,

02:10:00   you can delete files and you can drag files in and it totally works. It's amazing, but

02:10:05   it is so stupid that that's where it is. There's probably a lot of people listening to this

02:10:08   who are like, "What? You can do what?" And they're going to plug their iPhone into their

02:10:11   Mac and then go to iTunes, yeah, and navigate to the devices and then go down to the bottom

02:10:18   and see this and they're gonna be like, "What?"

02:10:22   You can't believe it.

02:10:23   - Yeah, just, I mean, and again,

02:10:26   why do you need to do that?

02:10:27   It's only if you have like a big file,

02:10:29   otherwise if a little file on iCloud Drive

02:10:31   or something like that, it's not gonna be a problem.

02:10:33   But, you know, I sometimes have like big files

02:10:37   that I wanna put on my iPad.

02:10:39   And doing it by wire is way better

02:10:42   than like putting a giant file in iCloud Drive

02:10:44   and waiting for iCloud Drive to sync it all the way up.

02:10:47   and then immediately on the other device turn around and sync it all the way back down.

02:10:51   That's sort of silly. And if I've got unlimited time, I can do it that way. But it's silly

02:10:57   that that's the only way I can do it.

02:10:59   Last but not least, the other thing I wanted to talk to you about, because I know you'd

02:11:03   appreciate it. Did you see that thing I linked to the other day that this guy Dan Liu wrote

02:11:07   about computer latency from 1977 to 2017?

02:11:11   Yeah.

02:11:12   So he like took like a high speed camera and with a bunch of different computers running a bunch of

02:11:18   different operating systems from a bunch of different eras measured the time from when you

02:11:23   the high speed camera captures the key moving on a keyboard and the letter pressed appearing

02:11:30   on screen in the terminal app on that device. And the fastest performing lowest latency computer he

02:11:38   he tested was the Apple IIe, which is, it makes me laugh, but it's funny the way he

02:11:47   phrases it, where he just had this vague notion that computers are slower than they were when

02:11:51   he was a kid and wanted to actually measure it because, you know, human memory and, you

02:11:58   know, is funny like that, that you might be very, you know, could have tested it and found

02:12:02   out he was very wrong. And then he has a terrific, he's an electrical engineer by training, and

02:12:06   a terrific explanation for why this is so and actually pretty reasonable, given what

02:12:13   modern computers are doing. But the other thing that cracks me up is that it always

02:12:18   comes down to like, the TI-99-4A or whatever it was called, performed pretty well, too.

02:12:25   It was like second place, but not as fast as the Apple IIe. And it always comes down

02:12:29   to "Waz was a genius." Right? There's all sorts of crazy optimizations where there's

02:12:37   like, you know, it's like the whole level of abstraction between the key being pressed

02:12:43   and it being sent as a signal is gone because of the clever design of the key switches in

02:12:47   the Apple II.

02:12:48   But that actually, I started reading this article. A couple people said, "Gruber,

02:12:52   you're going to love this." And I did love it. But as soon as I read it, I thought,

02:12:55   You know, I always think the same thing. It seems to me, it always seemed to me that the

02:13:01   input on like an Apple II was super fast. And it doesn't, like it's one of the things

02:13:08   about like running emulators that it's not just that the screen technology is so different

02:13:13   that it looks different and doesn't feel the same. It does, no matter how fast your computer

02:13:18   is, it never feels as fast.

02:13:21   - Yeah, I mean, I talked about how I could do my job

02:13:26   and you could do your job on a PowerBook 160

02:13:29   running right now.

02:13:30   - Right.

02:13:31   - And it's a little bit like that.

02:13:33   Every time there was an update, right,

02:13:36   there gets more stuff in the way.

02:13:37   They're like, "Oh, we've got a more powerful computer.

02:13:38   We can put more stuff in the way."

02:13:40   And whether that's graphics

02:13:42   or whether it's subsystems or whatever,

02:13:44   font support, whatever it is,

02:13:47   because we've got the power to deal with it,

02:13:50   which is true,

02:13:51   but it also means there's more layers between you,

02:13:54   you know, between the keyboard and the display.

02:13:56   And latency is a place where it happens.

02:14:00   I guess this is really good for like,

02:14:02   what is it, George R. R. Martin?

02:14:03   Writes all of his books on a,

02:14:07   like a WordStar,

02:14:08   - Running on like, - An online PC.

02:14:10   - Like a 286, I think. (laughs)

02:14:12   - Yeah, and it's just like, he's got the muscle memory.

02:14:15   I totally get why he does that.

02:14:17   And it's all like, not even a GUI,

02:14:19   It's all command line kind of stuff.

02:14:21   But his latency is super low.

02:14:23   I'm gonna guarantee you that he types it there,

02:14:25   it comes out there.

02:14:26   And it's funny, I was just starting up,

02:14:29   I have an Apple IIc and I'm gonna try to get

02:14:32   some of my old files off of it.

02:14:34   And I had that moment where I'm like,

02:14:35   oh, this feels pretty good.

02:14:36   I mean, like the keys really move

02:14:37   and they make a nice kind of clacking sound.

02:14:40   And yeah, there's something to be said

02:14:43   for that old retro stuff.

02:14:44   We prioritize different things now.

02:14:46   And plus, displays, our displays are so much richer, and their refresh rates are not as

02:14:52   high as the ones in the old days because they're so much richer. There are lots of good reasons

02:14:56   why, but still.

02:14:57   Yeah. The Apple IIc is one of my all-time favorite designs. Guy English and I both swear

02:15:04   by it. And I think on Twitter, we were like, Guy and I were talking recently on Twitter

02:15:09   about how like it could pass for like a in many ways pass for a modern computer and some

02:15:17   people are like you guys are nuts that thing looks ancient I don't know I think I'll put

02:15:22   a link to the show notes the 2C to me it was just I had a 2E I was a 2E guy but when I

02:15:28   was buying one off of eBay because I sold my 2E sadly when I when I bought my first

02:15:34   Mac I wish I had kept it but I know why I didn't I wanted the money right but so on

02:15:39   eBay I bought a 2C and the reason I bought the 2C is yeah it has a lot of

02:15:43   things that make it a lot more fuss-free than the 2E like the disk drive is in

02:15:50   the computer which the 2E was not you the disk drive was external it's got you

02:15:55   know it's got video on the back and an auxiliary video port if you want to do

02:15:58   like higher quality video it looks like a laptop without a screen and a lot of

02:16:03   its design language ended up being fed into. It's the same design language that they used

02:16:10   when they built the first PowerBooks. It didn't have a screen, although I believe you could

02:16:15   get an LCD screen for it that made it that much more portable. But the idea that it was

02:16:21   all self-contained, it's got a huge power brick, but it's self-contained and it's got

02:16:25   its own disk on the inside, that was a big step for Apple because the Apple IIs were

02:16:31   all, you know, everything was outboard. And it was also more hobbyist, you know, I had

02:16:37   slots, card slots that I could flip open in the Apple IIe. And the Apple IIc is a sealed

02:16:41   container like a modern computer.

02:16:44   Yeah, yeah, it's an interesting one to look at as where Apple was going. And, you know,

02:16:50   and it was a machine that was, came out of the era while Steve Jobs was in exile at Next.

02:17:00   No, I guess not. It says it was released here. 1984.

02:17:03   - Well, it came out, and the 2C came out about the same time as the original Mac.

02:17:06   - Huh, I didn't know that. I'm not involved. - But, you know, Steve was not around too much longer after that.

02:17:10   And this was the last, I mean, I guess people like the 2GS, I guess.

02:17:14   That was, for me, this is the heyday of the Mac. I actually—or of the Apple II.

02:17:19   I bought my Apple IIe that I had through my first two years of college.

02:17:23   I bought it right before I started high school, and it was 1984.

02:17:28   And I realized this the other day that my Apple II, the Mac already existed when I bought the Apple II,

02:17:36   which seems like that would have been a stupid move, but the fact was the Mac was so young at

02:17:39   that point. And the Apple II was everywhere. It was in my elementary school, it was in my high

02:17:44   school. All my friends who had computers had the Apple II. We could trade disks and stuff. And that

02:17:50   was, and it gave me, it gave me six years or five and a half-ish years through high school and the

02:17:55   the start of college. It served me really well. So Apple and the Apple II, Apple made

02:18:00   huge amounts of money on the Apple II in the 80s. We think of it now as like then the Mac

02:18:05   era began and that was the end of the Apple II. It's not true. Like the Mac took a long

02:18:08   time to kind of get up and running and during that period the Apple II was what was fueling

02:18:13   Apple's economic engine. Like to the point that I realized when I started as an intern

02:18:18   at Mac User Magazine, elsewhere in the universe at that moment there was still an Apple II

02:18:24   magazine. Like, even in 1993, they were still publishing like a plus insider magazine for

02:18:33   the Apple two. So the Apple two lived a lot longer than that. I think like conventional

02:18:38   wisdom has it now where it's sort of like, well, then the Mac happened and that was the

02:18:41   end of the Apple two. It's not true. The eighties were like the Apple twos, a golden decade.

02:18:47   There was really no upgrade path from the Apple two to the Mac. I mean, the, the, the

02:18:53   - The 2GS had a finder, which was super weird

02:18:56   because it just couldn't, I mean, they tried to make it,

02:18:59   they tried to retrofit it to be Mac-like,

02:19:01   but it really wasn't.

02:19:02   - It was unnatural. - My big upgrade path was,

02:19:04   I bought a 3.5 inch disc for the Apple II

02:19:07   because there were Macs that I was using elsewhere

02:19:10   at my college, but in my dorm room, I had the Apple II.

02:19:14   So with the 3.5 inch disc drive,

02:19:17   there was an app on the Mac called Apple II File Exchange,

02:19:21   where basically you could stick an Apple II formatted disc in onto a Mac. And it looked

02:19:26   like FontDAMover. It was one of these things, or like Transmit is today, where it was like,

02:19:30   the files on the floppy are here on the left side, and the files on the Mac are over here

02:19:34   on the right side. And you'd click and press the arrow button, and it would very slowly

02:19:38   kind of grind. But that's how I ended up printing all of my papers my freshman and sophomore

02:19:43   years in college, is I'd write them on the Apple II, put them on one of those floppies,

02:19:48   it to a computer lab or the college newspaper office, migrate them over onto the Mac, open

02:19:54   them up, format them, and print them on a laser printer. So that was the migration path.

02:20:00   That's where all of the stuff that I brought when I bought a Mac was that. I would just

02:20:04   put them on those floppies and then migrate them back out. But that was it. I guess there

02:20:09   was an Apple II card for the Mac for a while where you could boot an Apple II inside of

02:20:12   your Mac in a window, which is super weird.

02:20:15   - Right, and it was all because there was no real upgrade path.

02:20:19   Like, if a school had some sort of curriculum that was based on the Apple II,

02:20:23   there was no way, you know, whatever. It just wasn't any way to run it on a Mac. So they literally

02:20:29   put the Apple II on a card to put in a Mac so that you could just switch the device to be an Apple II.

02:20:36   - The Apple II was so popular. An awful lot of people went from the Apple II to Windows or to

02:20:42   DOS PC. The Apple II was incredibly popular for a long time, and a lot of those people

02:20:48   didn't make the move to the Mac. In fact, I've talked to people who tell the story

02:20:52   where they were on the Apple II and they loved it, and then they went to the PC, and it was

02:20:55   only sort of in the 2000s with the iPod and the iMac and all of that that they came back

02:21:01   to Apple, but that they actually had a previous Apple experience in the old days with the

02:21:06   Apple II before they went to the dark side.

02:21:09   Yeah, people, it's a lot of people who took a long time, you know, for some, some for

02:21:12   reasonable reasons, some just because it's human nature, you don't like change. But people

02:21:16   who got used to computers in the era, when you turned it on, and you had a cursor blinking

02:21:20   on screen where you had to type something to continue, saw the fact that the Mac didn't

02:21:25   have that and couldn't be configured to have that as a non starter, whereas you could get

02:21:30   a Windows or a DOS PC. You know, I always laugh thinking about it. But like for years,

02:21:36   way people, even when Windows was taking off and had millions of users, the way you got

02:21:41   into Windows was to boot into DOS and you typed "win." And then you could exit Windows

02:21:48   and go back to DOS and do your DOS stuff. And that was considered normal. I had jobs

02:21:55   where that's what, you know, I never had, I had jobs where that's what I would do. And

02:22:01   there were good reasons for it. It actually made sense that Windows didn't start automatically.

02:22:06   Yeah, sometimes I felt, coming from the Apple II, sometimes I had those moments where I

02:22:10   would, and even when I was a Mac user, where I would be like, "Can I go back to DOS?" I

02:22:15   feel way more comfortable using a DOS command line than I do using Windows in that era.

02:22:20   It's like I wanted to either use the Mac or I just wanted the command line. Just take

02:22:23   me back to it. It's what it wants. It's what the machine wanted to use. Anyway, this has

02:22:28   has been a great show. I hope you have a good new year. I hope you're having a good holiday

02:22:31   break.

02:22:32   Yeah, absolutely. Other than my boss being a mean jerk who wants me to work a lot. But

02:22:37   yeah, no, it's been good. And likewise, and have a happy new year. I'm looking forward

02:22:41   to 2018. I think there's going to be some good stuff in 2018.

02:22:44   You got great stuff recently. There's so much good stuff at sixcolors.com. You can spell

02:22:49   colors either way.

02:22:51   Yeah, I got to redirect.

02:22:54   can't even we don't have time to list all of your podcasts but upgrade is certainly the one that

02:22:59   might be of most interest to uh to listeners of this show with you and uh mike hurley uh

02:23:05   there's the comparable weekly pop culture podcast i hear uh john cercusa was on a recent episode

02:23:12   yeah yeah he gets he's around he gets around that's he makes his pronouncements about movies

02:23:18   and things on on the incomparable and the other podcast that maybe talk show listeners want to try

02:23:24   out is relatively new, started in 2017 called Download. And that is I host that, but I try

02:23:30   to get two or three interesting tech guests and take a broader tech view. So it's not

02:23:35   just Apple stuff. It's sort of like what a broader like what happened in tech and what

02:23:40   the issues are. Sometimes it's details about what what Microsoft or Apple or Google did.

02:23:44   And sometimes like the most recent one, we talked about the ramifications of the Disney

02:23:50   Fox deal with a reporter from The Hollywood Reporter and a writer from Polygon and like

02:23:58   how the world streaming especially gets impacted by everything that Disney's doing and buying

02:24:03   Fox and buying BAM Tech, the streaming company, and owning 60% of Hulu if this deal goes through.

02:24:09   And it's been a fun podcast because it gets me out of my comfort zone a little bit and

02:24:13   talking to a bunch of interesting people. So that's also at Relay FM. It's called

02:24:17   Download.

02:24:18   Alright Thank You Jason Happy New Year Happy New Year