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181: ‘Corporate Stiffy’ With John Moltz

 

00:00:00   We had a very fun interaction earlier today.

00:00:03   I find one of the ways--

00:00:05   I mean, clearly, overall, I am rocketing at light speed

00:00:09   towards crotchety old man status.

00:00:11   I mean, there's no doubt about it.

00:00:13   I can't remember.

00:00:14   I watch Saturday Night Live every week.

00:00:15   I don't remember the last time I'd ever heard of the musical guest.

00:00:19   Who was the musical guest?

00:00:23   I've already forgotten, which is another sign of--

00:00:28   Sure.

00:00:29   Short-term memory.

00:00:31   But there are a handful of ways where I feel like, hey, see,

00:00:36   I've still got it.

00:00:36   I'm with the kids.

00:00:37   And one of them is I keep using emoji more and more.

00:00:41   And I've noticed-- here's the thing.

00:00:45   When did iOS add the feature where

00:00:48   the auto suggestions above the keyboard include emoji?

00:00:52   I think that's iOS 10.

00:00:53   It just came out five months ago.

00:00:56   But I've been using it since the summer on betas.

00:00:59   So I've been using it for seven or eight months at least.

00:01:03   I have to say, I never really noticed that.

00:01:06   And I think part of it is I never

00:01:07   use those auto suggestions.

00:01:09   I should just close that and take the space back.

00:01:11   It's like I'm looking at the keyboard while I type.

00:01:14   And me looking at the keyboard while I type

00:01:16   means I don't see anything above the keyboard.

00:01:18   So I never use those.

00:01:19   And I'll bet people who do type faster.

00:01:23   And it does seem, when I do pay attention to it,

00:01:25   but it seems like the suggestions are sometimes amazing

00:01:28   where you can type a fairly long word

00:01:31   and it guesses, you know, you type like a--

00:01:35   - Or you just have a few words

00:01:36   and it guesses what the next one's gonna be.

00:01:37   - Right, right, like you type a-u

00:01:39   and somehow it guesses that you wanted

00:01:41   to type the word authorized

00:01:43   'cause of, you know, like the context of where it is.

00:01:45   It's like, wow, you could really save a lot of thumb taps

00:01:48   by just a-u and then auto, anyway.

00:01:51   I noticed I've--

00:01:53   - Well, you're too old for that now.

00:01:54   But I'm starting to notice those emoji that pop up as a suggestion. And so I sent one to you.

00:01:58   And I said the word "think" and when you type the word "think" there's like a little like

00:02:04   thought cloud with a thing and you said, you said it looks more like a fart than a thought.

00:02:11   And I thought, well, I've got to use that immediately. And within like 10 seconds of

00:02:16   paging through what can I connect the fart emoji to.

00:02:21   I found the poodle, the dog, the dog emoji, and it's even pointing the

00:02:26   right way where the little dot of the

00:02:31   puffy cloud is coming from the dog. You should get that into the

00:02:36   show notes. I happen to know that you have a big

00:02:40   white poodle. I do, yeah. I know that's the great

00:02:44   thing about that is like, I mean, he's not, thank God, you know, this was an argument early on when

00:02:49   we got the dog with my wife was like, you know, if we're getting a poodle, I want it to be cut like a

00:02:53   regular dog. I don't want to have it cut like, first of all, I want it to be a big poodle. I

00:02:56   didn't want some tiny little like teacup, you know, thing that's like shaking all the time.

00:03:01   So, that was number one. Number two was like, I can't have him cut like fancy show poodle. So,

00:03:09   he's mostly cut like a regular dog. He's got kind of like a poofy head and usually his tail's a

00:03:14   little bushy, but for the rest, this is usually fairly straightforward dog cut. So he doesn't

00:03:23   look exactly like that, but he is white and yeah, so it's kind of perfect. It is actually,

00:03:31   the emoji is actually named Poodle. I don't know why Poodles, among all dogs, deserve

00:03:38   their own emoji. Like, like what gets an emoji and what doesn't is sometimes so bizarrely,

00:03:43   like, why is poodle its own thing? How many other—there must be other dogs there.

00:03:51   I'm looking. I typed dog, and there's one that's just dog. It's just a generic dog.

00:03:56   And then there's poodle, and I think that's it. Oh, and then there's also

00:04:00   dog face. There's also dog face. Oh, yeah, there's faces.

00:04:06   Poodles are great dogs.

00:04:10   I do not have a dog.

00:04:12   This is a conversation that occasionally comes up

00:04:15   in the Gruber household of whether or not

00:04:18   we should get a dog.

00:04:19   My belief is that we travel too much,

00:04:24   and we don't have any kind of friends or family who

00:04:29   live near us by design.

00:04:30   And so it would be like a kennel situation.

00:04:36   several times a year and I just feel like I don't feel like that's good for

00:04:39   the dog and I mean I know that like that kennels are a little different than they

00:04:44   used to be I think that there's they're a little bit more like camp yeah pause

00:04:49   yeah so that that's good you know like when we were kids I mean like when

00:04:54   people had to put their dogs in a kennel they just put them like in a cage like

00:04:58   like a look yeah yeah two by four cage and it's that's that's terrible

00:05:04   Yeah, yeah, no, he and he for a while he was going to like everyone like when we got desperate when we get desperate

00:05:11   He's gone to this place that has like they sleep in cages, but then during the day, it's a doggy daycare thing

00:05:18   So he's out running around with a whole bunch of other dogs in like a in a big room

00:05:22   Which is I think kind of fun for him. Although he doesn't I don't think he likes staying outside of the house

00:05:27   I think he gets anxiety about that. So he

00:05:30   now we have this this

00:05:33   the daughter of someone that Karen used to work with and her boyfriend come and stay and

00:05:41   I don't think the daughter likes the grant very much, but the boyfriend loves grant

00:05:47   So they take they have a they apparently have a great time together

00:05:52   And they're they're coming back to the next time we go away

00:05:56   So they've only done that once before but we were gone for like two weeks. So, you know, I

00:06:01   I think this is a Shiba Inu, if I'm not mistaken. So there's Poodle, and then there's Shiba Inu.

00:06:09   Yeah, but when you hover over it, it just says "dog." So that might be what they've—

00:06:13   Oh, was it? Oh, okay. Well, yeah, but I mean, it's the Japanese dog.

00:06:16   So it makes sense that that would be the look. What's your dog's name? We shouldn't just grant.

00:06:21   Grant. Grant.

00:06:22   Grant.

00:06:22   Like Ulysses S.

00:06:24   Like Ulysses S, yeah.

00:06:26   I love a Poodle.

00:06:28   It was one of our babies.

00:06:29   If we were to get a dog, a poodle would be on the short list. You know what you never hear about a

00:06:32   poodle when somebody has a poodle? You never hear, "Well, that's a miserable, angry dog."

00:06:36   That's true. That's true. He's pretty good natured. I mean, he barks like crazy at anything that goes

00:06:44   down the street, but he's good with us. And the kid's not bad now, but when he was a little

00:06:50   younger, he could be rough and he's never bitten them.

00:06:55   Amy had a poodle growing up named Andy and he was a really good dog.

00:06:59   So among the things that I like about poodles, they have good dispositions, they do not shed.

00:07:04   And they're hypoallergenic. That's the real reason we needed to get a poodle because Karen's

00:07:12   little... But even if you're not allergic, it's like the stuff that people are allergic to,

00:07:18   It kind of has a smell, in my opinion.

00:07:23   And the hair thing is-- it would drive me nuts.

00:07:26   So good disposition.

00:07:28   And they live a long time.

00:07:29   They're a long-living breed.

00:07:33   I have a friend, a friend from college, who has-- well,

00:07:38   I guess at this point it's been so long--

00:07:40   has had a series of Great Danes with his wife and family.

00:07:44   And the Great Danes, they're beautiful dogs.

00:07:47   I mean, they're magnificent.

00:07:49   I mean, but they're also, to me, terrifying,

00:07:51   because if they stood up, they'd be like eight feet tall.

00:07:54   But they're apparently so good-natured.

00:07:56   They're so sweet.

00:07:57   Absolutely.

00:07:57   That's what he says when we've talked about it,

00:07:59   that they really are like Marmaduke.

00:08:06   But they only live like six years.

00:08:08   It's heartbreaking.

00:08:09   It's like you're signing up for a series--

00:08:11   That's terrible.

00:08:12   --a constant series of family heartbreak, where--

00:08:15   Yeah.

00:08:16   Right.

00:08:17   But the dog is magnificent and has a great disposition and is truly part of the family, and

00:08:20   he's gone. [laughter]

00:08:25   Karen was at the vet with Grant one time, and there was a woman there with a Great Dane, and

00:08:30   the dog was just, you know, was completely a wreck because he knew he was at the vet, and like, you

00:08:35   know, it was totally nervous. And so he was sitting on her lap. But because his front legs were so

00:08:44   long. He had his front legs on the floor and his butt on her woman's lap.

00:08:50   And he could just like, you know, then he was shivering because he was terrified.

00:08:55   Amy had a poodle and he lived, I think Andy was, I swear to God, I think he might have been like

00:09:02   18 when he died, which is, yeah, I mean at least 17. It was really a long time. And he was like

00:09:08   stone-cold deaf for the last few years. But it was as though he could still imagine sounds.

00:09:15   And so he'd be sleeping. And it was just great. He was a great dog his whole life,

00:09:23   and he was great in old age. But there was a vent near the family, like I-Mac, to the side,

00:09:30   a vent in the floor. And that was his spot, because he'd just soak up the heat.

00:09:36   And every once in a while, he'd just snap out of his sleep,

00:09:38   because he dreamed us out, and go roaring towards the door

00:09:42   like a young dog barking up a storm.

00:09:45   Maybe he imagined the mailman was there.

00:09:48   But there was no longer any correlation between the mailman actually coming in

00:09:51   when he would--

00:09:51   [LAUGHTER]

00:09:54   No idea.

00:09:55   Oh, man.

00:09:56   I had a dog growing up who was--

00:09:57   we just saw an ad in the paper and just took--

00:10:04   not really a rescue dog, but just some woman, literally like a trailer park, Chester. I loved

00:10:11   the son of a bitch. But he was really nasty. He was supposedly about three quarters poodle and

00:10:19   one quarter Pekingese. And I think the nasty part came from the Pekingese. He had...

00:10:23   **Matt Stauffer** It does. Yeah. Karen had Pekingese growing up and she

00:10:26   said she got bit all the time. They would just bite you constantly.

00:10:31   Well, Chester would-- he was sort of built more like a poodle.

00:10:35   Did not shed, but he didn't-- his hair was curly-ish,

00:10:38   but not like poodle-tight curls.

00:10:40   Black and white.

00:10:41   And he had a terrible underbite.

00:10:44   It was not from good breeding.

00:10:48   But I love the son of a bitch.

00:10:50   And when he was in a good mood, he was the greatest dog.

00:10:52   And he was kind of smart.

00:10:53   And then, winter, we used to put t-shirts on him.

00:10:56   We would just buy like a size four toddler,

00:11:01   cut out a little bit for peeing at the belly,

00:11:05   and then put it on backwards so that the logo would

00:11:07   be on his back.

00:11:08   And he used to love wearing shirts.

00:11:10   And you could just say, Chetty, go get your shirt.

00:11:13   And it was as though you said, Chetty,

00:11:16   I'm going to give you a hamburger.

00:11:18   He would light up, and he'd go tearing

00:11:22   to where we kept his shirt, get it, and then bring it to you.

00:11:26   It was. He could be so smart. But then the other thing he would like to do is he would like to crawl under

00:11:33   any of our sofas and just stay there for hours at a time. And if your feet got near him, he'd snap at him.

00:11:41   I swear to God. Swear to God. He'd stay under for three or four hours.

00:11:49   And sometimes when he was down there, he would just go, he would just be like a low growl.

00:11:55   Nonstop.

00:11:56   Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:11:57   Yeah, I mean, little dogs like that,

00:11:59   they have a tendency to love being in--

00:12:02   because we had a Westie and a Scotty when I was growing up.

00:12:07   And the Scotty-- actually, the Scotty was half Westie, too.

00:12:09   And the Scotty-- which, those two dogs did not get along.

00:12:14   But the people who lived next door had a Westie.

00:12:17   And our Scotty got along really well with their Westie.

00:12:19   And so that dog would come in and out of our house

00:12:22   all the time.

00:12:22   And I remember one time we had to go someplace.

00:12:26   And they're like, you got to get--

00:12:27   I can't remember that other dog's name.

00:12:28   You got to get him out.

00:12:29   Get him out.

00:12:30   And so I go upstairs, and the two of them are just like--

00:12:33   they're under my parents' bed.

00:12:34   They're just like under there, like, making a fort.

00:12:37   And I try and reach under there to grab them.

00:12:39   And they're both like, [GROWLS]

00:12:42   I loved Chetty.

00:12:44   Like reaching into a den of raccoons.

00:12:46   I love that dog for his effectively bipolar nature.

00:12:51   loved it. The other thing about Chester was he was a complete idiot.

00:13:00   Whenever he met a strange dog he would want to attack it and you know he was

00:13:04   only like I don't know less than knee-high. It wasn't like a tiny little

00:13:08   dog but he you know he was like a regular poodle not the big standard

00:13:10   poodle size and he would go after like you know like if he saw like somebody

00:13:15   walking a Doberman or whatever he'd want to get in a fight and it's like what are

00:13:18   What are you thinking? You have no chance. Like if he was left to his own in nature,

00:13:23   he'd be dead. He would find a big dog and go get killed. Yeah, they're not bright.

00:13:30   He did have, he had the same thing where he knew when he was going to the vet and he would be

00:13:35   terrified. And we used to take him in a car, lots of places, including places that were in the

00:13:39   general vicinity of where the vet was. And somehow he always knew, always.

00:13:46   Yeah, well, he was always like that with when we take him to doggy daycare.

00:13:49   We don't take him very much anymore because we both work out of the house now. But

00:13:52   when we get quite close to the block where the doggy daycare was, he'd start going,

00:13:56   I just get super excited because he'd know that he was going to just run around like an idiot for

00:14:01   four hours with some other dogs.

00:14:02   Oh, good stuff.

00:14:05   So yeah, you should get a dog.

00:14:07   Here, let me take a break. What a better what better time is there

00:14:12   to talk about a new sponsor.

00:14:15   Here we go.

00:14:15   This is great.

00:14:18   Today's episode is brought to you by SetApp, S-E-T-A-P-P.

00:14:23   It's a revolutionary new service for discovering,

00:14:25   using the best apps for your Mac.

00:14:28   What it is is effectively--

00:14:30   I mean, this isn't their words, but it's mine.

00:14:32   It's Netflix for Mac apps.

00:14:35   You pay $10 a month--

00:14:37   I think it's $9.99-- $10 a month subscription.

00:14:41   and you get access to all of the apps that are participating

00:14:46   in their program.

00:14:47   Developers obviously opt into this,

00:14:50   and they've worked out some kind of deal

00:14:52   where they all get a share.

00:14:54   I don't know how they're doing it.

00:14:55   It's not our business how they're dividing the money.

00:14:59   But the service is brought to you by MacPaw,

00:15:02   and they're a company that's been around for a long time.

00:15:06   They do programs like CleanMyMac and a few others.

00:15:10   They've been indie developers for a long time.

00:15:12   Great company.

00:15:13   I've known them for a while, and they've sponsored Daring

00:15:15   Fireball many times.

00:15:19   SetApp, they've been working on this for a while.

00:15:21   They briefed me on this all the way back at WWDC.

00:15:23   And it's truly-- I mean, I'm not saying this just

00:15:25   because they're sponsoring.

00:15:27   It is a very ambitious idea.

00:15:29   The idea is they're going to collect $10 a month

00:15:32   from tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands-- who knows,

00:15:36   at some point, a million users, wherever this is going to grow.

00:15:39   and that these people will have this access

00:15:41   to all of these apps.

00:15:42   Right now, they just launched last month,

00:15:44   just a few weeks ago.

00:15:45   Some of just, I can't name all the apps,

00:15:49   but these are really good apps.

00:15:50   There's apps in there like Ulysses,

00:15:51   which is a writing tool, sort of like Xcode for writing,

00:15:55   like a thing where you can build up big writing projects.

00:15:58   RapidWeaver 7, CleanMyMac from MacPaw themselves,

00:16:02   Ultima Player, and many, many more.

00:16:04   Just go to setup.com and you can see

00:16:07   the whole list of software.

00:16:08   There's no ads.

00:16:09   They don't show you ads.

00:16:10   There's no paid upgrades.

00:16:12   When one of the apps in the program comes up with an update,

00:16:14   you'll just get the software update.

00:16:17   It's just a huge collection.

00:16:19   And the more successful it gets, the more apps

00:16:22   might join in the future.

00:16:24   Right now, already, I have no hesitation

00:16:26   saying that with the library of apps

00:16:29   that they have right now, as you listen to me say this,

00:16:31   easily worth $10 a month.

00:16:33   Easily.

00:16:33   It's a value at $10 a month.

00:16:35   If it grows even more, it's going to get even better.

00:16:37   And here's the other thing, you can try it for 30 days for free.

00:16:42   So you don't even have to pay them the first $10 up front to get it.

00:16:45   You can just go there, sign up, see how it works, see how easy it is,

00:16:49   see how many apps there are.

00:16:51   And at the end of the month, even if there's just like one or

00:16:53   two of the apps that you like, you're already getting a pretty good deal.

00:16:57   You just pay $10 a month.

00:17:00   So go to setapp.com.

00:17:03   It's really, there's never been anybody,

00:17:06   There have been bundles before, many times, there still are on the Mac, where you can pay a low fee,

00:17:11   like you pay 50 bucks one time and you get a bundle of three or four or five hundred dollars worth of apps.

00:17:17   And there you go. There have been bundles before.

00:17:20   Apple several years ago introduced the App Store, which is a new thing, but there's never been anything like this,

00:17:26   like a subscription service where you get apps from an entire wide range of indie Mac developers.

00:17:33   So I really hope this thing takes off.

00:17:35   I think it's already a great value.

00:17:37   Go to setapp.com and find out more.

00:17:40   No special URL, no code, they just want setapp.com.

00:17:44   They'll know that they're daring.

00:17:46   - Yeah, I had heard about this and I couldn't,

00:17:47   I didn't know exactly how it works.

00:17:50   That's really cool.

00:17:51   - It is as simple as it sounds.

00:17:52   There is no catch.

00:17:54   There is no catch.

00:17:54   There's no ads, there's no hook,

00:17:56   there's no thing where you have to pay more,

00:17:58   there's no, they're not junior versions of the programs.

00:18:00   It is exactly what you,

00:18:02   If you're thinking it's too good to be true, it's not.

00:18:05   There is no catch.

00:18:07   The thing I always find with those bundles is they often--

00:18:10   like developers seem to like put--

00:18:13   they'll put their previous version into the bundle

00:18:16   because they know the new version is coming out soon.

00:18:18   So they want to get you to pay the upgrade price when

00:18:20   the new version comes out.

00:18:22   But this is not that.

00:18:24   When they first pitched me on it at WWDC,

00:18:27   they wanted a couple of minutes with me just

00:18:29   to see what I thought, my ideas.

00:18:31   I got very defensive in the meeting.

00:18:33   I like them, they're nice people,

00:18:34   but I did because I thought, well, tell me what the catch is.

00:18:37   And my gut feeling was, and they were talking,

00:18:40   like we think we'll sponsor Derek Fireball

00:18:42   when we come out and maybe the talk show, et cetera.

00:18:45   And my thought at the first moment was,

00:18:47   I don't know if I'm gonna be able to accept this

00:18:49   because if there's gonna be some kind of ornerous catch

00:18:52   that's going to trick people, and there is no catch.

00:18:56   I wouldn't take the sponsorship if it were.

00:18:58   It's that simple and it's a great deal,

00:18:59   So go check them out, set up, setapp.com.

00:19:02   We could parlay that into one of the topics

00:19:08   I wanted to talk about this week was the iPad.

00:19:13   This set app is obviously because of the nature of iOS,

00:19:16   it's Mac only.

00:19:17   One of the things I've written about this week

00:19:21   was the difference between the iPad as a 7G processor

00:19:28   the iPad as a seven-year-old platform

00:19:30   and the Mac as a seven-year-old platform back in 1991,

00:19:34   and just how much more powerful the Mac was as a platform

00:19:39   after seven years than the iPad is.

00:19:42   In terms of, I struggle to find a term for this.

00:19:45   I called it self-sufficiency.

00:19:47   In other words, can you just use this platform

00:19:51   to do everything?

00:19:53   And two examples of things that you can't do on an iPad

00:19:57   would be you can't make iPad apps on an iPad

00:20:00   because there's no Xcode for iPad or anything even similar.

00:20:04   And the other example,

00:20:06   which I think is a little bit more like a head scratcher,

00:20:08   is that you can't make,

00:20:11   there's no iBooks author for iPad.

00:20:13   Like it's clear that iBooks author,

00:20:16   that that format is best on iPad.

00:20:22   It works on your phone and you can read it on your Mac too

00:20:25   in the iBooks app.

00:20:27   But when somebody makes one of these rich, interactive iBooks,

00:20:31   it is no doubt in my mind that it is best on an iPad

00:20:34   with touch and with the sort of viewing intimacy of the iPad.

00:20:40   That when you read a book, it's no surprise.

00:20:44   This is literally from the 2010 iPad announcement

00:20:48   with Steve Jobs, why he had that chair there.

00:20:51   It's a device for sitting back in a chair

00:20:54   and reading, which is what you do with a book.

00:20:57   But you can't make an iPad book on an iPad,

00:21:00   because there's no iPad author--

00:21:02   or is that what it's called?

00:21:03   iBooks author.

00:21:04   iBooks author.

00:21:05   Yeah, no, iBooks author.

00:21:06   Is only a Mac app.

00:21:07   And I think that's a little weird.

00:21:09   I think it would have been weird if seven years into the Mac,

00:21:12   you still couldn't create Mac apps on a Mac,

00:21:14   and even weirder if you couldn't create the documents you

00:21:19   want to read on the Mac on a Mac.

00:21:22   - Yeah, and it seems like an easy way,

00:21:24   I mean, it seems like an easy one to do.

00:21:26   I mean, like, not necessarily easy,

00:21:28   like from a programming perspective,

00:21:30   but it doesn't really ruin their philosophy to do that.

00:21:35   I mean, it works with the philosophy

00:21:39   rather than against it.

00:21:42   - I think, yeah, and I think that the Xcode,

00:21:47   the idea of Xcode on iPad sort of works

00:21:51   against that philosophy, I think it will happen eventually.

00:21:54   And I'm pretty sure Apple is working on it.

00:21:56   I'm pretty sure there is an Xcode for iPad that's

00:22:00   been several years in the works in Cupertino,

00:22:04   but it's a lower priority.

00:22:05   But I don't have any information on how it works.

00:22:08   I just know that there's a team working on something like that.

00:22:10   But shocker, there's teams working on just about anything

00:22:13   that makes sense like that.

00:22:15   But I kind of think, though, that it might be

00:22:18   a different way of making apps.

00:22:20   Like, the way that Xcode works now on the Mac

00:22:25   is a very, very Unix-y behind the scenes.

00:22:28   It's a very, very Unix-y thing.

00:22:33   It's just a visual front end for a lot of things

00:22:36   that run at the command line level, which isn't really--

00:22:39   there is a Unix, obviously, with the core OS being the same.

00:22:42   That's there on iPad.

00:22:44   But I'm not quite sure that that works,

00:22:46   that that would work the same way.

00:22:47   I think it might be a more simplified way to make apps.

00:22:50   They would be real apps, but more, I don't know,

00:22:54   less fiddly.

00:22:56   Yeah.

00:22:57   Yeah.

00:22:58   Like Flash?

00:22:59   Sort of, maybe.

00:22:59   You know, like--

00:23:01   Ironically, right?

00:23:02   --I wouldn't be surprised if--

00:23:03   I would guess that it would work like this,

00:23:05   that they'd come out with a new way

00:23:07   to make apps that's a little simpler, a little bit higher

00:23:10   level, more abstract.

00:23:13   And you could share that same project with Xcode on the Mac

00:23:19   so that the one you're developing on the iPad,

00:23:21   you could develop on the Mac.

00:23:22   But if you have a more complex app or a legacy app

00:23:25   that was already started on Xcode on the Mac,

00:23:28   that not everything you do on the Mac,

00:23:30   you could do on the iPad version,

00:23:32   but everything you do on the iPad, you could do on the Mac.

00:23:33   Does that make sense?

00:23:35   I could see that.

00:23:36   - Yeah, yeah.

00:23:37   - But I think that the iBooks author thing

00:23:39   is more telling about Apple's priorities

00:23:42   and where they see the iPad.

00:23:45   I just...

00:23:47   Because I think in theory it should be there.

00:23:50   And I think one of the reasons it's not

00:23:52   is sort of proof on this whole, like,

00:23:57   are people worried about Apple's commitment

00:23:59   to the future of the Mac?

00:24:00   I think it's one of those things that makes my case, which

00:24:03   I've been arguing on the show with the last few guests,

00:24:05   in favor of, I don't think Apple has--

00:24:07   I don't think Apple is any less committed to the Mac

00:24:10   than at any point in the past.

00:24:11   I think the Mac has a bright future.

00:24:13   And I think the fact that they don't have--

00:24:15   know, they see it as fine that iBooks Author is Mac only is is evident of that.

00:24:22   Yeah, but when was the last time they updated it? There was a minor update in,

00:24:26   I looked, I thought it was like forever ago. Like maybe the bigger problem with iBooks Author is that

00:24:31   they're just not committed to iBooks period. That they sort of lost their corporate,

00:24:39   I don't know, I was gonna say Stiffy. Stiffy for iBooks ever since, you know,

00:24:48   since they got sued. I mean they came out of the gate. I mean they even had a special event

00:24:53   just for iBooks. It was that weird one-off event at the, what the heck is the name of that museum

00:25:01   in New York? I'm terrible with stuff like that. Anyway, the one from Men in Black. I know it was

00:25:08   Men in Black. They had a big... Yeah, like in the first Men in Black where...

00:25:14   Oh, in the beginning where he chases... Is it the Guggenheim?

00:25:19   Yeah, the Guggenheim. That's it. Yeah. Will Smith chases an alien

00:25:25   up there, and that's how he kind of draws the attention of the Men in Black.

00:25:28   Yeah. Just as a quick aside, Peter Cohen mentioned this today on Twitter, which blew my mind. Did you

00:25:35   know that the you know the guy you know Edgar and that and then movie the guy yeah the the bug that

00:25:41   puts the skin on the guy's skin on oh the the the alien the alien like i mean he's like he's the

00:25:51   guy i mean he's like the main bad guy right and he you know but he skins that he eats the guy

00:25:56   skins him and puts his skin on that that's Vincent D'Onofrio i knew that i had no idea that blew my

00:26:02   mind. I was like, "Oh my god, that's incredible." Anyway, I did know that. He doesn't really...

00:26:08   I think it's easy. He doesn't really look like him for more than 30 seconds.

00:26:12   Yeah, that's... Maybe that's why.

00:26:15   If you listen to him, though, you can definitely hear that it's him. Good movie. I love that movie.

00:26:20   That's a great movie.

00:26:22   I see it as evidence that Apple is committed to the Mac, that they're willing to do it.

00:26:29   I would be frustrated though, what I would be frustrated, and it's fine by me because I love

00:26:34   the Mac. I would rather, I would gladly, if somebody said to me, you can only use out of

00:26:41   iPhone, iPad, and Mac, you can only use two of the three for the next year and you can't touch the

00:26:46   other one. I would instantly, it would take me, it would take me less time than to say it. I would

00:26:50   just say get rid of the iPad. Mac and iPhone are all I need. iPad is totally a secondary thing for

00:26:57   me. In fact, I sometimes go like a week and I don't even know where the hell my iPad is.

00:27:02   I do like it. I use it mostly, I swear, my most frequent use is in baseball season using it as

00:27:09   a TV to watch Yankees games. Yeah, yeah. That's probably, I mean, I think entertainment is now,

00:27:16   I used to take it when I commuted up to Seattle, I would take it to right with a keyboard. But now

00:27:22   it's basically games and watching Netflix.

00:27:29   Anything...so for me as somebody who, from my work, wants the Mac to remain a thriving platform,

00:27:36   it's music to my ears. Like, I would actually be slightly more worried if the iPad were more capable

00:27:42   because it would at least lend some credence to the idea that Apple thinks the iPad is the future of personal computing.

00:27:48   The fact that it isn't, even after seven years,

00:27:52   it actually just gives me confidence

00:27:53   in their commitment to the Mac.

00:27:54   But I'd be frustrated, and it would be angering to me,

00:27:57   if I were one of the people who's really trying

00:28:00   to make a go of using the iPad as their full-time platform,

00:28:04   you know, the Ben Brooks' and Federico's of the world.

00:28:08   I would find that very frustrating.

00:28:10   'Cause it's, seven years, it really makes me think about,

00:28:12   you know, this comparison to,

00:28:14   and for some reason, I mean,

00:28:17   System 7 seems like an arbitrary number, but it's funny because 1991 was when I got my

00:28:21   first Mac.

00:28:22   I mean, I used one in school before, but I didn't own one.

00:28:25   And it's when System 7 came out, which was a big, big landmark in—I mean, I think it

00:28:34   was the landmark.

00:28:35   Yeah, in the early days.

00:28:36   I would say System 7 was the division between the early days of macOS and the later days

00:28:42   of macOS.

00:28:43   I mean, maybe that's a little arbitrary, but I don't think so.

00:28:46   I mean, it was when they changed a whole bunch of things.

00:28:48   Like, remember when control panels,

00:28:52   I forget how you used to install them in System 6.

00:28:53   They were sort of more like suitcase type things.

00:28:56   Where in--

00:28:57   - Oh yeah, that's right.

00:28:58   God, that's right, yeah.

00:29:00   - Third party ones were weird.

00:29:02   And then in System 7, control panels became a lot more

00:29:06   like apps where they were just self-contained things

00:29:08   and you just put them in a folder.

00:29:09   And there was your system folder at the root level

00:29:11   and inside was a folder called control panels

00:29:13   and you just put them in there.

00:29:15   And you wanted to uninstall one.

00:29:16   you just took it out and restarted.

00:29:18   It was a beautiful system.

00:29:22   - It was, yeah, it was. - It was.

00:29:25   - It just crashed all the time.

00:29:27   - But no, I disagree, I disagree, I really do.

00:29:31   I don't like it when people say

00:29:32   that the System 7 era Macs crashed all the time.

00:29:35   I think the arc of being a power user

00:29:39   on System 7 era Macs was you would start

00:29:43   running the basic system and you would be like you'd fall in love with the Mac

00:29:47   and then you'd get into the nerd community and you'd start finding out

00:29:50   about an it's yeah and extensions and these extensions could sometimes do like

00:29:56   just change like a little slight thing but it's like oh I like that like now

00:30:00   your mouse cursor is a dog you know right right and that's kind of easy

00:30:05   like all that and it would do is just sort of swap out the system's cursor and

00:30:10   and point to this other cursor instead, and okay,

00:30:13   there you go, now your cursor is a smurf.

00:30:15   And you'd get more and more,

00:30:21   and then all of a sudden when you go empty trash,

00:30:24   Oscar the Grouch pops out of your trash can

00:30:27   and sings a song, which was adorable.

00:30:30   Like if you didn't have the Grouch extension

00:30:33   installed on your Mac for at least a month or two,

00:30:36   then you've got no soul.

00:30:37   [LAUGHTER]

00:30:42   But the problem is it leads to such--

00:30:44   yeah, I mean, I think what happened was in those early days,

00:30:47   we didn't have enough stuff that would really

00:30:54   cause a lot of trouble.

00:30:55   And then as more things came out,

00:30:57   it became worse and worse and worse.

00:30:59   And then by the time System 8 came out,

00:31:01   they had to basically put a thing in there

00:31:04   to manage all your freaking--

00:31:07   I remember specifically the one that everybody knew.

00:31:10   I mean, at least anybody who did design work

00:31:11   had to have an extension called Adobe Type Manager, ATM.

00:31:16   Did you have ATM?

00:31:17   Or no, because you didn't--

00:31:18   I don't think I did, but I didn't do that kind of stuff.

00:31:21   So the thing that ATM did was natively,

00:31:25   the system wanted true type fonts for vector fonts.

00:31:29   But almost all of the professional fonts

00:31:31   that you could buy were in postscript format.

00:31:36   And to get them to look WYSIWYG on screen, you needed Adobe Type Manager.

00:31:42   Apple's system didn't natively render postscript fonts.

00:31:47   And you needed postscript fonts to do serious work, so you'd have to have ATM installed.

00:31:51   But ATM would load first because it starts with an A. I mean, it almost certainly loaded first,

00:31:57   and if not, it certainly loaded early. But you had to load it last because it

00:32:03   It would get conflicted with so much stuff.

00:32:05   You had to load it last.

00:32:06   So everybody-- I think it even shipped.

00:32:08   I think when you installed it from Adobe,

00:32:10   if you bought it straight up legit-- I forget even

00:32:12   if you had to buy it.

00:32:13   Maybe they gave it away.

00:32:14   But the way Adobe gave it to you,

00:32:16   the file was named like tilde ATM.

00:32:20   I forget what character it was before it.

00:32:22   But it was some kind of punctuation character

00:32:24   that in Apple's sorting algorithm at the time

00:32:27   would load last.

00:32:30   And that was a little-- anyway, in my opinion,

00:32:32   The curve of being a Mac power user in the '90s was you'd start getting more and more

00:32:38   extensions.

00:32:39   And remember when you'd boot and you'd see every time an extension loaded, you'd see

00:32:41   the icon during the boot sequence?

00:32:43   And then you'd get a second line of them, a third line.

00:32:47   So it was like a bell curve.

00:32:49   You'd start getting –

00:32:50   And then a bomb.

00:32:51   No, no, no.

00:32:52   Then it would just stop.

00:32:54   Like one of them would load and it would just stop and you'd be like, "Oh, that is shit."

00:33:01   And then you would--

00:33:03   I mean, everybody remembers.

00:33:04   You've got to remember.

00:33:05   How did you start up and not load extensions?

00:33:09   Shift key.

00:33:09   Of course.

00:33:10   Right?

00:33:10   You didn't even have to-- you probably

00:33:11   had to think more about it to say it.

00:33:12   Your hand probably already went to the shift key.

00:33:15   Right?

00:33:17   You just had muscle memory of how

00:33:18   to restart your Mac with the shift key down.

00:33:20   No, but then what would happen is you'd max out,

00:33:22   and you'd be so proud of how many extensions you have,

00:33:25   but your Mac would be unstable.

00:33:26   And then all of a sudden, the light would shine,

00:33:29   and you'd say, more extensions is not a good thing,

00:33:32   fewer extensions, and you should run it closer and closer,

00:33:35   as close as you can to the configuration it ships with.

00:33:38   Like a Mac out of the box from Apple

00:33:41   without any other extensions was always

00:33:43   an extremely stable device.

00:33:45   Now, I'm not saying that it never crashed,

00:33:47   I mean, but usually it was completely an application's fault.

00:33:49   The system itself was stable.

00:33:51   And so by the end of it, by the end of the classic era,

00:33:53   I had as few system extensions as possible.

00:33:56   Everyone was one that I felt like I could not do without.

00:33:59   And from a reputable vendor.

00:34:02   - Yeah, and you developed sets.

00:34:06   - Right, with Conflict Catcher.

00:34:08   - Because like, yeah, if I'm gonna do like publishing today

00:34:10   and then I'll boot with my publishing set

00:34:12   and if I'm gonna play like a game

00:34:14   and I need some sort of 3D thing.

00:34:16   - And a minimal and the other thing sometimes

00:34:18   if you wanted to play a game is you reboot

00:34:20   with a minimal set just to free up as much RAM as possible.

00:34:23   Keep it as light as possible.

00:34:26   RAM double.

00:34:27   Oh man.

00:34:28   I love the Mac.

00:34:30   I thought I love the classic Mac.

00:34:31   I think it still is overall a simpler conceptual design than Mac OS X.

00:34:37   I think Mac OS X is way too fiddly and exposes way too many goofy bits.

00:34:41   You know iOS clearly takes the cake and yeah.

00:34:45   I've become comfortable with the goofy bits at this point but there is a there is a I

00:34:49   I mean, the fact that you can just drag a system folder from Mac

00:34:54   to Mac and reboot it is pretty cool.

00:35:01   But there were definitely some parts of the classic Mac system

00:35:06   that you cannot defend as elegant design.

00:35:09   Like, for example, by the '90s, this is just an--

00:35:13   in the '80s, when it came out, it made perfect sense.

00:35:15   But in the '90s, by the--

00:35:18   should have been fixed with system 7 but I know why it wasn't because the legacy reasons that they

00:35:22   were carrying all this baggage but the fact that you had to allocate memory to the programs with

00:35:27   get info oh god oh my god for people who weren't classic mac os users what you would do is you'd

00:35:33   find any application and you'd go get info and in the info it would have a text field where it would

00:35:38   say how much ram was allocated and so developers when they ship their apps would buy you know

00:35:44   Typically, they would have a basic--

00:35:47   They would take it all.

00:35:48   Well, they would have--

00:35:49   they would ship it with a preconfigured--

00:35:51   when you first downloaded the app or installed it,

00:35:54   it would have a default that was defined by the developer.

00:35:57   So Photoshop, by default, would take a lot more RAM

00:36:00   than a very simple, lightweight app that just, I don't know,

00:36:06   capitalizes all letters for you or something like that.

00:36:09   But you could, as the user-- it was just a text field

00:36:12   in GetInfo--

00:36:13   you could give an app more or less as needed.

00:36:17   It does not seem like something that the computer

00:36:21   for the rest of us should force you to do.

00:36:24   - Yeah, really, yeah.

00:36:25   - All right, I can't defend that.

00:36:27   - Yeah, and I can remember,

00:36:28   not that Windows 95 was greater,

00:36:32   but at least some level of protected memory

00:36:35   was the one thing that I was like,

00:36:39   "Oh man, that would be nice to..."

00:36:41   (laughs)

00:36:42   I'm not switching, but I really want that.

00:36:43   - The very best Mac apps had programmers

00:36:45   who were clever enough to get around it.

00:36:47   So Photoshop at a certain point used to use a RAM disk,

00:36:50   its own RAM disk, and so you didn't have to,

00:36:54   you could open big files in Photoshop

00:36:57   and not have to really worry about having

00:36:59   given it enough RAM, it would do it on its own.

00:37:01   And BB Edit famously was able to operate with a very small,

00:37:06   it was like, the instructions for BB Edit

00:37:08   were do not screw with the default amount of RAM

00:37:11   It doesn't need much, and BBEdit had a brilliant scheme where you could open files,

00:37:18   as big as the text file is, is how much RAM BBEdit needs to display it,

00:37:24   but it could be way more than what the app had, because it would allocate the memory outside of that

00:37:29   allocation that you got from GetInfo. It managed its own memory separately, which was fantastic.

00:37:34   But neither here nor there.

00:37:37   I don't know. I would be frustrated if I were an iPad first user.

00:37:43   I guess it really depends on what you're, I mean, it just depends on what you're doing. I think

00:37:47   there's definitely, there are definitely things that I do that

00:37:51   would find frustrating, but I don't do them that often.

00:37:55   I think I'm somebody who probably could do most

00:37:59   of my work on an iPad. There's no way I could. Because it's mostly,

00:38:03   mostly I'm writing and then I'm taking it

00:38:06   and I use Ulysses which is one of those apps in setup.

00:38:08   - Setup.

00:38:09   - And that's in setup.

00:38:10   And I write it up and then I take it

00:38:14   and I put it someplace.

00:38:15   You know, I usually, I either take the file

00:38:18   and send it to somebody or I post it into

00:38:21   some sort of web-based CMS.

00:38:24   So all that stuff I can do. - How would you be

00:38:25   recording this podcast?

00:38:27   - Well, that's one thing.

00:38:30   - Right?

00:38:31   (laughing)

00:38:32   You can't, I mean, you can record podcasts on iOS devices.

00:38:37   I have not done it.

00:38:38   - Yeah, but it's jumping through a whole bunch of hoops.

00:38:40   Whereas there's like 10 different,

00:38:41   there's 10 different easy ways to record a podcast

00:38:45   on a Mac, at least, right?

00:38:47   You just open.

00:38:48   - I'm using two separate ones right now.

00:38:50   - Yeah, no, I guess I'm just using one,

00:38:52   but that's, you're probably smarter than me.

00:38:55   - Well, it's because of that problem.

00:38:58   - But it's like, you can record,

00:38:59   you just have these other apps running and, you know,

00:39:02   or I use Call Recorder, which is an extension for Skype,

00:39:04   and there's no way that you can install an extension

00:39:08   for an app on iPad.

00:39:10   And there's just, I don't know,

00:39:13   it's just another example of the type of thing.

00:39:15   And I know that I've listened to a couple of podcasts

00:39:17   where there's like a web-based thing

00:39:20   that somebody's working on, I forget the name of it.

00:39:22   I heard Snell talking about it recently.

00:39:25   - Oh, to edit. - Yeah, but I think

00:39:27   you can record too.

00:39:29   It's like a way that a group of people can get on

00:39:31   and you just use, I think it's ridiculous

00:39:33   that the answer to getting people to record podcasts

00:39:36   on an iPad is to use a web app instead of a native app

00:39:39   because the gist of it is that all you need

00:39:41   is the microphone then, and the server side

00:39:43   does the recording, you know, like it records,

00:39:46   the web app records little bits, and as you go,

00:39:49   keep sending it to the server, so like if the connection

00:39:52   breaks or whatever, it's not, you know,

00:39:53   you don't lose the whole, you only lose

00:39:55   like a couple seconds at a time.

00:39:56   I think it's ridiculous that it's not a local thing,

00:40:00   that the solution is to do it all on the web.

00:40:03   Anyway, the gist of it is that in the midst

00:40:05   of all of this months-long Sturm und Drang over,

00:40:09   oh, I think Apple is abandoning the Mac.

00:40:12   I think they're trying to force us all to use iPads.

00:40:14   And in the midst of all this,

00:40:16   I've been more or less on the side of, I don't think so.

00:40:19   I really think the Mac is fine,

00:40:20   but I think lost in this is the opposite,

00:40:24   which is the iPad is nowhere near as powerful

00:40:27   as it should be at this point in time.

00:40:29   You should be able to record a podcast through native apps.

00:40:34   There should be a way to have two apps at a time

00:40:37   using the microphone so that one could be Skype

00:40:40   sending the communication over the internet

00:40:42   and the other one can be a call recorder type thing.

00:40:45   There's no reason you shouldn't be able to do that.

00:40:48   I don't know, I'd be frustrated.

00:40:53   I think that the--

00:40:54   - Is it, I mean, is it still just the thing

00:40:56   of like walking and chewing gum at the same time?

00:40:58   - Maybe.

00:41:00   - Do we keep coming back to that one in particular?

00:41:03   - I don't know.

00:41:04   I don't know, maybe.

00:41:06   I think the other thing too,

00:41:07   I've been thinking about this a lot lately too,

00:41:08   is where does this idea that the iPad is,

00:41:11   that Apple's gonna push the, sweep the Mac aside

00:41:15   in favor of the iPad?

00:41:16   I think a large part comes down to what Tim Cook said

00:41:21   when they debuted the iPad Pro,

00:41:25   where Tim Cook said, I don't have it in front of me,

00:41:28   but it's something to the effect of--

00:41:31   - I mean, he said he doesn't use a Mac.

00:41:32   - No, he never said that.

00:41:33   He's never said that.

00:41:34   He has said that he-- - Okay.

00:41:36   - I think he said that he's traveled only with an iPad.

00:41:38   But like when he went to,

00:41:42   or not when he went to,

00:41:44   when he invited ABC News into his office in Cupertino

00:41:48   to do an interview about the FBI San Bernardino case,

00:41:52   there's a big iMac on his desk.

00:41:54   There's a 5K iMac on his desk.

00:41:56   So, I mean, he's got one on his desk.

00:41:57   If he didn't use it, I can't imagine why he'd have it on his desk.

00:42:02   I find it very hard to believe that Tim Cook does not use a Mac.

00:42:05   I would be shocked if he actually said that.

00:42:08   He has said that he travels only with an iPad.

00:42:10   He has said that he thinks there's many people, many users who

00:42:12   can get by with only an iPad.

00:42:14   But I think it was his words that this is the best example of our vision

00:42:21   for the future of personal computing.

00:42:24   It said something to the effect of that.

00:42:26   And I think that it was--

00:42:29   if you take it literally, it sort of sounds like, yeah,

00:42:31   he's saying that this is going to be the future,

00:42:34   and everything else, which would include the Mac,

00:42:36   is by the way said.

00:42:38   I think he was just selling the iPad Pro.

00:42:40   I don't really think he meant it that way.

00:42:43   I think that the better--

00:42:47   I mean, the problem is that you have that statement.

00:42:50   You have some-- at least, I think

00:42:51   there's at least a couple of statements

00:42:52   that he's made about stuff like that.

00:42:54   And then you have a year like 2016 where they don't really update the Mac very much.

00:43:00   And they have the desktop ones are just sitting there. So the convergence of those two things

00:43:07   makes people think. Which is an example.

00:43:10   Yeah, not always do.

00:43:11   Right. They haven't updated the iPad in over a year either. Right?

00:43:17   Well, didn't the 12th, the Pro, the smaller Pro came out in April, right?

00:43:24   No, yeah, yeah, last April. So it'll be, if they have, or March, I guess, it'll be a year.

00:43:30   Yeah, yeah, they didn't do it in the fall, which they did.

00:43:33   And yeah, like, and so the 12-inch or 13-inch iPad Pro hasn't been updated now in over a year.

00:43:38   It came out alongside the iPhone last year, or at least it was debuted alongside the iPhone and came

00:43:44   out in October or whatever. But that's been unchanged for over a year. So I don't think

00:43:49   I think that lack of updates to hardware should not are not necessarily indicative of their commitment

00:43:55   to the platform. I think that the annual update to the OS is a better sign of their commitment

00:44:01   to the platform. I don't know what the explanation is but I'd be frustrated.

00:44:10   um hey with the Ulysses was my description of it as sort of like an IDE for writing is that

00:44:16   is that a good description like a yeah yeah yeah I mean it's uh to me it I mean I used to write

00:44:23   in bbedit all the time um and I mostly write in markdown and so uh but I wanted something

00:44:29   that was better at arranging the files um so Ulysses is like that um it gives you you know

00:44:36   You can create folders and projects and stuff like that.

00:44:40   It's somewhere in between BB Edit and Scrivener.

00:44:46   It's not as fancy as Scrivener.

00:44:49   It doesn't have things for writing scripts and things

00:44:51   like that.

00:44:52   You can't put pictures in and scrapbook stuff

00:44:58   when you're building characters and things to write books.

00:45:00   If you're writing a full book, you probably

00:45:02   want to use Scrivener.

00:45:03   you could write a full book in Ulysses too. And it has an iPad version and they sync, right?

00:45:09   Yeah. Yep. Yep. And that's the nice thing. I mean, so it works on the iPhone, iPad, and on the Mac.

00:45:15   It's always been one of those apps that sort of appeals to me, but never pushes me over the edge.

00:45:21   It took me a while. It really took me a while to get used to it. I had been using BB Edit for

00:45:25   years and I couldn't get used to it. But then finally, I think it was like one of the recent

00:45:33   and update. So I've been using it for two years, a year and a half, something like that.

00:45:42   And very happy with it. I still use BBEdit for certain things.

00:45:46   And you know, I know Apple has done, Apple has some of their apps that work great cross

00:45:50   platform. I think that the, I have complaints about the Mac version of photos being not

00:45:55   Mac like enough and sort of, it just feels like an app written by iOS programmers, not

00:46:01   Mac programmers.

00:46:03   But in terms of actually syncing and having photos

00:46:05   that I take on my iPhone just magically appear on my Mac

00:46:09   and changes, I edit, I straighten, you know.

00:46:13   One of the things, I mean, I take thousands of photos a year

00:46:15   and I'm like, not serious, but like semi-serious.

00:46:19   I own like a $4,000 Canon SLR with counting the lenses.

00:46:24   I cannot take a straight picture.

00:46:27   I mean, 20 years into an avid amateur photography

00:46:31   hobby. Almost every photo I take, the horizon is crooked. So like straightening images is just,

00:46:38   I do it all the time. And I love that you straighten it on. It doesn't matter which device

00:46:41   you straighten it on. There it is. It's synced up to your iCloud. I love it. And the iWorks Suite,

00:46:47   now that they've, you know, they had hit the reset button, you know, for years there was like

00:46:51   the iOS versions which had a certain file format and the Mac versions which had file formats that

00:46:57   couldn't round trip because it used features.

00:46:59   And they hit the reset button.

00:47:01   And the only way to do it is to sort of set the Mac back.

00:47:04   But they've gotten them to the point

00:47:06   now where most of what the Mac apps could always do,

00:47:09   they can do everywhere now.

00:47:11   So the iWorks apps are a good example.

00:47:13   But Ulysses just shows that third party developers,

00:47:15   and I think in a lot of ways, are

00:47:18   doing a better job of making the iPad appear

00:47:21   to the Mac a peer, not appear.

00:47:26   Yes, yeah, right. A sibling, a full-fledged sibling to the man than Apollos, you know,

00:47:31   with iBooks Author as exhibit A. Yeah. It's a fairly, I mean, it's a relatively simple

00:47:40   app. I'm not trying to, that came out wrong. I mean, that's one of the things I like about it.

00:47:46   There aren't like a huge number of bells and whistles and it lets you get into the writing,

00:47:51   which is what you want to do, but it gives me enough flexibility in terms of arranging things

00:47:55   that it's got exactly what I want.

00:47:59   So it doesn't have to do anything super freaky

00:48:05   like stuff that's not allowed on iOS.

00:48:11   - You know who else is doing an amazing job

00:48:14   on treating the iPad as a first class platform

00:48:19   for creative people is OmniGroup.

00:48:22   - Yeah.

00:48:24   Again, I think better than Apple.

00:48:26   I really do.

00:48:28   - Oh, yeah.

00:48:29   Well, I think, yeah, I mean, they're like,

00:48:31   they're at the forefront, and they made that decision.

00:48:34   And I mean, I'm assuming that it's working out

00:48:39   well enough for them.

00:48:40   I hope so.

00:48:42   - Yeah, my understanding is, yeah.

00:48:43   - I've always loved their apps.

00:48:44   - But they really, and I think that they did it in a way

00:48:48   where the Mac versions of their apps never suffered.

00:48:50   Like, the Mac versions of Omni apps never had

00:48:53   like an 18 month period where they were like one step forward, two steps back to get iOS

00:49:00   compatibility.

00:49:01   So, really, I mean, I would hold them up as a better example than Apple of how to get

00:49:06   iPad versions and Mac versions that just work together.

00:49:13   And did you see that Ken Case, founder, co-founder of the Ami group, CEO, he had his annual,

00:49:20   Here's what 2016 was for us,

00:49:24   and here's what we're looking at in 2017.

00:49:26   Did you see that post?

00:49:27   I'll put it in the show notes.

00:49:32   I swear to God, I'm typing it in right now.

00:49:33   Here we go.

00:49:34   I won't go into details on the app by app basis,

00:49:40   but one of the things that was fascinating about it

00:49:42   is that they have hired Sal Soyahan,

00:49:48   who was formerly a longtime Apple evangelist

00:49:51   for automation technologies, I believe,

00:49:54   was what his group was called,

00:49:56   which was AppleScript and Automator and stuff in that area.

00:50:01   And Sal left Apple, was it early December?

00:50:10   Somewhere around there.

00:50:11   And seemingly, the details are not public,

00:50:17   but the gist of it, and Sal had a piece that he wrote

00:50:20   for Mac Stories, suggesting that Apple seems to think

00:50:25   that extensions are the future of automation,

00:50:28   meaning the little sharing sheet things that you have now

00:50:32   where you can, like if you have the,

00:50:34   I use a bookmarking service called Pinboard,

00:50:39   and I have an app called Pinner on my iPhone,

00:50:41   and when I have a URL and go to share it,

00:50:43   I get a little extension up there that says add to Pinboard,

00:50:46   and I can just tap that and it goes.

00:50:49   That that sort of thing is the future of automation

00:50:51   and it's not like scripting or something like that.

00:50:54   Which extensions are great,

00:50:56   but it's a totally separate thing.

00:50:58   It's like saying, it really is like saying

00:51:00   the future of citrus is apples.

00:51:02   It's like, that's not citrus.

00:51:04   You know what I mean, apples are great,

00:51:06   but we need oranges and lemons and limes.

00:51:08   I mean, you can't, what are you gonna do

00:51:11   if you make a martini?

00:51:12   You can't put a goddamn apple peel in it.

00:51:15   You need a lemon peel.

00:51:17   I mean, that's a terrible analogy because,

00:51:19   but anyway.

00:51:20   (laughing)

00:51:21   Anyway, Ken Case revealed in his year in review thing

00:51:26   that the Omni Group has been consulting with Sal

00:51:29   since he left Apple, like, and they're smart.

00:51:32   It's just one of those ways where the Omni Group

00:51:34   is so smart, where it's like Sal says,

00:51:36   well, after 20 years, I'm leaving Apple,

00:51:38   and the Omni Group was like, quick, let's get 'em.

00:51:40   (laughing)

00:51:41   - Right, yeah, well.

00:51:43   - Well, you're right.

00:51:44   I mean, there's gotta be a bunch of other companies like,

00:51:46   "Oh, shit, we should get in line."

00:51:49   - I mean, now that you mentioned that, I remember that,

00:51:51   I remember hearing about that at any rate.

00:51:53   And I don't think, I mean, they haven't really

00:51:56   like, shown their hand yet, right?

00:51:58   - But they have a, they've revealed a demo.

00:51:59   Anyway, they've got engineers working on,

00:52:01   or at least an engineer working on a cross-platform

00:52:07   scripting system for the OmniGroup apps.

00:52:11   But it's, now how is that gonna work?

00:52:16   You know, there's like on the Mac,

00:52:18   there's the Apple script is there,

00:52:20   it's part of the system.

00:52:21   I mean, it's really the OSA,

00:52:22   but it's Apple events are part of the system.

00:52:24   And there's a standard way for developers

00:52:26   to add scripting support to their apps.

00:52:30   And that the same way that, you know,

00:52:32   the same things that you do as a developer

00:52:34   to make your app scriptable by Apple script,

00:52:36   or JavaScript, which is now a first class

00:52:39   officially supported language for scripting apps on Mac.

00:52:41   Also, it's along the lines of doing this,

00:52:44   it's the same work that you have to do

00:52:45   to get automator support for your app,

00:52:47   so you can make your app part of an automator process.

00:52:52   You can't do it, there's no Apple events on iOS,

00:52:57   so if, and there's no real alternative to it,

00:52:59   so the Omni group is doing their own thing.

00:53:02   Forget what they're calling it,

00:53:04   but it's based on JavaScript,

00:53:06   because part of the reason that it's tricky for developers

00:53:10   to do something like this is that the rules for the App

00:53:13   Store on iOS are that you can't add an interpreter to your app.

00:53:18   In other words, you can't have an app that makes apps,

00:53:21   even if it runs within itself.

00:53:23   But what you can do is use the system version of JavaScript

00:53:27   that comes with WebKit.

00:53:28   And so you can use JavaScript, the JavaScript

00:53:31   that comes with the system.

00:53:33   And presumably, that's what Apple or what Omni's doing,

00:53:35   because they're saying that their scripting technology

00:53:39   is based on JavaScript.

00:53:42   But the gist of it is, and there's an example script

00:53:44   that they show an animation of that I guess Sal wrote,

00:53:47   where you make a rectangle and then you make a circle

00:53:51   out of the rectangle and you color it green

00:53:52   and then position it at a certain point.

00:53:54   It's, he's scripting their drawing app, OmniGraffle,

00:53:59   and that these same scripts are gonna be cross-platform

00:54:01   Mac and iOS, which is really, we haven't had that.

00:54:04   It's great, but to me, I read this,

00:54:07   and I think this is great, and it makes,

00:54:10   it helps establish Omni as the leading indie Apple developer,

00:54:14   Apple platform developer today,

00:54:16   but this is the sort of thing that should be coming

00:54:18   from Apple, not from a third-party developer.

00:54:20   It should be the same thing for all apps.

00:54:23   I mean, that's one of the reasons AppleScript,

00:54:24   and I say what you want about the language,

00:54:25   but one of the reasons it's a great technology

00:54:27   was before AppleScript, in the early days of the Mac,

00:54:31   There were any app that wanted to have like an automation.

00:54:35   I mean, we used to call them macros.

00:54:36   Nobody uses the word macro anymore,

00:54:37   but it's the same idea, right?

00:54:40   But any app that had macros or something like that

00:54:43   had their own thing.

00:54:45   It was all, you know.

00:54:46   - That's how I got into,

00:54:49   that's how I like, I started my career in IT.

00:54:53   Was basically doing macros.

00:54:56   So I came to work in a financial department

00:54:59   and they had all these spreadsheets

00:55:00   they were doing all this stuff manually. And so I started out just by taking Excel and doing

00:55:08   having an arrow over, arrow through cells, instead of really learning. Before I learned how to do any

00:55:15   kind of programming, it was just like down one cell, down one cell, down one cell, over, over,

00:55:21   over, copy, that kind of thing. Just very deliberately telling it exactly what I would do

00:55:27   by hand, and then slowly working into learning Visual Basic for applications.

00:55:35   That's my nightmare background.

00:55:39   Well, I forget the name of it. There was a competitor for years with bbedit. I think

00:55:46   it was called Alpha. There was a programming text editor for the Mac, and it used TCL,

00:55:52   TCL as a scripting language, which was, it wasn't like its own invention of the language,

00:55:57   but what they did, it was an open source scripting language that I think has largely fallen out

00:56:01   of favor in recent decades.

00:56:03   But you know, it's a sort of scripting language where anybody could look at it and sort of

00:56:07   get the gist of, oh yeah, you know, I mean, it wasn't like a weird language.

00:56:10   It was like, oh yeah, I kind of see what's going on here.

00:56:14   But they embedded the interpreter in their app and no other Mac app used TCL.

00:56:17   So anything you did that you were scripting it was only within the text editor itself.

00:56:21   there was no way to do something with text

00:56:24   and then send it to Excel or whatever.

00:56:27   Apple, having it as a system level technology

00:56:30   is what made that possible.

00:56:32   And the fact that iOS doesn't have it

00:56:35   and the fact that it doesn't,

00:56:36   you know, reading between the lines of what Sal

00:56:39   has said publicly since he left

00:56:42   doesn't seem like it's in the plans either.

00:56:44   So I think that's kind of worrisome.

00:56:45   - Yeah.

00:56:47   - And it would, again, another sign

00:56:49   that it would make me angry if I were an iOS user.

00:56:51   What?

00:56:54   All right, let's take a break and tell you

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00:59:38   You watch the Super Bowl? No. I wish I hadn't. I know. I quipped that I was the real winner

00:59:52   because I did not watch the Super Bowl. I wish I hadn't. Wow. As somebody who put a little scratch

00:59:56   on the Atlanta Falcons. That's heartbreaking. Yeah, no, it's just, it's really two teams that

01:00:04   I just don't, I didn't care about at all. So, um, I'm, I just said, I thought I can watch the,

01:00:10   you know, I can watch the commercials later. I wrote a little bit. Well, here's something,

01:00:16   here's a story that's came out. It, they're not new, but two stories came out in the last two

01:00:22   days. There's a fast company story by, let me get his name, uh, Mark Sullivan. It came out yesterday

01:00:31   headline, "Why Apple's 10th Anniversary iPhone Will Likely Cost More Than $1,000."

01:00:36   And the gist of it is that according to this guy who says he has

01:00:40   he has a source with knowledge of Apple's plans. That's how he attributes it.

01:00:43   Doesn't say where the source is from. Is it from Apple? Is it from the supply chain?

01:00:47   Is it

01:00:48   a bartender at BJ's in Cupertino?

01:00:51   I don't know. But this guy has a source and he says that what Apple is going to do

01:00:55   next year

01:00:56   is come out with the iPhone 7S

01:01:00   and the iPhone 7S Plus, which would be exactly in line with the past couple of years where

01:01:06   they just take the new number version and then add an S. I mean, it doesn't say it's

01:01:12   going to be called the S, but they're going to look exactly like the 7 and 7 Plus. Not

01:01:17   like, sort of like it, like the way that the 7 sort of looks like the iPhone 6 and 6S.

01:01:23   But that they are also going to introduce a new, even though they're going to come out

01:01:27   with a 7S and 7S Plus with the new stuff. They're also going to come out with an all-new

01:01:32   industrial design. That's and it'll have an OLED display and it's going to go edge-to-edge

01:01:39   and it's going to be 5.8 inches instead of 5 and it's going to cost more. So even though

01:01:44   they're going to introduce 7S and 7S Plus, instead of having them debut at the top of

01:01:50   the line, there's going to be this new iPhone that's going to debut at the top of the line

01:01:54   at an even higher price starting at more than $1,000.

01:01:57   Now, the $1,000 thing isn't ridiculous

01:02:01   'cause if you buy the high-end iPhone 7 Plus,

01:02:05   it is like $969.

01:02:07   So it's already, they've already,

01:02:08   the top of the line most expensive iPhone

01:02:11   is already roughly $1,000.

01:02:14   So it's not preposterous that the starting point

01:02:18   of a new high-end one would be $1,000.

01:02:22   So this is a five point, and this is the eight.

01:02:25   - Well, they're saying they don't know the name,

01:02:26   and he even says--

01:02:29   - Which is what we've maybe heard of as the pro before.

01:02:32   - Right, I think iPhone Pro, if they did this,

01:02:35   was actually the more likely name, in my opinion,

01:02:37   but we can get to that, 'cause he also says,

01:02:39   the new 5.8-inch phone will probably be called

01:02:42   the iPhone 8, but this is Mark Sullivan writing,

01:02:45   but some believe Apple will call it the,

01:02:48   parentheses, far cooler sounding,

01:02:49   end parentheses, iPhone X.

01:02:52   I don't iPhone X I can I think that they I would hope that they learn their lesson by calling Mac OS 10 Mac

01:02:58   Oh spelling it with an X

01:03:00   Because for years, I think that the majority of people caught pronounced it I Mac OS X

01:03:07   In my yeah, I would do that by mistake occasionally

01:03:11   And I knew I knew what it was called. What what was the other one that they used to?

01:03:18   Oh, the iTouch. The calling the calling the iPod Touch the iTouch, right?

01:03:23   There's way more people who call it the iTouch than than iPod Touch. I think

01:03:28   calling it iPhone capital X, I mean who knows? I guess if they do that they

01:03:32   should actually pronounce it iPhone X? If they're expecting people to pronounce it

01:03:37   iPhone X, then... No, that's a big mistake. I was, when I read that, I was

01:03:42   thinking it's iPhone X not 10 if they did call it iPhone X I but the thing is

01:03:49   like where do you go there because you can't add an it my phone I can't add an

01:03:52   S because it would sound like you're saying excess yeah yeah you can't put

01:04:00   the s in front of it because then it would be like iPhone sex right I anyway

01:04:07   the second story is next I found FX to FX yeah just just go back to 1991 and

01:04:20   call it the iPhone 2 FX the iPhone the iPhone perform today came out KGI's Ming

01:04:27   Qi Kuo the analyst who has the best sources in this opponent if he reports

01:04:34   from China, I think, or at least from Asia.

01:04:36   And clearly, his sources have always

01:04:38   been in the supply chain.

01:04:39   The supply chain that fills his stuff.

01:04:41   He's been saying this for a while.

01:04:43   This isn't new, but he's--

01:04:45   this idea that they're going to do new ones of the exact same

01:04:49   form factor as the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus,

01:04:52   and this new thing with 5.8-inch diagonal OLED display that

01:04:59   might curve at the edges and is more of a chinless, foreheadless

01:05:03   edge-to-edge top-to-bottom design with a touch home button that's actually embedded in the screen

01:05:09   and is virtual, not really a button, etc. These aren't new rumors, but he reiterated this is

01:05:14   pretty much… I don't think anything in this report contradicts anything in Mark Sullivan's report,

01:05:22   so I don't know if they have the same sources or similar ones, but there's nothing really

01:05:26   conflicting. So it is… there's a little bit of a "where there's smoke, there's fire" aspect to this.

01:05:32   I think so. Sullivan source might be maybe I think that that's a very high possibility. I think you

01:05:43   would actually bet on that. But well has a pretty good track record. Yeah, I mean, you know, right.

01:05:51   Although I although I think I don't know, maybe it's possible. But usually these I mean, the one

01:05:56   of the reasons why they do these reports is to advertise for their firm. So it seems unlikely

01:06:01   likely that he would speak off the record like that.

01:06:06   - Well, but it's telling though that he came out

01:06:08   with the report the next day, I don't know.

01:06:10   You know what, here's a pet peeve.

01:06:13   I've said this before publicly, I hate this.

01:06:15   One of the ways that I wish, if I had a magic wand

01:06:19   that I would wave it, it would be that I hate

01:06:21   when these sites, when they report on rumors

01:06:24   of upcoming iPhones, inevitably,

01:06:26   this report here is from 9to5Mac to say,

01:06:29   this is about the KGI report.

01:06:33   They always illustrate the story

01:06:35   with a user-submitted mock-up

01:06:38   of what a future iPhone might look like,

01:06:41   which isn't based on, it's not like the source of,

01:06:45   the only way it makes sense to conclude an illustration

01:06:48   is if you have a source who says they've seen it

01:06:51   and then you make one that looks like

01:06:53   what the source is saying.

01:06:54   - Looks like what they, yeah. - Whereas they always

01:06:55   illustrate 'em with these things that people

01:06:58   just make out of their imagination.

01:07:00   Like, it's not, it bothers me profusely,

01:07:04   because I know as a critical reader of the news,

01:07:07   I know what this illustration is.

01:07:08   I know to just ignore it.

01:07:10   But I can't help it, I know that most people,

01:07:12   if they glance at this, are thinking,

01:07:14   this is an illustration of the thing

01:07:16   that they're talking about.

01:07:17   - So that's what it's gonna look like, yeah.

01:07:19   - Like imagine if--

01:07:21   - Yeah, and I've had conversations with people,

01:07:22   you know, like casual people,

01:07:23   like people you meet someplace and, you know,

01:07:25   like, oh, I saw a picture of it the other day.

01:07:26   I was like, that's not--

01:07:27   Like imagine if you had a news story that said, "Killer on the Loose," you know,

01:07:34   "Serial Killer is on the Loose in town," and you include an illustration of a man,

01:07:39   but the illustration of the man in the story has nothing to do with the killer on the loose.

01:07:43   You just need—right?

01:07:44   It's—

01:07:45   It's somebody's ideal version of a killer.

01:07:49   Right.

01:07:50   It's just a bald guy with a big, bushy beard.

01:07:54   He's got machetes for hands.

01:07:56   Do you know what I mean? It's like whenever they used to talk about the Unabomber back

01:08:00   before they caught him, and they'd always have this story where there was, you know,

01:08:04   they'd always have this illustration of a guy with a—they have a hoodie on? He had

01:08:08   a hoodie and sunglasses.

01:08:09   Yeah, with glasses, right?

01:08:11   Right. But it was based on—there was a witness one time who saw a guy that, you know, there

01:08:18   was some kind of connection where law enforcement legitimately thought they had a witness who

01:08:22   saw him mailing a package one time, and that it was a police sketch from this witness,

01:08:28   and they would use the same drawing over and over again. It wasn't like they just randomly

01:08:31   drew a guy, which is what these stupid illustrations of future edge-to-edge iPhones are. Anyway,

01:08:41   I have problems with this. I don't disbelieve that this is Apple's plan, and there's

01:08:48   enough smoke now that I can't help but think this might be it, that they're going to do

01:08:53   an iPhone 7S and 7S Plus. And instead of introducing them at the top of the line, they're not going

01:08:59   to push them down the line either. I think they'll keep the prices the same and instead

01:09:03   will introduce a new heretofore never seen tier above this. That's a very Apple-like

01:09:10   thing to do, whereas the rest of the industry races to lower and lower prices as "smartphones"

01:09:16   more and more commodities, and the average selling

01:09:18   price of a smartphone in general continues to drop,

01:09:21   it's a very Apple-like thing to do to say,

01:09:24   we're in such a position of prominence.

01:09:27   We're so clearly the preeminent smartphone phone maker

01:09:31   that we're going to move it up.

01:09:33   I could see that.

01:09:34   But I have some problems with this plan,

01:09:36   though, because everybody also seems

01:09:37   to be reporting the same things, that this new device,

01:09:41   the hot stuff is going to be, they're going to have trouble making them in quantity. That

01:09:49   it's, you know, that it's going to be supply-concerned. New iPhones have always been.

01:09:53   Yeah, because they can't get the screens.

01:09:55   Yeah, they can't get the screens and the touch sensors more difficult. All of these reports

01:10:01   have been very consistent. Now, I don't know how many of them come from this one source,

01:10:05   know the KGI's Ming-Chi Kuo, maybe he's the only one and it's bullshit but they

01:10:11   keep saying over again the other thing that's reiterated is that they're going

01:10:14   to it's going to be an OLED on the front that goes edge to edge it's gonna have a

01:10:18   touch sensor you know touch ID and a home button that is somehow embedded in

01:10:23   the screen. Apple has had patents I mean again I try to stay away from patents in

01:10:30   terms of the connection of well if Apple file a patent they must be using it no

01:10:35   They file patents for anything patentable, not just anything they use.

01:10:38   But there is a patent that Apple has filed somewhere where it's how to put a camera behind

01:10:42   a display, which would obviously be necessary if the screen goes edge to edge because you

01:10:47   can't get rid of the selfie camera.

01:10:48   I mean, that would be like the one thing Apple could do that would actually keep people from

01:10:52   buying a new phone.

01:10:54   Get rid of the headphone jack, like all these tech reports like, "Oh, you get rid of the

01:10:56   headphone jack.

01:10:57   No one's going to buy this thing.

01:10:58   Everybody's going to wait a year to see if this takes off."

01:11:00   No, it's like record-breaking sales for the iPhone without the headphone jack.

01:11:03   took away the selfie camera, people wouldn't buy it because people actually...

01:11:08   Yeah, well, you couldn't FaceTime. You couldn't... There's so many... Apart from just being able to

01:11:12   take a picture of yourself, there's other stuff. We know you love the selfie camera, but this edge

01:11:16   to edge design is so beautiful, we just threw it away. Also, there's no...

01:11:20   Johnny took away your... Also, there's no speaker. So you...

01:11:24   There's no earpiece for holding the phone up here, so you had...

01:11:30   I don't know, like the whole, so like they're also speculating that it's not gonna, it might not have buttons like on the sides either

01:11:35   It's like how do you reboot that phone? It's gotta have one, right? It has to have at least one

01:11:41   There's no, like at least one physical button. There's no way to, I don't know. Uh, yeah, shake it

01:11:47   The iPhone shake

01:11:58   (laughing)

01:12:00   I should start writing fake rumors again.

01:12:07   - It would be funny if they made it like an old Mac

01:12:10   where it was sort of like the little hole

01:12:12   for the SIM card tray where you'd have to poke a paperclip.

01:12:14   - Yeah, right, right.

01:12:16   I wore it.

01:12:17   That was like, Hank found that action.

01:12:20   So I have two classic Macs up in my office

01:12:23   and he hasn't played with them in a long time,

01:12:26   But when he was younger, he'd come up and I'd fish out my old floppy disks.

01:12:31   And I mean, I really think the thing that he liked-- he liked loading up some

01:12:34   of the games and playing with them.

01:12:35   But I think one of the things he liked the most was just force ejecting a floppy disk.

01:12:39   [LAUGHTER]

01:12:42   With a paperclip.

01:12:44   And the worst part was is forcing the paperclip in was just

01:12:47   pushing the button on the floppy drive mechanism.

01:12:50   Because it wasn't like Apple had their own floppy drives.

01:12:52   They were just buying the ones from Sony that everybody else used.

01:12:55   the other PC makers. Yeah, they just covered it up. Just for the sake of elegance, they

01:12:59   covered it up. That was brilliant, though. It was brilliant the way that under normal operation,

01:13:07   you didn't eject the floppy disk, the system did. And so you'd have to, the only way to get it out

01:13:13   was to drag it to the trash. Although that metaphor, dragging it just to trash is one of

01:13:19   of those. That was a little weird because you tell somebody that the first time. What do you

01:13:25   think dragging a floppy disk to the trash does? And I think the right answer is somebody, the

01:13:31   correct answer in terms of what happened is it would eject the disk, but I think the right answer

01:13:35   in terms of being able to intuit how the metaphors of the Mac worked would be, well, it erases the

01:13:42   the disk, right?

01:13:43   Nope, it ejects it.

01:13:44   They fixed it.

01:13:48   It was funny.

01:13:48   They fixed it in Mac OS X by having the trash can turn

01:13:51   into an eject button as you drag a disk, which works,

01:13:55   because it looks like an ejector,

01:13:56   but it's still a little weird.

01:13:58   My problem with this is that I think

01:14:02   this is the phone that everybody is going to want.

01:14:04   And if it costs more and is lower quantity

01:14:07   and they can't sell it, who's going to buy the 7S and 7S Plus?

01:14:11   I don't get it.

01:14:14   I guess that there's a lot of people who are like, well,

01:14:16   that new phone looks awesome, but I'm not

01:14:18   paying over $1,000.

01:14:19   I only want a 32 gigabyte iPhone 7,

01:14:22   so I'm going to pay $600 or whatever, $650 or whatever,

01:14:25   costs for a 32 gig iPhone 6 or 7s.

01:14:30   So I see that, but it's like--

01:14:33   I don't know.

01:14:34   It just seems a little weird to me that they would do both.

01:14:38   If they're going to come out with a new design,

01:14:40   why not just say this is the new design?

01:14:42   I guess because the price is so high, I don't know.

01:14:45   - Yeah. - I guess it--

01:14:46   - Yeah, I mean, I guess they wanna do it,

01:14:48   they wanna make it, I don't know.

01:14:50   Maybe they won't do it. - Right.

01:14:51   - But if they wanna do it,

01:14:53   you know, sell it at a high price because you can't,

01:14:58   I don't know, I'm not gonna get that phone.

01:15:02   I mean, the thing that bothers me about this report

01:15:04   is there's no mention of a four inch phone.

01:15:06   - Right, right, right.

01:15:08   Right, because that is sort of--

01:15:09   that's what I want them to do if they have the technology

01:15:12   to make edge-to-edge phones, is I

01:15:14   want them to make a phone with the screen size of the iPhone

01:15:17   7, the 4.7-inch diagonal, and then make the phone just

01:15:22   that size of that screen, which would be about as tall

01:15:25   as the iPhone SE and a little wider.

01:15:29   And I could take that.

01:15:30   I could take it being a little wider,

01:15:32   but having it be that height, man, that would be great.

01:15:35   That's the phone I wanted to make,

01:15:36   and they're not making it.

01:15:37   - Yeah, I mean, maybe that's the next year.

01:15:40   - I guess, I don't know, but, you know.

01:15:43   - I mean, and I don't mind paying more for it.

01:15:45   I mean, it was very nice not having to pay much

01:15:47   for the iPhone SE, but I'm used to paying,

01:15:50   you know, basically paying 650, so I would do that.

01:15:55   - I would argue--

01:15:56   - I want the, I just want the smaller phone

01:15:58   with modern terms.

01:16:00   - I would argue right now that the most beloved iPhone

01:16:03   Apple is selling today is the iPhone SE.

01:16:06   that the, meaning the people who have the iPhone SE

01:16:09   know exactly why they bought it

01:16:10   and they're delighted by it.

01:16:12   I know you like it.

01:16:13   My pal, my pal, Chinkudol, has one and waited for it.

01:16:18   I mean, he doesn't really follow this stuff religiously,

01:16:20   but he just so did not want a bigger phone.

01:16:23   And he got the SE and he loves it.

01:16:25   He says it's the best thing,

01:16:26   the best thing he's ever owned period, like gadget wise.

01:16:28   - Yeah, yeah.

01:16:29   Well, that's what I think.

01:16:30   Like the best Apple products I bought within

01:16:33   at least the last year are the SE and AirPods.

01:16:36   - Yep.

01:16:36   - I love it.

01:16:38   I mean, I don't use the, I didn't buy an SE,

01:16:40   I sent my review unit back,

01:16:42   and ultimately it's 'cause I want the camera.

01:16:46   But I have mixed feelings.

01:16:48   And everybody I know who has like the iPhone 7

01:16:50   sort of has the, well, I already have a bigger phone,

01:16:53   I kinda wish I had that super fancy dual lens camera

01:16:55   and the 7 Plus, and everybody has the 7 Plus,

01:16:57   it's like, I love this phone, I love how big it is,

01:16:59   I love the all-day battery life, but it is kinda big.

01:17:01   You know, like Marco Arman was just talking about an ATP

01:17:04   where he keeps, you know, he's like 51, 49 each way,

01:17:09   and every time he kind of commits to one,

01:17:11   the second he goes there, the grass is greener

01:17:13   on the other side and he wants to go the other way.

01:17:15   Whereas the iPhone SE people know exactly what they want.

01:17:17   They want a phone with that super nice hand feel,

01:17:20   pocket size, you know.

01:17:24   For the people who know that that's what they want

01:17:25   is a small phone, the iPhone SE is absolutely amazing.

01:17:27   It's the best device, best iPhone Apple's ever made

01:17:31   in some ways.

01:17:32   - Yeah.

01:17:33   - Yeah, no, I would-- - And in terms of,

01:17:34   and I'm not surprised one bit that they spent

01:17:37   like months trying to get it into sufficient quantity

01:17:40   to meet demand, that this phone with your own

01:17:43   internal technologies was actually so popular

01:17:45   that they couldn't keep up with demand.

01:17:48   - Yeah. - So I don't know, I don't--

01:17:50   - Yeah, so I don't know if this is what's coming out

01:17:52   in the fall, I'm not sure what I'm gonna do.

01:17:56   Because I don't want a bigger phone,

01:17:57   and so, and I don't wanna spend,

01:18:00   I mean, I'm certainly not gonna spend $1,000

01:18:01   to get a giganto phone.

01:18:03   And I don't wanna eye the other two,

01:18:06   so I'm gonna stick with my SE.

01:18:07   - The consensus on, like I said,

01:18:09   like the phone, the ideal phone that I wish Apple would make

01:18:12   was with 4.7 inch display,

01:18:14   this display from the iPhone 7 with no chin or forehead.

01:18:18   And if they can narrow the sides a little bit,

01:18:20   that'd be great.

01:18:21   And that would be a phone that physically would be

01:18:24   about as tall as the SE and a little wider.

01:18:27   And I could take that.

01:18:29   everybody, the consensus, if you just draw a 16,

01:18:32   just take a piece of graph paper

01:18:34   and make a 16 to nine aspect ratio rectangle

01:18:38   with a 5.8 inch diagonal,

01:18:41   which is the size of this OLED display

01:18:43   everybody's talking about,

01:18:44   that's roughly as tall as the iPhone 7.

01:18:49   So you're not carrying around a plus sized phone

01:18:52   in height anymore.

01:18:53   You've got like the smaller current iPhone,

01:18:56   the mid-sized iPhone in height,

01:18:58   But it's a lot wider.

01:18:59   It is a very wide phone.

01:19:01   Just take a piece of graph, here's your homework listeners,

01:19:06   take a piece of graph paper and draw it.

01:19:07   I don't want a phone that's any bigger than,

01:19:09   this phone is the biggest phone

01:19:10   that I could possibly be happy carrying.

01:19:12   So I don't want a phone

01:19:13   that's the same height as this but wider.

01:19:16   I'm not saying I won't buy it,

01:19:17   but I'm gonna bitch about it

01:19:19   every single week on this show.

01:19:21   Here, let me take a final break here

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01:20:18   This is a very Apple-like way of doing things.

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01:22:06   Here's the asterisk. They also sell a dog mattress

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01:22:16   mattress, the dog mattress is cheap enough that they won't give you 50 bucks

01:22:19   off. But your dog will thank you. So that's the asterisk. You can't get that.

01:22:23   You can't save the money on that. Oh, anything else? Anything else you wanted

01:22:28   to talk about? I had a couple of other things in the show notes. You see

01:22:30   Samsung's... Samsung had a factory catch fire because of batteries.

01:22:35   Just why? Because of batteries they threw out. They threw out a bunch of bum batteries and they caught on fire.

01:22:44   I got a note from—I'm not going to say who, but I got a note from somebody else in

01:22:49   the media.

01:22:50   It's sort of like not an enemy of mine, but someone who likes to give me shit.

01:22:56   And he wrote that—he was like, "I don't often have good things to say about you, but

01:23:01   slow clap for this one," which was my link to this.

01:23:06   I wrote, "The headline was 'Samsung factory fire triggered by discarded batteries,'

01:23:10   And my entire contents of the article was, "The rare case when a figurative garbage fire turns

01:23:15   into a literal garbage fire." Now, that's good. I call this show, the show notes, this description

01:23:22   of the talk show says that it's the director's commentary for "Daring Fireball," which has

01:23:25   sort of happened. I sometimes look at that and think it's not quite right. But to do a real

01:23:30   director's commentary, I will reveal my thinking behind this post, where I knew I wanted the link

01:23:34   to it. The joke came to me immediately, but I didn't know which way to do it. Put the straight

01:23:41   news in the headline and make the joke in the body, or should I use the headline,

01:23:47   "Figurative garbage fire turns into literal garbage fire," and then have the body say,

01:23:56   "Samsung factory fire triggered by discarded batteries." I couldn't decide which way to go.

01:24:03   I kind of regret it. That's why I'm sort of talking about it now. Where I kind of feel like maybe it

01:24:06   was a little more likely to go viral as a retweeted tweet if because the thing that goes in the tweet

01:24:12   is the headline. Yes. Yeah. And it comes off more as an onion-esque thing, except it's real.

01:24:22   Totally. That was one of the jokes I read through my head too. And I try to avoid it because usually

01:24:30   if the joke that comes to me is not from the Onion, there's a better joke somewhere, because

01:24:34   you could say it about a lot of things. But it really does read like an Onion article,

01:24:38   like one of the ones that doesn't even have the article where they just have headlines.

01:24:41   Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:24:44   Anything else that you wanted to talk about this week?

01:24:47   Your site is very political.

01:24:57   It is, it is.

01:24:58   I don't know what you don't know. I don't know if you do that on the show.

01:25:02   I mean, I noticed that I've noticed you've gotten some pushback from some readers.

01:25:07   Uh, a little bit, but since this is the director's commentary.

01:25:10   I will say this, uh, that I have, I've actually in recent years, largely tuned out of

01:25:15   obsessively watching the stats during Fireball. Um, it roughly, uh, it's not secret though. I'm

01:25:22   not, I'm not secretive about it. A couple of years ago, it peaked out at around 4 million page views

01:25:27   per month, and it collapsed when Google Reader went away.

01:25:36   I lost around a million page views a month when Google Reader went away.

01:25:40   And seemingly there were so many people using Google Reader who, when a new Daring Fireball

01:25:44   articles would come up, they would go, you know, like, you know, open a new tab from

01:25:49   Google Reader to read it on Daring Fireball.

01:25:52   This isn't counting people who just read the RSS.

01:25:54   This is people who come to the site.

01:25:55   Google Reader had a tremendous impact on the page views.

01:25:59   But I don't think it had any impact on the number of people

01:26:01   who read during Fireball.

01:26:02   This is why I have never sold my sponsorships based

01:26:05   on promises of page views.

01:26:06   It's just a loose estimate of how many people read the site.

01:26:12   Whether they come once a day or whether they come three times a day,

01:26:15   it's readers that matter more than pages.

01:26:17   And slowly but surely-- and lots of other people have noticed this too--

01:26:20   page views are down.

01:26:22   But they've stabilized at somewhere between around 2.5

01:26:26   million page views per month.

01:26:28   And that's super stable.

01:26:29   That's been, for the last 18 months--

01:26:32   September is the only exception where September

01:26:35   goes up a little bit because that's when the iPhone news

01:26:37   comes out.

01:26:37   And I tend to be writing a little more,

01:26:39   and people are a little more interested.

01:26:41   But other than September, it's pretty stable month to month.

01:26:43   There's been no drop-off since I've started

01:26:48   writing more about politics.

01:26:49   So all the people who've said, you're going to lose--

01:26:52   you know, I come to you to get away from this, you're going to lose readers.

01:26:55   I haven't lost any readers or if I F well,

01:26:58   you and you've always talked about it at least a little bit now and again.

01:27:01   So it's not, it shouldn't, your views shouldn't be a surprise to anybody.

01:27:06   I would not, I would not, I didn't do this during the George W. Bush era.

01:27:09   Uh,

01:27:10   I would not have done it if John McCain had beaten, uh,

01:27:15   Obama with one exception, which I will come back to in a second.

01:27:18   And I almost certainly would not have done it if Mitt Romney had beaten Obama four years ago with Paul Ryan.

01:27:24   The exception is, and I did write about it then in 2008, was I was vociferously opposed to Sarah Palin as the vice presidential nominee

01:27:32   on the grounds that she was completely, utterly, literally no politics involved, just unqualified and unfit for the job as vice president.

01:27:41   Like the president we have now.

01:27:43   Exactly, like, except I would, would you trade Trump for Sarah Palin?

01:27:48   Oh, God. That's a close call. Maybe? I would. I think I would. Maybe. I think I would. That's

01:27:55   a really frightening thought. I think I would because I think she's completely unqualified,

01:27:58   and I don't think she's a real reality. I don't think she's big on facts. But I don't think she's,

01:28:06   on the other hand, I don't think—which I think are things that you really need. I think it's

01:28:10   absolutely essential. I think this idea that you could be unhinged from reality—I know people say

01:28:14   like "unhinged from reality." It's a cliche, but I think that's literally what Donald Trump is. I

01:28:18   I think he's completely unhinged from reality.

01:28:22   He's also-- I think he's more vindictive than she is.

01:28:24   Yes, I completely agree with that.

01:28:26   I completely agree that he's more vindictive.

01:28:30   I just--

01:28:31   She can be a little vindictive, but he's

01:28:35   turned it into an art form.

01:28:37   It's a closer call.

01:28:38   I mean, there's no doubt in my mind--

01:28:39   and I would take Mike Pence.

01:28:41   I'm hoping that Trump gets impeached.

01:28:43   I'm hoping that there's some kind of plan in place

01:28:46   in the Republican Party and that--

01:28:48   - I mean, he is, my pence is reprehensible as a,

01:28:51   as a, I would think both a person and a politician,

01:28:55   but I think he's much more stable.

01:29:00   - Yeah, I don't think he, I don't think he would,

01:29:04   there's no doubt in my mind that he would not

01:29:05   start a war on a lark.

01:29:08   I really, really, I mean, I--

01:29:11   - Yeah, I mean, some of these comments that he's made,

01:29:12   you know, he's very interested in making,

01:29:15   like tiny nukes because he seems like he seems like sometime within the next four years he wants

01:29:24   to drop the nuclear bomb right so he's made the argument of why do we why do we have them

01:29:27   and we're not going to use them which is terrifying yeah uh the truth is we don't have we we have them

01:29:36   because we invented them and it you know somebody else was going to invent them first and it was

01:29:40   strategically better for us to have invented them but really the whole point of having them now is

01:29:45   is to hopefully keep anybody else on the planet

01:29:48   from using them, which is--

01:29:50   From using them.

01:29:52   It's deterrence.

01:29:53   Well, the guy doesn't know what the START treaty is.

01:29:55   Well, and the other thing is that the whole theory

01:29:57   of nuclear deterrence is based on a chess-like series

01:30:02   of strategic, if we do this, they might do--

01:30:08   here's what they might do in response.

01:30:10   And at any step of the way, there's this logical aspect

01:30:14   of okay, so it really makes the most sense

01:30:16   for nobody to use them first.

01:30:18   And it's the fact that there's like three or four

01:30:21   logical steps involved to completely prevent this man

01:30:24   from using it.

01:30:26   It's really, to me, it is politics in terms of

01:30:29   it's commenting on politicians, but it's not,

01:30:31   I'm still trying my best to avoid any sort of

01:30:34   left-right divide.

01:30:35   And the only aspect of it that doesn't involve Trump

01:30:37   that I'm willing to write about is the stuff

01:30:40   that I would consider out now, corruption.

01:30:42   which to me shouldn't be a left-right thing,

01:30:45   but unfortunately has become one.

01:30:47   Like this thing yesterday where I linked to the story

01:30:49   about Trump's new FCC guy,

01:30:51   which is sort of more along the lines

01:30:53   of traditional during-fireball content,

01:30:54   talking about the FCC and the stuff that they can regulate.

01:30:57   But that one of the things that,

01:30:59   the regulations that he's targeted to get rid of

01:31:02   is a thing to open up cable boxes,

01:31:05   to have laws in place to open up the cable box market.

01:31:09   Well, that's not a liberal idea.

01:31:11   know that that's just anybody who's ever been frustrated with the shitty you

01:31:16   don't have any options here's Comcast gives you this box and you get it and

01:31:19   that's it it and it sucks and you have to pay them $100 a month to use it or

01:31:25   whatever they charge that that's not a politics that's not a politics thing

01:31:29   there's not a single regular person in the entire country of 300 million people

01:31:33   who wouldn't be better off if if if that was the law of the land and instead the

01:31:37   only people who it works for people who probably you know who own cable

01:31:40   companies.

01:31:42   - Right, right.

01:31:43   - So that's just out and out corruption in my mind.

01:31:45   Or this other one that really gets me

01:31:47   is this thing yesterday I linked to where

01:31:49   this Georgia Republican named Purdue

01:31:53   has introduced resolution to throw out

01:31:56   a new package of rules for prepaid debit card

01:32:00   overdraft fees.

01:32:03   - Oh yeah, yeah.

01:32:04   - And this is the thing that affects low income people.

01:32:05   Low income people can't get a credit card.

01:32:07   They go and if they have the cash,

01:32:08   you can get a prepaid debit card.

01:32:09   Now you have a debit card that's prepaid, and you can use it in places where you need

01:32:14   a credit card.

01:32:15   I mean, this is a thing that can really help people get back on their feet because it's

01:32:18   really hard to function in our society without a credit card or something that works like

01:32:22   a credit card that you can swipe.

01:32:26   The idea that they would charge these completely usurious overdraft fees, and this company

01:32:33   that is doing it in favor of runs the payday, what do they call it, payday loan places?

01:32:38   Payday loans, yeah.

01:32:39   Which are notoriously bad and need regulation because they charge the type of interest rates

01:32:45   that the Bible tells you that this is wrong.

01:32:50   It's why the mob isn't that big anymore because they all want to do business.

01:32:54   They don't have to be illegitimate anymore.

01:32:56   And they charge rates that are worse than what the mob ever charged people.

01:32:59   When you go to a loan shark, it really...

01:33:02   But the overdraft fees on these debit cards are actually higher than the payday loan interest

01:33:07   It's absolutely the sort of thing that the government should be doing. It is not a liberal idea. It's not a Democratic idea or a Republican idea.

01:33:16   It is exactly what the government, the idea of government is meant to do. It's just created rules for society that help the population at large.

01:33:23   at large. There's nobody who gets hurt or is offended in terms of their political sensibilities

01:33:31   when the penalty fee for overdrawing your prepaid debit card is a reasonable low level.

01:33:38   It's absolutely absurd. And of course it turns out that the company spent $270,000

01:33:45   lobbying Congress, including this shitbag from Georgia, David Perdue.

01:33:51   [chuckle] But we don't talk politics.

01:33:54   BRIAN KENNY And there's that thing that the North Dakota legislature did.

01:33:59   There was a ballot initiative that would enforce, not enforce just on Republicans, but enforce

01:34:08   ethics rules on any elected official, and they convened an emergency session of the legislature

01:34:16   to overthrow a voter-approved ballot initiative for ethics requirements.

01:34:25   Right. It was literally just a ballot. It was direct democracy, not representative democracy.

01:34:32   Yeah. And admittedly, we have a lot of ballot initiatives out here, and a lot of them are

01:34:38   batshit insane and shitty. And people don't always know what they're doing when they vote for some

01:34:45   of these things. However, in many cases, it's a way to tell the legislature, "Hey, you know what?

01:34:54   Screw you. You're not doing what we want you to do, and now you're going to." Well, I guess not,

01:35:01   you know, unless you can have an emergency session.

01:35:04   The cravenness of convening an emergency session to undo it before it can take place is astounding,

01:35:11   especially on something where it's just ethics and government.

01:35:15   It really isn't controversial. You can argue that Brexit never should have been a ballot initiative.

01:35:20   Right. Oh, yeah. There's a perfect example.

01:35:23   That's exactly the sort of thing that's why representative government is better than direct

01:35:28   democracy. It is a West Coast thing, ballot initiatives. We have them here, but they're all

01:35:32   municipal. It's all Philly. I don't even think they're statewide. I don't think I've ever even

01:35:37   seen a statewide ballot initiative. I don't think Pennsylvania has them. Philadelphia, the city does.

01:35:41   Well, that's why you can't buy beer.

01:35:43   Otherwise, that would have gotten overturned a long time ago.

01:35:49   No, it's actually funny. There actually is not popular appeal in Pennsylvania for this.

01:35:53   I know you've been running short on time here, but the gist of it is, when Prohibition was

01:36:00   repealed, before Prohibition, Philadelphia had the highest per capita number of bars

01:36:05   in the country. There was something like a bar for every 40 men, something like that.

01:36:11   And Philadelphia was a fantastically wet town during Prohibition. None of the bars closed.

01:36:17   They all just claimed to close, just stayed open and the police never enforced it.

01:36:21   But Pennsylvania had a pro-Prohibition governor at the time. I forget the idiot's name. But when

01:36:28   Prohibition was repealed, he created what was called and still is to this day called the

01:36:34   Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board and he publicly said this was because he was pro-prohibition,

01:36:39   he was against the repeal of it even though it had been repealed but he was still pounding the,

01:36:43   you know, sort of like where you can still today be abortion should be illegal politician even

01:36:50   though it's been the law of the land for 44 years. You know, politically it seemingly wasn't

01:36:56   political death to be pro-prohibition. He created the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board with the

01:37:01   stated purpose of making it as difficult as possible to get it alcohol in Pennsylvania

01:37:05   as as he could. And that was where that's where all all liquor comes from. And we've got these

01:37:11   crazy laws where they're starting to get softened up a little bit. Like supermarkets are starting to

01:37:15   get special licenses where they can sell beer. But you can't buy beer in a supermarket. You can only

01:37:21   buy cases of beer from a quote-unquote beer distributor, and a beer distributor can't sell

01:37:26   beer in anything less than a case. So you could go and buy a six-pack, but at this place where you

01:37:32   buy a six-pack, you can't buy more than 12 beers at once. It has to be in two separate six-packs.

01:37:36   If you go to buy a case of beer, you can do that. You can buy wine and spirits in the state-controlled

01:37:42   liquor stores, and only through the state-controlled liquor stores. And anyway, we had a Republican

01:37:46   governor a couple years ago named Corbett who wanted to abolish the Pennsylvania Liquor Control

01:37:51   board and just make Pennsylvania a normal state where you could, you know, like the

01:37:56   places where you buy beer and wine are just independent businesses. And it didn't have

01:38:02   popular support because the way that the opposition, the way they defeated it was the liquor store

01:38:11   employees are all, it's a union job. And the union ran ads saying, you know, we have, I

01:38:18   I think there's, I don't know, 6,000 people employed

01:38:20   by the liquor stores.

01:38:21   This guy's gonna cost us 6,000 jobs.

01:38:23   Now this is in a state with, I don't know,

01:38:26   I forget about the population of Pennsylvania,

01:38:28   but it's like 20 million or something, I don't know.

01:38:30   But 15, 10 million, 10, 20 million people,

01:38:33   6,000 jobs are gonna be lost.

01:38:35   Without addressing the fact that every single person

01:38:39   who gets hired by the new liquor stores that would open up

01:38:41   would have a job that didn't exist.

01:38:43   That just gets, but just, he's gonna,

01:38:45   getting away with this, getting away with the state stores

01:38:47   would eliminate 6,000 jobs was enough to kill it politically,

01:38:50   which is crazy, absolutely crazy.

01:38:55   So here we now get beer, wine, and liquor

01:38:59   in the grocery store.

01:39:00   I wish.

01:39:02   Can't buy any of it.

01:39:03   So I always say my analogy is if you want to buy your ingredients

01:39:10   to cook dinner, a bottle of wine, and a six pack of beer, in Pennsylvania

01:39:17   there's no possible way that you're not going to three stores.

01:39:20   You have to go to three separate stores. It's crazy.

01:39:23   All right. My thanks to you, John Moltz.

01:39:28   People can enjoy you as at Moltz on Twitter. Uh,

01:39:31   they can hear your melodious voice on your, are you on several podcasts?

01:39:35   Oh my God. How many podcasts, which ones do you want to pitch?

01:39:38   Turning this car around. Uh, it's a parenting podcast with John Armstrong.

01:39:43   The rebound. Yeah. With John Armstrong and the other guy.

01:39:47   and The Rebound with Dan Morin and the other guy,

01:39:50   who is Lex Friedman,

01:39:52   and I do the AeroCast with Dan and Guy English.

01:39:56   - What the hell's that?

01:39:57   - It's about Aero, it's about a TV show.

01:39:59   - Oh, okay.

01:40:00   I know that's why I don't listen to that one.

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