ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► So we should probably catch everyone up in case they weren't aware.

00:00:03 ◼   ► Uh, Aaron did in fact have our baby early Thursday morning.

00:00:08 ◼   ► So for those of you who may have heard the last episode, you may recall that that was,

00:00:15 ◼   ► uh, that was recorded Tuesday night and I didn't really want to get into it during the show.

00:00:20 ◼   ► But Aaron, Aaron was actually starting to have contractions during the show.

00:00:25 ◼   ► Like it was shortly before the show that we looked at each other and said,

00:00:28 ◼   ► "Oop, yeah, this is probably it." So we went into the OB the following morning, Wednesday morning,

00:00:34 ◼   ► and the OB had said, "Oh, she'll definitely, Aaron, will definitely be done by evening time."

00:00:42 ◼   ► And as we got closer and closer to evening time, "Oh, it'll be definitely done by midnight." And

00:00:48 ◼   ► as we got closer and closer to midnight, "Oh, it'll be definitely done any second now." And

00:00:51 ◼   ► sure enough, a little after three in the morning, Aaron blessed our family with our little girl.

00:00:57 ◼   ► whose name is Michaela Charlotte, and we are overjoyed and very tired, which is exactly the

00:01:06 ◼   ► normal response for having a newborn. Oh, and I started to say earlier, and then I got myself

00:01:11 ◼   ► sidetracked, we did what appears to be the inverse of the Syracuse family approach because our first

00:01:16 ◼   ► child was, or at least my hazy memory of Declan, was reasonably easy in the grand scheme of things.

00:01:24 ◼   ► Like any child is a royal pain in the tuchus, but nonetheless

00:01:27 ◼   ► Declan was reasonably easy. Whereas

00:01:31 ◼   ► Michaela is

00:01:34 ◼   ► Starting out anyway

00:01:36 ◼   ► Considerably more challenging and it may just be that my memory which is already bad in general

00:01:40 ◼   ► Has just blocked the new baby phase from my mind

00:01:43 ◼   ► But oh boy, this is something else and and if I recall correctly John you said that that your son

00:01:49 ◼   ► Was what did you call him? I was asking Aaron this early like a screamer pillar or something like that

00:01:53 ◼   ► Screaming Pillow, yeah, from The Simpsons.

00:01:55 ◼   ► It was one of his many delightful names.

00:01:57 ◼   ► He basically screamed for the first several months of his life, continuously.

00:02:01 ◼   ► [laughs]

00:02:03 ◼   ► And yet, you somehow decided to have a second child, which...

00:02:06 ◼   ► Yeah, you gotta roll the dice, you know?

00:02:08 ◼   ► Like, the only thing that kept us...

00:02:10 ◼   ► Dappel was like, "What if the next one is worse?"

00:02:12 ◼   ► And we're like, "Is that even possible? Is it possible that what could be worse?"

00:02:15 ◼   ► Like, literal fire coming from the baby?

00:02:17 ◼   ► I don't know what could be...

00:02:19 ◼   ► What could be worse? Yeah, I don't know.

00:02:21 ◼   ► was inconsolable. Nothing consoled him in any way. You know, rocking, walking, burping,

00:02:29 ◼   ► feeding. He refused to eat for a really long time.

00:02:31 ◼   ► Oh, even feeding? Oh, okay, so you're worse off than we are. Because the one thing that we do

00:02:37 ◼   ► have going for us is that if Michaela's attached to Aaron, everyone is happy. Well, except Aaron,

00:02:42 ◼   ► but everyone is happy. And I say except Aaron only because, as it turns out, which I didn't know

00:02:47 ◼   ► until we had a kid. Breastfeeding? Not fun. Not easy. Who knew? And so Aaron is extremely

00:02:55 ◼   ► happy to be able to do it, don't get me wrong, but it is not an intensely pleasurable experience

00:03:01 ◼   ► for Aaron to have this leech latched onto her all the time.

00:03:05 ◼   ► **Matt Stauffer** I mean, it can be depending, but yeah, there's

00:03:08 ◼   ► definitely a learning curve that most people don't think about. And one of the extra difficulties

00:03:12 ◼   ► with Alex was because it was our first, we didn't have the experience to know that this is a thing

00:03:17 ◼   ► we could successfully do. Like, you know, Aaron had it with Jack and she knows, like,

00:03:21 ◼   ► I'm capable of this. Like it's a pain and it's annoying and lots of things can go wrong and,

00:03:25 ◼   ► you know, be a bother and be painful and things got a little bit out of her, but she can do it.

00:03:30 ◼   ► But Alex was like, look, you know, can we accomplish this? Why does our child refuse to

00:03:36 ◼   ► feed? Why is he just screaming at me? Like, surely this child is hungry, but no, it's only hungry for

00:03:42 ◼   ► screaming. Oh, he's hungry for more screaming.

00:03:44 ◼   ► Oh yeah. So it wasn't, yeah, Michaela isn't as bad as Alex in that regard.

00:03:51 ◼   ► This is a lot of complaining, which is truly and utterly unfair.

00:03:55 ◼   ► You just hit me at a tired moment.

00:03:57 ◼   ► The reality of the situation is, and I'm being serious,

00:03:59 ◼   ► is that if I take a step back,

00:04:01 ◼   ► we have been lucky enough through the miracle of science,

00:04:04 ◼   ► and I say that with no hyperbole intended,

00:04:06 ◼   ► we have been lucky enough through the miracle of science to have two kids that

00:04:09 ◼   ► that nature by itself wouldn't let us have.

00:04:12 ◼   ► And that is really tremendous,

00:04:14 ◼   ► and we're deeply, deeply, deeply lucky for it.

00:04:17 ◼   ► Erin's labor was difficult.

00:04:20 ◼   ► Every labor is difficult.

00:04:21 ◼   ► I'm not saying hers is more or less difficult

00:04:23 ◼   ► than any other.

00:04:25 ◼   ► - Well, regardless, big congratulations, Casey.

00:04:28 ◼   ► You guys went through a lot on both fronts with both kids,

00:04:31 ◼   ► and we're really proud of you, and big congratulations.

00:04:34 ◼   ► - It's all smooth sailing from here.

00:04:36 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:04:37 ◼   ► - Totally, that's exactly how it works.

00:04:38 ◼   ► (electronic music)

00:04:40 ◼   ► So, you have a newborn, everything is in chaos,

00:04:43 ◼   ► you haven't slept at all,

00:04:45 ◼   ► you got a self-employment gig set up yet?

00:04:47 ◼   ► - Yeah, totally. (laughing)

00:04:49 ◼   ► Lying right up.

00:04:50 ◼   ► No, I do not, I have not even thought about it.

00:04:53 ◼   ► Although, because this is what I need to do with my time,

00:04:57 ◼   ► I'm working on a Mac app.

00:04:59 ◼   ► What sort of, kind of.

00:05:02 ◼   ► That was the correct reaction.

00:05:03 ◼   ► - Nursing clock pro.

00:05:04 ◼   ► - Yes, that's it, that's exactly it.

00:05:06 ◼   ► No, um-- - Overcast for Mac.

00:05:08 ◼   ► - Overcast for Mac, and by the way, I'm billing you tomorrow.

00:05:11 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:05:12 ◼   ► No, I, God, I'm trying to think of the short,

00:05:15 ◼   ► short version of this story.

00:05:16 ◼   ► So I have a very esoteric and very weird

00:05:21 ◼   ► photo management workflow that works for me.

00:05:26 ◼   ► I understand that it's complete garbage

00:05:29 ◼   ► to everyone else on the planet, but it works for me.

00:05:33 ◼   ► And the problem with that workflow is it's based

00:05:36 ◼   ► bunch of Python that I basically understand but can't really create anymore. Like, I can—I'm

00:05:43 ◼   ► not very good at writing Python. I've done a smattering in my day, but very, very little.

00:05:47 ◼   ► And these scripts came from Dr. Drang. I've tweaked them ever so slightly in order to do

00:05:53 ◼   ► what I need, but they're almost entirely what Drang had written. So anyway, so Apple, in their

00:05:59 ◼   ► infinite wisdom, has decided to release new images—new image codecs or formats, whatever you

00:06:04 ◼   ► you want to call it, with HEVC and HEIC, HAFE, whatever, I don't even care, whatever, I'm

00:06:09 ◼   ► tired.

00:06:10 ◼   ► Point is, there's new things, and those have ruined my workflow.

00:06:13 ◼   ► And so rather than trying to hack apart Drang script, which is great, like I'm not trying

00:06:18 ◼   ► to say script is bad, it's just a KC problem, I don't really understand Python very well.

00:06:24 ◼   ► Although I do approve of using whitespace as delimiters.

00:06:27 ◼   ► Don't at me.

00:06:28 ◼   ► But anyway, the point is, I've decided to write a Swift command line app in order to

00:06:33 ◼   ► do basically the same thing, which is to say look at a folder full of images and videos,

00:06:38 ◼   ► figure out what the date was that those images or videos were taken, which could be as simple

00:06:45 ◼   ► as the file creation date but oftentimes is not, rename them to a given format.

00:06:50 ◼   ► So in my case I prefer, and this is one of the few cases where I like 8601, so my preferred

00:06:56 ◼   ► file format or my preferred file naming is 2017 or 2018 - 01 - 17 space hour hour - minute minute -

00:07:08 ◼   ► second second that's just the one I like if you don't like it that's fine this one is mine

00:07:11 ◼   ► that's a reference John anyway point is the the script that Drang wrote does all of this for me

00:07:19 ◼   ► but I decided I don't I don't like the way I hacked it up to work with live photos and trying

00:07:24 ◼   ► to figure out what's the associated movie with a particular image, and so I'm just rewriting it as

00:07:30 ◼   ► a Swift command line app that'll do all this for me. And in the span of just today, I think I started

00:07:35 ◼   ► it, I feel like I'm about a third of the way through, which means I'm actually about a tenth

00:07:39 ◼   ► of the way through. But that's better than nothing, and that's exciting. And I will probably either

00:07:43 ◼   ► never release this or at most open source it so other people can laugh at how hacky this is,

00:07:48 ◼   ► because I'm not writing it for a job, I'm writing it for me and #YOLO, but that's what I've been

00:07:53 ◼   ► been doing on and off when I've had a moment to breathe, when I've not been entertaining

00:07:56 ◼   ► Declan, or keeping the Screamer Pillar from screaming.

00:07:59 ◼   ► So I'm trying to steal my Screamer Pillar. You've got to come up with a new name. You

00:08:03 ◼   ► had your pre-birth name with Sprig and Sprout. You've got to have a post-birth name.

00:08:06 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah. I thought Michaela was good enough. Seems not. Anyway, what else is in follow-up?

00:08:11 ◼   ► What do we got here? So there's another Black Desktop Mac, I hear.

00:08:15 ◼   ► Yeah, this is one I did not know about. Why? Because it's Europe only! So many things are

00:08:21 ◼   ► Europe only. I like this model of Mac. This is like the, I don't know what you would call

00:08:26 ◼   ► this case. It's the sort of iMac looking all in one, but the nice looking one. They made

00:08:31 ◼   ► a lot of Macs in this particular form back here, but apparently one of them came in black

00:08:34 ◼   ► in Europe. So more cool stuff. I was also trying to find, I looked for the link for

00:08:39 ◼   ► the second thing. There was a story that went around a while ago about how Europe or some

00:08:46 ◼   ► European countries or some sort of international standards body had some requirement about

00:08:50 ◼   ► the specific color of computers.

00:08:53 ◼   ► I think the story was like,

00:08:54 ◼   ► here's why all computers used to be beige.

00:08:56 ◼   ► It's because of this like ISO specification.

00:08:58 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:08:59 ◼   ► - And I couldn't for the life of me find the link.

00:09:01 ◼   ► So if anyone knows it, send it to us

00:09:03 ◼   ► and we'll put it in the show notes.

00:09:04 ◼   ► But anyway, the important part of that story

00:09:06 ◼   ► other than the silly sensational headline

00:09:08 ◼   ► was that to comply with this,

00:09:11 ◼   ► apparently Apple had to create a bunch of PowerBooks

00:09:14 ◼   ► whose keyboards were grayish and it looked just awful

00:09:17 ◼   ► because PowerBooks were all kind of like dark gray or black

00:09:20 ◼   ► and they had keyboards that either matched or complemented that, except for they would

00:09:24 ◼   ► make them for, I think it was just Germany, but maybe it was all European countries, they'd

00:09:27 ◼   ► make a nice sleek black PowerBook and put it like a light gray keyboard on it and it

00:09:31 ◼   ► was gross.

00:09:33 ◼   ► So kudos for Europe for having this black PowerMac 5500 and whatever the opposite of

00:09:39 ◼   ► kudos is for making Apple make their computers ugly for you.

00:09:43 ◼   ► >> Cheers and cheers, John.

00:09:45 ◼   ► Cheers and cheers.

00:09:46 ◼   ► >> Yeah, what's the opposite of kudos though?

00:09:47 ◼   ► Cheers and cheers works.

00:09:48 ◼   ► Kudos and dookies?

00:09:49 ◼   ► - Dukies is Kudos' background, right?

00:09:53 ◼   ► - All right, moving on.

00:09:53 ◼   ► So tell me about the Peacalk about screen

00:09:56 ◼   ► and how it is as quoting,

00:09:58 ◼   ► and I'm now quoting from the show notes,

00:10:00 ◼   ► "The reffer of fans."

00:10:01 ◼   ► - Yeah, so Marco's mighty iMac Pro

00:10:05 ◼   ► was recently purchased by James Thompson,

00:10:06 ◼   ► creator of Peacalk, the--

00:10:08 ◼   ► - An iMac Pro configured like mine,

00:10:10 ◼   ► not like my actual one.

00:10:11 ◼   ► I didn't sell mine to him.

00:10:13 ◼   ► - Yes, yes.

00:10:14 ◼   ► And Peacalk has been around for many, many years.

00:10:16 ◼   ► It's a calculator application

00:10:17 ◼   ► it was able to run his fans at full blast. How can a calculator run iMac Pro's fans at full blast?

00:10:25 ◼   ► Well, if you haven't been keeping up with Peacalk, and you really should be, there is an interesting

00:10:32 ◼   ► feature hidden in the about screen that starts to make more sense when you understand that it's

00:10:37 ◼   ► revving the fans. So I don't want to spoil it for you, but it does other things, as they say on Seinfeld.

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00:12:50 ◼   ► - So this is an older story about people announcing

00:12:56 ◼   ► ARM's Windows PCs as kind of Microsoft's second run

00:13:00 ◼   ► at selling you ARM hardware that runs Windows.

00:13:03 ◼   ► Remember, what was it, Windows RT was the first one?

00:13:06 ◼   ► They were gonna sell like x86 versions of,

00:13:08 ◼   ► I think it was their Surface stuff or whatever,

00:13:10 ◼   ► and also ARM versions with a special version of Windows

00:13:12 ◼   ► that runs on it.

00:13:13 ◼   ► They did, they actually did it.

00:13:14 ◼   ► Yeah, no one bought them, but they did it.

00:13:16 ◼   ► - And it just wasn't that popular.

00:13:18 ◼   ► A lot of people speculated because it's like,

00:13:20 ◼   ► well, it's all well and good and it runs Windows

00:13:21 ◼   ► and it has some advantages, but it was a while ago.

00:13:25 ◼   ► ARM PCs weren't as powerful as they are now.

00:13:28 ◼   ► And the main thing is like, well, I can't run Office.

00:13:31 ◼   ► Or, you know, not in Office,

00:13:32 ◼   ► but I think they ported Office.

00:13:33 ◼   ► But like all the software that runs on Windows,

00:13:37 ◼   ► unless the developers recompile for ARM, I can't run it.

00:13:40 ◼   ► So their second run at this is Clean Air

00:13:42 ◼   ► without a special, you know, without it being like Windows, you know, suffix type thing,

00:13:48 ◼   ► it's just Windows 10 for ARM.

00:13:50 ◼   ► They have an emulator that will run x86 software so everyone doesn't have to port.

00:13:56 ◼   ► Like they're doing a better job of like, you know, supporting a second architecture.

00:13:59 ◼   ► It still remains to be seen whether it will succeed for them because I really think, you

00:14:04 ◼   ► know, I don't know.

00:14:05 ◼   ► The only examples I have that I'm knowledgeable about are the many transitions Apple has made

00:14:10 ◼   ► to different CPU architectures,

00:14:12 ◼   ► and in all cases, Apple has made a transition

00:14:14 ◼   ► from one thing to another.

00:14:17 ◼   ► It has not tried to sustain on an ongoing basis

00:14:20 ◼   ► two things at the same time,

00:14:22 ◼   ► so I'm not sure what Microsoft's endgame here is.

00:14:24 ◼   ► But anyway, I'm not really interested

00:14:26 ◼   ► in Microsoft's ongoing strategy

00:14:28 ◼   ► to find ways to sell people more copies of Windows

00:14:31 ◼   ► and making interesting hardware.

00:14:34 ◼   ► I'm mostly interested in this

00:14:36 ◼   ► because of the consumer experience

00:14:39 ◼   ► that is offered by these various ARM PCs.

00:14:42 ◼   ► These are all laptops, obviously, or portable things.

00:14:47 ◼   ► And a lot of these products offer to the customer

00:14:51 ◼   ► statistics like 20 hours of battery life.

00:14:54 ◼   ► And one reviewer said that he has been using it

00:14:58 ◼   ► for five days without charging the battery.

00:15:02 ◼   ► This was an ARM-based PC he was testing.

00:15:04 ◼   ► And most of these things come with LTE.

00:15:07 ◼   ► Now the modern, the slightly more modern than December twist on this is CES happened recently,

00:15:11 ◼   ► which I'm mostly doing my best to ignore, plus or minus the new televisions.

00:15:17 ◼   ► But apparently at CES, people who were there were saying, you know, you can't throw a rock

00:15:22 ◼   ► without hitting a laptop that has LTE.

00:15:24 ◼   ► So this combines two new ways for Marco to reiterate old complaints about Apple laptops.

00:15:29 ◼   ► One, battery life doesn't seem to be that great, and two, they don't have LTE.

00:15:34 ◼   ► And I have to think this is kind of one of those, if Microsoft is successful with these

00:15:39 ◼   ► things, like maybe they find a way to sell them, the emulator works well enough to make

00:15:43 ◼   ► people consider them, but it's not like they get a little bit more battery life than a

00:15:48 ◼   ► MacBook Adorable, because 20 hours is enough more than five or six hours that it's in a

00:15:56 ◼   ► different ballpark.

00:15:57 ◼   ► It changes how you would use this thing.

00:15:59 ◼   ► If you could buy an Apple laptop that was MacBookadorably-ish form factor with LTE that

00:16:08 ◼   ► got 20 hours of battery life, people would flip their lid.

00:16:12 ◼   ► And so the question is, why can't we buy that?

00:16:14 ◼   ► The LTE question we've talked about many times in the past.

00:16:17 ◼   ► Seems like it is within Apple's grasp to do that, but so far they haven't.

00:16:21 ◼   ► And the ARM thing we've also talked about in the past, but this is another scenario

00:16:24 ◼   ► kind of like the Microsoft Surface Studio and various other things that Microsoft does

00:16:29 ◼   ► where I look at it and I think Microsoft has better hardware ideas than Apple and is merely

00:16:36 ◼   ► thwarted by the fact that their platform is not as successful and they have lots of other

00:16:39 ◼   ► problems that are, you know, so you can say, well, you know, you kept saying the Microsoft

00:16:43 ◼   ► Server Studio is such a big deal, but it's not really setting the world on fire. Yes,

00:16:46 ◼   ► they have other problems. Like you don't win just because you have interesting hardware.

00:16:49 ◼   ► But it pains me to see Microsoft being more innovative in its hardware when I think if

00:16:53 ◼   ► Apple just did those same things, plus also stayed good at all the things that it's good

00:16:57 ◼   ► that on its much more, you know, sort of popular on the upswing platform, I think

00:17:03 ◼   ► we would all all love products like that. And I'm not saying it's time for Apple to

00:17:06 ◼   ► go to ARM or whatever, I'm just saying the longer Apple waits, the more its

00:17:11 ◼   ► laptops seem like they are, I don't know, I'm not gonna say like from another age,

00:17:17 ◼   ► but going in a different direction than everybody else. If I can't think of any

00:17:21 ◼   ► person who, you know, who is a current MacBook adorable owner, this is the

00:17:25 ◼   ► the 12-inch MacBook with one little port on the side of it, also known as the MacBook One,

00:17:28 ◼   ► and saying, "Great, you like that and everything, but what if I gave you the same thing

00:17:34 ◼   ► and it had to run some of your existing software and emulation, but you get 20 hours of battery

00:17:37 ◼   ► life and it has LTE?" I think a lot of people would be willing to give that a try. I know I would.

00:17:41 ◼   ► Oh, absolutely. I was just thinking earlier today that I love my adorable. I freaking love this

00:17:51 ◼   ► thing, but I was also thinking I would kill everyone I knew for a second port, but that's

00:17:56 ◼   ► a different issue.

00:17:57 ◼   ► I do love this thing, though.

00:17:58 ◼   ► I really and truly and honestly do.

00:18:01 ◼   ► It is not exceptionally fast.

00:18:03 ◼   ► It is only one port, which is very frustrating from time to time.

00:18:07 ◼   ► Not always, but from time to time.

00:18:09 ◼   ► But I love this computer.

00:18:12 ◼   ► And if you told me that I could get two times the battery life—not to say that I have

00:18:17 ◼   ► a problem with the battery life. But if you said, "Hey, charging once a day isn't even

00:18:22 ◼   ► necessary. Charge once a weekend." And/or you said, "Oh, and by the way, you can have

00:18:28 ◼   ► the internet anywhere? Oh my word, I would pay twice as much as I paid for this thing.

00:18:33 ◼   ► I think I paid like two or three thousand dollars for this thing." Whatever it was,

00:18:37 ◼   ► it was not insignificant given that it's the tiniest laptop that Apple sells. And I would

00:18:43 ◼   ► do anything, just like John was saying, I would do anything to have this Phantom laptop

00:18:49 ◼   ► with twice the battery life in LTE.

00:18:51 ◼   ► I don't care if it has an arm or not.

00:18:53 ◼   ► That to me is mostly irrelevant.

00:18:54 ◼   ► Obviously it's an interesting conversation for us three nerds, but as a consumer, I don't

00:18:58 ◼   ► care if it has an arm or not.

00:18:59 ◼   ► I just want it to last forever, which it sort of does now, and have LTE would be tremendous.

00:19:06 ◼   ► Yes, I understand.

00:19:07 ◼   ► You can tether.

00:19:08 ◼   ► I get that.

00:19:09 ◼   ► But to me, I'd prefer to have it on board if I could.

00:19:12 ◼   ► So the ARM factor is, you know, it's like if you put x86 in there, it wouldn't get 20

00:19:19 ◼   ► hours of error.

00:19:20 ◼   ► Like that's the contention of this being ARM, right?

00:19:23 ◼   ► And it starts to be ever more plausible when you think about how like the iPhone benchmarks

00:19:29 ◼   ► against the Adorable in single and multi-threaded like the modern iPhone, and then you compare

00:19:34 ◼   ► the size of the battery in the iPhone X to the size of the battery in the Adorable.

00:19:38 ◼   ► Now granted, the Adorable has a massive screen on it.

00:19:40 ◼   ► Like it's not apples to apples.

00:19:41 ◼   ► It's not 100% clear to me that, oh, just magically replace the CPU with ARM and you get 20 hours

00:19:45 ◼   ► of battery life.

00:19:47 ◼   ► But like I said, from a consumer's perspective, they don't know or care what hardware is inside

00:19:54 ◼   ► these, except as it might impact their software compatibility experience, and that's where

00:19:58 ◼   ► the emulator comes in and maybe that hurts their battery life.

00:20:00 ◼   ► But either way, if they treat this as a transition and go all the way, this is an experience

00:20:06 ◼   ► that Apple currently can't compete against.

00:20:08 ◼   ► It's very far from competing against.

00:20:10 ◼   ► And the other angle we didn't even get to here is the sort of Vitici angle where if

00:20:14 ◼   ► you were to go to the story that will link to the show notes from Ars Technica and look

00:20:17 ◼   ► at these products you would say, "But wait a second!

00:20:19 ◼   ► That's not a MacBook adorable!

00:20:20 ◼   ► That's an iPad with a keyboard!

00:20:22 ◼   ► That's like a Windows 10 convertible blah blah blah."

00:20:24 ◼   ► And remember Windows has the one OS strategy that handles touch and blah blah blah and

00:20:28 ◼   ► Apple doesn't.

00:20:29 ◼   ► And that brings us into a second conversation that I think I had probably around December

00:20:33 ◼   ► whenever I was on upgrade with Jason Snell talking about iOS laptops.

00:20:37 ◼   ► since then, or maybe it was before that, I remember,

00:20:40 ◼   ► Jason's written a couple of articles about it,

00:20:43 ◼   ► Viticci's talked about it forever, and it's come up again,

00:20:46 ◼   ► and so, you know, maybe the answer isn't

00:20:48 ◼   ► an adorable 20 hours of battery life,

00:20:49 ◼   ► maybe the answer is an iOS laptop,

00:20:52 ◼   ► which is another thing that people are climbing for,

00:20:54 ◼   ► and as I said on upgrade, Apple should totally make one,

00:20:56 ◼   ► because it is a known proven form factor,

00:20:58 ◼   ► and some people really like iOS,

00:21:00 ◼   ► and I can see you getting 20 hours of battery life

00:21:02 ◼   ► from an iOS laptop, so if you're not gonna do it

00:21:05 ◼   ► with the actual adorable, to make hazy happen,

00:21:08 ◼   ► do the iOS laptop thing?

00:21:10 ◼   ► - I think the iOS laptop thing is a thing

00:21:12 ◼   ► that they should do.

00:21:13 ◼   ► I don't know how good it would end up being,

00:21:15 ◼   ► but I know a lot of people who would buy them.

00:21:17 ◼   ► I would probably buy one.

00:21:18 ◼   ► I've had, ever since the 9.7 Pro came out,

00:21:22 ◼   ► I've used, I have dramatically increased my iPad usage

00:21:27 ◼   ► because I got it with the smart keyboard.

00:21:30 ◼   ► And the smart keyboard cover, it transforms an iPad

00:21:34 ◼   ► for a lot of people, and I'm one of them,

00:21:36 ◼   ► and I know I'm not the only one.

00:21:38 ◼   ► And it's pretty much always in it.

00:21:41 ◼   ► I never take it out of that cover.

00:21:43 ◼   ► I do occasionally, like if I'm gonna be sitting

00:21:44 ◼   ► on the couch for a while, I will occasionally

00:21:47 ◼   ► fold the keyboard behind it, but I'm not even detaching it.

00:21:51 ◼   ► I consider that keyboard part of my iPad.

00:21:53 ◼   ► So if we had basically what tablet PCs offered

00:21:57 ◼   ► like 15 years ago, which was the convertible form factor,

00:22:01 ◼   ► where it looks like a laptop except the hinge,

00:22:04 ◼   ► you could rotate the screen all the way around

00:22:07 ◼   ► and then flip it back to fold it back on itself.

00:22:10 ◼   ► PC makers still make laptops like this.

00:22:12 ◼   ► This is still a thing you can get.

00:22:14 ◼   ► That, some version of that as an iPad

00:22:17 ◼   ► that had a permanently attached keyboard

00:22:20 ◼   ► that was a really good keyboard

00:22:23 ◼   ► and then the whole thing could be shaped and weighted

00:22:26 ◼   ► the way a laptop is shaped and weighted

00:22:28 ◼   ► and have a lot of benefits there,

00:22:30 ◼   ► that would be an amazing device for a lot of people.

00:22:32 ◼   ► And this is not to say that all iPads

00:22:35 ◼   ► should become laptops, obviously that's not true.

00:22:38 ◼   ► But what we've seen with the stopping the fall

00:22:43 ◼   ► of iPad sales and starting to have some growth again

00:22:46 ◼   ► in the last few quarters, I think that's directly

00:22:50 ◼   ► attributable to two big changes in the iPad line.

00:22:54 ◼   ► Number one, that awesome new cheap 329 iPad,

00:22:58 ◼   ► that's a big thing.

00:22:58 ◼   ► and number two, the iPad Pro finally giving a lot of

00:23:03 ◼   ► high-end and business users what they've been begging for

00:23:07 ◼   ► for the iPad since day one.

00:23:09 ◼   ► I made this tweet about it that was kind of quick

00:23:13 ◼   ► on this point, but it's like the history of the iPad

00:23:16 ◼   ► has been like, Apple tries something.

00:23:19 ◼   ► They say, "We don't need legacy thing X, Y, or Z."

00:23:22 ◼   ► And then customers are like, "I don't know.

00:23:24 ◼   ► "I think we kind of do need that."

00:23:26 ◼   ► And Apple's like, "Nah, trust us, you don't need it."

00:23:27 ◼   ► And sometimes they're right.

00:23:29 ◼   ► And that's why I think they make that bet so often,

00:23:31 ◼   ► and they're so stubborn on it for so long most of the time,

00:23:35 ◼   ► because a lot of times they are right about that.

00:23:37 ◼   ► But sometimes they're not.

00:23:38 ◼   ► And when you have a pretty decent-sized portion

00:23:42 ◼   ► of your customer base hacking keyboards onto iPads

00:23:46 ◼   ► in weird ways in these crappy cases and brackets and things,

00:23:51 ◼   ► eventually you're like, okay, well,

00:23:54 ◼   ► let's actually just make the iPad do this well.

00:23:57 ◼   ► and we will make the iPad support it better.

00:23:59 ◼   ► The same way like the iPad One didn't have any support

00:24:04 ◼   ► in the hardware for a case.

00:24:06 ◼   ► And that's where the iPad One case was that horrible

00:24:09 ◼   ► like vinyl pocket thing that was a disaster

00:24:13 ◼   ► because there was no good way to attach a case to an iPad.

00:24:17 ◼   ► The iPad Two, they realized, oh,

00:24:19 ◼   ► everyone is attaching cases to this,

00:24:21 ◼   ► so we'll build in the magnets to have this,

00:24:24 ◼   ► you know, magnet connector on the side,

00:24:25 ◼   ► and that can support the case.

00:24:27 ◼   ► Over time, these needs expand, eventually we get

00:24:29 ◼   ► where we are with the iPad Pro now,

00:24:30 ◼   ► where we have the smart connector,

00:24:31 ◼   ► we have a nice easy way to attach keyboards

00:24:34 ◼   ► without dealing with Bluetooth or batteries or anything,

00:24:36 ◼   ► and Apple makes this nice one.

00:24:38 ◼   ► It really hasn't panned out that much in the sense

00:24:40 ◼   ► that nobody else really makes anything

00:24:41 ◼   ► for the smart connector, but Apple does at least.

00:24:44 ◼   ► So I feel like going towards this clamshell iPad option,

00:24:49 ◼   ► or this convertible iPad option, as kind of a half laptop,

00:24:55 ◼   ► That is a perfectly valid place for the iPad line to go.

00:24:58 ◼   ► Not all of them, but for that to be an option.

00:25:01 ◼   ► They already sell it in like four different sizes.

00:25:03 ◼   ► People are always like,

00:25:04 ◼   ► "Well, they only wanna ever make one.

00:25:05 ◼   ► "They wanna minimize SKUs."

00:25:08 ◼   ► No, that's not true anymore.

00:25:09 ◼   ► That has not been true for a long time

00:25:12 ◼   ► for most Apple product lines.

00:25:13 ◼   ► They're fine making additional models

00:25:15 ◼   ► if it expands the market.

00:25:17 ◼   ► And so I think this would expand the market by enough

00:25:21 ◼   ► to make it worth the additional cost of having it.

00:25:24 ◼   ► So that aside for a minute, let me just rant about LTE for one more time. This will be

00:25:28 ◼   ► quick. We don't have to think about why Apple might or might not want to put LTE in Mac

00:25:38 ◼   ► laptops. We don't have to. This does not have to be theoretical because PC laptops have

00:25:44 ◼   ► offered LTE built in as an option for over a decade. It's not theoretical at all. We

00:25:50 ◼   ► We can see why people want it, we can see that people buy it, we can see the good and

00:25:55 ◼   ► bad that comes from it, we can see how it can be managed and sold.

00:25:58 ◼   ► All of this has been shown by the PC world for over a decade.

00:26:03 ◼   ► The only good reason, they might have some bad reasons, but the only good reason why

00:26:09 ◼   ► I don't think Apple has LTE in Macs is because Mac hardware has spent so much of the last

00:26:17 ◼   ► a few years especially, but honestly,

00:26:19 ◼   ► a lot of the time since iOS came out,

00:26:22 ◼   ► Matt Carver has spent so much of this time in neglect

00:26:25 ◼   ► and in seemingly, the entire platform

00:26:28 ◼   ► has seemed to be in maintenance mode in a lot of ways.

00:26:31 ◼   ► And we see signs of this maybe not being true anymore

00:26:34 ◼   ► with things like the iMac Pro,

00:26:36 ◼   ► where this is like this awesome computer,

00:26:38 ◼   ► lots of custom engineering and everything.

00:26:41 ◼   ► So maybe we're coming out of this time,

00:26:44 ◼   ► but there is no question in my mind

00:26:46 ◼   ► that there is no good reason why we can't have LTE

00:26:51 ◼   ► as an option in MacBooks.

00:26:52 ◼   ► There are only bad reasons.

00:26:54 ◼   ► And if Apple wanted to make it happen,

00:26:56 ◼   ► if they cared to make that happen in the Mac line,

00:26:59 ◼   ► if they thought that was a thing that was worth their time,

00:27:02 ◼   ► they could do it.

00:27:03 ◼   ► It would be totally fine.

00:27:05 ◼   ► Mac OS has had support for distinguishing

00:27:08 ◼   ► cellular connections on network API requests.

00:27:11 ◼   ► Since I think Mountain Lion or something,

00:27:13 ◼   ► it's been there for a while now.

00:27:15 ◼   ► So the software support is there.

00:27:18 ◼   ► There are apps like Trip Mode,

00:27:19 ◼   ► if you really need to watch it more than that.

00:27:22 ◼   ► But these are all solved problems on the software side.

00:27:26 ◼   ► The hardware side is, okay, is it a cost issue?

00:27:29 ◼   ► Charge more for it.

00:27:31 ◼   ► It's a cost issue on the iPads too.

00:27:33 ◼   ► You can get a $1000 iPad Pro,

00:27:36 ◼   ► and then you can add LTE to it for like 150 bucks.

00:27:39 ◼   ► Like that's okay, whatever you need to charge,

00:27:41 ◼   ► charge it, okay.

00:27:43 ◼   ► We will bear that as the market.

00:27:45 ◼   ► People want this.

00:27:47 ◼   ► Yes, you can tether, as you mentioned earlier, Casey,

00:27:49 ◼   ► but tethering sucks.

00:27:51 ◼   ► It's not always on, your phone isn't always with you,

00:27:53 ◼   ► you're draining two batteries in instead of one.

00:27:54 ◼   ► Like, that sucks, nobody wants that.

00:27:57 ◼   ► Yes, you have to have another plan for another device,

00:27:59 ◼   ► but these days, we have plans for our watches now,

00:28:02 ◼   ► for God's sake.

00:28:03 ◼   ► Plans for additional devices have become easier and easier

00:28:07 ◼   ► over time, and cheaper and cheaper over time.

00:28:09 ◼   ► There are so many people who would buy a MacBook Pro,

00:28:13 ◼   ► or a MacBook, whatever, I don't care.

00:28:15 ◼   ► some Apple laptop running Mac OS,

00:28:16 ◼   ► I don't care what it's called,

00:28:17 ◼   ► they would buy that with an LTE option

00:28:21 ◼   ► for an extra, I don't know, 200 bucks,

00:28:23 ◼   ► and would gladly pay an extra 20 to $40 a month

00:28:27 ◼   ► to have that on a cellular plan.

00:28:29 ◼   ► This is not theoretical.

00:28:31 ◼   ► The entire PC world has done this for a decade.

00:28:33 ◼   ► We know this, we see this.

00:28:35 ◼   ► We know it can be done.

00:28:37 ◼   ► Apple, for God's sake, it's way past time, just do it.

00:28:40 ◼   ► - So in that category of things that Apple, you know,

00:28:44 ◼   ► sees other people doing this is we don't need to do that. One very minor one, well

00:28:48 ◼   ► I don't know, I don't think it's that minor because I continue to be annoyed

00:28:51 ◼   ► by it despite the fact that I'm not really in the market for this thing. Take

00:28:55 ◼   ► a look at the picture at the top of that Ars Technica article about the Windows

00:28:59 ◼   ► 10 PCs and you know so this is a great example of a convertible iPad-ish type

00:29:05 ◼   ► thing and it's got an OS on it that runs your desktop apps but you can also touch

00:29:09 ◼   ► it and it's got a keyboard and it's got a little kickstand. This is actually a

00:29:12 ◼   ► less laptop-y, more smart keyboard-y things.

00:29:14 ◼   ► - There's a little loop where you can store your pen.

00:29:16 ◼   ► - Look at that.

00:29:17 ◼   ► A, it's got a pen, which is in the earlier category

00:29:20 ◼   ► of things that Apple didn't seem like it needed

00:29:21 ◼   ► until I realized it.

00:29:22 ◼   ► But B, guess what?

00:29:23 ◼   ► It has a place for you to put the pen

00:29:26 ◼   ► that you're going to use with your tablet-y thing.

00:29:29 ◼   ► And there are a million third-party ways to do that,

00:29:32 ◼   ► but I'm not entirely sure what Apple expects people to do.

00:29:35 ◼   ► Like, do they expect people to put it behind their ear,

00:29:37 ◼   ► like a carpenter or something?

00:29:39 ◼   ► - By the way, the third-party ways all suck.

00:29:42 ◼   ► I've tried many of them, they're all terrible.

00:29:44 ◼   ► - Right, I just saw one today of like another one

00:29:47 ◼   ► of these things like a case with a big long stick

00:29:50 ◼   ► that magnetically attached to the smart cover or whatever.

00:29:52 ◼   ► It's like, you know, it's almost like we had it better

00:29:56 ◼   ► in the Palm days where all those devices came

00:29:57 ◼   ► with a little slot where you put that tiny little

00:29:59 ◼   ► stinky plastic stylus.

00:30:01 ◼   ► Hell, the Newton had slots for you to slide a stylus into.

00:30:03 ◼   ► They had a collapsible one where it went in

00:30:05 ◼   ► sort of horizontally and the message pad 110,

00:30:09 ◼   ► it went in vertically.

00:30:11 ◼   ► If you're, you know, they sell a stylus now,

00:30:13 ◼   ► a pretty good one, and people like it,

00:30:14 ◼   ► and the people who like it want to use it with their iPad,

00:30:17 ◼   ► because as far as I'm aware,

00:30:18 ◼   ► you can't use that stylus anywhere else, can you?

00:30:20 ◼   ► Like, it doesn't work with anything except for an iPad.

00:30:22 ◼   ► So the only reason you own it is to use it with your iPad,

00:30:25 ◼   ► and I guess you just carry the pencil in one hand

00:30:28 ◼   ► and the iPad in the other.

00:30:29 ◼   ► It's just, this just seems like a huge oversight.

00:30:33 ◼   ► And so my tiny, tiny miniature wishlist thing

00:30:37 ◼   ► that Apple should do, obviously LTE is bigger,

00:30:39 ◼   ► and you know, iOS laptops is bigger,

00:30:41 ◼   ► but like if we can't get either one of those things, Apple,

00:30:44 ◼   ► give us an officially supported place

00:30:46 ◼   ► to put the Apple Pencil so that you can carry both it

00:30:51 ◼   ► and the iPad that it goes with together in some way

00:30:54 ◼   ► where there is a reasonable chance

00:30:55 ◼   ► that they won't immediately detach and you'll lose it.

00:30:57 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:30:59 ◼   ► - Yeah, there's also, I mean, I honestly,

00:31:00 ◼   ► I think the Pencil could use a lot more consideration

00:31:02 ◼   ► than that, but maybe that's for another show.

00:31:05 ◼   ► - Yeah, but anyway, Microsoft obviously has been

00:31:07 ◼   ► on that page for a long time,

00:31:08 ◼   ► 'cause they're sort of a kitchen sink thing.

00:31:09 ◼   ► "Oh, it's a laptop, it's a tablet, you can draw on it, you can touch the screen, it's

00:31:13 ◼   ► got a stylus, you know, it's got a--" hell, the Surface Book thing had that whatever,

00:31:17 ◼   ► that little cylinder thing that you stick on the screen and turn and do all sorts of

00:31:21 ◼   ► things.

00:31:22 ◼   ► The knob!

00:31:23 ◼   ► Yeah, they're trying all sorts of stuff.

00:31:24 ◼   ► I'm just saying like, we've crossed the stylus Rubicon here, like we're all in stylus land,

00:31:31 ◼   ► we just need some place to put it.

00:31:33 ◼   ► And I say this, I own one of these, and you know where mine is?

00:31:36 ◼   ► It is on my nightstand next to my iPad.

00:31:39 ◼   ► And no, it doesn't roll off because it's vaguely weighted and I have it on the inside instead

00:31:42 ◼   ► of the outside, but it just annoys me.

00:31:45 ◼   ► Like one of the reasons I never have my stylus with my iPad is I don't have a way to attach

00:31:49 ◼   ► it.

00:31:50 ◼   ► And all those third-party ways always just seemed a little bit, I don't know, inconvenient

00:31:54 ◼   ► for me, especially since I'm not like a super heavy stylus user.

00:31:58 ◼   ► But honestly, there should be an Apple-supported way to do it, please.

00:32:02 ◼   ► I just want my MacBook adorable with LTE.

00:32:04 ◼   ► Yes, I would pay the extra fees for it if I really thought it was useful.

00:32:08 ◼   ► You wouldn't pay as much as a watch, you know why?

00:32:10 ◼   ► No!

00:32:11 ◼   ► Because the adorable is so much bigger than the watch.

00:32:13 ◼   ► And the watch is so small, you shouldn't pay money for a small thing.

00:32:16 ◼   ► Why should I pay for that?

00:32:17 ◼   ► It's just sipping data.

00:32:19 ◼   ► Who buys batteries?

00:32:20 ◼   ► That's why Mac apps get more money, because the screens are bigger.

00:32:22 ◼   ► Yeah, right.

00:32:23 ◼   ► Well, I feel like we kind of got sidetracked, though, on the idea of ARM.

00:32:28 ◼   ► Us?

00:32:29 ◼   ► Yeah, I know, right?

00:32:31 ◼   ► Do we think that this is realistic?

00:32:32 ◼   ► I feel like we went through this like six months ago or something like that, and I don't

00:32:37 ◼   ► remember what conclusion we came to.

00:32:40 ◼   ► It seems to me like if it wasn't for the fact that there's so many third parties that would

00:32:45 ◼   ► need to get on board this train, this would have maybe already happened at this point.

00:32:50 ◼   ► Like it seems like Apple would want to control the entire stack.

00:32:55 ◼   ► They're clearly very good at making ARM CPUs.

00:32:58 ◼   ► The ARM CPUs they make are clearly very power efficient.

00:33:02 ◼   ► In so many ways, I'm slightly surprised

00:33:04 ◼   ► they haven't dipped their toes into this water.

00:33:06 ◼   ► Although I agree with, I think it was John

00:33:08 ◼   ► that said earlier that they don't typically

00:33:11 ◼   ► straddle to platforms.

00:33:14 ◼   ► They will just decide, okay, we're going from PowerPC

00:33:16 ◼   ► to Intel or we're going from Intel to ARM, et cetera.

00:33:18 ◼   ► But I don't know, I feel like this is an inevitability,

00:33:23 ◼   ► but remind me of this in like 15 years

00:33:26 ◼   ► when we're still on Intel processors.

00:33:28 ◼   ► - Well, they're playing chicken with that inevitability.

00:33:31 ◼   ► So we all see it as an inevitability, but it's, you know, the game of chicken is that

00:33:35 ◼   ► inevitability of like, look, they got a new arm.

00:33:37 ◼   ► Like they're so good at doing ARM CPUs.

00:33:38 ◼   ► Their ARM CPUs are getting better and better.

00:33:40 ◼   ► Like isn't it only a matter of time?

00:33:42 ◼   ► The car racing in the other direction at that eventuality is, yeah, but if they keep holding

00:33:49 ◼   ► on, eventually the Mac will just fade away on its own and we won't have to deal with

00:33:52 ◼   ► it because iOS has always been ARM and so problem solved, right?

00:33:56 ◼   ► It gets back to the Mac investment thing.

00:33:58 ◼   ► in our past discussions, like, look, if you really want to go ARM on the Mac, it's very

00:34:02 ◼   ► difficult to support both for a long time, which means you're kind of signing up to build

00:34:09 ◼   ► like an 18-core ARM processor to compete with Xeon's if you're still going to be in that

00:34:13 ◼   ► market, which, as of last year, Apple has decisively said, yes, we want to be in the

00:34:17 ◼   ► market. Marco's sitting in front of one right now. So if you want to go ARM on the Mac,

00:34:22 ◼   ► oh, now it's not just, yes, great. So we can take the phone CPU and throw it in a laptop

00:34:25 ◼   ► and we're like, oh, we're good to go there,

00:34:27 ◼   ► it's a perfect fit.

00:34:28 ◼   ► What do you put in the iMac Pro?

00:34:31 ◼   ► And then you got the Thunderbolt issue,

00:34:32 ◼   ► and it's like, yeah, we could solve all these problems,

00:34:34 ◼   ► you could totally do it.

00:34:35 ◼   ► If the Mac was a growing platform

00:34:36 ◼   ► and it was the future of the company, they would do that.

00:34:39 ◼   ► They would make ARM CPUs with 18 cores in them,

00:34:41 ◼   ► they compete with Xeon's,

00:34:42 ◼   ► and they would figure out the Thunderbolt thing

00:34:43 ◼   ► and they'd be fine.

00:34:44 ◼   ► But that's not where the Mac is right now.

00:34:46 ◼   ► And so it's like, do we really want to put that much money

00:34:48 ◼   ► into a platform that we sell so little of?

00:34:50 ◼   ► Maybe if we just hold on long enough,

00:34:52 ◼   ► we won't have to worry about this problem

00:34:53 ◼   ► and it will solve itself.

00:34:54 ◼   ► So that is the game of chicken I see on the ARM CPUs.

00:34:57 ◼   ► Like in the fantasy engineer world,

00:34:59 ◼   ► it seems like a no brainer that Apple would do it

00:35:02 ◼   ► because they're so good at it.

00:35:03 ◼   ► And surely they do a great job

00:35:04 ◼   ► or they'd work out the tech issues.

00:35:06 ◼   ► But in the reality where you have to look at sales numbers

00:35:09 ◼   ► and consider how much you're investing and yada, yada, yada,

00:35:12 ◼   ► it does not look like a sure bet,

00:35:16 ◼   ► that, you know, clearly the right thing for Apple to do.

00:35:19 ◼   ► So, you know, every year, like you smell the wind

00:35:24 ◼   ► be like, "Is this the year for ARM?"

00:35:27 ◼   ► And I suppose that the thing that could make it happen sooner rather than later or not

00:35:30 ◼   ► at all is Apple could actually decide, "We're going to do a two CPU strategy.

00:35:35 ◼   ► We're not going to bother trying to compete with Xeon."

00:35:38 ◼   ► But all these next year's set of ARM system-mounted chips for iPhones and iPads could cover such

00:35:48 ◼   ► a vast portion of their laptop line at this point, right, in terms of CPU power and GPU

00:35:54 ◼   ► power for that matter, that they could sell more than half of their Macs with ARM CPUs

00:36:00 ◼   ► without having to basically build the new chips.

00:36:02 ◼   ► Like I say, we're building these anyway for the iPads and the iPhones.

00:36:06 ◼   ► Repurpose them, do all the work we have to do to the OS, voila, ARM on the Mac and, you

00:36:12 ◼   ► know, the Mac Pro and the iMac Pro and all that other stuff, you know, we're not going

00:36:16 ◼   ► put that much money into ARM to build chips for those.

00:36:20 ◼   ► So those will just stay with x86 and we'll just continue to ride this out with two CPU

00:36:24 ◼   ► architectures.

00:36:25 ◼   ► But so far Apple's never done that and I don't think that strategy is a good idea.

00:36:29 ◼   ► I think the strategy is commit and convert.

00:36:32 ◼   ► Either go big or go home.

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00:38:33 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

00:38:37 ◼   ► - Jon, tell me about Windows 10 sets.

00:38:39 ◼   ► This was, I haven't been keeping up with Windows 10.

00:38:42 ◼   ► I have not actually ever run Windows 10.

00:38:44 ◼   ► My Windows stuff at work is Windows 8 or earlier.

00:38:48 ◼   ► I still retreat to the comfort of Windows 7,

00:38:51 ◼   ► the relative comfort of Windows 7

00:38:52 ◼   ► for someone who's not a Windows user, obviously.

00:38:54 ◼   ► Although I bet Windows users are comfortable

00:38:56 ◼   ► in Windows 7 too.

00:38:57 ◼   ► Like, yeah, that was the last one

00:38:58 ◼   ► that still seemed vaguely like Windows,

00:38:59 ◼   ► but Windows 8 screwed it all up.

00:39:00 ◼   ► Some people like Windows 10.

00:39:01 ◼   ► But anyway, Windows 10 sets,

00:39:05 ◼   ► I'm assuming this is an official shipping feature,

00:39:07 ◼   ► but I can't really tell

00:39:08 ◼   ► 'cause it's just a YouTube video

00:39:09 ◼   ► I know it's just a speculative thing. But you know my love of window arranging and so to see any OS vendor

00:39:15 ◼   ► Coming up with new strategies for dealing with windows is interesting to me now

00:39:20 ◼   ► Obviously the windows the windows windowing model is so different from the Mac and I like the Mac windowing model better

00:39:25 ◼   ► but given the windows windowing model where

00:39:28 ◼   ► everything it's his own damn window and it's its own little taskbar item and

00:39:34 ◼   ► its own independent entity and potentially also its own duplicate running instance of an application like is

00:39:40 ◼   ► Everything flies in the face of the Mac model

00:39:42 ◼   ► But given that model on Windows we got a lot of Windows floating around many of which are actually independent instances of programs

00:39:48 ◼   ► it's difficult to figure out how to

00:39:50 ◼   ► To come up with a sort of a system or to create any sort of hierarchy like on the Mac because you basically can't have you

00:39:59 ◼   ► Know I don't technically you can but from a user's perspective

00:40:04 ◼   ► You can only have one instance of an application running at once, right?

00:40:07 ◼   ► So if you start Safari and it shows up in your dock

00:40:09 ◼   ► What if I want to run a second instance of Safari?

00:40:12 ◼   ► Well, you can't now obviously if you know what you're doing, you can make that happen, but regular users

00:40:16 ◼   ► If they double-click Safari again in the finder

00:40:19 ◼   ► It doesn't launch a second Safari on your dock if you click it again on your dock

00:40:22 ◼   ► It doesn't launch a second Safari

00:40:24 ◼   ► You've got Safari and within Safari you have multiple Safari windows and then within windows you have multiple tabs that hierarchy on the Mac

00:40:31 ◼   ► Application is one level and then drill down one level each application can have zero or more windows. That's

00:40:37 ◼   ► One fundamental aspect of doing well windows is not like that. So if you don't have that hierarchy, I mean

00:40:44 ◼   ► Windows kind of had that hierarchy back in the day. Maybe you two windows

00:40:48 ◼   ► Victims can tell me about this. Do you remember the windowing model? I think I think maybe Visual Studio did it at one point

00:40:54 ◼   ► There was a name for it that I used to know where you'd have a parent window and all di

00:40:58 ◼   ► Yeah, and all child windows were inside the parent window.

00:41:01 ◼   ► Called MDI, Multiple Document Interface.

00:41:03 ◼   ► Yeah, that was a terrible idea.

00:41:05 ◼   ► But anyway, there is still that hierarchy because you can launch one instance of IE

00:41:09 ◼   ► and have multiple tabs, and in many applications you could launch one instance of the application

00:41:12 ◼   ► and open multiple documents, even though depending on the taskbar model.

00:41:15 ◼   ► Yeah, that's what Photoshop has always done in various ways.

00:41:18 ◼   ► Yeah, because that started as a Mac app, so this inherited.

00:41:21 ◼   ► So you have some flexibility to do it, but in general it's much more flat in Windows.

00:41:24 ◼   ► So Windows 10 sets, it's kind of like when Apple added framework support for tabbed windows

00:41:33 ◼   ► on the Mac where it was easy for a Mac application to say we're going to support tabs that look

00:41:37 ◼   ► and behave vaguely like Safari tabs.

00:41:39 ◼   ► So previously you'd have my document-based application text edit.

00:41:44 ◼   ► You know, you launch text edit and you open a bunch of new documents and each document

00:41:47 ◼   ► is in a new window.

00:41:49 ◼   ► And with the framework support for tabbing, it's like, oh, it's pretty easy for text edit

00:41:52 ◼   ► to say, now I support tabs.

00:41:53 ◼   ► And you could take your two text edit windows and merge them together and now they're in one tabbed window that kind of looks like

00:41:58 ◼   ► A safari window with little safari tabs right they added that a couple years ago. Well Windows 10 sets adds

00:42:03 ◼   ► Tabbed windowing sort of to the window manager so that an OS level you can assemble

00:42:09 ◼   ► Windows from multiple different applications into one tabbed

00:42:14 ◼   ► Mega window to make a set of documents, so you've got a web browser window a text editor window

00:42:20 ◼   ► your graphics application window,

00:42:23 ◼   ► all are tabs within the same master window.

00:42:27 ◼   ► So it's not like it's seven PowerPoint documents,

00:42:30 ◼   ► it's a PowerPoint document, an IE document,

00:42:32 ◼   ► like a Finder window, whatever they're called in Windows.

00:42:36 ◼   ► A file system thing showing your disk explorer,

00:42:40 ◼   ► is it even called that anymore, who knows?

00:42:42 ◼   ► And that's their way of organization.

00:42:46 ◼   ► So instead of just being a flat stew of windows,

00:42:49 ◼   ► which is one of the many reasons that Windows usually loves to full screen because look,

00:42:52 ◼   ► there is no hierarchy, so just give each window the entire screen and I will just furiously

00:42:56 ◼   ► alt-tab between them and I will feel efficient.

00:42:59 ◼   ► Now that you have the ability to make sets of windows based on whatever task you're doing,

00:43:04 ◼   ► kind of like I've talked about making sets of tabs in my web browser, this is my like,

00:43:08 ◼   ► I'm shopping for a new screwdriver window and I have like seven tabs at different sites

00:43:13 ◼   ► looking at screwdrivers, right?

00:43:15 ◼   ► This could be I'm working on a project, here's all the graphics from the project, here's

00:43:18 ◼   ► Here's my research window, here's a text editor window, here's a web preview of what I'm doing.

00:43:25 ◼   ► Put them all together into one big set and then the cloud twist is, oh, and also Microsoft

00:43:29 ◼   ► will cloud sync those sets.

00:43:31 ◼   ► So if you go over to another Windows 10 computer and log in as you, you can recall that set

00:43:36 ◼   ► and say, "What was I working on?"

00:43:37 ◼   ► Bring up that Windows set from that thing I was working on and all those windows appear

00:43:42 ◼   ► on your new computer, all those tabs or whatever.

00:43:46 ◼   ► So I think that's very intriguing.

00:43:47 ◼   ► I would love both that statefulness and the ability to sort of mix and match Windows in

00:43:52 ◼   ► a task-oriented way.

00:43:55 ◼   ► It doesn't work really with the Mac windowing model, so I don't think Apple should look

00:44:00 ◼   ► at this and adopt it wholesale, but I'm kind of excited by Windows itself taking another

00:44:06 ◼   ► look at something as basic as window document and application management and trying to come

00:44:12 ◼   ► up with a, you know, I'm not going to say it's novel because I'm sure 57 ex-Windows

00:44:17 ◼   ► managers have done this exact same thing.

00:44:20 ◼   ► But I found it interesting, and there are parts of it I find attractive, especially

00:44:23 ◼   ► the cloud syncing and statefulness.

00:44:26 ◼   ► Of course, all the caveats apply.

00:44:28 ◼   ► Does this require support from application vendors?

00:44:30 ◼   ► Will the only person who supports it be Microsoft?

00:44:32 ◼   ► If you take a bunch of cruddy Windows applications and try to use it with this, will they not

00:44:35 ◼   ► behave correctly?

00:44:36 ◼   ► Historically, Microsoft has had a harder time getting all its developers to adopt new technologies.

00:44:41 ◼   ► Apple has done better.

00:44:46 ◼   ► They're a little bit spotty in recent years, especially with things like autosave and state

00:44:49 ◼   ► restoration and stuff like that that kind of flew in the face of Mac orthodoxy and was

00:44:54 ◼   ► sort of only halfheartedly implemented by some Mac applications.

00:44:57 ◼   ► But in general, I think Apple has a better time at it.

00:45:00 ◼   ► So once again, I am in the position where I am forced to praise Microsoft and be proud

00:45:06 ◼   ► of what they're doing and wish Apple not did the same things, but innovated with a similar

00:45:13 ◼   ► spirit.

00:45:14 ◼   ► Like, when's the last time Apple looked at window management on the Mac and had some

00:45:18 ◼   ► bold new ideas?

00:45:19 ◼   ► Like, they added some vague, slightly annoying snapping thing in, like, Sierra and then,

00:45:27 ◼   ► like, the tiling thing.

00:45:29 ◼   ► Was that Sierra, too?

00:45:30 ◼   ► They added a couple of minor features in half-hearted ways in recent years, but nothing that, you

00:45:36 ◼   ► tries to not fundamentally rethink, but add a dramatically new feature akin to

00:45:41 ◼   ► like you know mission control or expose or whatever. Like in the early days of

00:45:47 ◼   ► Mac OS X, you know, that's what they were doing. They were saying, you know, we have

00:45:51 ◼   ► a new idea of how you might want to manage Windows and we call it expose and

00:45:54 ◼   ► later we'll rename it and make it even more confusing. And then spaces, like this

00:45:58 ◼   ► is not a new idea, but hey we think it's maybe worth bringing to the Mac and

00:46:01 ◼   ► we'll refine it and try to make a different model. I miss that. I miss those

00:46:05 ◼   ► days of windowing innovation.

00:46:08 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, this is just one more area

00:46:10 ◼   ► where it feels like the Mac is in maintenance mode.

00:46:13 ◼   ► One of these times, one of these cool experiments

00:46:17 ◼   ► by somebody else is going to take off.

00:46:20 ◼   ► Like, Microsoft is doing a lot of things,

00:46:22 ◼   ► they're trying a lot of things,

00:46:23 ◼   ► and yeah, they aren't all working,

00:46:25 ◼   ► but some of them are and some of them will,

00:46:27 ◼   ► and it's, you know, both in hardware and software

00:46:30 ◼   ► with what they're trying over there.

00:46:32 ◼   ► And Apple is really not trying that much

00:46:35 ◼   ► on this level with the Mac.

00:46:38 ◼   ► The touch bar is probably the only thing

00:46:41 ◼   ► that was on anywhere near this level that they tried,

00:46:44 ◼   ► and that was more of a hardware,

00:46:46 ◼   ► I know the implementation crosses everything,

00:46:47 ◼   ► but that was more of a hardware feature

00:46:49 ◼   ► than a software feature from the user point of view.

00:46:52 ◼   ► And it wasn't particularly well received,

00:46:54 ◼   ► and I think history will judge it as a flop,

00:46:58 ◼   ► if the president has it at least.

00:47:00 ◼   ► but that doesn't mean they should not try anything else.

00:47:03 ◼   ► That just means the one thing they tried

00:47:05 ◼   ► that was anywhere near this type of thing didn't work out.

00:47:08 ◼   ► But they need to keep trying because the PC industry is.

00:47:12 ◼   ► And we forget sometimes quite how small percentage-wise

00:47:16 ◼   ► the Mac has compared to PCs in market share.

00:47:23 ◼   ► And the Mac is much more influential

00:47:26 ◼   ► compared to its market share size than you would expect.

00:47:28 ◼   ► but if people are like on their work PCs

00:47:32 ◼   ► and they're using all these things at work

00:47:34 ◼   ► and they get used to something like this sets feature,

00:47:38 ◼   ► then the Mac just looks bad by comparison for not having it.

00:47:42 ◼   ► And the more, as time goes on,

00:47:45 ◼   ► the more Microsoft tries things,

00:47:47 ◼   ► some percentage of them will stick,

00:47:49 ◼   ► some of them already have, like touchscreen laptops.

00:47:51 ◼   ► Again, we all made fun of that, Apple makes fun of that,

00:47:53 ◼   ► but the reality is people use them and like them

00:47:57 ◼   ► it's fine, and Apple doesn't do that.

00:47:59 ◼   ► And so when somebody who is used to being able

00:48:01 ◼   ► to scroll the screen on their laptop occasionally

00:48:02 ◼   ► with their finger or poke a link with their finger sometimes

00:48:04 ◼   ► they go to a Mac and that doesn't work.

00:48:06 ◼   ► And that doesn't make Apple look like

00:48:08 ◼   ► great product visionaries, it makes the Mac look broken

00:48:10 ◼   ► or outdated.

00:48:12 ◼   ► And over time, the number of things that cause that feeling

00:48:16 ◼   ► in new buyers is going to increase.

00:48:19 ◼   ► That's my concern with the Mac stagnating is that

00:48:22 ◼   ► Apple can keep the Mac kind of in maintenance mode

00:48:25 ◼   ► for a lot of the platform, and you might think,

00:48:28 ◼   ► "Oh, well Apple's fine, they're selling iPhones and iPads."

00:48:30 ◼   ► Yeah, it's fine.

00:48:32 ◼   ► But the rest of the industry that the Mac competes with

00:48:35 ◼   ► is moving forward, with or without Apple.

00:48:37 ◼   ► They are moving.

00:48:39 ◼   ► And if Apple is not even really putting in a strong effort

00:48:43 ◼   ► to compete with them, the Mac isn't going to remain

00:48:46 ◼   ► constant over time, it's going to decline over time.

00:48:49 ◼   ► It's going to start falling behind in big ways.

00:48:52 ◼   ► And I don't want that to happen

00:48:53 ◼   ► to my favorite computing platform of all time.

00:48:57 ◼   ► - I'm just tired of being sad, man.

00:48:58 ◼   ► I'm tired of being sad.

00:49:00 ◼   ► - I'm happy with this, I'm my pro, I'll tell you that.

00:49:02 ◼   ► But it had nothing to do with the software.

00:49:03 ◼   ► - Yeah, I was gonna say,

00:49:05 ◼   ► the touch bar, as Marco said, is a reason to be happy,

00:49:08 ◼   ► because look, that was a pretty big investment

00:49:10 ◼   ► and a pretty important, dramatic, clearly Mac-only feature.

00:49:13 ◼   ► Doesn't seem to have worked out, whatever,

00:49:15 ◼   ► but that's exactly what we're asking for.

00:49:16 ◼   ► You gotta try things, right?

00:49:18 ◼   ► But I would say that the T2 in Marco's iMac Pro

00:49:22 ◼   ► another example of, granted mostly hardware-based, but interesting

00:49:25 ◼   ► innovation that, you know, it's borrowing technology from iOS, like it's

00:49:30 ◼   ► building on other successes, so that's just smart business, but they didn't have

00:49:34 ◼   ► to do that. They could have made a more traditional Xeon-based PC and slapped it

00:49:38 ◼   ► inside an iMac case, but they didn't. There's extra cost

00:49:43 ◼   ► and expense involved in adapting that iOS hardware and software to the Mac, and

00:49:48 ◼   ► And they did it, and that's an exciting avenue for innovation, I think.

00:49:53 ◼   ► To make Macs less like Apple-branded Hackentoshes, and more like, you can't assemble this from parts.

00:50:02 ◼   ► This has advantages over a PC that you would build in terms of performance, power draw, security, all the areas that we expect Apple to innovate in.

00:50:11 ◼   ► in, which for many years, even in the Mac's heyday, in the jobs, you know, PowerBC G3/G4

00:50:17 ◼   ► era, when Macs were very exciting and were the bread and butter of the company, those

00:50:23 ◼   ► Macs inside were more conventionally like PCs than Marco's iMac Pro is.

00:50:28 ◼   ► They didn't have some weird custom ARM chip implementing secure boot, they were more or

00:50:31 ◼   ► less on the same, you know, what is it, EFI and later the all of Intel's security features.

00:50:41 ◼   ► But it wasn't like Apple was building these giant custom chips to do all of its like image

00:50:45 ◼   ► processing from the camera and to run the SSD and to do a secure boot and stuff like

00:50:50 ◼   ► that.

00:50:51 ◼   ► That I think is innovation.

00:50:52 ◼   ► It's not software innovation, but it is innovation and investment in the Mac.

00:50:55 ◼   ► So I'm heartened by the renewed interest and yeah, we all would have liked the Touch

00:51:00 ◼   ► bar to maybe be more to our tastes. You know, maybe some people like it, but for the three

00:51:03 ◼   ► of us, it hasn't really set the world on fire. So I guess more of that, please, and, you

00:51:11 ◼   ► know, with a higher batting average.

00:51:14 ◼   ► Well, and, you know, it seems like there's obviously a lot of different areas in which

00:51:18 ◼   ► Apple is innovating or not innovating or moving forward or just in maintenance mode. My main

00:51:24 ◼   ► The main complaint about stagnation is in frequency

00:51:28 ◼   ► of hardware updates, number one, and number two,

00:51:30 ◼   ► the much bigger problem, I think, is the software platform.

00:51:34 ◼   ► You know, it's very, I think there's,

00:51:36 ◼   ► John, I think there's a lot of parallels to be made

00:51:37 ◼   ► to your, you know, Copeland 2010?

00:51:41 ◼   ► Yeah. (laughs)

00:51:42 ◼   ► To that article, like, you know, the arguments you made

00:51:44 ◼   ► back forever ago, which is like, you know, at some point,

00:51:47 ◼   ► forgive me for trying to paraphrase your argument,

00:51:49 ◼   ► but at some point, you know,

00:51:52 ◼   ► they can't continue doing this forever,

00:51:53 ◼   ► something has to change, there has to be a next generation

00:51:55 ◼   ► version of this at some point.

00:51:57 ◼   ► And I don't know, we don't have enough insight into Apple

00:52:00 ◼   ► to know, is there a next generation version of Mac OS

00:52:04 ◼   ► that they're working on?

00:52:05 ◼   ► Because we don't see any signs of that,

00:52:08 ◼   ► and obviously we probably wouldn't until it was

00:52:10 ◼   ► much further along and almost ready to ship,

00:52:12 ◼   ► but if there isn't, that's a big problem.

00:52:16 ◼   ► That's a really big problem.

00:52:17 ◼   ► Because the OS we're using right now on the Mac is,

00:52:23 ◼   ► It's fine in a lot of ways, it's world class in a lot of ways, but it's really ancient

00:52:27 ◼   ► and creaky and has a lot of baggage and does a lot of things in really outdated ways.

00:52:32 ◼   ► That is catching up to it.

00:52:34 ◼   ► It has been catching up to it for quite some time, it's going to keep catching up to it

00:52:37 ◼   ► more and more.

00:52:39 ◼   ► And for Apple to move the Mac forward, they need to be investing heavily in it.

00:52:43 ◼   ► They need to be giving it its next generation operating system, a next generation platform.

00:52:49 ◼   ► And so things like the Touch Bar and the T2

00:52:51 ◼   ► are awesome on the hardware side.

00:52:54 ◼   ► The iMac Pro is amazing.

00:52:56 ◼   ► I continue to be incredibly happy with it as a computer.

00:52:59 ◼   ► But Mac OS is starving for attention.

00:53:02 ◼   ► It is stagnating, it is falling apart.

00:53:05 ◼   ► It is starving.

00:53:06 ◼   ► High Sierra is in many ways pathetic and scary

00:53:11 ◼   ► in how sloppy things were done with it,

00:53:15 ◼   ► how many bugs there still are in a lot of areas.

00:53:17 ◼   ► security bugs are embarrassing. I mean, it's getting worse. Every release seems like it's

00:53:22 ◼   ► getting worse. Sierra was a terrible release also. Very unreliable, lots of bugs, lots

00:53:27 ◼   ► of problems, lots of subsystems and things that were seemingly rewritten for vague reasons

00:53:32 ◼   ► and then were worse and more buggy. Like, this is increasing over time because they're

00:53:38 ◼   ► not putting the resources into the OS that it needs to be stable and secure and to be

00:53:44 ◼   ► moved forward. That's my concern area. It's not about the T2 and the touch bar. It's

00:53:49 ◼   ► that macOS itself is not being properly maintained and invested in. And hopefully I'm wrong.

00:53:55 ◼   ► Hopefully I'm totally wrong and they're working on an awesome new next generation,

00:53:59 ◼   ► you know, OS 11 or whatever it would be called. Not that, but you know. Hopefully I'm wrong

00:54:03 ◼   ► about all this. But we have seen no signs in that direction. So we have no way to know.

00:54:09 ◼   ► If there's a next-gen operating system, I don't think it would be a next-gen macro operating system.

00:54:13 ◼   ► It would be a next-gen Apple operating system that would span the range, right?

00:54:17 ◼   ► Because like what you're really talking about for next-gen operating systems, and honestly, I don't think Apple is at the Copeland 2010 point

00:54:23 ◼   ► just because like in the if you look at the the rate of important advancement in computing

00:54:30 ◼   ► lots of really important sort of

00:54:35 ◼   ► industry changing, paradigm shifting stuff happened really early on in that beginning

00:54:40 ◼   ► part. Going from very simple computers to more complicated ones and it just so happens

00:54:45 ◼   ► that Apple's success with the Apple II and the Mac happened to hit right before all of

00:54:52 ◼   ► the personal computers got on the memory protection preemptive multitasking bandwagon. So it was

00:54:57 ◼   ► unfortunate timing that they were successful with a slightly older platform. But there's

00:55:02 ◼   ► There's nothing out there as clear cut as like memory protection.

00:55:05 ◼   ► You either have it or you don't and it's a pretty big innovation and if you are unfortunate

00:55:09 ◼   ► enough to be massively successful with a platform that doesn't have it, it's very hard to add

00:55:13 ◼   ► it after the fact.

00:55:15 ◼   ► Everyone else has it and it's not a minor thing.

00:55:17 ◼   ► But there's no room for an extra operating system but I think Apple can get along with

00:55:21 ◼   ► their mock BSD amalgam.

00:55:26 ◼   ► As they've shown, they can bring that down to watches and all the way up to Macs.

00:55:30 ◼   ► So it's fairly flexible and it's pretty neat and they can piecemeal replace parts of it

00:55:34 ◼   ► and improve it so it's still got life left in it.

00:55:36 ◼   ► But eventually you want a next generation operating system.

00:55:40 ◼   ► That next generation operating system is not a next generation iOS and not a next generation

00:55:43 ◼   ► Mac operating system.

00:55:44 ◼   ► It's a next generation Apple operating system that will probably have to run on their self-driving

00:55:48 ◼   ► cars and your watch and your glasses and your whatever.

00:55:55 ◼   ► That's where they would go and I don't think it's pressing for them to do that now.

00:55:59 ◼   ► But all their car projects and any other weird things they've tried with glasses and rings

00:56:07 ◼   ► and whatever, those are avenues to experiment with different kernels, real-time operating

00:56:13 ◼   ► systems, things optimized for neural nets, which arguably they're experimenting with

00:56:18 ◼   ► on the phone with whatever that – what's the little thing, the name, the branding name

00:56:22 ◼   ► they gave to the neural processing thing.

00:56:25 ◼   ► CoreML?

00:56:26 ◼   ► No, no, no.

00:56:27 ◼   ► Bionic?

00:56:28 ◼   ► No.

00:56:29 ◼   ► There was some part of the chip that was dedicated to help.

00:56:33 ◼   ► Anyway, I've heard lots of rumors of experimentation with different sort of kernels and sort of

00:56:42 ◼   ► core OS designs and also anything they're doing with the car.

00:56:47 ◼   ► I've also heard rumors that that stack was potentially different from the bottom up than

00:56:52 ◼   ► a lot of the existing ones.

00:56:54 ◼   ► Whether those things go anywhere, I guess I don't think it's pressing, but if and when

00:56:59 ◼   ► When a next generation Apple operating platform comes along, I fully expect it to span the

00:57:03 ◼   ► range of all their products and to finally and decisively the dichotomy between Mac and

00:57:11 ◼   ► iOS, which is to say I don't think it is imminent.

00:57:13 ◼   ► We're much more likely to get something sooner, as we talked about in a couple shows ago with

00:57:17 ◼   ► the unified UI framework, right?

00:57:20 ◼   ► That is a much more reasonable incremental step towards that goal.

00:57:25 ◼   ► And right now, it could be argued that Apple currently has a unified low-level OS across

00:57:31 ◼   ► all their products.

00:57:32 ◼   ► Because under the covers, it's all Mac, BSD, Darwin, however you want it.

00:57:36 ◼   ► That's underneath all of them.

00:57:37 ◼   ► It's not like the watch, as far as I'm aware, is running a dramatically different operating

00:57:42 ◼   ► system from the kernel all the way up than your Mac is.

00:57:45 ◼   ► So there is a common foundational platform with various bits stripped down on it and

00:57:50 ◼   ► obviously different architectures and different optimizations and stuff like that.

00:57:54 ◼   ► It's just that as you get up to the higher layer, this historical, somewhat artificial

00:58:01 ◼   ► distinction appears.

00:58:02 ◼   ► "Oh, this is a Mac app, that's an iPad app."

00:58:04 ◼   ► No, they're totally different.

00:58:05 ◼   ► They look kind of the same, yeah, I know, but just they're same core OS, same core—yeah,

00:58:09 ◼   ► I know, but they're not.

00:58:10 ◼   ► It's not the same thing.

00:58:12 ◼   ► So I think Apple can address that top layer before they have to go all the way down to

00:58:15 ◼   ► the bottom and start, you know—what was that?

00:58:18 ◼   ► Google has a project like that?

00:58:20 ◼   ► What is it called?

00:58:21 ◼   ► This is the show where I can't remember the names of anything.

00:58:25 ◼   ► Fuchsia?

00:58:26 ◼   ► There we go.

00:58:27 ◼   ► I pulled it out.

00:58:28 ◼   ► Pulled it out before the chat room.

00:58:29 ◼   ► Ha.

00:58:30 ◼   ► Their Fuchsia operating system is sort of like an out in the open, let's try this experiment

00:58:34 ◼   ► with another potential platform, which is such an un-Apple-like thing to do, which like

00:58:38 ◼   ► sows confusion.

00:58:39 ◼   ► It's like, wait, so are you still doing Chrome OS?

00:58:43 ◼   ► And what about Android?

00:58:44 ◼   ► And what the hell is Fuchsia?

00:58:45 ◼   ► And not an Apple move at all.

00:58:47 ◼   ► But Apple should be doing things exactly like that internally.

00:58:50 ◼   ► - Maybe they are, who knows?

00:58:52 ◼   ► I don't know, it's just weird, 'cause in the last 24 hours,

00:58:57 ◼   ► as I mentioned previously, I've been reminded how much

00:59:01 ◼   ► I freaking love this MacBook Adorable.

00:59:05 ◼   ► Even the keyboard, which admittedly is not the most

00:59:08 ◼   ► reliable thing in the world, but I do love the feel

00:59:11 ◼   ► of it, something tremendous.

00:59:13 ◼   ► - It turns off by itself sometimes, but it's fine.

00:59:15 ◼   ► I won't mention that for six months.

00:59:16 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly, it's not a big deal.

00:59:19 ◼   ► I love this little laptop.

00:59:21 ◼   ► And I love this little laptop's hardware design.

00:59:25 ◼   ► But I tell ya, Apple software is not doing it for me.

00:59:31 ◼   ► And for a fleeting moment earlier today,

00:59:34 ◼   ► actually, I mean it was yesterday,

00:59:36 ◼   ► it's all a blur you guys.

00:59:37 ◼   ► Anyway, for a fleeting moment sometime in the last 48 hours,

00:59:40 ◼   ► I thought to myself,

00:59:41 ◼   ► "Man, I wonder if I should just try Windows again."

00:59:43 ◼   ► - No.

00:59:44 ◼   ► - Because, well, and I know that that's the answer,

00:59:46 ◼   ► But I'm looking at, and I think I tweeted about this,

00:59:49 ◼   ► but I was trying to pull pictures off my iPhone.

00:59:53 ◼   ► And Image Capture, which is an app that comes

00:59:57 ◼   ► with the operating system that is designed

00:59:59 ◼   ► to do specifically this and almost nothing else,

01:00:01 ◼   ► Image Capture says, "Oh, I can't do that

01:00:04 ◼   ► "because of error negative 9917."

01:00:06 ◼   ► And I was like, well, crap, at this point,

01:00:08 ◼   ► I'm basically using Windows already.

01:00:10 ◼   ► That's a useful error message.

01:00:11 ◼   ► Negative 9917.

01:00:13 ◼   ► - No, only the Mac operating system

01:00:15 ◼   ► as negative number error messages, right?

01:00:17 ◼   ► - That's probably an OS status.

01:00:18 ◼   ► - That's deep Mac flavor,

01:00:21 ◼   ► negative number in an error dialog.

01:00:25 ◼   ► - All I'm saying is,

01:00:26 ◼   ► it was a completely non-actionable error,

01:00:30 ◼   ► and I could not find anything useful on the internet

01:00:33 ◼   ► about what to do about it.

01:00:34 ◼   ► And I don't know if the issue was

01:00:37 ◼   ► that something on my iPhone is corrupted,

01:00:40 ◼   ► and the issue is iOS software is kind of broken,

01:00:44 ◼   ► or at least for me anyway.

01:00:45 ◼   ► I don't know if it was something that was wrong with my Mac.

01:00:49 ◼   ► I tried two different Macs,

01:00:51 ◼   ► had different but similar problems across both.

01:00:55 ◼   ► It's just things like what drew me to the platform.

01:00:57 ◼   ► - I can tell you what the problem was.

01:00:59 ◼   ► You were doing something that Apple does not give,

01:01:02 ◼   ► they could not possibly give less of a shit about.

01:01:05 ◼   ► You were connecting an iPad,

01:01:07 ◼   ► or you were connecting an iPhone to your Mac with a cable,

01:01:12 ◼   ► and then you were launching an old program

01:01:14 ◼   ► from the Mac OS utilities folder

01:01:16 ◼   ► to try to take data off of your iPhone over a wire.

01:01:20 ◼   ► Apple could not give less of a shit about that,

01:01:23 ◼   ► so it's never tested.

01:01:24 ◼   ► - And I think you're probably right,

01:01:26 ◼   ► and that's just really too bad, right?

01:01:28 ◼   ► And maybe the problem is me,

01:01:31 ◼   ► maybe the problem is Casey again,

01:01:32 ◼   ► in that maybe I just need to accept iCloud Photo Library,

01:01:36 ◼   ► but for reasons that are not interesting

01:01:38 ◼   ► and that I don't care to explain,

01:01:39 ◼   ► I'm not all in on iCloud Photo Library.

01:01:42 ◼   ► And because in the past, it was always fine,

01:01:46 ◼   ► because I would have to remember to pull things off my phone,

01:01:48 ◼   ► but no big deal.

01:01:49 ◼   ► That it worked every time.

01:01:51 ◼   ► 100% of the time, it worked every time.

01:01:53 ◼   ► Now, 60% of the time, it works every time.

01:01:56 ◼   ► That's also a reference, John.

01:01:58 ◼   ► So anyway, I found myself--

01:02:01 ◼   ► and I think I made the same speech, again,

01:02:03 ◼   ► like six months ago--

01:02:04 ◼   ► I found myself just more and more annoyed

01:02:08 ◼   ► that things that used to reliably work don't work anymore.

01:02:12 ◼   ► And it was such a whiplash because in the same day or two window, I've just head over

01:02:19 ◼   ► heels fallen in love with this MacBook Adorable and thought to myself, "You know what?

01:02:24 ◼   ► Even though I'm not the kind of person to buy computers hourly like Marco, I will probably

01:02:30 ◼   ► get a new Adorable whenever it's refreshed because I want more of this Adorable.

01:02:36 ◼   ► I want more speed.

01:02:37 ◼   ► I want more ports, and if they don't give me more ports,

01:02:39 ◼   ► that's fine, but if they give me more speed, that's great.

01:02:41 ◼   ► - The adorable fans have to buy every one,

01:02:43 ◼   ► because each one is barely usable, so any improvements,

01:02:46 ◼   ► like, oh my god, please!

01:02:48 ◼   ► - It's not that bad, but I understand your point.

01:02:49 ◼   ► I understand your point.

01:02:52 ◼   ► So, I go from just being overjoyed by this adorable,

01:02:56 ◼   ► and generally speaking, I'm pretty overjoyed

01:02:58 ◼   ► with my iPhone 10, and then I just see these software issues

01:03:02 ◼   ► that are just depressing and disheartening,

01:03:06 ◼   ► "pressing" may not be the right word, but just disheartening. And it makes me just

01:03:09 ◼   ► feel like, you know, it's like that throw your hands in the air, and don't

01:03:13 ◼   ► wave them like you don't care, because you do care. You just throw your hands in the

01:03:15 ◼   ► air and then plop them down on the desk and you're just like, "Well, now what? Now what do I

01:03:20 ◼   ► do?" Because I'm just screwed. I mean, where am I gonna go? And it's a rhetorical

01:03:24 ◼   ► question, and I don't think we need to answer it, but it's just frustrating

01:03:27 ◼   ► because it used to be this was my happy place. And maybe the problem is

01:03:31 ◼   ► that I'm clinging to the Mac and the Mac is dead. Again, we don't need to go

01:03:34 ◼   ► there, we spent so much time there, it's not even worth it, plus I don't want to give Federico

01:03:37 ◼   ► and Mike the pleasure, but one way or another, I don't know where the issue is, if it's me,

01:03:42 ◼   ► if it's the Mac, if it's Apple, if it's software, if it's hardware.

01:03:45 ◼   ► Well, you do know where it is in this case, like you just said, your photos work well

01:03:48 ◼   ► as a little bit old, right?

01:03:50 ◼   ► And so, and like Marco said, you are exercising code paths that are not popular anymore with

01:03:57 ◼   ► most other people.

01:03:58 ◼   ► So they're going to be abandoned, not tested as much, so you're keeping your habits, "Hey,

01:04:03 ◼   ► I use image capture, this is how I do my photos, this is just the way I like to do it.

01:04:07 ◼   ► And time marches on, and everyone else has different photo workflows that do not exercise

01:04:12 ◼   ► this code path at all.

01:04:14 ◼   ► It's kind of like if you, you know, I manually arrange my music, I don't want to use iTunes.

01:04:18 ◼   ► I manually arrange it and I play the stuff manually from the finder.

01:04:21 ◼   ► It's like, you can keep doing that for a long time, but once everyone starts using iTunes,

01:04:24 ◼   ► it's hard to swim against that tide.

01:04:25 ◼   ► You know, like, oh, now they sell music and I'm not forced to use iTunes, it's the only

01:04:28 ◼   ► way I can buy music is they can play the fair play DRM.

01:04:30 ◼   ► Like, how long can you keep doing it the one old way that you did it?

01:04:34 ◼   ► You can keep doing it the one old way forever if you never update anything else about your

01:04:37 ◼   ► computing life, right?

01:04:39 ◼   ► But, you know, it's hard to hold on to that.

01:04:41 ◼   ► So it's like, you know, you're using third-party software that fewer and fewer people are using

01:04:47 ◼   ► for the task you're using it for, and you're asking more and more of it because you're

01:04:52 ◼   ► taking more bigger, more complicated pictures in different formats, right?

01:04:56 ◼   ► So it's not, you know, I'm not saying you're doing anything particularly wrong, but it's

01:04:59 ◼   ► explicable, right?

01:05:00 ◼   ► And I think it's inevitable in situations where you're like that.

01:05:04 ◼   ► We all have computer habits that are like that.

01:05:06 ◼   ► We're like, "I'm just going to keep doing it this way until I can't do it anymore."

01:05:08 ◼   ► I think you may be approaching the "until you can't do it anymore" thing, because unless

01:05:13 ◼   ► you're going to write the Mac app yourself to handle this, which you were just entertaining

01:05:16 ◼   ► the idea of doing, probably there's not a big market for other people to write Mac applications

01:05:21 ◼   ► to support these kind of workflows.

01:05:24 ◼   ► So as I think we have all done at various points, there comes a time where you say,

01:05:29 ◼   ► I will give in and try whatever everyone else is doing.

01:05:33 ◼   ► Try the iCloud photo library.

01:05:35 ◼   ► Try Google photos.

01:05:36 ◼   ► Try – get back on the code path that is being actively developed that has lots of

01:05:41 ◼   ► people using it and if it breaks spectacularly at least you'll be suffering along with

01:05:44 ◼   ► millions of other people who will cause the thing to be fixed.

01:05:47 ◼   ► Whereas here you are just screaming into the void about a very high number negative error

01:05:53 ◼   ► code from image capture.

01:05:55 ◼   ► And by the way, I put a link in our notes for the good old days of negative numbers

01:06:01 ◼   ► and error messages on the Mac, when most of them were singular double digits.

01:06:05 ◼   ► Before we got into negative 9,478, we had good old negative 27, and it was like a good

01:06:10 ◼   ► friend.

01:06:11 ◼   ► And then you'd have to turn your computer off and back on again.

01:06:13 ◼   ► No memory protection.

01:06:14 ◼   ► So, I agree with everything you said, but with one small correction.

01:06:19 ◼   ► The pieces of this workflow that are falling down right now that I was complaining about

01:06:25 ◼   ► a moment ago, that was all first party.

01:06:26 ◼   ► You had said third party, maybe that was accidental,

01:06:28 ◼   ► but this is image capture, which is first party using--

01:06:31 ◼   ► - Yeah, it was like Marco said,

01:06:33 ◼   ► you're digging something out of like,

01:06:34 ◼   ► is that a utilities folder?

01:06:35 ◼   ► But anyway, yes, it is first party.

01:06:37 ◼   ► There's lots of applications that come with the Mac

01:06:39 ◼   ► that haven't been touched in forever,

01:06:40 ◼   ► and that if they stop working, who's gonna notice?

01:06:43 ◼   ► Like, when's the last time you launched

01:06:44 ◼   ► the chess application, does that still work?

01:06:46 ◼   ► Are there bugs in the chess application?

01:06:47 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:06:48 ◼   ► - Also, like, the conditions that this is operating

01:06:50 ◼   ► in are changing, like, now that iCloud Photo Library

01:06:53 ◼   ► is on phones and that photo management is kind of

01:06:55 ◼   ► automatic and managed on the device,

01:06:58 ◼   ► the interface to interface capture,

01:07:00 ◼   ► like exposing a DCIM folder and exposing photos

01:07:03 ◼   ► like through a virtual file system on the phone

01:07:07 ◼   ► that the computer can just copy off of,

01:07:09 ◼   ► I think that's all simulated at this point.

01:07:11 ◼   ► It's different, it's all weird now

01:07:13 ◼   ► because iCloud Photo Library messes with

01:07:16 ◼   ► what photos are actually on the phone

01:07:18 ◼   ► and what control you have over that

01:07:19 ◼   ► and if things try to access them, weird things might happen.

01:07:22 ◼   ► So it's probably running into something is different now

01:07:25 ◼   ► with that versus with maybe the HEIC and HEIF changeover

01:07:29 ◼   ► and not to mention the High Sierra appears

01:07:34 ◼   ► that nothing has been tested at all in the entire OS ever.

01:07:38 ◼   ► So it's a combination of all these things.

01:07:40 ◼   ► Yeah, one of those things is going to make

01:07:43 ◼   ► your incredibly low priority use case not work.

01:07:46 ◼   ► But this is not an excuse, this is probably just the reason.

01:07:51 ◼   ► Ultimately, this is like, I totally share,

01:07:54 ◼   ► I think, your disappointment here.

01:07:56 ◼   ► It's like, clearly, both the hardware and the software

01:08:00 ◼   ► on the Mac were really being neglected

01:08:02 ◼   ► for a few bad years there.

01:08:04 ◼   ► It seems like they have righted or are righting the ship

01:08:08 ◼   ► on the hardware side, but the software side,

01:08:12 ◼   ► I don't see any sign of that.

01:08:14 ◼   ► And that's, so like, we're just gonna keep having

01:08:17 ◼   ► more and more embarrassing, disheartening,

01:08:20 ◼   ► illustrious releases where it seems like

01:08:23 ◼   ► more gets broken than gets fixed.

01:08:26 ◼   ► That's my concern and I hope that doesn't come to pass,

01:08:29 ◼   ► but so far that is what's happening.

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01:09:18 ◼   ► you probably know how to make websites in other means.

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01:10:19 ◼   ► (jazzy music)

01:10:21 ◼   ► - Is there something happy for us to talk about?

01:10:25 ◼   ► - Well, hmm, there actually is.

01:10:27 ◼   ► Let me, I was saving this, but.

01:10:30 ◼   ► - Well, do you wanna do Ask ATP?

01:10:33 ◼   ► That's always pretty happy.

01:10:34 ◼   ► - Yes, let's do Ask ATP,

01:10:35 ◼   ► and then I have an after show gift for you, Casey,

01:10:38 ◼   ► to celebrate your new baby.

01:10:39 ◼   ► another baby? No, it's literally, it is a gift for Casey. You'll see. Alright, let's

01:10:45 ◼   ► do Ask ATP. If we're talking about the Mac Pro, I'm hanging up. We're not. First of all,

01:10:50 ◼   ► part one of the gift is we're not talking about the Mac Pro. Alright, fair enough. Alright,

01:10:53 ◼   ► starting with Ask ATP, Eric Berlin writes, "Do you expect the release of the iMac Pro

01:10:58 ◼   ► will slow the update cadence of the non-Pro iMac? For example, would Apple hold back a

01:11:04 ◼   ► six-core Coffee Lake iMac configuration in 2018 because it would outperform the eight-core

01:11:09 ◼   ► Xeon W configuration in the current Mac Pro.

01:11:12 ◼   ► It's an interesting question.

01:11:14 ◼   ► I would think that it would not slow things down because they're serving different purposes

01:11:21 ◼   ► and maybe single core is way better on the non-Pro iMac, but presumably multi-core will

01:11:28 ◼   ► always be way, way, way, way, way better on the iMac Pro.

01:11:32 ◼   ► So I don't think this would be the case,

01:11:34 ◼   ► but I am not terribly confident in my guess here.

01:11:37 ◼   ► Marco, what do you think? - I am terribly confident.

01:11:39 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:11:41 ◼   ► - To me, it's no question.

01:11:42 ◼   ► The iMac Pro, they're not going to hold back

01:11:46 ◼   ► new releases of the regular iMac that outpace

01:11:50 ◼   ► or come close to the iMac Pro's performance in certain ways

01:11:55 ◼   ► due to the progress of the consumer CPUs

01:11:57 ◼   ► versus the progress of the Xeons.

01:11:58 ◼   ► I know this-- - 'Cause they already have 'em.

01:11:59 ◼   ► - Yeah, I know this because not only

01:12:02 ◼   ► is the current iMac faster in single core

01:12:05 ◼   ► than most of the iMac Pro configurations.

01:12:06 ◼   ► - And it will always be, almost.

01:12:08 ◼   ► - Yeah, but also, they already did it once.

01:12:10 ◼   ► The 2013 Mac Pro cylinder that came out

01:12:13 ◼   ► was bested seven months later, or eight months later,

01:12:17 ◼   ► when the iMac 5K came out, and those processors

01:12:19 ◼   ► were faster than in single core.

01:12:21 ◼   ► So they've already done this in the past.

01:12:24 ◼   ► It is currently the case.

01:12:26 ◼   ► They don't let that control them at all.

01:12:28 ◼   ► Apple is confident enough,

01:12:30 ◼   ► and neglectful enough for the Mac Pro.

01:12:32 ◼   ► But they, they are--

01:12:33 ◼   ► - That part helped.

01:12:34 ◼   ► - It's a combination of, you know,

01:12:35 ◼   ► they know that like, iMac Pro buyers

01:12:38 ◼   ► are not going to not buy the iMac Pro in meaningful numbers

01:12:42 ◼   ► because the newest iMac is now slightly faster

01:12:46 ◼   ► in single-threaded tasks.

01:12:47 ◼   ► That's not a major factor for most Pro buyers.

01:12:52 ◼   ► Also, I don't think Apple would care,

01:12:53 ◼   ► and also they, you know,

01:12:57 ◼   ► They would never hold back the release plans of consumer lines in order to favor a Mac

01:13:06 ◼   ► Pro line.

01:13:07 ◼   ► They don't care enough about the Mac Pro to do that most of the time.

01:13:10 ◼   ► - Yeah, and if they had to wait on Xeon timelines, they would never update anything.

01:13:13 ◼   ► It would be ridiculous.

01:13:14 ◼   ► Part of this is Intel, but honestly, the single core differences, it's good for bragging rights

01:13:21 ◼   ► and benchmarks.

01:13:22 ◼   ► You're a few percentage faster.

01:13:24 ◼   ► The multi-core difference when you have 18 cores for a good parallel thing is you're

01:13:29 ◼   ► many times faster.

01:13:31 ◼   ► So it's a difference of minor percentages in bragging rights versus a fundamental change

01:13:38 ◼   ► in your workflow.

01:13:39 ◼   ► Like, if I can do this three times faster, that's why you buy a Pro Mac.

01:13:44 ◼   ► If you want fastest single-core performance, Apple sells you one of those.

01:13:47 ◼   ► Like if that's what you want, like you have some task that you can't make multithreaded

01:13:51 ◼   ► and you want the absolute fastest machine you can do it, Apple will sell you one, but

01:13:56 ◼   ► it's going to make a change in your life that is in single or double digit percentages.

01:14:00 ◼   ► It's not going to be like 500% faster like it might be if you go from a low core count

01:14:07 ◼   ► on a low end iMac to 18 cores on the top end iMac Pro.

01:14:12 ◼   ► So honestly I don't think they really compete with each other.

01:14:15 ◼   ► Now it could be argued that for the people who just want everything all the time, which

01:14:19 ◼   ► we've been so conditioned to expect so little, we're not asking this, but yeah, you can take

01:14:25 ◼   ► one of those Intel CPUs that has the fastest single core performance and wedge it into

01:14:31 ◼   ► an iMac Pro if they make one of those that supports ECC RAM like the i9 or whatever or

01:14:35 ◼   ► something like that.

01:14:36 ◼   ► Like, you could say, "Why won't Apple sell me an iMac Pro with a low core count that

01:14:41 ◼   ► is just as fast as the iMac 5K?"

01:14:45 ◼   ► You know, like, I don't think, again, I don't think there's a demand for that.

01:14:48 ◼   ► Like if you want that, buy a 5K iMac because it's not appreciably different.

01:14:55 ◼   ► You're not getting the big multi-core performance.

01:14:57 ◼   ► The reason it's so fast and single-core is because, well, it's not the Xeon line, so

01:15:02 ◼   ► it's revved more, and because you can go faster when you don't have so many damn cores shoved

01:15:05 ◼   ► inside there.

01:15:06 ◼   ► So it's a long way of answering Eric's question to say they won't hold it back.

01:15:12 ◼   ► Don't worry.

01:15:13 ◼   ► They might not ship new iMacs for other reasons, but believe me, it's not because they're afraid

01:15:17 ◼   ► of stomping on their Pro Max.

01:15:19 ◼   ► All right, Andy Hume writes, "What are John's plans for his cheese grater after he replaces

01:15:24 ◼   ► it?

01:15:25 ◼   ► Sell it?

01:15:26 ◼   ► Donate it to the Hackett collection?"

01:15:27 ◼   ► And I'm going to add my guess, which is it'll go in your attic, never to be seen again.

01:15:31 ◼   ► Yeah, I had a collection before Hackett was in short pants.

01:15:36 ◼   ► Wow.

01:15:37 ◼   ► A giant collection of stuff in my attic that's probably worth remembering.

01:15:41 ◼   ► But I have a half of mine to answer this literally because I actually do have plans for and collections

01:15:49 ◼   ► of actual cheese graters.

01:15:51 ◼   ► Because Oxo used to make a cheese grater that I used to grate parmesan cheese.

01:16:00 ◼   ► There was the one hard cheese grater that I found ergonomically satisfying.

01:16:06 ◼   ► And they stopped making it.

01:16:08 ◼   ► They stopped making it because it had a design flaw.

01:16:11 ◼   ► It had this flappy plastic part of it that would eventually crack.

01:16:16 ◼   ► So I kind of understand why they stopped making it, because it would last a couple years and

01:16:21 ◼   ► then that thing would crack.

01:16:22 ◼   ► So it's like, "Oh, we need to go back to the drawing board," because yeah, this thing is

01:16:25 ◼   ► great, but eventually it cracks.

01:16:27 ◼   ► And the one they replaced it with is terrible.

01:16:30 ◼   ► It is ergonomically bad.

01:16:32 ◼   ► You don't get as much mechanical advantage when compressing the cheese against the grating

01:16:38 ◼   ► part that turns or whatever.

01:16:40 ◼   ► I continue to wish and hope for and have many times thought about trying to tinker my way

01:16:45 ◼   ► into an electric powered one of these because it is difficult to do and tiring and kind

01:16:50 ◼   ► of tedious, if you use as much Parmesan cheese as I do, to constantly have to be grating

01:16:55 ◼   ► it by hand.

01:16:57 ◼   ► You can't really use a food processor or any other things for a variety of other reasons.

01:17:00 ◼   ► You kind of need something that's slow, high torque.

01:17:02 ◼   ► Anyway, I've thought about it a little bit.

01:17:03 ◼   ► But in the meantime, these OXO cheese graters

01:17:05 ◼   ► they don't make anymore.

01:17:07 ◼   ► I think either I or my wife or some combination,

01:17:10 ◼   ► like we waited too long.

01:17:12 ◼   ► We realized, we went to like buy a new one

01:17:14 ◼   ► after one of ours cracked and we're like,

01:17:15 ◼   ► we can't find it anymore.

01:17:16 ◼   ► What happened to it when you found it?

01:17:17 ◼   ► It was discontinued.

01:17:18 ◼   ► And we tried a bunch of other ones and they all sucked.

01:17:20 ◼   ► And it was like, we need to, there's no,

01:17:21 ◼   ► we need to just find every one of these things

01:17:24 ◼   ► that's still for sale.

01:17:24 ◼   ► So I have like a collection of three of them,

01:17:26 ◼   ► I think, in the basement.

01:17:27 ◼   ► My current one is slowly cracking upstairs

01:17:29 ◼   ► in my kitchen right now.

01:17:31 ◼   ► And when I go through those three,

01:17:32 ◼   ► like I don't know what I'm gonna do.

01:17:33 ◼   ► Maybe at that point it's time for me

01:17:35 ◼   ► to build my electric powered one.

01:17:38 ◼   ► But anyway, my plans for my cheese graters are grim.

01:17:40 ◼   ► Like I don't know what I'm gonna do

01:17:41 ◼   ► after I go through all three of them.

01:17:43 ◼   ► But my plan on my Mac Pro is it will go into my attic

01:17:46 ◼   ► alongside its brethren.

01:17:47 ◼   ► Surely it will because this is one of my champion Macs

01:17:50 ◼   ► of all times.

01:17:51 ◼   ► It will have a place of honor next to my SE30.

01:17:53 ◼   ► Wow.

01:17:55 ◼   ► - I never in a million years did I think that

01:17:59 ◼   ► that was where this question was going to end up.

01:18:02 ◼   ► And this is one of the reasons I love this show so damn much

01:18:06 ◼   ► is because that's where we ended up.

01:18:09 ◼   ► Alrighty, and finally, in our diversion into Ask ATP

01:18:13 ◼   ► that's going to make us happy again,

01:18:15 ◼   ► Kurt asks, "Hey, remember messages in iCloud?"

01:18:18 ◼   ► Womp, womp.

01:18:19 ◼   ► - Is this my question?

01:18:21 ◼   ► Like, what's the question?

01:18:22 ◼   ► Yeah, honestly, I almost forgot about it,

01:18:24 ◼   ► but like, yeah, there's no, look, there's no news here.

01:18:28 ◼   ► They announced it, it isn't here, you know.

01:18:31 ◼   ► It probably got delayed until the next OS release.

01:18:34 ◼   ► Oh well.

01:18:35 ◼   ► - I'm not oh well because that was one of the features

01:18:36 ◼   ► I was most looking forward to.

01:18:37 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, I wanted it. - I had it actually,

01:18:38 ◼   ► I had it actually as a topic in the list for a long time

01:18:40 ◼   ► and it kept getting pushed down.

01:18:41 ◼   ► And I wanna say to this question, yeah, I remember it.

01:18:46 ◼   ► I was looking forward to it.

01:18:48 ◼   ► Every time I go to messages and I see a different collection

01:18:50 ◼   ► of messages and a different conversation contents

01:18:53 ◼   ► on my Mac and on my phone that are like sitting two feet

01:18:55 ◼   ► from each other, I think why does this have to be this way?

01:18:58 ◼   ► So I really hope, fine, if it's not done, by all means,

01:19:01 ◼   ► wait until it's done, right?

01:19:02 ◼   ► But I really, really hope

01:19:04 ◼   ► that this feature appears eventually.

01:19:06 ◼   ► - Yeah, me too.

01:19:08 ◼   ► There's a reason why it got a noticeable applause

01:19:11 ◼   ► during the keynote where it was announced last summer.

01:19:13 ◼   ► But it's the kind of thing,

01:19:15 ◼   ► look, if it's not done, don't chip it.

01:19:17 ◼   ► If it's unreliable or if it's broken,

01:19:20 ◼   ► the system we have now is already unreliable and broken.

01:19:22 ◼   ► We don't need it to be broken in new ways.

01:19:24 ◼   ► Let's wait until it works right and then chip it.

01:19:26 ◼   ► I'd rather have it late than wrong.

01:19:31 ◼   ► Well, thanks to our sponsors this week,

01:19:32 ◼   ► Squarespace, Hullo, and RXBar,

01:19:35 ◼   ► and we will see you next week.

01:19:38 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

01:19:40 ◼   ► ♪ Now the show is over ♪

01:19:43 ◼   ► ♪ They didn't even mean to begin ♪

01:19:45 ◼   ► ♪ 'Cause it was accidental ♪

01:19:47 ◼   ► ♪ Accidental ♪

01:19:48 ◼   ► ♪ Oh, it was accidental ♪

01:19:50 ◼   ► ♪ Accidental ♪

01:19:51 ◼   ► ♪ John didn't do any research ♪

01:19:53 ◼   ► ♪ Marco and Casey wouldn't let him ♪

01:19:56 ◼   ► 'Cause it was accidental (accidental)

01:19:58 ◼   ► It was accidental (accidental)

01:20:01 ◼   ► And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm

01:20:06 ◼   ► And if you're into Twitter

01:20:09 ◼   ► You can follow them

01:20:11 ◼   ► @C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:20:15 ◼   ► So that's Casey Liss

01:20:17 ◼   ► M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:20:20 ◼   ► A-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N

01:20:22 ◼   ► S-I-R-A-C

01:20:25 ◼   ► ♪ USIC recuser, it's accidental ♪

01:20:29 ◼   ► ♪ Accidental ♪

01:20:31 ◼   ► ♪ They didn't mean to ♪

01:20:33 ◼   ► ♪ Accidental ♪

01:20:34 ◼   ► ♪ Accidental ♪

01:20:35 ◼   ► ♪ Tech podcast, so long ♪

01:20:39 ◼   ► - So Casey, I have a gift for you.

01:20:43 ◼   ► - Okay.

01:20:44 ◼   ► - I was wondering where, whether to keep this secret,

01:20:48 ◼   ► how long to keep this secret,

01:20:50 ◼   ► but at some point the secret is going to fall out,

01:20:53 ◼   ► so I figured I might as well come clean with you now.

01:20:56 ◼   ► - Oh my God, I think he fired you.

01:20:58 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:21:00 ◼   ► He somehow got you fired from your job, that's his gift.

01:21:02 ◼   ► - That's it, yeah, yeah.

01:21:03 ◼   ► I wrote a note as you to your boss,

01:21:05 ◼   ► filled with profanity.

01:21:08 ◼   ► - Oh, that would be for me, so that doesn't make sense.

01:21:10 ◼   ► - Yeah, actually. (laughing)

01:21:13 ◼   ► Yeah, so my gift to you is revealing the secret.

01:21:17 ◼   ► Tiff got me a vinyl player for Christmas.

01:21:21 ◼   ► A vinyl player.

01:21:24 ◼   ► Is that what you think they're called?

01:21:25 ◼   ► Oh my god.

01:21:26 ◼   ► You might need to look at the box again.

01:21:27 ◼   ► Oh, a turntable.

01:21:28 ◼   ► Oh my god.

01:21:29 ◼   ► They're definitely not called vinyl players, I can tell you that.

01:21:32 ◼   ► This is the best.

01:21:33 ◼   ► This is the best moment of my life right now.

01:21:36 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:21:37 ◼   ► I figured you could use a gift after your probably sleepless week.

01:21:40 ◼   ► Alright, so can you give me context for this?

01:21:44 ◼   ► Like is she buying it for you as a joke?

01:21:47 ◼   ► Is it something that you mentioned you wanted?

01:21:48 ◼   ► Is it something that she wanted and is passing it off as a gift to you but really she wants

01:21:53 ◼   ► it?

01:21:54 ◼   ► Is this her bowling ball?

01:21:56 ◼   ► So we've had the Hello Internet episode of vinyl sitting on the floor of my office for

01:22:03 ◼   ► like two years or however long it's been since it came out.

01:22:06 ◼   ► Does she know she can make a player out of a cone of paper and a needle?

01:22:11 ◼   ► I did not know that actually.

01:22:12 ◼   ► I guess that makes sense.

01:22:13 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

01:22:14 ◼   ► Anyway.

01:22:15 ◼   ► - She got me a turntable so that we could play

01:22:19 ◼   ► the Hello Internet vinyl.

01:22:21 ◼   ► - I have a turntable and I have that particular record.

01:22:25 ◼   ► - No spoilers, we haven't played it yet.

01:22:27 ◼   ► - No, I haven't either.

01:22:28 ◼   ► I've had it for forever and I still haven't had

01:22:30 ◼   ► a chance to play it, so I'm right there with you.

01:22:31 ◼   ► But that's awesome.

01:22:33 ◼   ► So I need to start sending you actual good music

01:22:37 ◼   ► and thus not fish post-haste.

01:22:39 ◼   ► - Well, and she also got me a fish album.

01:22:41 ◼   ► She got me a live one, which is great.

01:22:44 ◼   ► - Giveth and taketh away.

01:22:46 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:22:48 ◼   ► - So I actually decided, you know,

01:22:51 ◼   ► 'cause also over the holidays,

01:22:54 ◼   ► we visited Mike and Adina, and they had a turntable,

01:22:58 ◼   ► and they were playing music on it

01:23:01 ◼   ► during our entire meal there,

01:23:04 ◼   ► and it was really nice to just kinda be hanging out

01:23:09 ◼   ► and to have music playing.

01:23:10 ◼   ► Now--

01:23:10 ◼   ► - You can't do that without vinyl, that's for sure.

01:23:13 ◼   ► - Right, and so it was nice though,

01:23:16 ◼   ► and so I figured, okay, let's, I'll try this on.

01:23:19 ◼   ► Like, you know, it's like trying on a new style of hat

01:23:22 ◼   ► or something, it's like, here's something that like,

01:23:25 ◼   ► the hit people are doing, I don't know if this is my thing,

01:23:29 ◼   ► but I'll try it on, you know, and so I tried it on,

01:23:32 ◼   ► and so I have a couple of albums, you know,

01:23:35 ◼   ► also by the way, boy do I suck at buying vinyl.

01:23:40 ◼   ► There's a lot of albums that are available on vinyl,

01:23:43 ◼   ► with modern albums, besides the ones that were

01:23:45 ◼   ► originally issued on vinyl in the 60s and stuff.

01:23:48 ◼   ► But there's a lot of modern albums and reissues

01:23:52 ◼   ► from the 90s and stuff that have been reissued now

01:23:55 ◼   ► on vinyl now that it's a growth business

01:23:57 ◼   ► that you can charge people $25 for the same album

01:24:00 ◼   ► they bought 20 years ago.

01:24:01 ◼   ► Most of them that I have found,

01:24:04 ◼   ► about half of the ones I have found,

01:24:06 ◼   ► I have accidentally bought them where it's like

01:24:08 ◼   ► they split what was one CD onto two records.

01:24:12 ◼   ► And so each side of each record has three or two songs on it

01:24:19 ◼   ► followed by this giant wide strip of black silence

01:24:23 ◼   ► in the middle.

01:24:25 ◼   ► - Oh, Marco.

01:24:25 ◼   ► - Didn't you have a record player as a kid, though?

01:24:27 ◼   ► - Yes, so this is, like, I know how to use them.

01:24:30 ◼   ► - You don't remember, like, you don't remember

01:24:32 ◼   ► one of the things about CDs being its capacity

01:24:35 ◼   ► for, like, how many minutes of audio you can have on it

01:24:38 ◼   ► with the compromises about the inner and outer tracks,

01:24:40 ◼   ► like that those things were gone,

01:24:42 ◼   ► like that was one of the innovations of CDs.

01:24:44 ◼   ► - Oh my God, I just figured it out.

01:24:46 ◼   ► Yeah, 'cause the outer tracks will rotate more

01:24:49 ◼   ► so they'll have more fidelity.

01:24:50 ◼   ► Oh, that's why they do it.

01:24:52 ◼   ► - Vinyl is a (beep) show.

01:24:53 ◼   ► - Oh, that's those (beep)

01:24:55 ◼   ► All right.

01:24:56 ◼   ► - Did you just say vinyl is a (beep) show?

01:24:58 ◼   ► - It is.

01:24:59 ◼   ► - I was trying to think of a way to say it without cursing,

01:25:01 ◼   ► but I just said it's the after show, whatever.

01:25:03 ◼   ► - So like, so let me tell you my annoyances first,

01:25:06 ◼   ► then I'll get into some things I actually like about it.

01:25:09 ◼   ► Yeah, so many, I bought albums thinking like,

01:25:13 ◼   ► oh, I love this album, it's good,

01:25:15 ◼   ► 'cause my criteria is obviously things

01:25:18 ◼   ► that I want to play out loud with other people around

01:25:23 ◼   ► that I wouldn't be embarrassed by,

01:25:24 ◼   ► the whole album has to be good all the way through

01:25:27 ◼   ► 'cause skipping songs is not really an easy thing.

01:25:29 ◼   ► - Oh, it's not bad.

01:25:30 ◼   ► I understand your point, but it's not bad.

01:25:32 ◼   ► - So anyway, and I had to get a photo preamp,

01:25:35 ◼   ► So I got of course the one from (bleep)

01:25:38 ◼   ► - I forget it out.

01:25:38 ◼   ► All right, this record player is just a way for Marco

01:25:40 ◼   ► to buy more amps and other German boxes with vulgar names.

01:25:44 ◼   ► - One box, a phono preamp,

01:25:46 ◼   ► because the turntable did not have a built-in preamp.

01:25:48 ◼   ► Okay, so first of all, I'm like,

01:25:50 ◼   ► I kind of set everything up,

01:25:52 ◼   ► and there's just constant low-level noise

01:25:56 ◼   ► coming out of the speaker,

01:25:57 ◼   ► and I'm like, well, something's wrong.

01:25:59 ◼   ► - Feels warm, doesn't it?

01:26:00 ◼   ► - Yeah, so it's like, I got a ground loop isolator.

01:26:03 ◼   ► I tried that.

01:26:04 ◼   ► like a power isolating brick.

01:26:05 ◼   ► I tried different cables in case the cables

01:26:08 ◼   ► were introducing interference.

01:26:09 ◼   ► Everything's analog, so everything can introduce

01:26:11 ◼   ► interference in an all analog signal path.

01:26:14 ◼   ► Tried lots of things, isolated lots of things,

01:26:16 ◼   ► and it turns out, yeah, that's just the noise floor

01:26:18 ◼   ► of this cartridge or whatever.

01:26:20 ◼   ► There's no, it isn't a ground loop.

01:26:22 ◼   ► It isn't electrical interference.

01:26:24 ◼   ► It's just like, yeah, just the noise floor isn't that low.

01:26:28 ◼   ► (laughs)

01:26:30 ◼   ► And definitely, my least favorite thing about playing them

01:26:35 ◼   ► is how often you have to flip it over,

01:26:39 ◼   ► because each side holds, I think, a maximum

01:26:41 ◼   ► of something like 22 minutes or 20 minutes,

01:26:43 ◼   ► something like that.

01:26:44 ◼   ► Do you know the exact number, Jon?

01:26:45 ◼   ► - No, I don't remember from my youth,

01:26:47 ◼   ► but I surely do remember flipping.

01:26:49 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly.

01:26:50 ◼   ► So you have to flip 'em every four or five songs, basically,

01:26:53 ◼   ► unless you have one of these stupid audio file ones

01:26:57 ◼   ► that I accidentally bought,

01:26:58 ◼   ► where it's like you take one album, split it onto four,

01:27:00 ◼   ► and you're gonna flip it every two songs.

01:27:02 ◼   ► Thanks a lot.

01:27:04 ◼   ► Anyway, I will say in this endeavor,

01:27:08 ◼   ► there are things that I unexpectedly like about it.

01:27:12 ◼   ► The best metaphor I've come up with for this is

01:27:18 ◼   ► it's kind of like a Kindle is for reading.

01:27:21 ◼   ► Like, a Kindle does not look as good

01:27:25 ◼   ► as an iPad or a printed page.

01:27:27 ◼   ► Like the resolution of the text is nowhere near it,

01:27:30 ◼   ► even on the new Kindles with the higher resolution screens,

01:27:32 ◼   ► it's nowhere close to either print

01:27:34 ◼   ► or even retina screens on an iPad Pro.

01:27:36 ◼   ► Like a Kindle by all accounts looks worse.

01:27:40 ◼   ► It also does less and functions worse in a number of ways

01:27:45 ◼   ► than other ways to read books.

01:27:47 ◼   ► But the appeal of Kindles is that they can do nothing else.

01:27:53 ◼   ► So it kind of helps you appreciate the book more

01:27:58 ◼   ► that if you're using this device to read books,

01:28:02 ◼   ► that's all you're doing.

01:28:04 ◼   ► You kind of have to put some effort into it.

01:28:07 ◼   ► That's all you're doing.

01:28:08 ◼   ► It's not going to ever do anything else.

01:28:09 ◼   ► It's very simple, et cetera.

01:28:11 ◼   ► Playing music on vinyl is a pain in the (bleep)

01:28:16 ◼   ► but it's a way to deliberately sit down

01:28:21 ◼   ► and choose to enjoy an album.

01:28:24 ◼   ► And this works especially for me

01:28:26 ◼   ► because I've always been an album listener.

01:28:29 ◼   ► Even when I listen to MP3s and everything,

01:28:32 ◼   ► I don't listen on Shuffle to my whole collection or anything

01:28:34 ◼   ► I don't make playlists, I listen to albums

01:28:37 ◼   ► all the way through.

01:28:38 ◼   ► That's how I've always listened for like the last 20 years.

01:28:41 ◼   ► Like that's just how I listen to music.

01:28:43 ◼   ► And I've joked to Tiff like,

01:28:44 ◼   ► "Oh, we could have just gotten a CD player."

01:28:45 ◼   ► (laughs)

01:28:46 ◼   ► Or like an iPod.

01:28:47 ◼   ► - I was gonna say, there are other devices you can buy

01:28:51 ◼   ► that only play music.

01:28:52 ◼   ► - I know, I know.

01:28:53 ◼   ► But I'm saying like, you know,

01:28:55 ◼   ► this is a pain in the (beep)

01:28:57 ◼   ► and it's a novelty and it's, you know,

01:29:00 ◼   ► I don't expect to be playing vinyl forever

01:29:02 ◼   ► and it doesn't sound better.

01:29:03 ◼   ► It sounds worse.

01:29:04 ◼   ► Notes will be worse.

01:29:04 ◼   ► You know, I'm not, my making fun of Casey in the past

01:29:09 ◼   ► on vinyl is that, you know,

01:29:10 ◼   ► I don't mind when people say they enjoy it more.

01:29:12 ◼   ► I do mind when people say it sounds better

01:29:13 ◼   ► 'cause it doesn't and it can't and it never will.

01:29:16 ◼   ► But I do appreciate the activity of playing music on vinyl now in a way I didn't appreciate

01:29:26 ◼   ► before.

01:29:27 ◼   ► So that is my gift to you, Casey.

01:29:30 ◼   ► You need to get one of those—I don't know if they make these, but like, I don't know

01:29:33 ◼   ► what the best analogy is—but like, one of these things you use for like pets or animals,

01:29:36 ◼   ► where like, it looks like a record player, and you put a record on it, and you put the

01:29:41 ◼   ► little needle in, and you hear the little crackle, but then what actually happens is

01:29:45 ◼   ► behind the scenes it plays just you know a digital audio file that is exactly

01:29:50 ◼   ► equivalent to whatever record you put on there so you can get the audio quality

01:29:54 ◼   ► you want with all the other stuff that you want from it like so you get you get

01:29:58 ◼   ► all the ceremony of doing it held make the make the digital audio file stop and

01:30:01 ◼   ► make you flip the disk before it plays the next two tracks right I've actually

01:30:05 ◼   ► been scheming like I wonder if I could get a Raspberry Pi or something next to

01:30:09 ◼   ► the record player and just put an SD card in and have like have cheap SD

01:30:13 ◼   ► cards in the pocket of each vinyl cover and just like stick it in there.

01:30:18 ◼   ► Mm-hmm. The music. So you just, you just, what you just want to do is put a plastic

01:30:21 ◼   ► disc on something and drop a needle on it. That's what you want to happen. And then

01:30:24 ◼   ► you just want music to play. But the music doesn't have to come from that thing.

01:30:27 ◼   ► Yeah. It's, anyway.

01:30:29 ◼   ► Well, so you didn't, you didn't adequately explain to me, I guess it was, was it just

01:30:34 ◼   ► the Hello, Intern? And that's like literally it? Or just Tiff actually, was Tiff actually

01:30:38 ◼   ► convinced by the, the moon hipsters from London that this is a thing that you have to do to

01:30:42 ◼   ► regain your youth and coolness? I think some of both, certainly. And you know,

01:30:46 ◼   ► it's a cool thing. It's a really nicely designed object. Like, it's a nice

01:30:49 ◼   ► like hipster turntable. It's like this like, you know, minimal visual

01:30:53 ◼   ► design thing made of wood. Like, it's really nice looking. So, I think it's a

01:30:58 ◼   ► combination of all those things. Well, I'm very disappointed in you, Marco. Oh, yeah.

01:31:01 ◼   ► I'm very disappointed in Mike and Adina, but, you know, they're young. So, next

01:31:09 ◼   ► - I'll buy an SACD player maybe,

01:31:12 ◼   ► and I'll tell you how that goes.

01:31:13 ◼   ► - Oh no, I would not be, I would say, there you go.

01:31:16 ◼   ► Now you're on the right track.

01:31:17 ◼   ► You gotta get an Akimichi stereo,

01:31:18 ◼   ► and a Super Audio CD player, and what was the other one?

01:31:21 ◼   ► DVD audio, DVDA?

01:31:23 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think that's dead, I think SACD.

01:31:25 ◼   ► I mean, both formats never went.

01:31:26 ◼   ► - They still make SACD?

01:31:28 ◼   ► - Well, you can get, if you get a Sony Blu-ray player,

01:31:32 ◼   ► it will, they're almost all also SACD players.

01:31:35 ◼   ► So I could get a Sony 4K Blu,

01:31:37 ◼   ► 'cause I was thinking like maybe I should get

01:31:38 ◼   ► a 4K Blu-ray player.

01:31:40 ◼   ► - There you go, 4K TV now.

01:31:41 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly, so I could also--

01:31:43 ◼   ► - You can think of the ceremony of the Blu-ray

01:31:45 ◼   ► as you wait for Java to load the stupid menus.

01:31:47 ◼   ► That's all part of the ceremony, Marco.

01:31:48 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:31:49 ◼   ► - Oh, no worries.

01:31:50 ◼   ► - I'm very, I wanna be very clear here.

01:31:53 ◼   ► I don't give two craps about the ceremony.

01:31:55 ◼   ► I appreciate the idea of sitting down

01:31:59 ◼   ► to deliberately and only listen to music,

01:32:02 ◼   ► like to just enjoy the music that is playing

01:32:05 ◼   ► and not have it be part of a whole separate

01:32:09 ◼   ► like computing experience and multimedia device

01:32:12 ◼   ► and everything, like it's hard--

01:32:14 ◼   ► - You could just get a CD player.

01:32:15 ◼   ► I'm not convinced you don't care about the ceremony.

01:32:19 ◼   ► - I don't care about the ceremony.

01:32:20 ◼   ► - I'm not convinced.

01:32:21 ◼   ► - And just give me a few more days of flipping these disks

01:32:24 ◼   ► and believe me, I--

01:32:25 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:32:27 ◼   ► - You know what else you can do with records

01:32:28 ◼   ► that you might remember from your youth?

01:32:29 ◼   ► They shatter real good when you have fights with them.

01:32:31 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:32:32 ◼   ► - Well it's also, it's kinda cool too,

01:32:34 ◼   ► First of all, like the services,

01:32:36 ◼   ► like I've been buying most of them on Amazon,

01:32:40 ◼   ► the ones that are still in print at least.

01:32:42 ◼   ► And it's cool 'cause like they include a digital copy.

01:32:46 ◼   ► If you buy vinyl on Amazon, it automatically adds

01:32:49 ◼   ► that album to your music collection.

01:32:51 ◼   ► - That is the most millennial hipster thing

01:32:53 ◼   ► I've ever heard in my life.

01:32:55 ◼   ► - Well, and so-- - You buy a record

01:32:57 ◼   ► and it comes with the--

01:32:58 ◼   ► - Yeah, oh yeah.

01:32:59 ◼   ► Some of the ones I've bought have the CD

01:33:02 ◼   ► in a paper sleeve inside the vinyl.

01:33:04 ◼   ► Like it comes with a free CD. - What?

01:33:05 ◼   ► I've never seen that.

01:33:07 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think the Nickel Creek one I bought,

01:33:09 ◼   ► I think has that.

01:33:10 ◼   ► - Oh, great band, great, great band.

01:33:11 ◼   ► - I know, yeah. (laughs)

01:33:13 ◼   ► If you buy the one with the corn song,

01:33:16 ◼   ► the Elephant in the Corn, whatever,

01:33:17 ◼   ► the album that has that on it, it comes with that.

01:33:20 ◼   ► - You know how they make like USB thumb drives

01:33:23 ◼   ► out of all sorts of things,

01:33:24 ◼   ► and they need to come out with a vinyl album

01:33:28 ◼   ► that is itself actually an SD card.

01:33:30 ◼   ► Like it's an SD card with a huge circular grooved handle.

01:33:34 ◼   ► That is a record, but really this is a giant SD card.

01:33:38 ◼   ► - Yeah, so anyway, yeah, and it's,

01:33:41 ◼   ► I again, it's, I know it's ridiculous,

01:33:44 ◼   ► and it does not sound better,

01:33:47 ◼   ► and it's a bit of a pain in the ass,

01:33:48 ◼   ► but it is kind of fun.

01:33:49 ◼   ► I also, I kind of like having the giant album art.

01:33:53 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:33:53 ◼   ► Like, this is like the original album art.

01:33:56 ◼   ► - That's what you should be buying.

01:33:57 ◼   ► You should just be buying record sleeves

01:33:58 ◼   ► and putting them on your wall is art.

01:34:01 ◼   ► Don't listen to them, look at them.

01:34:02 ◼   ► - That's actually not a bad idea.

01:34:03 ◼   ► (laughs)

01:34:05 ◼   ► We'll get there.

01:34:05 ◼   ► - I used to have long boxes on my wall

01:34:07 ◼   ► when CDs came out as a replacement of like,

01:34:11 ◼   ► because I was kind of disappointed that album,

01:34:12 ◼   ► like the album art went away.

01:34:14 ◼   ► It's like, well, they got these long boxes,

01:34:15 ◼   ► so I guess it's all like, and then those went away too.

01:34:18 ◼   ► - Well, I for one am happy that you've discovered

01:34:21 ◼   ► that sometimes I say things that are not completely insane.

01:34:24 ◼   ► Turns out, I know it's weird, but it does happen.

01:34:28 ◼   ► - Look, it wasn't the same when you said it sounded better.

01:34:31 ◼   ► That was definitely insane.

01:34:32 ◼   ► It does not sound better.

01:34:33 ◼   ► - Well, I'm excited.

01:34:34 ◼   ► I applaud Tiff's purchase for you.

01:34:37 ◼   ► I applaud you realizing that something

01:34:40 ◼   ► I've known for most of my life and older,

01:34:44 ◼   ► people older than us have known for their entire lives,

01:34:47 ◼   ► basically, that hey, it's not so bad.

01:34:49 ◼   ► And you know what?

01:34:50 ◼   ► In the grand scheme of things,

01:34:51 ◼   ► as a man who likes wristwatches based out of 1812,

01:34:55 ◼   ► I'm not entirely surprised that you like

01:34:56 ◼   ► an audio playback system that is also based out of 1812.

01:35:01 ◼   ► So as time goes on and as you get older,

01:35:04 ◼   ► so does your technological preferences.

01:35:09 ◼   ► And so this is just the next step in the way.

01:35:11 ◼   ► Then you have a beard now, I mean,

01:35:12 ◼   ► you just need some flannel. - That's true,

01:35:13 ◼   ► I do have the beard.

01:35:14 ◼   ► - I mean, you're really getting clean.

01:35:16 ◼   ► You need flannel and skinny jeans

01:35:17 ◼   ► and you'll be full hipster.

01:35:19 ◼   ► - Yeah, I'm not actually skinny though, that's the problem.

01:35:22 ◼   ► - Does that matter?

01:35:22 ◼   ► - I'm not saying, you're trying to recapture your youth,

01:35:24 ◼   ► you're not actually in your youth.

01:35:26 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:35:27 ◼   ► - Oh, that is a good gif, though.

01:35:29 ◼   ► - Surprised gif.

01:35:30 ◼   ► - God damn it, Sean.

01:35:31 ◼   ► (beeping)