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143: Capital F, Capital C

 

00:00:00   I also like the idea of titles that make people not want to listen.

00:00:03   You know what?

00:00:04   You don't want to listen?

00:00:05   Fine!

00:00:06   Capital F, capital C, that's what you get.

00:00:07   It's obscure.

00:00:08   It's for the connoisseur, man.

00:00:10   Alright, anyway, first item of follow-up, the most followed-up item last week was both

00:00:18   Marco's description and my reinforcement of the idea that if you lose the tiny little

00:00:23   Apple remote in your couch cushions or it's just dark and it's somewhere on your couch

00:00:26   on the arm of your couch or on a coffee table and you go reaching for it and you feel around

00:00:31   to try to find it and you accidentally swipe your fingers across touchpad while you're

00:00:35   watching video that will move the playhead on the video.

00:00:38   And many many people were going to tell us that if you hit the menu button it would just

00:00:42   go back to where it was.

00:00:44   When you move the playhead it doesn't actually start playing again until you tell it to play

00:00:48   but then you're still kind of faced with the situation of "oh well how do I get the playhead

00:00:51   back to where I want to put it?"

00:00:52   I don't think you even have to put it back first of all but second of all if you accidentally

00:00:56   do that if you're reaching to the remote and you swipe your hands across touchpad and it

00:01:00   moves the playhead somewhere just hit the menu button and it will go back to where it

00:01:03   was.

00:01:04   I think you can probably also just hit, well maybe you can't hit play.

00:01:06   Anyway, menu button, the largest followed up item.

00:01:09   I didn't know that in my one hour of using it but since then I have used it and it works.

00:01:15   Have you used Plex yet?

00:01:16   I haven't, I keep meaning to install that.

00:01:18   I haven't installed it.

00:01:19   And the thing that keeps me away from Plex, I went through this big long painful experience

00:01:22   to install it on my PS4 and then was disappointed in the client.

00:01:26   The main thing that keeps me from installing it is my Plex server would be my Synology,

00:01:30   but I use the DS video server instead, and the kids use the DS video server.

00:01:34   Like you can play video from it from my television from ten different places.

00:01:39   And I think, I don't like to mess with that setup, because I think by enabling Plex there's

00:01:44   a potential that I could screw up my existing video thing, or maybe it'll show up as two

00:01:47   DLNA servers.

00:01:48   I don't know.

00:01:49   Anyway.

00:01:50   two DLNA servers because my dad uses DLNA and he has Plex running, I believe hosted

00:01:56   on the Synology of Memory Serves, and there are two separate DLNA servers for sure.

00:02:01   Yeah, so I'm always just afraid to touch what works, especially if it involves things

00:02:05   that my kids are using, but I will eventually try.

00:02:07   Really you should get yours first and try it and tell me about it.

00:02:11   Right.

00:02:12   Let's, we'll figure that out.

00:02:14   At some point maybe, I'm sure I'm going to get one.

00:02:16   It's just, haven't done it yet, trying to hold out, trying to wait for the holidays,

00:02:20   probably won't work, we'll see.

00:02:22   What did your kids say about the remote?

00:02:25   - This I thought was interesting

00:02:26   because I've seen a lot of things about the Apple TV

00:02:30   or about just technology in general

00:02:32   where it's like we old people don't understand it

00:02:35   and only the kids truly understand it.

00:02:38   And I thought one of my kids' reaction

00:02:40   to the new remote was interesting.

00:02:43   They're used to having lots of different remotes

00:02:47   'cause I don't have a universal remote,

00:02:49   I have a bunch of different remotes.

00:02:50   They have learned more or less to navigate my crazy television setup to get what they

00:02:54   want on the television.

00:02:55   They're not really that into it.

00:02:57   They don't want to know how it works.

00:02:58   They just want to know the minimum possible to get it to work.

00:03:01   Anyway, I said, "Here, here's the new Apple TV."

00:03:03   And I showed it to them and we were watching some video and at some point they wanted to

00:03:06   watch a video by themselves.

00:03:08   And I said, "Oh, just use the new Apple TV."

00:03:09   And they didn't know what the remote looked like because they're used to the TiVo remote.

00:03:12   Anyway, I gave them the remote and showed it to them.

00:03:15   And immediately, this is my daughter.

00:03:18   She was super angry that this remote did not work like the other one.

00:03:21   She was just trying to navigate the grid of items to, you know, go up and to the left.

00:03:25   And I was like, all right, go over to Netflix.

00:03:27   Why she was watching Netflix, now everyone knows she knows how to do it from the T-02.

00:03:30   But anyway, just moving the sort of selection to the Netflix icon on the main screen using

00:03:36   the touch pad did not, was not immediately apparent how that worked, even though I kept

00:03:40   showing her swipe your thumb left or right or tap or whatever.

00:03:43   And she got so angry, she was like, why can't it just be buttons?

00:03:45   I just want to go up and left.

00:03:47   She was just so angry that it didn't work the way the other one did because she was competent with the other one

00:03:51   She knows how to go again. It was a TiVo remote not the little Apple thing

00:03:54   She knows how to go up up left left and then hit the button in the middle to select and this tiny little remote

00:03:59   Was thwarting or it had taken away her skill and made her back into a novice and that is a phenomenon that we're all very

00:04:06   familiar with in the adult world or the world of people who aren't in elementary school anyway

00:04:11   where they have a set of computer skills that have been built up over many years and

00:04:16   The the introduction of anything new even if the new thing is better is seen as a threat or as a bad thing

00:04:22   Because it puts them back into the role of novice. They know how to use the old system

00:04:27   They know how to use

00:04:28   You know a particular interface or a piece of hardware or a piece of software or whatever and that expert they start that expertise starts

00:04:34   To feel like they start to internalize that as like I am a competent person. I know how to do this job

00:04:39   I can't whatever whatever task I need to accomplish I can accomplish it and I use it and any tool you give them even if

00:04:44   the tool is actually better once you learn it, because it makes them feel like they can

00:04:47   no longer do the task they could previously do, that tool is bad. And it was amazing to

00:04:51   me to see that happen in an eight-year-old. You know, it's not—we're not that different,

00:04:57   you and I, the old people and the young people. Even an eight-year-old can be super angry

00:05:01   that her hard-earned skills of using the directional pad and the select button on a T-bar remote

00:05:07   can be erased in a moment by new technology. Anyway, she's used to it now. It's fine.

00:05:11   Just like that.

00:05:12   All is right in the world.

00:05:13   Well, yeah, I mean, you know, she's eight.

00:05:14   It takes three seconds.

00:05:15   You learn how to do it.

00:05:16   It's like she was still angry about it for that day, but now she's over it.

00:05:19   Oh, goodness gracious.

00:05:21   All right, any other follow-up, or are we already done?

00:05:23   If we are done, that is world record follow-up.

00:05:26   I'm very proud of us.

00:05:27   I think Marco's been doing more Apple TV gaming.

00:05:30   Do you have anything more to add on it?

00:05:32   Yeah, so basically what happened between last show and this show is that my family discovered

00:05:38   that the Apple TV can in fact be a good gaming system because we discovered the game that

00:05:42   everybody else discovered two years ago, Badland. This was especially good because none of us

00:05:47   had actually played it on iOS, so it was all new to us. Badland is a fantastic game for

00:05:52   the Apple TV.

00:05:53   I don't think I've ever even heard of this.

00:05:55   So it's kind of like the art style, almost of limbo but with color, and it's this kind

00:06:02   of intricate, really fancied up version of the basic gameplay mechanic of Flappy Bird.

00:06:09   And this is really minimizing its goodness, but it's like, so you know, you are this bird

00:06:13   and you like, you push the button to go up and you let go of the button to fall and you

00:06:18   know, just like this kind of inertia based flying game. And you just fly through these

00:06:21   side scrolling levels and there's all sorts of different obstacles and things that you,

00:06:26   you know, things you pick up to change, the behavior of things and you multiply and divide,

00:06:31   It's crazy.

00:06:33   It's just a really, really good game and it is incredibly good even on the Siri remote.

00:06:39   We've actually tried it with the gamepad and with the Siri remote and we actually find

00:06:42   it's better with the Siri remote and I can't explain why.

00:06:45   I don't know why.

00:06:46   Is it tap to click or is it click to click?

00:06:48   You have to actually click the button and it doesn't just tap.

00:06:51   But again, it doesn't make sense.

00:06:52   I don't know why it's better but for some reason it just feels better.

00:06:55   It feels right on the Siri remote.

00:06:57   Well, doesn't it feel weird to hold a traditional console style controller in two hands and

00:07:02   the only thing you're doing with it is pressing one button with one thumb?

00:07:05   Maybe. That might be it. So anyway, it really is a fantastic game. I highly recommend it

00:07:11   for any Apple TV owner. It's accessible, like, you know, kids can play it, adults can

00:07:16   play it, non-gamers can play it. It is really a very nice, well-done game. I think it's

00:07:21   like five bucks. Who cares? Just get it. Like, it's really good. By far, the best Apple

00:07:27   TV gaming experience that we've had so far.

00:07:29   Interesting. This looks aesthetically, just reading the, um, or excuse me, not reading,

00:07:35   but watching the little video on their website, this looks aesthetically a lot like World

00:07:39   of Goo to me. Did either of you play that?

00:07:41   Yeah, it's, yeah, and I, honestly, I wouldn't expect World of Goo to work because of the

00:07:45   lack of a pointer, but it is kind of in that, in a similar art style, or maybe that was

00:07:51   one of the influences on it. Certainly, it's just a, it's a gorgeous, you know, artistic

00:07:56   design game. It's really, really -- and it's kind of funny, it's kind of sick, like, it's

00:08:01   really good. Just get Badland. There aren't that many things you can do in the Apple TV

00:08:05   that are really excellent right now, because we're just waiting on a lot of software to

00:08:09   get ported or written for it. This is one of those things. This highly recommended Badland.

00:08:14   >> There's another one of those one-button-press games.

00:08:17   >> Yes.

00:08:18   >> Because, you know, and designed for -- I'm assuming this was designed for touch originally,

00:08:21   but it lends itself well, because you are forced to go forward. Like, there is no move

00:08:26   forward thing, like isn't going forward, isn't that like part of the the gameplay itself, and that

00:08:30   the screen moves on whether you're ready or not, so if you have to backtrack or something to get

00:08:34   around an obstacle and the screen is moving on, tough luck, right? Yeah, exactly. And so this is

00:08:40   a type of game that I think traditional gamers who are used to having more control over their

00:08:45   environment might find off-putting, but is ideal for the phone where you don't want to make someone

00:08:50   try to use a virtual d-pad, and now on the Apple TV where we actually have a real d-ish pad or

00:08:55   or whatever. If you just want to use the remote, hey, we already have a game already tuned

00:08:59   for single button press and now that button doesn't even block any of the screen. So,

00:09:03   an ideal Apple TV port.

00:09:05   - Yeah, and it's, you know, it's watchable by people, like it's fun to watch someone

00:09:08   playing it. Nothing about it needs to be on a personal device that's only in your hands.

00:09:16   You know, it really is very much like a TV friendly, family friendly, general audience

00:09:22   kind of game. It's just really good. Highly recommended. I also tried Provenance more

00:09:27   this week. So the provenance is that emulator, so you can't actually get it on the app store.

00:09:31   It's one of those, it's one of the relatively few apps I think that is published with the

00:09:36   intention of everybody, it's open source and to install it you have to download the source

00:09:42   code, register for an Apple developer account, have Xcode build the game and connect your

00:09:49   TV via USB to your computer and have Xcode install the game onto your Apple TV with provisioning

00:09:55   profiles generated from your developer account.

00:09:57   My goodness.

00:09:58   It is definitely not something that you can just like tell a non-developer to just go

00:10:04   do this and expect them to figure it out. They might, but the chances are not great.

00:10:10   So it is very much a cumbersome process. I know Flux, the F.lux, that I believe just

00:10:17   came out with something similar for iPhones and iPads

00:10:20   where they had this open source version

00:10:23   that they just say here you can side load this

00:10:26   with Xcode and a developer account

00:10:28   if you want this on your device without jailbreak

00:10:30   and something like that.

00:10:31   So it's a pretty cumbersome process

00:10:35   and then it's nerdy, then you have to like

00:10:37   tell it to import your ROMs

00:10:39   that you wanna play in the emulator

00:10:40   and then it like creates a web interface

00:10:43   and you have to like go from your Mac and upload them

00:10:46   So it's definitely a little bit cumbersome to get set up.

00:10:49   But when it is set up, you have an emulator on your Apple TV.

00:10:52   And it covers all the popular 8 and 16-bit systems.

00:10:55   It doesn't go into-- like, it doesn't have N64 or anything

00:10:59   more advanced.

00:11:00   I think it stops at, like, Super Nintendo and Genesis level.

00:11:03   But it is really quite good.

00:11:06   I've played better emulators.

00:11:08   If you have a computer with a game pad on your computer,

00:11:11   you can do a lot better.

00:11:12   Because like, Providence, it lacks

00:11:14   a lot of customizable control that a lot of emulators have. You can't, for example, customize

00:11:19   the controls. So if you don't like how they map the buttons onto the gamepad, tough luck.

00:11:24   Oh, I guess you have the source code. I guess you could change it. But I am a developer

00:11:30   and I wouldn't bother doing that. They also don't appear to have any of the really nice

00:11:35   scaling modes. So like, you know, all these old games, they were made for much lower resolution

00:11:39   screens and if you run them on a modern emulator, you get all these like fancy, like the 2x

00:11:44   AI and Super Eagle, like all these fancy scaling up modes to make the graphics look better

00:11:49   on higher resolution larger screens that we have these days. And so that is not present

00:11:55   on this. So you're just looking at like a pixel quadrupled version of the game or whatever,

00:12:00   you know, just scale it up like in the dumbest way possible, scale it up to the big screen.

00:12:06   So it doesn't look great, but you know, it looks no worse than the original system did.

00:12:11   So overall, it's fun.

00:12:12   It's a fun way to get a whole bunch of games on an Apple TV

00:12:15   if you have a game pad.

00:12:16   Don't even bother if you have the Siri remote.

00:12:18   Just don't bother.

00:12:19   But if you have a game pad, check out Provenance.

00:12:21   Oh, if you have a game pad and an Apple TV

00:12:24   and you're a developer and you have a USB CD, USB cable.

00:12:28   - And you have a bunch of backups of your old video games.

00:12:31   - Yes, and if you have legally obtained backups from,

00:12:35   I don't even know what hardware that would be

00:12:37   to create those, if you have all of those,

00:12:40   which are really small. It's funny, like, I loaded up every game I wanted from Genesis,

00:12:48   Super Nintendo, and NES, and even Sega Master System, and these games are like a few hundred

00:12:52   kilobytes each. Like, I played through Sonic 1, which by the way, Sonic 1 is a hard game.

00:13:00   I used to be a lot better at Sonic than I am now. Wow. When it turns out we don't play

00:13:05   games for like a decade, it really impacts your ability to play them. I almost got a

00:13:10   the game over in labyrinth zone, that's how bad it was. I died in marble hill zone, I

00:13:14   mean that's, this is how bad I've gotten. So I played through that and it's like you

00:13:18   know a few hundred kilobytes. So it's a quick, it's a great way if you are this geeky to

00:13:21   set this kind of thing up, it is a really cool thing to do for a little while at least.

00:13:27   That being said, overall I am, so now that I've had good game experiences on the Apple

00:13:33   TV, I am more optimistic for its future, but it's going to depend a lot on how many people

00:13:39   actually buy these game controllers and then how many developers can afford to make games

00:13:46   for it.

00:13:48   Certainly there's going to be games like Badland where you don't need the game controller and

00:13:51   that's good but it's so limited because you see if you don't have one of these yet, you

00:13:57   look at that remote and you might think oh games can use six buttons or whatever.

00:14:01   No games can use basically I think two buttons.

00:14:04   The D-pad simulator, or you know, they have the track pad, and the play/pause button,

00:14:09   and I think that's it.

00:14:10   I think everything else is off limits to games, because everything else has a meaning into

00:14:15   the system that you aren't allowed to override.

00:14:18   And of course there's the accelerometer stuff, so you know, you could kind of do like Wii

00:14:21   game kind of stuff, some of it, not even all of it, because some of it requires more buttons

00:14:25   and more precision and everything, but you could do some of the kind of stuff we saw

00:14:28   on the Wii, but it is pretty limited.

00:14:31   So I do hope we see more good games, I'm sure we will, and there's probably even more out

00:14:35   now that I haven't tried yet, but I do think it's gonna be, I do think it has the potential

00:14:41   to be a really fun gaming platform, and I just hope it pans out.

00:14:44   Yeah, I was struck again by the stories this weekend about video game sales, like, thinking

00:14:51   of the Apple TV and iPhone gaming and everything else as kind of like gaming for the masses,

00:14:56   where it's like, "Yeah, I'm not that into games, but if you have a fun game to play,

00:14:59   check it out, the Apple TV, you buy it for other reasons, if it plays games it's cool.

00:15:02   But you know, I think the general impression of the people who are not in the video game industry

00:15:10   is that most people play phone games. You know, you got a phone, everyone's got a smartphone,

00:15:15   you can play games on it. Do you know anyone who has a smartphone who hasn't had at least one game

00:15:19   that they've played briefly, like had a week where they were addicted to insert name of your favorite

00:15:23   game here, whatever that may be? Even if it's just some random Zynga thing or Flappy Bird you

00:15:28   you mentioned before, the idea that for the mass market,

00:15:32   they're what we used to call casual games,

00:15:35   but there's so many more of those people, right?

00:15:37   And then there are the hardcore people,

00:15:39   the weirdos who have actual game consoles

00:15:42   and stuff like that.

00:15:43   But when you look at it from the numbers side of it,

00:15:46   it is flipped around.

00:15:48   There was this Call of Duty, Black Ops 3 came out

00:15:52   and sold like $550 million in the first weekend

00:15:56   and it's on track to earn a billion dollars.

00:15:59   It's almost as if, like if you took it in the movie sense

00:16:02   where people said, people have the impression of,

00:16:04   well, most people go to see these small independent movies

00:16:09   'cause they're just movie casuals

00:16:10   and only the real hardcore people go to see "Jurassic World."

00:16:13   But no, no one has that impression.

00:16:14   Everyone says, well, movies?

00:16:15   Well, "Jurassic World," that's a smash hit.

00:16:17   Like that's for the masses, that's for the mainstream.

00:16:20   Gaming is so weird in that the thing that everyone thinks

00:16:23   is kind of like a dying industry of these, you know,

00:16:27   hardcore gamers.

00:16:28   There's only a couple of, you know,

00:16:30   tens or hundreds of millions of those,

00:16:31   as opposed to the billion people who play cell phone games.

00:16:34   And yet that's where all the money is.

00:16:36   Though these, you know,

00:16:37   Call of Duty Black Ops is making more money

00:16:39   than probably the entire top 10 in the iOS,

00:16:44   you know, gaming charts.

00:16:46   And that's just one game on this supposed platform

00:16:49   that is dying PCs and consoles.

00:16:53   So I don't know how we're gonna square that circle.

00:16:55   Like, I don't think we can extrapolate and say,

00:17:00   well, consoles are going away and PCs are going away.

00:17:02   And pretty soon the mass market will take over

00:17:05   and everyone just plays "Badlands" on their Apple TV

00:17:08   and plays "Flappy Bird" and "Candy Crush".

00:17:12   And that is the gaming industry.

00:17:14   When the money people are like,

00:17:16   give me this year's call of duty any day,

00:17:18   it is a money-making machine on the scale of a blockbuster movie and as far as the money people are concerned

00:17:24   That's the mass market of gaming. So I don't know it's hard

00:17:28   It's hard for me to get a handle on this because as a gamer I do see these other sort of

00:17:33   not lesser games, but smaller games as

00:17:37   as

00:17:39   The the the thing that's weird and I see Call of Duty as exactly the same as Jurassic World

00:17:45   The only thing that doesn't fit with that is the popular notion that console games and PC games are somehow going away to be to be wiped away by

00:17:52   lesser devices like the

00:17:56   Smartphone and iPad games that kids play and Apple TV games and whatever

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00:20:27   - So as we record big day today,

00:20:30   The biggest of all though for our friend Federico Vatici,

00:20:34   his dreams have come true.

00:20:37   Today is iPad Pro Day.

00:20:39   I did not have the time to go and take a look at the store

00:20:43   to see if they had any in stock.

00:20:44   I did not pre-order one.

00:20:46   I have no experience with this whatsoever,

00:20:48   but one of us does.

00:20:50   - So I actually went, Tiff won an iPad Pro,

00:20:53   and so we decided, like any Apple product,

00:20:57   if you're going to get it at all,

00:20:59   Get it when it's out because the price is not gonna change

00:21:02   between now, well actually, nevermind.

00:21:04   The way Apple is these days, this'll be for sale

00:21:06   for the next five years.

00:21:07   And it will drop by 100 bucks next year.

00:21:10   But anyways, so we decided, Tiff was interested

00:21:15   in larger screen iPad, so this morning,

00:21:18   woke up, ordered it for in-store pickup,

00:21:20   'cause I was surprised, they said it would be available

00:21:22   for online ordering today in stores later this week.

00:21:26   and they surprised everyone, including the stores,

00:21:29   based on the employees I talked to,

00:21:31   by having it available in stores today.

00:21:33   That was great, so I went and ordered it,

00:21:35   like still in bed in the morning

00:21:36   with the Apple Store app for the iPhone,

00:21:38   which was the best way to order things.

00:21:39   Unfortunately, the pencil was already back ordered

00:21:43   at eight in the morning,

00:21:44   already back ordered three to four weeks.

00:21:47   And the stores, I asked around,

00:21:49   and it sounds like most stores

00:21:52   actually got zero pencils to sell today.

00:21:55   it's not like they sold out, they actually just didn't get any.

00:21:58   So what makes you think the pencil is back ordered as opposed to nobody has been able

00:22:01   to order it?

00:22:02   The people in my store said that they think the big stores in Manhattan might have gotten

00:22:07   a small number. And I heard some people from maybe some stores in Europe that are really

00:22:11   high profile, that they got a couple. So it does seem like they are coming to some stores.

00:22:19   They came to some stores today and the early orders this morning had some people said they

00:22:23   got a one to two week delay window rather than my quoted three to four weeks. So they

00:22:28   are coming but I can't help but feel like Apple keeps botching the releases of these

00:22:34   things. You know, like in the same way that the watch launch was totally botched. I mean

00:22:40   the watch launch was a disaster where yeah it officially launched on this day but you

00:22:45   couldn't actually get one for like months and if you wanted certain ones you waited

00:22:50   even longer for things like the modern buckle or leather loop or the black link that were

00:22:55   very back order, delayed. And now, so now with the iPad Pro, it's nice that it's available

00:23:04   today that that was a nice surprise that we were able to pick one up today, but two of

00:23:08   its main selling features, the smart keyboard, is that what it's called, the smart keyboard?

00:23:12   I believe that's right. The keyboard from Apple and the pencil were both totally unavailable

00:23:18   for most people who try to buy it today.

00:23:21   And who knows how long it'll be.

00:23:24   It does kind of put a damper on it.

00:23:25   Like, Tiff was really excited about the Pencil,

00:23:28   and so was I, honestly, to try the Pencil.

00:23:31   And it does put a damper on it to be like,

00:23:32   "Okay, now we finally get this device

00:23:34   "that, by the way, was announced two months ago."

00:23:37   It's not like this was announced last week

00:23:39   and we've been really impatient.

00:23:40   This was announced two months ago,

00:23:41   and it just barely shipped, apparently.

00:23:44   And they couldn't even get the store stock

00:23:47   with the really critical accessories,

00:23:50   like that just seems like a botched launch to me.

00:23:53   And this, like, the operations guy is running the company.

00:23:57   How does, like, how does this happen?

00:23:59   I don't know.

00:24:00   I'm probably being too critical of this,

00:24:03   but it really does put a damper on it.

00:24:06   When you go to the store,

00:24:07   all happy to get this new device

00:24:08   that you could do this cool new thing with,

00:24:11   and then it says, oh, you can't get your pencil

00:24:12   for another month, you know, that's--

00:24:14   - That's a bummer for you,

00:24:15   but what does that mean in terms of things

00:24:18   that Apple cares about?

00:24:19   Does it mean fewer sales?

00:24:21   - I did see a number of people today,

00:24:23   I tweeted early in the morning like,

00:24:24   this kinda sucks, and I did see a number of people

00:24:28   responding saying that they were going to go

00:24:30   pick up an iPad Pro today, but since they can't

00:24:32   get a pencil, they're just going to wait until they can.

00:24:34   So they're just delaying the sales,

00:24:37   they're still gonna sell those probably,

00:24:38   but they will just be delayed.

00:24:40   But I have to imagine, first of all,

00:24:42   Apple really wants a big opening weekend.

00:24:44   They want to be able to brag that they sold

00:24:46   X million iPads in a weekend, if they do.

00:24:49   So it's gonna hurt them in that way,

00:24:50   but also there is gonna be a certain degree of,

00:24:53   like right now there's inertia.

00:24:55   It's day one and people are really excited about it

00:24:58   and they wanna go get it.

00:24:59   Maybe some people who were on the fence

00:25:01   about whether they wanted to get it,

00:25:02   maybe they now won't get it,

00:25:04   'cause maybe as this inertia dies down

00:25:06   over the next three to four weeks

00:25:08   before they can get the accessories that they want,

00:25:10   maybe in that time they'll actually decide,

00:25:11   you know what, maybe I don't really need this anymore.

00:25:14   It's probably not going to be a massive portion of their sales,

00:25:16   but I do think it will hurt them in some way.

00:25:18   - Well, so how does that balance with the other side

00:25:20   of which I think happened with the watch?

00:25:22   There are positive aspects of things not being available.

00:25:25   There is the perceived scarcity that essentially,

00:25:29   you know, that this product is playing hard to get

00:25:31   and it makes you want it even more because you can't get it.

00:25:34   There is, for the people who weren't even

00:25:35   that interested in it, there is the meta story about,

00:25:40   I don't want to watch, but people who do want watches

00:25:43   are not able to find them.

00:25:44   It's the Cabbage Patch Doll phenomenon.

00:25:46   Like it becomes like a frenzy, like,

00:25:48   "Wow, this must be really popular

00:25:49   "'cause people really want it

00:25:50   "and it's sold out everywhere."

00:25:52   And that creates a positive buzz about it.

00:25:54   And then finally, as like, you know,

00:25:56   oh, someone finally got a modern buckle, right?

00:25:59   As these products trickle out

00:26:02   when they're ready to ship or whatever,

00:26:03   you get repeat stories.

00:26:05   I know we already covered the Apple Watch seven times,

00:26:07   but here's the first person

00:26:08   to have the Darth Vader link bracelet.

00:26:09   Here's the first person to have the modern buckle.

00:26:11   So on and so forth.

00:26:12   Not that I'm saying Apple is doing it on purpose,

00:26:14   like that it's artificial scarcity.

00:26:15   It totally seems like this is just,

00:26:17   as soon as they're able to manufacture them in volume,

00:26:19   they ship them.

00:26:20   But I would say against the idea

00:26:23   of someone being disappointed

00:26:25   that they can't get what they want,

00:26:26   and then just saying, well, nevermind, and not coming back,

00:26:29   balance that against the positive effects

00:26:31   of the perceived desirability and value,

00:26:35   and the repeat press on the sort of the trickle

00:26:37   of stuff coming out.

00:26:38   So I have to think,

00:26:40   I think it's bad for it not to launch all at once,

00:26:43   mostly just because it reflects poorly on the company

00:26:46   and might give someone a bad impression about Apple.

00:26:48   But I think overall,

00:26:50   I don't think it's actually hurting their sales

00:26:51   as long as, I mean, obviously,

00:26:53   as long as by the time the holidays come,

00:26:55   as long as everybody who wants to get an iPad Pro

00:26:57   with a pencil for the holidays can get one.

00:26:59   They may cut that close,

00:27:00   'cause that's where you could actually get hurt in sales,

00:27:01   'cause things are seasonal like that.

00:27:03   If they miss the holidays,

00:27:04   obviously they've really messed up.

00:27:05   But as long as they make the holidays

00:27:06   with a reasonable amount of time,

00:27:07   I think people not getting their pencils for a couple weeks

00:27:10   is not that big a deal.

00:27:11   The main thing I'm annoyed about as a lazy person

00:27:13   who stays at home all the time is I seem to remember

00:27:16   in the old days that Apple would, if not favor,

00:27:20   online orders, then at the very least,

00:27:23   sort of give them equal footing,

00:27:24   where now with the Apple TV, I experienced this myself,

00:27:26   I ordered an Apple TV and before my Apple TV arrived to me,

00:27:30   they were already showing up in stores.

00:27:31   So rather than, you know, like, and so now I bet

00:27:34   if you were to order a pencil now,

00:27:36   you would get it sometime within the delivery window,

00:27:38   but then this weekend, if you go into a big Apple store,

00:27:41   you might be able to pick one up

00:27:42   if you just happen to go in the morning.

00:27:43   And so it's, they're definitely favoring retail, it seems,

00:27:47   over mail order.

00:27:49   - Yeah, and that's, again, like the Apple TV,

00:27:51   it was not a big botch, but I heard a ton of stories

00:27:54   like that from people who ordered online,

00:27:57   and then they had weird shipping issues,

00:27:59   they didn't ship on time, and then, yeah,

00:28:01   the stores got them first, like that's, it just--

00:28:03   - Well, that makes sense, though.

00:28:04   I'm like, I'm saying this is what they do,

00:28:05   and annoys me because I stay at home, but people who order online, who are those people?

00:28:10   It's better to put them in the stores because most people are just like wandering through

00:28:13   the mall and they see the Apple store and they wander in and they have no idea when

00:28:16   a product launch or anything about it.

00:28:17   It's only us who like order the second it's available online because we just want to,

00:28:21   we want to do the action that we think is going to give us the product as soon as possible

00:28:25   because we're tiny little children at heart, right?

00:28:27   And so it's like, oh, it's available for ordering to stay up at 3am and order, order, order.

00:28:30   No one else is like that.

00:28:31   No one knows when these things are.

00:28:32   They just like, they go into the Apple store and they say, "Whoa, there's a new iPhone.

00:28:35   Are the new iPhones out?

00:28:36   Oh, they're not out?

00:28:37   Okay, well, I'll check back next weekend.

00:28:38   Oh, they are out.

00:28:39   Oh, here's the new Apple TV."

00:28:40   They don't know or care when things launch, so it's much better to have them available

00:28:43   in the store for sort of, not impulse purchases, but, "Hey, let me wander into the Apple store

00:28:47   and see what's available," as opposed to trying to cater to people who stay up till 3 a.m.

00:28:51   to order a phone.

00:28:52   Yeah, I don't know.

00:28:54   Just the whole thing, it just puts a damper on.

00:28:57   You know?

00:28:58   Like, it's not that, it doesn't ruin things.

00:28:59   It's not going to kill all their sales, but it just puts a damper on the enthusiasm.

00:29:04   It's like, "Oh, this is great!"

00:29:05   Except, "Oh, no, bad news."

00:29:07   You know, it's --

00:29:08   It puts a damper on your enthusiasm.

00:29:09   The rest of the world doesn't even know the iPad Pro exists yet.

00:29:12   They'll know when the ads start running on TV, and when they wander -- even when the

00:29:14   ads run on TV.

00:29:15   I think people are perfectly accepting of seeing an ad on TV for a cool Apple thing,

00:29:20   then wandering into the Apple Store and saying, "Is that thing I saw an ad for on TV yet?"

00:29:23   And having the Apple Store say, "No, we don't have those yet."

00:29:25   And they'll be like, "Oh, all right."

00:29:26   And they'll come back the next weekend.

00:29:28   That's how I feel like the vast, vast majorities of Apple sales operate.

00:29:35   Tiff just wants a pen, I understand.

00:29:37   All that being said, I was able to try the Pencil and Smart Keyboard in the store because

00:29:43   they had a demo one that some of the staff were playing with out on the floor.

00:29:48   And so I went up and I got to play with it too.

00:29:51   They wouldn't sell it to me.

00:29:53   I offered.

00:29:54   But they were not allowed to sell it to me.

00:29:57   million dollars for one night with your iPad Pro.

00:30:00   - Oh my god, that's a reference.

00:30:02   - I know it's a reference.

00:30:03   - Hey, we saw a movie together, yay.

00:30:05   - I've actually never seen the movie,

00:30:06   but I know what you're referring.

00:30:08   - It isn't that good.

00:30:09   (laughs)

00:30:11   Please email Jon.

00:30:12   So I will say, having now played with the pencil

00:30:16   and keyboard, very briefly, I mean,

00:30:17   I had about five minutes with the pencil

00:30:21   and about two minutes with the keyboard.

00:30:23   I will say the keyboard is not as bad as I expected.

00:30:28   I expected it to be terrible

00:30:29   'cause I heard it had similar key switches

00:30:31   to the MacBook One and possibly even worse key feel

00:30:35   than the MacBook One.

00:30:37   I think it's probably about the same,

00:30:39   maybe a little bit better even.

00:30:41   I don't know, it didn't feel as horrible to me

00:30:44   than the MacBook One, but it was very close.

00:30:46   Doesn't matter, you know, it's an iPad keyboard.

00:30:48   It's going to be a compromise in a lot of different ways.

00:30:50   So that's fine.

00:30:52   I know there is a Logitech one,

00:30:55   the Apple stores are even selling it.

00:30:56   Like they had that in stock.

00:30:58   They were out of stock of every other iPad accessory,

00:31:02   including the Smart Cover and the Smart Case,

00:31:04   which are now two separate, like,

00:31:06   now the Smart Case is only the back part.

00:31:10   - Oh, that's weird.

00:31:11   - And so if you want both the back and the front covered,

00:31:15   you have to buy both parts for a total of like $150.

00:31:19   - Yikes.

00:31:20   - Yeah, so that's annoying.

00:31:21   (laughing)

00:31:22   Like, it's almost as expensive as just buying the keyboard,

00:31:25   which covers both.

00:31:26   So you might as well just buy the keyboard at that point.

00:31:29   Anyway, the keyboard was very securely attached.

00:31:32   It only really holds the iPad in one angle though.

00:31:35   As far as I can tell, I wasn't sure

00:31:36   if you could adjust it at all.

00:31:38   It seemed like it was fixed to this one particular angle

00:31:41   that it would hold it at.

00:31:42   - You could shove the pencil behind it

00:31:43   because there's no place else to put that pencil,

00:31:45   so just pull the iPad forward,

00:31:48   put the pencil in there, push it back, it'll be fine.

00:31:50   - Yeah, I mean, this is gonna be the kind of product

00:31:52   where there's a huge opportunity here for third parties

00:31:55   to make way better cases and keyboards than Apple did.

00:31:58   Because you're gonna want a place to put the pencil

00:32:01   and there isn't one anywhere on the iPad,

00:32:04   anywhere in any of Apple's cases.

00:32:06   You know, it's similar to how the iPad One

00:32:10   just kind of, they had that terrible gray

00:32:13   like wraparound case and the iPad One was just clearly

00:32:16   not designed with a case in mind at all

00:32:18   and they just kind of threw one on.

00:32:19   That's how the pencil feels today, which is like,

00:32:21   here's this awesome thing that almost everyone is,

00:32:24   well not almost everyone, but a lot of people

00:32:25   are going to want for this iPad,

00:32:27   and the iPad was seemingly designed with no regard

00:32:31   to how this thing would actually be kept

00:32:33   on or near or in the iPad.

00:32:35   - As Dan Morin pointed out today, it goes behind your ear.

00:32:38   (laughing)

00:32:40   - Right, well it's too heavy for that, first of all, I think.

00:32:42   - Is it?

00:32:42   - So it is heavy.

00:32:44   It's not like uncomfortably heavy.

00:32:47   It doesn't feel like a lightweight pencil

00:32:48   or a plastic stylus.

00:32:50   It feels dense and not too heavy, but almost too heavy.

00:32:55   - Your ears can take it, I have faith in them.

00:32:57   (laughing)

00:32:58   - But it really does feel incredibly good

00:33:01   to use that pencil.

00:33:01   I would say the keyboard,

00:33:03   if I were really into this thing myself,

00:33:06   I'm probably not going to be,

00:33:07   but if I was really into this thing myself,

00:33:09   I would probably skip the keyboard,

00:33:11   but I would definitely get a pencil

00:33:13   because I'm not an artist of any kind.

00:33:16   I have no illustrative abilities at all.

00:33:19   I hardly ever hand write anything.

00:33:21   This made me want to hand write things

00:33:23   and draw diagrams and become some kind of artist

00:33:26   even though I probably won't ever be.

00:33:28   The pencil is great.

00:33:31   And combining it with palm rejection,

00:33:34   other touch input, everything,

00:33:36   I could not in my five minutes of using it,

00:33:38   I never encountered an error in thinking

00:33:42   that a touch was the pencil or rejecting the palm properly,

00:33:46   Like it was flawless.

00:33:48   And they were using the Adobe,

00:33:50   oh God, it's like an Adobe Sketch something.

00:33:52   - Adobe Sketch is the app, yeah.

00:33:53   - That, yeah, that's what we were using to draw with.

00:33:57   And it worked very well.

00:33:58   There is a little bit of lag still,

00:34:01   but it is the best stylus slash pen tablet thing

00:34:06   for a computer.

00:34:07   By far the best I've ever seen.

00:34:09   Not even close.

00:34:10   Way better than the Wacom tablets that I've seen.

00:34:13   way better than any previous iPad or iPhone stylus

00:34:16   that I've tried.

00:34:17   It just, completely different experience, far better.

00:34:22   I was able to rest my palm on it, flat on the table,

00:34:25   and just write, just hand write.

00:34:26   Like Gruber mentioned in his review, which is very good,

00:34:29   he mentioned that he tested by drawing his signature,

00:34:32   and that when you draw your signature on most touch devices,

00:34:35   or pen terminals in stores, it always looks horrible,

00:34:39   crazy, nothing like your real signature.

00:34:40   And he said on the iPad Pro,

00:34:41   it looked like his real handwritten signature.

00:34:44   In my very brief testing here,

00:34:46   I tried handwriting things,

00:34:48   like just handwriting a few sentences,

00:34:50   and it looked just like my handwriting on paper.

00:34:53   It is incredibly good.

00:34:56   I wish I had a reason to use it.

00:34:57   And right now I don't think I do.

00:35:00   - So it's time for you to go look at the show notes, Marco,

00:35:01   if you haven't already,

00:35:03   because there are two videos related to this topic

00:35:05   in the show notes.

00:35:06   These were from tweets.

00:35:07   One is from Steve Strese saying he was not impressed

00:35:10   with the pencil latency.

00:35:11   So it's, I think it's an animated GIF

00:35:13   because Twitter is stupid.

00:35:14   But anyway, take a look at that tweet

00:35:16   and look at his video.

00:35:17   I don't, I can't tell what app he's using there,

00:35:18   but the lag on the thing that he's doing

00:35:20   is just horrendous.

00:35:22   - That is really rough actually.

00:35:24   - All right, now scroll down and here's Matt Panzareno

00:35:27   saying really, because when I was using it, it was awesome.

00:35:29   And then look at his video, also of an iPad Pro,

00:35:32   presumably with a different app,

00:35:34   and look at the lag there.

00:35:35   - It looks like a different app.

00:35:36   - Yeah, it might be, although they later in the discussion,

00:35:38   they're like, I was using Adobe Sketch

00:35:40   and then Panzer says, "Oh, I was using Adobe Sketch 2.

00:35:43   I don't know if it's in this picture."

00:35:44   And anyway, I think what this shows is

00:35:49   that from application to application,

00:35:52   there can be a big difference in latency and responsiveness.

00:35:56   In other words, the hardware is capable,

00:35:58   but depending on how the application is programmed,

00:36:01   you could get the latency you see.

00:36:02   'Cause I don't think these are broken iPads.

00:36:04   I think you could get the latency you see

00:36:05   in the first video, which is really, really bad,

00:36:07   or with the same exact hardware,

00:36:09   you can get the latency you see in the second video,

00:36:10   which is really, really good.

00:36:12   - Yeah, I mean, it's gonna depend entirely on good coding.

00:36:15   Like, you know, at some point,

00:36:18   the hardware is going to be the limiting factor,

00:36:20   but yeah, I mean, my experience matches

00:36:22   Panzareno's video there of it just being,

00:36:24   you know, it does, you can feel that there is some latency,

00:36:28   but it is really small,

00:36:30   and it's perfectly fine for handwriting, I think.

00:36:33   - And when I saw the first video, I'm like,

00:36:34   oh, well, maybe that's slow

00:36:35   because it's trying to do like a brush type thing

00:36:37   where it's like pressure sensitive,

00:36:39   there's like bristles you can see it's trying to be like a brushed ink thing

00:36:41   where the leading edge has things but then look at the panzerinos video and

00:36:46   he's doing like translucent smeared ink looking like he's not just doing solid

00:36:50   black lines either and what in whatever application he's using it seems to be

00:36:53   doing even fancier effects and this is yet another opportunity to link that

00:36:58   Microsoft video showing the different latency things if you watch I always go

00:37:02   back to that Microsoft video to calibrate my eyeballs to hard numbers

00:37:05   because they tell you they have like the thing with adjustable latency here's one

00:37:08   millisecond here's 10 here's 100 mm-hmm to my eyes the good video of the iPad

00:37:13   Pro here is still not down to one millisecond but it's much better than a

00:37:17   hundred milliseconds so it's somewhere in that range and the idea that the

00:37:22   application can affect what the latency is like shows that this is really just

00:37:27   the dawning of the mass market perhaps I'm sure Apple hopes it is but perhaps

00:37:32   the dawning of the mass-market era of pen computing as I was able that that

00:37:37   started with Windows for pen or whatever or the grid pad or that started with the

00:37:40   surface or whatever really it remains to be seen if this will actually popularize

00:37:44   the pen to any significant degree but in all cases I think pen input is not yet

00:37:53   at the level has not crossed the threshold that the mouse did when the

00:37:56   Mac was introduced because there were you know mouse type input devices before

00:38:01   and after the Mac but one of the things that the Mac has been excellent at from

00:38:06   day one is when you move the mouse the cursor on the screen moves. There's no stuttering, there's no lag

00:38:12   It's a seemingly direct connection and that was very important at the dawning of the Mac to making a Mac feel like a Mac

00:38:18   It's one of the reasons that like, you know

00:38:19   Windows always felt weird and different until they got their cursor stuff nailed down a couple of years later and on the Mac

00:38:25   There was nothing you can do in a program to make that mouse cursor screw up

00:38:29   Like it's not like well if you program your application badly the mouse cursor won't be responsive not drawing with the mouse

00:38:36   Because yeah, you could screw that up because you know on the original Mac if you tried to draw with a fancy brush tool

00:38:39   It would be all lagging gross and everything. I'm talking about

00:38:41   The mouse itself like just moving the cursor around

00:38:44   That stayed solid like there's nothing you could do an application to screw that up

00:38:48   I'll short of crashing or grinding a disk or something terrible

00:38:51   Like I would even even that they tended to even when the disk was grinding it the mouse would still move smoothly

00:38:54   All of us have experienced a crash where the entire computer is frozen, but the mouse cursor still works. That's an important part of the

00:39:01   Sort of physical interface to computers with a mouse is the reliability of you move the mouse or you swipe on the trackpad

00:39:08   And the cursor was it's also by the way why it's so incredibly disconcerting

00:39:12   When your mouse cursor freezes we've all had it happen many times many more times in the bad old days of classic Mac OS

00:39:18   It almost feels like the world is broken for a second where you move your mouse and the cursor doesn't move you're like oh

00:39:23   No, this is not right something. It's like you've been knocked off kilter or something

00:39:28   It violates this constraint of the world

00:39:30   that you believed in when I moved the mouse

00:39:32   that the cursor moves.

00:39:33   Well, for pen computing or any kind of pen input

00:39:37   to really become as sort of second nature and boring

00:39:40   as mouse input is nowadays,

00:39:42   we have to eventually get past the idea

00:39:46   that the responsiveness will be different.

00:39:49   And it's different with the pen

00:39:50   because pen's not a pointing device.

00:39:51   Pen is a drawing device.

00:39:52   So where I was giving the mouse a pass before and say,

00:39:54   "Oh, well, of course, if you wiggle the mouse really fast

00:39:56   that's in super paint with the spray can thing,

00:39:59   it would be all lagging gross and that's fine.

00:40:01   That's because the mouse isn't primarily a drawing thing.

00:40:04   It's for moving things around and clicking and pointing,

00:40:06   but the pen, it's not a pointing device.

00:40:08   There is no cursor on the screen,

00:40:09   it's entirely about drawing.

00:40:10   So I want all pen input to be, you know,

00:40:14   like the second video or better.

00:40:16   And it's clear that we're not quite there yet,

00:40:19   which is kind of a shame, but this is early days,

00:40:21   at least as far as Apple's concerned with pen input.

00:40:24   Although the Newton sitting on my desk right now

00:40:26   might disagree, but that had pretty bad latency too.

00:40:31   - So a couple thoughts on this.

00:40:32   First of all, to double down on what you were saying

00:40:35   about the world being completely wrong

00:40:37   when your mouse freezes, imagine how weird it is

00:40:40   when not only is the mouse frozen,

00:40:41   but your mouse button doesn't exist anymore

00:40:44   because it's a software fake button.

00:40:47   Like that has happened to me a handful of times

00:40:48   on this MacBook Pro that I have for work and it is weird.

00:40:53   - So you just press and the little vibratey thing

00:40:55   doesn't vibrate underneath it?

00:40:56   - Correct, so it's like pushing on a plate of glass,

00:40:59   nothing happens.

00:41:00   And that's when like everything is broken.

00:41:03   On the plus side, you have a physical indicator

00:41:06   that everything's broken, but on the downside,

00:41:08   this thing that you forget is all software

00:41:11   suddenly stops working and it's very weird.

00:41:14   And the other thing I wanted to throw out is,

00:41:15   I believe it was after the iPad Pro was announced,

00:41:19   I'd remembered seeing something about like

00:41:20   advanced multi-touch or something like that.

00:41:22   And I went back and watched the WWDC session on it

00:41:25   and we'll link it in the show notes.

00:41:26   It's session 233, I believe.

00:41:29   And it was really, really interesting.

00:41:31   And they talked in the session,

00:41:32   I don't remember who gave it,

00:41:33   a lot about these infinitesimally small windows of time

00:41:38   with which you have to process touch input

00:41:40   and how they coalesce it

00:41:41   and this and that and the other thing.

00:41:42   And I watched it like a month or two ago,

00:41:44   so I'm a little fuzzy on it now,

00:41:45   but it was really, really interesting.

00:41:47   And if you have the time, it's worth watching.

00:41:49   And I bring this up because it very well could be,

00:41:53   If both these videos are using the same Adobe app

00:41:56   or whatever it is, if it's the same app,

00:41:58   then this is irrelevant.

00:41:59   But if it is different apps,

00:42:01   it would not surprise me at all

00:42:02   if there are very different performance characteristics

00:42:05   between two different apps,

00:42:07   because the way they handle it can change

00:42:10   very, very dramatically,

00:42:11   depending on whether or not they're good developers,

00:42:13   whether or not they're using new APIs, et cetera.

00:42:15   - Yeah, Fraser Spears says that,

00:42:17   just to confirm that, he's used the iPad Pro as well,

00:42:20   latency is very app dependent.

00:42:22   He says the latency is undetectable in Notes,

00:42:24   meaning the Apple Notes application, I assume,

00:42:26   but very laggy in paper by 53.

00:42:29   I don't know which apps are used in this video,

00:42:31   but I'm totally willing to believe

00:42:33   that it's entirely app dependent

00:42:35   and that what we're not seeing is like,

00:42:37   oh, bad or buggy hardware or something.

00:42:38   It's just, you know, it's just software.

00:42:40   Like Casey said, if you're not pulling, you know,

00:42:42   processing the events in a particular way

00:42:44   or using whatever the fast path is for doing input.

00:42:46   And like I said, this Panzareno video,

00:42:49   that's like something that looks like a magic marker

00:42:52   where it's like smeary and thicker towards the edges,

00:42:54   something that looks like grease paint,

00:42:56   something that looks like watercolors.

00:42:58   So it's not like it only works

00:42:59   if you're drawing a solid black line,

00:43:01   but if you're doing anything fancy, it's slow.

00:43:02   So I really have no idea why the slow one is slow

00:43:05   and why the fast one is fast,

00:43:06   other than just maybe using the wrong APIs or something.

00:43:09   - Yeah, well, anyway, regardless,

00:43:12   we at least know that when properly handled

00:43:16   by the software side, the pen, the pencil,

00:43:19   can be really great.

00:43:21   and in a few apps already, it already is.

00:43:23   And that, I mean really, using this blew my mind,

00:43:28   like how good it is.

00:43:30   It is, I just, again, I wish I had a reason

00:43:33   to hand write things.

00:43:33   I've never even, I've never been like a notebook

00:43:35   at my desk kind of person.

00:43:36   Like a lot of people will sketch things out

00:43:38   on paper notebooks.

00:43:39   I've never even done that.

00:43:40   I never took notes in school.

00:43:42   But man, I do wish that I had a reason to use it

00:43:46   'cause it really is awesome.

00:43:47   - You just need to do a video Pictionary.

00:43:50   someone who needs to make a Pictionary application for iPad Pro people so you can do Pictionary

00:43:54   with people across the country.

00:43:56   Like draw something basically?

00:43:58   You didn't get to see their face, you know?

00:44:00   Right, right.

00:44:01   iPad Pro you can put up on an easel.

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00:46:10   So, iPad Pro software-wise.

00:46:14   I got TIFF's iPad Pro,

00:46:16   wasn't able to get anything else for it,

00:46:17   so we have no case, no cover, no pencil, no keyboard,

00:46:21   but we're probably not gonna get the keyboard anyway.

00:46:23   Brought it home.

00:46:24   So far, I would say, based on my quick experience with it,

00:46:28   it is really a mixed bag.

00:46:30   Most of the reviews seem to back up

00:46:32   what I've experienced so far.

00:46:34   First of all, it is huge.

00:46:36   And because it is so huge,

00:46:38   Certain aspects of things that you could do well

00:46:41   on iPads before are actually worse, in my opinion.

00:46:44   I think it was definitely worse for reading,

00:46:47   unless you're reading things like comic books or magazines

00:46:49   where you need as much space as possible.

00:46:51   But just for reading regular column articles,

00:46:54   or iBooks looked kind of ridiculous on it, to be honest.

00:46:58   Because iBooks does not seem to offer margin control, so.

00:47:01   - You gotta crank the font size up, though.

00:47:03   That's what it lets you do.

00:47:04   It lets you keep the same number of words per line,

00:47:08   but make the text way bigger so it's easier to see.

00:47:11   - Yeah, but then you're just holding it back further?

00:47:14   I mean, you know--

00:47:15   - No, it's for people who have,

00:47:17   your eyes will go eventually, young man,

00:47:19   and you will appreciate it much better.

00:47:21   - No, absolutely, I mean, you know,

00:47:22   if you actually need a bigger size

00:47:24   just to make it legible in general

00:47:26   for vision accessibility reasons, that's a different story.

00:47:29   But if you have vision within kind of the normal range

00:47:34   and you don't need it to be really huge,

00:47:36   I would say in general that the other iPads are better reading devices for that reason.

00:47:42   This is obviously better for video.

00:47:43   >> Well, for reading, though, what if you want to have Twitter along the side while

00:47:46   you read?

00:47:47   >> That's a terrible idea.

00:47:48   Why would you want that?

00:47:49   >> People do that.

00:47:50   I'd do it.

00:47:51   Or if you just want to have Twitter and Slack and the same thing split, each one gets a

00:47:55   reasonable-sized column.

00:47:56   Like you're still thinking as if the screen is one thing that the application can fill.

00:48:01   Apple hasn't done much to dissuade you from that notion, but they have at least cut the

00:48:05   screen in half or thirds or whatever. So I think you have to, in considering software,

00:48:10   which granted I'm sure you read this, has not been updated very well for the iPad Pro

00:48:14   and sometimes looks ridiculous, at the very least you can say, "All right, well, it may

00:48:19   not be a good reading experience for this thing, but that's only because I'm letting

00:48:23   it have the whole screen. Why don't I divide the screen up and let something else have

00:48:26   that thing and now I have two good reading experiences at the same time?"

00:48:29   Yeah, I mean that's that's kind of the idea but like one of the things that made

00:48:33   iPads and and e-readers so good for reading books compared to computers is

00:48:39   That you could only do that one thing on the screen

00:48:42   You could fill up the screen with one reading app and you like if you try nobody reads books on their computers for the most

00:48:48   part because

00:48:49   You have these giant screens that are filled all these all these little windows of all these all these distractions and it's not a very

00:48:54   Good reading environment for that. Do you think that's why people not read books on computers?

00:48:58   I think that's one of the reasons.

00:48:59   I think the main reason is that it's uncomfortable to sit at a desk staring at a screen that's

00:49:03   in front of you.

00:49:04   Okay.

00:49:05   Similarly, it's uncomfortable to hold this iPad up for a long time because it is not

00:49:12   light or small.

00:49:13   And so, you know, different reviewers have agreed and disagreed on this point that I've

00:49:17   seen so far.

00:49:18   Some of them say it's okay.

00:49:19   Some of them say it's heavy.

00:49:20   You know, Tiff's initial impression, my initial impression so far, is that it's pretty heavy

00:49:25   to hold up for more than a minute or two.

00:49:28   Like you wanna have it on some kind of propped up case

00:49:31   or desk or stand or something,

00:49:34   not just holding it up in bed for a long time

00:49:36   or anything like that.

00:49:37   So for a lot of things,

00:49:40   if you've ever done anything on an iPad

00:49:43   and the smallness of the iPad screen

00:49:46   has been a limiting factor for you,

00:49:48   then this will be an improvement.

00:49:50   That's not true for everything.

00:49:52   - Andy Anako had a good picture though, speaking of that.

00:49:54   Recently he tweeted a picture of,

00:49:56   I think his tweet was the text was "living the dream" and what he had was his iPad Pro

00:50:00   showing a comic book and next to it a physical comic book, which you could see, you could

00:50:06   take that physical comic book and basically place it on the screen and it was pretty much

00:50:09   exactly the same size as the screen.

00:50:10   So if you're a comics reader and you're tired of looking at comics either shrunken or cropped,

00:50:14   you can't get two page side by side, but at least now you can get one full-size real-life

00:50:19   comic book page at a one-to-one ratio on your iPad Pro.

00:50:24   - Yeah, and for people who mark up PDFs,

00:50:28   this would be great for them, because it's like,

00:50:30   you want that to be kind of life-size

00:50:33   or close to it at least, and the 10 inch iPad was almost,

00:50:36   but not quite the right size to do that.

00:50:39   So stuff like that, there are things

00:50:42   that are gonna be better on this for sure,

00:50:43   and there's probably gonna be a lot of those things,

00:50:45   but what all I'm saying is that

00:50:47   not everything is better on it,

00:50:49   and it's important, if you're thinking about

00:50:51   one of these devices, it's important to know that going in,

00:50:53   just because certain things, there is such a thing

00:50:56   as too big of a screen for certain things.

00:50:58   And you might hit that.

00:51:00   But as you alluded to earlier, Jon,

00:51:02   one of the bigger challenges up front here is that iOS,

00:51:07   while it's nice to have things like the split view

00:51:09   and the slide over and everything,

00:51:11   these features are pretty basic so far.

00:51:15   They still could, especially things like the slide over,

00:51:18   the app launching experience there,

00:51:20   if you're having to scroll through this giant long list

00:51:23   of these apps that are capable of doing this.

00:51:26   Like this interface, I don't know who designed

00:51:29   this interface because it should have been obvious

00:51:31   to anybody that as soon as you have more than a handful

00:51:35   of apps that support this feature,

00:51:36   this does not work very well.

00:51:39   But anyway, there are affordances for the big screen

00:51:43   and things that take advantage of the big screen in iOS.

00:51:46   But the iPad has always kind of been

00:51:49   the second class citizen of iOS.

00:51:52   It has always gotten, oftentimes delayed hardware

00:51:56   capabilities or less good hardware in certain ways.

00:51:59   Like the cameras are never as good as the iPhone cameras.

00:52:02   It got touch ID late.

00:52:04   The new one, even the iPad Pro, as the reviews have noted,

00:52:07   doesn't have the touch ID sensor from the 6S,

00:52:10   the good new one.

00:52:11   It has the slower old one from the iPhone 5S and 6.

00:52:15   And that seems crazy.

00:52:16   This is like a new flagship iOS device

00:52:19   that there is a substantially better touch ID sensor

00:52:24   that launched two months ago,

00:52:26   and the iPad Pro doesn't have it.

00:52:27   And 3D touch, it doesn't have either.

00:52:29   That might be 'cause they couldn't get it

00:52:31   to work on the big screen.

00:52:31   That's a little more understandable, I think,

00:52:33   'cause you can see the challenges involved there.

00:52:35   - I think the touch ID sensor makes sense too, though,

00:52:38   because-- - Why?

00:52:39   - Volumes, because how many,

00:52:42   I don't think there is an entire world

00:52:43   of vendors making this touch ID sensor.

00:52:46   I think there's a limited number of people

00:52:47   who even can make it.

00:52:48   maybe like patent encumbered or whatever,

00:52:50   who has the ability to manufacture, who has the expertise.

00:52:52   And the iPhone is just so damn high volume

00:52:55   that it's going to get every single one of those things

00:52:56   so they can manufacture for the foreseeable future.

00:52:58   That, I don't know if that's true,

00:53:00   but that is a plausible explanation as to why,

00:53:03   why you wouldn't, you know,

00:53:05   the iPhone would absorb everything because it has to,

00:53:06   because it is the most important product.

00:53:08   And if there's any part that is in limited supply,

00:53:10   iPhone gets it and don't even bother,

00:53:12   don't even worry about the iPad,

00:53:14   just give them the old sensor.

00:53:15   It doesn't even matter, the iPhone is what matters.

00:53:17   because if you had to think of a part on the iPhone

00:53:19   that is supply constrained, the touch ID sensor,

00:53:22   especially the brand new one,

00:53:23   is one of the top ones that I would pick.

00:53:26   - I don't know, I think it's equally likely

00:53:28   that this was just an area where somebody decided,

00:53:30   you know what, people aren't unlocking their iPad

00:53:34   via touch ID as often as they do it on their phone,

00:53:36   so it's not that important, we can save a dollar.

00:53:38   It feels more like that.

00:53:39   - Is it cheaper?

00:53:40   Is the new one actually more expensive, though?

00:53:43   It might even just be the same, I don't know.

00:53:45   It seems more like iPhone gets all the good stuff,

00:53:49   all the best stuff first.

00:53:49   It is the oldest favorite child.

00:53:51   If anything is in short supply,

00:53:53   iPhone gets the stuff first.

00:53:55   - Right, so regardless of the reason of that,

00:53:57   on the software side, unfortunately, that's also true.

00:54:02   And you see things like, even back forever ago,

00:54:06   when the iPad launched with 3.2, iOS 3.2,

00:54:11   then iOS 4 with multitasking came out for the iPhone,

00:54:14   And it wasn't until, what about four months later,

00:54:17   something like, or maybe even six months later,

00:54:19   in like 4.3 was when they unified it,

00:54:22   where they brought all those features to the iPad.

00:54:25   Look at when iOS 7 launched, and then in the early betas,

00:54:29   they wouldn't even give you the iPad beta,

00:54:30   'cause it was so unfinished,

00:54:32   they wouldn't even give you the developer betas at first.

00:54:35   And then later on in the iOS 7 developer process,

00:54:37   they eventually released the iPad version of it.

00:54:40   And I would say the iPad version has always,

00:54:43   and still lags behind the iPhone version

00:54:47   ever since the iOS 7 redesign.

00:54:49   There are certain things about it that just seem half-assed.

00:54:53   Things like Control Center, things like that,

00:54:56   that swipe over, app picker, UI,

00:54:59   notifications have always been kinda weird on it.

00:55:03   There's still, I think as Gruber pointed out in history,

00:55:05   there's still no calculator or weather apps.

00:55:08   It just seems like in so many ways,

00:55:10   The iPad is trying to be this higher end device,

00:55:15   and in many ways it's achieving that.

00:55:17   But on the software side,

00:55:19   it's being held back by these limitations.

00:55:22   And they did make great strides with the split view

00:55:26   and with the slide over in iOS 8.

00:55:28   That does help a lot, but in general,

00:55:31   it just seems like it's not getting a lot of attention

00:55:34   in its software.

00:55:35   And you get there, here we are, flagship product.

00:55:39   This is obviously very important to Apple

00:55:41   to get the iPad sales boosted again,

00:55:44   get them going again, keep the iPad alive, keep it going.

00:55:48   So you have this flagship product.

00:55:50   It launches right before the holidays, peak time.

00:55:54   First of all, yeah, no accessories available, right?

00:55:56   Problem number one.

00:55:57   But then second of all, hardly any apps are updated for it.

00:56:00   So already you have this weird experience

00:56:02   where when you launch most iPad apps,

00:56:05   they come up in the blurry, blown up way

00:56:07   and it just looks terrible.

00:56:09   It looks ridiculous.

00:56:11   That's a problem.

00:56:12   And just going through Tiff's initial setup here at home,

00:56:15   we've seen a lot of those apps.

00:56:16   Almost every app she uses has not been updated.

00:56:19   And that includes both games and browsing apps

00:56:22   and magazines and shopping apps.

00:56:23   There's so many apps that have just not been updated.

00:56:26   So that's problem number one.

00:56:28   But even just iOS, Tiff's first impression

00:56:31   when she saw the springboard home screen,

00:56:34   she was looking at how many icons you get across the top.

00:56:37   And the number of app icons has stayed the same

00:56:41   in how many you get per row and column in Springboard

00:56:44   hasn't changed, even though the screen size

00:56:46   got almost twice as big.

00:56:47   So everything's just this giant,

00:56:49   spread out, weird arrangement.

00:56:52   And she immediately started looking for a setting

00:56:54   to change it, 'cause she assumed,

00:56:56   of course there has to be a setting.

00:56:58   Of course this would not be the only way

00:57:00   you would ship this thing.

00:57:01   Nope, there's no setting to change it.

00:57:02   That is the only way it's shipped.

00:57:03   It just seems like there is just not enough resources

00:57:08   at Apple being devoted to making iOS better

00:57:12   specifically for the iPad.

00:57:14   It's hard enough for developers to justify

00:57:18   putting a lot of work into iPad apps a lot of the times.

00:57:20   And that's gonna be another problem this has

00:57:22   because now, for the first time, I think in a while,

00:57:27   with Split View coming a few months ago

00:57:30   and now with the iPad Pro having a whole new screen size,

00:57:34   not to mention if you wanted to take advantage

00:57:35   of things like the pen and keyboard in significant ways,

00:57:38   app developers need to catch up.

00:57:41   They need to do a lot of work to get their iPad apps

00:57:44   to be really great now, to keep them current,

00:57:46   to keep them running well in the newest hardware,

00:57:48   to keep them taking advantage of the newest hardware.

00:57:50   The iPhone does this to us every year in some way,

00:57:52   but the iPhone has a lot more people using it,

00:57:54   and therefore it's a lot easier to make money on the iPhone

00:57:56   for a lot of kinds of apps.

00:57:57   But the iPad, because it's a smaller platform

00:58:00   by install base, it's always been a little bit harder

00:58:04   for a lot of people to justify doing work on it,

00:58:07   and doing work on iPad apps.

00:58:09   And the problems in Apple's software ecosystem

00:58:12   of app pricing, sustainability, over-competition,

00:58:16   everything, all of those problems are magnified

00:58:20   on the iPad side, because the install base isn't as big,

00:58:24   so you can't just make it up in volume.

00:58:26   It's harder to make it on the iPad side.

00:58:29   There's less competition, I think, which helps,

00:58:30   but it's just harder.

00:58:32   Look at how many iPad apps have just been

00:58:35   just totally abandoned and just are getting

00:58:38   no meaningful updates because their developers

00:58:40   just can't afford to work on them.

00:58:43   I think this is ultimately going to be

00:58:46   what decides whether the iPad Pro succeeds or fails

00:58:49   is will developers, including Apple with iOS,

00:58:54   will developers be able to justify

00:58:57   investing a lot of resources into making really great

00:59:00   software for the iPad Pro.

00:59:02   'Cause it's kind of a chicken and egg problem.

00:59:05   If they don't, then the iPad Pro,

00:59:08   it will probably not do substantially better

00:59:11   than the other iPads have done.

00:59:13   And it's not like they're bombing,

00:59:14   and everyone always says, "Oh, well it's a bigger business

00:59:15   "than McDonald's," or whatever.

00:59:16   You know, they're doing okay, but it seems like

00:59:18   the point of this product was to really juice

00:59:20   the iPad lineup, really give it a substantial boost.

00:59:22   And unless the software comes,

00:59:25   I don't think that's going to happen.

00:59:27   I also don't see what in the software ecosystem

00:59:31   will meaningfully change that will suddenly make this

00:59:35   a great platform that is worth developers,

00:59:38   both large and small, spending a lot of time

00:59:41   creating and maintaining professional quality apps

00:59:43   for this platform.

00:59:45   - Seems like Apple's been coasting on the,

00:59:47   not coasting, but like benefiting from the inevitability

00:59:50   of the iPad that they apparently feel

00:59:52   that I've always felt, even from like the original iPad

00:59:55   Remember when the iPad was coming out, it was like Apple's tablet, we didn't know what

00:59:58   the name of it was going to be.

00:59:59   One of the topics of discussion around that time, although we didn't have a lot of podcasts

01:00:02   talk about it on, was what is the home screen going to look like on an Apple tablet?

01:00:08   And the reason that was a discussion, because the second thing anyone would say in that

01:00:12   conversation is they can't just do what they do on the phone and have just a grid of icons

01:00:16   because the screen is massive.

01:00:18   So what are they going to do?

01:00:19   Like it was fun to think about what is the sort of the home experience, the root level,

01:00:26   the bottom level, the thing you see when you turn the thing on.

01:00:30   What does that look like when you have a tablet-sized device?

01:00:32   And Apple's answer was it looks like a phone, we spread stuff out a little bit more, right?

01:00:37   And as the iPod, iPad changed sizes, when it got smaller, you know, the icons were there,

01:00:42   now it's gotten bigger, the icons just spread out.

01:00:45   There's a couple aspects of that.

01:00:47   One is if they actually did put things in at the same density they are on a phone, that

01:00:54   would be an object of ridicule.

01:00:56   People like, "That big iPad, you can't tell where anything is because there's a million

01:00:59   icons on the home screen."

01:01:01   So they can obviously not do them.

01:01:03   That just goes to show that the density that works well on a tiny thing in your hand, you

01:01:06   can't use that same density when the thing is the size of an actual notebook piece of

01:01:10   paper.

01:01:11   But surely, looking at the iPad Pro, you could fit a few more in there, can't you?

01:01:14   is just huge white space between them, but it all gets back to the same root problem,

01:01:19   which is trying to figure out, which Apple has been trying to do and mostly failing for

01:01:24   many many years now, how to take this computing device that Apple and I at least think is

01:01:30   the future of computing, as obvious as anything else, but that it has to grow up and it has

01:01:37   to start taking on more of the capabilities of desktop computers and it has to do that

01:01:41   at the same time as it doesn't take on all of their crap.

01:01:44   The whole reason we see it as the future of computing

01:01:46   and inevitability is that there's some things

01:01:49   you won't be able to do on a phone,

01:01:50   which is, we don't have to call inevitable,

01:01:52   it's already here, boom, done, right?

01:01:54   Some things you can't do on a phone that's too darn small,

01:01:56   and PCs are still too hard to use, including Macs.

01:01:59   So here's this thing that's in between.

01:02:01   It takes all the good stuff from your phone

01:02:03   that everyone knows how to use and is comfortable with,

01:02:04   gets rid of all the legacy crap,

01:02:06   but how can you make it have more capabilities?

01:02:08   And designing the home screen with the iPad

01:02:10   was one of the first times that I've always faced with that thing.

01:02:12   Hmm.

01:02:13   All right.

01:02:13   What do you see when you turn on the iPad?

01:02:15   We have this big screen.

01:02:16   Can we do something different in this realm?

01:02:19   And that realm is like the place where people go to launch their apps

01:02:21   or to rearrange things or whatever.

01:02:24   And they punted on it.

01:02:25   They said, well, I don't know.

01:02:26   We don't really have any good ideas right now.

01:02:28   So let's just make a degree out of icons.

01:02:30   And they just continued to kick that down the road, all the while knowing

01:02:33   that surely there's something more they can do.

01:02:35   But it's like, but you don't want to make it into--

01:02:36   what, are you going to have a Finder on the iPad?

01:02:38   No, no.

01:02:38   We don't want that crap.

01:02:39   The whole reason people like the iPad is that it's simple, right?

01:02:42   So it has to be straightforward.

01:02:44   And like, all right, yeah, we're fine with that.

01:02:46   But now we're getting to the point in the iPad's evolution, it's like, but we have to

01:02:49   make it more capable.

01:02:51   So bigger, good, yes, thumbs up.

01:02:52   I've always been a big fan of the iPad Pro.

01:02:54   You have to make it bigger because there's more stuff you can do.

01:02:56   And then what can we do with that real estate?

01:02:58   That's a harder problem.

01:02:59   I've got this extra real estate.

01:03:00   Apple's like, "No, we could split the screen and make it like a divider that you can kind

01:03:04   of like..."

01:03:06   It's better, better than nothing, but it still shows that they haven't figured out how to

01:03:12   add capability without adding complexity.

01:03:14   The beauty of the thing we all know, the Windows pointer mouse, you know, WIMP interface pioneered

01:03:19   by the Mac or popularized by the Mac, is that evolved over time with a vocabulary that we're

01:03:25   all familiar with.

01:03:26   Like, you know, it's easy for us to think like, "Oh, Macs aren't that hard or PCs aren't

01:03:29   that hard.

01:03:30   Everyone knows how to use Windows and menu bars."

01:03:34   And like, there's a vocabulary for dealing with windows that, you know, that they have

01:03:37   widgets on them that you can resize them from various edges, you can move them around tabs

01:03:42   or another vocabulary that was added.

01:03:43   And we all understand how tabs work.

01:03:45   But that's us, everyone else.

01:03:47   And same thing with the file system, file system and folders and, you know, navigating

01:03:50   the hierarchy, a very simple, consistent vocabulary for people who are into computers.

01:03:55   For everyone else, it might as well be, you know, inscrutable.

01:03:58   And just like some people just never fully grasp it.

01:04:00   So that's why we know that like the smartphone and the iPad

01:04:04   are inevitably the future because history has shown over,

01:04:08   you know, decades that just people,

01:04:11   not enough people grok computers the way we grok them.

01:04:15   This interface is, you know,

01:04:17   it's much better than what came before.

01:04:18   The command line, even a small number of people grok.

01:04:21   The GUI with the mouses and the scroll bars,

01:04:23   a larger reveal grok,

01:04:24   but everybody gets the smartphone, right?

01:04:26   And, but there are those of us who use computers

01:04:29   to do our job, so they have to figure out a way

01:04:31   to make these things more capable

01:04:33   without making them more complicated.

01:04:34   And that is a really difficult job, and that's on Apple.

01:04:36   Like, individual developers, they can make their applications

01:04:40   to use the old parlance iPad Pro savvy,

01:04:43   and they need to all do all that stuff or whatever,

01:04:44   but it's kind of on Apple to show how this can really be

01:04:49   the future of computing, and so far,

01:04:50   they've been timid about it, because it's safe to say,

01:04:54   we'll just do what we did on the phone and bigger,

01:04:55   'cause people already understand it, and it works fine,

01:04:57   but you're not gaining any new capabilities then,

01:04:59   Even though they said, "Well, when you rotate mail sideways,

01:05:00   "you get a new sidebar."

01:05:02   Or even on the 6S Plus,

01:05:04   they did a couple of different layouts and whatever.

01:05:07   This is so massively huge, you can't just say,

01:05:09   "All right, well now all our apps

01:05:10   "will have a little bit different layout."

01:05:11   'Cause sometimes you don't even have anything

01:05:12   to go over there.

01:05:13   Inevitably, you have to get to some solution

01:05:14   that gives us what we do with Windows,

01:05:17   but in a simpler way.

01:05:18   And the splitter is their first crack at that,

01:05:19   and I haven't used it, so I don't know how successful it is,

01:05:22   but boy, I just feel like they have a long way

01:05:24   to go in this area.

01:05:25   and most of the complaints surrounding software

01:05:30   on the iPad Pro,

01:05:31   I don't think it dooms the tablet as a platform,

01:05:33   it just goes to show that this is a hard problem

01:05:37   and it's easy to take for granted

01:05:39   the breakthroughs and conventions that came with the Mac

01:05:41   and with the original GUI that had so much time to evolve.

01:05:44   I remember we had two arrows on both ends of the scroll bars

01:05:46   and we had proportional scroll thumbs

01:05:48   and then we got rid of the scroll bars entirely

01:05:50   and all that.

01:05:51   Even just something as simple as moving windows around

01:05:53   and scrolling.

01:05:54   There's a lot of cracks at that.

01:05:56   Like what we have now is not what was first there,

01:05:58   and we tried all sorts of different things

01:05:59   to try to find something that was better.

01:06:02   Proportional scroll thumbs were a pretty big revolution.

01:06:04   Apple didn't invent those obviously,

01:06:05   and they were really late adopting them.

01:06:08   But that was a significant enhancement

01:06:10   over the original scroll thumb,

01:06:11   and the original Mac scroll bars

01:06:13   were a significant enhancement over the weird ones

01:06:14   on the Xerox systems that you had to like middle click

01:06:16   or whatever to scroll.

01:06:17   So I don't expect anyone to nail this in the first try,

01:06:22   But the iteration time has definitely slowed down,

01:06:26   I think mostly because the smartphone and its interface

01:06:29   became so iconic that Apple's like,

01:06:32   "Well, worst case, it's like a phone,

01:06:34   "but on a bigger screen, everybody understands that

01:06:36   "and it'll be fine."

01:06:37   But we won't make significant progress

01:06:38   towards the future of computing, capital F, capital C,

01:06:43   that Tim Cook and I and several other people believe

01:06:46   must come someday.

01:06:48   - Yeah, I don't know.

01:06:49   I mean, a lot of these problems,

01:06:52   people assume to be problems, like my old

01:06:55   launch an app without a setting screen design problem,

01:06:58   where you assume, oh well, computers are too hard to use,

01:07:01   so the way to make them easier to use

01:07:03   is to get rid of all these files and windows and everything,

01:07:07   get rid of all these things people are confused about.

01:07:10   But if you look at it only in that way,

01:07:12   that's kind of a naive 22-year-old smart person

01:07:17   way to look at things, of like, well, this is all stupid,

01:07:19   we'll just get rid of it.

01:07:21   And then you do and you realize,

01:07:22   oh, now we have a lot of problems to solve.

01:07:26   And the solutions that you build up

01:07:28   end up being oftentimes more complex or worse,

01:07:32   or at least no better than what was already there.

01:07:35   Because what was already there

01:07:36   was actually there for good reasons.

01:07:38   And so a lot of these problems, I think,

01:07:40   have to be backtracked in some way.

01:07:42   For example, iCloud Drive, perfect example of this,

01:07:45   where you have, okay, well, there's no more files.

01:07:48   each app just has its own content in the app.

01:07:51   And then, oh, now we have a sync engine

01:07:53   and well, it'll just sync.

01:07:54   There's documents still in the app.

01:07:56   And then, oh, it turns out having a folder

01:07:59   that just syncs everywhere, like Dropbox, is really useful

01:08:02   and makes a lot of things way easier

01:08:05   than all these apps having their own little sandbox silos.

01:08:08   And also those little sandbox silos

01:08:10   bring lots of other limitations

01:08:11   and challenges to the platform.

01:08:13   And, oh, by the way, all this contributes very heavily

01:08:16   to why a lot of people can't get their work done on iOS.

01:08:18   - Don't you feel like it's tempting

01:08:20   to slide back to the old solutions?

01:08:21   - Yeah.

01:08:22   - I think that was, you know, Sync is a great example

01:08:24   where it's like the new stuff is supposed to work

01:08:26   but doesn't and Dropbox used the old paradigm

01:08:29   plus reliability to say, look you guys,

01:08:32   you guys haven't figured it out.

01:08:34   I know this is an old paradigm that is confusing

01:08:35   but it's reliable and at least, at the very least,

01:08:38   the people who understand files and folders

01:08:40   will understand Dropbox and the other people,

01:08:41   they'll muddle along because we'll be reliable enough

01:08:43   but it's so easy to go back to that.

01:08:46   Apple doesn't like to do that.

01:08:47   That's why the iPad Pro doesn't come with a bunch of windows

01:08:50   with widgets that you slide around on the screen, right?

01:08:52   They totally could.

01:08:53   It could, you know, they could make like a touch,

01:08:55   an OS X designed for touch

01:08:57   where all the window widgets are gigantic or whatever,

01:08:59   but you have actual windows.

01:09:01   Apple doesn't wanna do that to its credit,

01:09:03   to its detriment or demerit

01:09:05   or whatever word you wanna insert there.

01:09:07   They don't seem to have quite an idea

01:09:10   what to do going forward.

01:09:12   and they've been really cautious about like poking their way towards the edges of like,

01:09:17   I mean, Microsoft has been much more daring in thinking the old paradigms are cruddy,

01:09:23   we want to try something new, and they went hog wild with the whole Metro stuff.

01:09:28   I don't think that was successful either, but they certainly, you know, came, went forward

01:09:34   much more boldly than Apple.

01:09:35   Apple's just been like, it's just, we'll just use the smartphone stuff.

01:09:38   Everyone likes that.

01:09:39   the compromises we made to a small screen, we will port to the big screen and don't

01:09:43   complain that it can't do anything more than a phone.

01:09:45   Yeah, I mean at this point, I would say the main thing that holds iOS back from more pro

01:09:51   adoption is the OS. It's not that the screens weren't big enough. Those things help. And

01:09:58   things like the iPad Pro and the pencil and finally a decent keyboard, those things will

01:10:06   all help and they will all bring in certain portions of the workforce and population that

01:10:12   couldn't have done it before or didn't want to do it before.

01:10:15   But fundamentally, the main reason why so many people say, "I can't get my work done

01:10:20   on an iPad," or "It would be very clunky for me to get my work done on an iPad,"

01:10:25   fundamentally that comes down to iOS and the structure of iOS, how things like files and

01:10:30   documents and sandboxing and apps, how those things are all -- and multitasking, like how

01:10:35   how these all work together, the things they can do,

01:10:38   the things they can't do, that is ultimately

01:10:40   what it comes down to for a lot of people.

01:10:41   And that is really hard to change meaningfully

01:10:45   without, as you said, without just basically

01:10:47   making it a Mac, like without redoing

01:10:49   all these old complexities.

01:10:51   Now Apple is trying to figure out

01:10:54   which of those old complexities were actually not necessary

01:10:57   and which are necessary to have a productive

01:11:01   kind of pro work machine.

01:11:03   - I don't think any of them are necessary.

01:11:04   The question is simply, like, because all they are is a means to an end.

01:11:07   The end is I need to have a way to use multiple, to do multiple things at once.

01:11:14   We call it multiple application, but there's no reason that paradigm you need to stick,

01:11:17   although Apple seems married to that.

01:11:18   You could have gone, Apple could have gone the OpenDoc route where everything is inverted

01:11:21   and the document is king and there's no real applications.

01:11:24   And anyway, they didn't.

01:11:25   The point is they have applications.

01:11:26   So we're faced with, basically the high level problem we're faced with is how do I do more

01:11:29   than one thing at one time?

01:11:31   before these things start sharing with each other,

01:11:32   just simply, how do I go to a web browser,

01:11:36   to my text editor, to my email, to my photo editor?

01:11:39   How do I do more than one?

01:11:40   Windows solves that problem,

01:11:41   not capital W, Windows for Microsoft,

01:11:43   but Windows is the solution that people came up with,

01:11:46   that there's going to be application content,

01:11:47   it's in these little rectangles

01:11:48   that we can change the size of.

01:11:50   When we change the size to small,

01:11:51   scroll bars are there to move around.

01:11:52   They have a thing that you can drag them on.

01:11:54   They have little buttons that you can close

01:11:56   and minimize and match.

01:11:58   That was the old solution to that.

01:12:00   Old solution, if I've seen anybody use computers,

01:12:03   Windows are not something that most people deal with well.

01:12:07   And it has simply not gotten better.

01:12:09   You can't blame it all,

01:12:10   it's because old people didn't grow up with computers.

01:12:12   There are many, many people who grew up with computers

01:12:14   who cannot manage Windows.

01:12:15   I, as we all know, am an expert at managing Windows.

01:12:17   - Oh my God.

01:12:18   - Because I grew up with it,

01:12:20   and because I have an aptitude for it.

01:12:21   But, and it makes me keenly aware

01:12:23   that pretty much everyone else I see

01:12:25   has no idea what to do with Windows.

01:12:26   Even young kids at work, like kids just out of college,

01:12:29   I see how they use computers

01:12:31   and they have these massive screens

01:12:32   and they have like maybe two windows on them.

01:12:34   That's why people love tiling window managers

01:12:36   and things like Windows 10

01:12:37   where you jam the window against the side of the screen,

01:12:39   it fills the half.

01:12:39   Managing Windows is, it is not easy to do,

01:12:44   to have a bunch of windows all shuffling around.

01:12:45   It's like having 17 papers on your desk

01:12:47   all overlapping with each other

01:12:48   and trying to manage it, right?

01:12:50   That is, it's not like that people

01:12:51   are gonna get better at that.

01:12:53   So I'm not saying it's a bankrupt paradigm.

01:12:54   It's way better than people managing

01:12:57   the mental state required to deal with a command line,

01:12:59   right, big advancement over that.

01:13:01   But you can't go back to it,

01:13:04   but we still have the root problem of,

01:13:05   what if I wanna do a bunch of stuff at once?

01:13:07   So how do you let me do a bunch of stuff at once

01:13:09   without asking me to manage Windows?

01:13:11   And so far, we don't have a good answer to that.

01:13:14   The iOS multitasking switcher, splitting the screen,

01:13:18   none of those things, like we recognize all those things

01:13:21   are better than nothing,

01:13:23   but still not as capable as Windows,

01:13:25   even to people who aren't good at managing windows

01:13:27   and don't like to have a lot of windows,

01:13:29   if you're at all used to windows, you're like,

01:13:31   I wish I could just have windows on this thing,

01:13:32   but then you realize it doesn't work

01:13:34   with the finger or whatever.

01:13:34   So that's just one root problem.

01:13:36   How do I give something that's the equivalent of windows?

01:13:40   Like, I don't wanna say it that way,

01:13:41   but how do I let people use this computing device

01:13:45   to do more than one thing at the same time

01:13:47   and move between those tasks in a nice way?

01:13:49   So set that aside, we don't have a good solution.

01:13:51   The other one you were talking about, Marco,

01:13:53   How do I deal with the data?

01:13:55   How do I take some piece of data?

01:13:57   How do I synthesize like pictures from here,

01:14:00   text from there, a link from here?

01:14:01   How do I move stuff between applications,

01:14:04   keep track of where things are, save things,

01:14:06   have, you know, like, and the old solution

01:14:08   that was files and folders in a file system.

01:14:10   You had images, you had text documents, you know,

01:14:12   and that was the old paradigm.

01:14:13   And as we all know, people aren't good at the old paradigm.

01:14:16   Files and folders, people make a big giant mess.

01:14:17   They can't keep track of where they are.

01:14:19   Lots of people can deal with it,

01:14:21   but lots of people just can't.

01:14:22   And again, we've had computers long enough not to say like,

01:14:24   "Oh, we just gotta wait for the old people to die.

01:14:26   Young people will know how to deal with files and folders."

01:14:28   Nope, we ran that experiment.

01:14:29   Human beings are not changing that fast.

01:14:31   Files and folders, a lot of people can use it,

01:14:33   but a lot of people can't.

01:14:35   It's much easier when there's no saving.

01:14:37   You open the Notes app,

01:14:38   you type a bunch of notes in with your thumbs on your iPhone

01:14:40   and you close the Notes app.

01:14:41   No one is begging for a save button

01:14:43   on the Notes application.

01:14:44   I've said this a million times.

01:14:46   And it just goes to show that like,

01:14:49   those are complexities that we don't need.

01:14:51   But when you want to do something that would traditionally be done with files and folders in a file system,

01:14:55   what is the solution for that?

01:14:57   So Apple should really probably have like teams of 50 really smart people,

01:15:02   multiple ones of them, working on all these problems.

01:15:04   Because right now they're either not solving them at all or making the most timid move in the direction of solving them.

01:15:11   And then just kind of being like, I don't know, like it's a little bit more complicated than the iPhone,

01:15:17   but it's not as good as a Mac. What do you guys think of that?

01:15:20   And it's just not the same as the bold vision of the Mac of saying the command line is crap forget about it what we're

01:15:24   Doing has nothing to do with the command line here are you know we've seen the future and just gooeys

01:15:29   And we're gonna this is the direction we're gonna take and it's way better than everything came before it and so far

01:15:34   We haven't had that moment for the post you know the post wimp world

01:15:39   So two questions for you John first of all on an infinite time scale would we get good at using Windows I?

01:15:47   Don't think so because I don't think there's any I don't think there's any evolutionary pressure

01:15:51   Like there's there's nothing about being good at windows that makes your genes more likely to be passed on

01:15:58   So in the absence of that pressure

01:16:01   I don't see how the genetic makeup of humans would change over any period of time to become better at managing

01:16:08   multiple traditional windows and the second reason of course is that

01:16:12   We will come up with different interfaces that are better than windows and simpler and better suited to us

01:16:17   So it's not you there's nothing holding windows steady of saying I demand that windows as they currently exist stay there for the next

01:16:23   You know three billion years to wait and see if human evolution will make us better at handling them

01:16:28   You took that question way too seriously, but I gave you I gave you the answer, but I appreciate it

01:16:34   I mean, that's nothing less. Yeah, exactly the other question I had and I am being serious now is

01:16:39   you seem

01:16:41   really disappointed with the multitasking paradigm in iOS and

01:16:45   You know, I have this iPad mini the first one with the retina display and it doesn't support

01:16:51   God, I always get the terminology wrong. So it does do slide over. It doesn't do split view

01:16:56   I'm pretty sure I got that right. That's right

01:16:57   And so I've only had limited experience with the multitasking on an iPad, but I feel like I really like it

01:17:05   I will say that the multitasking switcher when you're switching between apps and in the slide over or what have you is

01:17:11   is stupid. Like, I agree with you there. That's dumb. But the general premise behind it, I

01:17:17   don't think it's so bad. I'm not saying there couldn't be better, but I mean, I think it's

01:17:20   a pretty solid first step. Do you not think that?

01:17:23   I don't know. Like, it's easy to see that it's not as capable as multiple windows, right?

01:17:29   Sure. Because two, like, it's better than one, but not as good as three. And what if

01:17:33   you've got four, and so on and so forth. Sixty. Yeah. And it doesn't help you with the, it

01:17:39   doesn't help you yet with the, you know, sharing for one thing to the other, dragging and dropping

01:17:44   across that line, or somehow because things are visually next to each other, all the same

01:17:49   things we do in the desktop.

01:17:50   Like drag and drop is, again, not saying drag and drop is what they should bring over because

01:17:54   it's the old thing that worked, but they need something that fills the same role as drag

01:17:57   and drop in that like, you know, I have something over here, I'm going to drag it over there

01:18:02   and I'm going to chuck it into this thing and now this image I dragged out of photos

01:18:06   onto the desktop, I drag from the desktop into photos.

01:18:09   That's not a particularly efficient move,

01:18:10   but it's using a vocabulary that we understand to do that.

01:18:13   The reason I'm mostly disappointed in it as,

01:18:15   not disappointed, like it's better than nothing,

01:18:17   but it's so clearly still less capable

01:18:22   than a desktop computer,

01:18:25   but I feel like almost as hard to explain

01:18:27   to people who aren't familiar.

01:18:29   Like I just tried to show my daughter today

01:18:31   for whatever reason, she decided to use the laptop

01:18:36   to write something instead of writing it on a piece of paper.

01:18:39   I don't think she writes on her iPod.

01:18:41   But anyway, she decided to use a laptop.

01:18:43   And she asked me how to make the window cover the whole screen.

01:18:46   Because that's just a user.

01:18:47   She's grown up on iOS.

01:18:48   So I showed her the full screen thing.

01:18:49   She's in full screen mode.

01:18:50   And then she wanted to look something up in Safari.

01:18:53   And I wanted to show her, you can actually

01:18:54   see the text editor in Safari at the same time.

01:18:58   But then I realized, to show her that, I have to show,

01:19:00   all you have to do-- again, all you have to do

01:19:02   is arrange the windows.

01:19:05   Arrange the windows.

01:19:07   She doesn't know how windows move.

01:19:09   She doesn't know windows can be resized.

01:19:11   I resized a window and she asked me how I did it.

01:19:12   How did you change the size of the window?

01:19:14   Like it's another thing, you know, like.

01:19:17   So trying to show someone how to use windows,

01:19:19   obviously very complicated.

01:19:20   Trying to show her how to use split view on the iPad

01:19:23   would, it results in almost the same conversations.

01:19:26   Like it's already, already too complicated I feel like.

01:19:29   That people aren't gonna figure it out on their own.

01:19:32   And I think it suffers in comparison to windows

01:19:34   and that it doesn't really give you a sort of functional vocabulary that you can apply

01:19:39   repeatedly because once you figure out how a window works, you still may not be good

01:19:43   at arranging windows because just knowing how to a window works is like I know how to

01:19:47   form all the letters.

01:19:48   It's not the same as knowing how to write, you know what I mean, or knowing how to hit

01:19:50   one piano key is not the same as knowing how to play a piano.

01:19:53   But you know that any key on the keyboard, if you hit it with your finger, will make

01:19:56   a noise.

01:19:57   You figured out the vocab, the functional vocabulary, the basic functional vocabulary

01:20:00   of a piano.

01:20:01   Once you figure out how windows work, you can drag them by the title bar, you can resize

01:20:04   them, you can close them, you can move them around, you learn the parameters, can I move

01:20:08   it all the way off the screen?

01:20:09   No, no, I can't.

01:20:10   Can I get the title bar underneath the menu bar?

01:20:12   Not unless there's like a bug in the OS, which happens sometimes.

01:20:17   Is it really that much easier?

01:20:18   Don't think about the split view as like, "Oh, it's pretty cool.

01:20:20   I kind of like it."

01:20:21   You know how to use desktop computers.

01:20:22   Think about it as if you had to show somebody who had only ever used a smartphone, how to

01:20:28   use split view with their eyes glazed over and they'd be like, "I don't get it."

01:20:31   And then secondarily, could they transfer those skills?

01:20:34   Like if you say you show them how to use split view

01:20:35   and they figure it out, could they,

01:20:37   are those skills useful for anything else?

01:20:38   So they're gonna say,

01:20:39   "Now I can split view any two applications,"

01:20:41   or would you have to show them again?

01:20:42   Okay, well, this is how you do a split view,

01:20:44   but what if you want to, like when you come back to it,

01:20:46   will the same two things be in the split view?

01:20:47   Or what if you want to put something different

01:20:48   in the split view?

01:20:49   What if you want to have multiple,

01:20:50   like I think it's already too complicated

01:20:53   and still less capable.

01:20:55   Now, I'm not entirely sure about that,

01:20:57   but that's my sense of it so far is that

01:21:01   It's not like it's on its way to being as good as the Mac.

01:21:03   I think it's not as capable as the Mac

01:21:07   and not really easier to explain than Windows.

01:21:10   So I feel like it's a bad solution at this point.

01:21:13   - You know, I've been talking about it before,

01:21:14   like there seems to be a certain baseline level

01:21:17   of required complexity.

01:21:19   And that's not to say that for things like multitasking,

01:21:22   that we have Windows or SlideOver

01:21:24   or everything's full screen.

01:21:25   Like that's not to say that these things

01:21:28   cannot be improved upon,

01:21:29   but I do think there is a certain ceiling

01:21:32   that we cannot surpass of how simple can we make this?

01:21:37   Because the fundamental fact is these are advanced concepts.

01:21:42   They're going to have some inherent level

01:21:43   of minimum complexity.

01:21:45   Oh, oh, we're gonna have multiple things that are separate,

01:21:49   that are running on this screen at once,

01:21:50   and there's going to be some way

01:21:52   to divide the screen space between them,

01:21:54   and you're gonna have to be able to pick out

01:21:57   which ones to open somehow,

01:21:59   figure out if you wanna open them one at a time

01:22:02   or if you want to add multiple ones to the screen

01:22:04   in some way, then figure out how to switch between them,

01:22:07   how to close certain ones or all of them.

01:22:09   Like there's going to be some baseline level

01:22:12   of complexity to this no matter how it's designed,

01:22:14   no matter what system it is.

01:22:16   There's going to therefore be some kind

01:22:18   of basic learning curve, no matter how easy to make it.

01:22:21   So again, this isn't to say that we can't improve

01:22:24   systems we have now, but I think people are assuming that there is some endgame here that

01:22:31   we should be going for where anybody can just pick it up and all of a sudden it's perfect.

01:22:36   And that's never, we're never going to reach that.

01:22:39   I think you're mistaking intuitiveness in the old parlance for just a better UI, because

01:22:44   you could say all the same things back before the GUI existed. Like there's some inheriting

01:22:48   complexity in a time-sharing system where multiple programs are running at the same

01:22:53   time and we're never gonna make that easier because this you know like and

01:22:56   then the GUI came along and it's like oh well I guess if you totally rethink

01:23:00   things then I guess you can make it massively easier for a huge number of

01:23:03   people still too complicated for all people but so much better you know like

01:23:08   you really there is no I don't think there's any limitation and you know the

01:23:13   endgame obviously would be like you know some crazy neural interface where you

01:23:16   just think stuff and imagine what happens or or the endgame is all the

01:23:20   extinction of human life and the computers take over. Anyway, there's definitely an endgame,

01:23:24   you may not like it. But for things like interfaces, I think they're absolutely,

01:23:30   I think that kind of thinking that is just like, there's a certain amount of complexity and there's

01:23:35   no way we're going to make it simple, is just absolutely the wrong way to look at this. Because

01:23:39   having lived through the GUI revolution and having seen how, that's why the original GUI

01:23:44   and the Mac was so brilliant, that it did find a way. Lots of people tried to find ways to do it,

01:23:49   And then the Mac finally did find a way

01:23:52   through the use of metaphor and through what

01:23:55   I've maintained is one of the best interfaces ever,

01:23:58   the spatial finder, giving people

01:24:01   an interface that played to the strengths of the knowledge

01:24:07   that they have from living in the actual world

01:24:09   and let them use those skills to manage

01:24:11   this virtual world of the computer in a way

01:24:15   that wasn't possible before.

01:24:17   And it made them much more capable.

01:24:19   It didn't just make the capabilities easier,

01:24:21   it added new capabilities.

01:24:24   And what we needed is the next one of those revolutions.

01:24:26   Arguably, the smartphone was the next one

01:24:27   of those revolutions.

01:24:28   It just happened to be in a constrained environment

01:24:31   where the thing has to fit in your hand

01:24:32   and you carry it around with you,

01:24:33   which let us avoid a lot of the more difficult problems.

01:24:37   It was a very difficult problem in itself.

01:24:38   Like that was the second revolution, the smartphone, right?

01:24:41   Making people be able to do stuff with computers,

01:24:44   people who couldn't even use computers,

01:24:45   or making you not even think of it as a computer.

01:24:47   But in the larger realm, we still have these other computers

01:24:50   that have changed into this incredibly capable

01:24:53   general purpose thing we have

01:24:54   that we still think is too complicated.

01:24:55   So that is the next frontier.

01:24:57   So I'm not as fatalistic as you are about like,

01:25:01   yeah, there is some inherent complexity

01:25:03   and people aren't going to change,

01:25:04   but I really truly believe there absolutely is a way

01:25:07   to leverage what humans are good at

01:25:10   to let them do all the things they do

01:25:12   with desktop computers in an easier way.

01:25:15   To go back a step, it is absolutely insane to me, John,

01:25:18   that you would take Windows as the introduction

01:25:23   to multiple things happening at the same time.

01:25:26   To me, the iPad multitasking interface

01:25:29   is so much easier to understand

01:25:31   and makes so much more sense.

01:25:34   Yeah, it's a little bit weirder

01:25:36   in that there's not a lot of visual cues as to what to do,

01:25:39   but in every other measurable way,

01:25:41   I feel like it is so much easier.

01:25:42   And for your daughter to be confused by Windows, that's not terribly surprising to me.

01:25:48   But I think if you had done the reverse and started her on the iPad, and then said to

01:25:52   her, "Alright, well this is kind of like the iPad, but you can have more than just two,

01:25:56   and you don't have to do some weird gesture to slide them around, you just have to grab

01:26:01   it and move it," I feel like that would have made a lot more sense to her.

01:26:04   To me, I think you're looking at the iPad interface as a dumbing down of windowing,

01:26:12   whereas I see, even though this obviously is chronologically the reverse, I feel like

01:26:17   windowing is an extension of the more simple iPad interface.

01:26:23   And it's a much easier paradigm to understand.

01:26:26   And yes, it's not discoverable, but once you've discovered it, it is so simple to use.

01:26:31   And it seems like it would be – a lot of the problems that people have with windowing

01:26:37   systems, I don't think they would have them with the iPad.

01:26:40   This is all guessing.

01:26:41   I have no evidence.

01:26:42   I've never asked my parents, "Hey, how do you have two apps open at the same time

01:26:46   on the iPad?"

01:26:47   This is all supposition.

01:26:48   But it just seems so much more logical to me than the far more inscrutable task of managing

01:26:54   windows.

01:26:55   I think you're getting hung up again on the learnability and intuitiveness.

01:26:57   It doesn't really matter how confused they are at first.

01:26:59   matters is after you've shown them how to do it does this translate into sort of a new paradigm

01:27:05   does it give them skills and vocabulary that they can then use to manage complexity in their life

01:27:09   like not the computer complexity but the complexity whatever whatever thing it is that

01:27:13   they're using the computer to do you want to you know there's always going to be some you know

01:27:19   again that's the the saying from the old gooey days the only thing that's actually intuitive is

01:27:23   the nipple everything else is learned and so intuitiveness is totally a red herring right

01:27:29   All you want is something that most people can learn in a reasonable amount of time,

01:27:34   and that after they learn it, it gives them a toolset because it defines a sort of

01:27:38   understandable world that lets them use those skills to solve problems.

01:27:44   So you can totally see how the GUI, the Mac GUI in particular, gave people that vocabulary.

01:27:49   All applications work the same. The menu bar is always at the top. All the windows work the same.

01:27:52   Scroll bars work the same. The mouse works the same. There's a simple vocabulary for same click,

01:27:56   double clip, and then adding that right click and everything like that. That was a tool set.

01:28:01   I don't think the split view thing, it's a vocabulary that works in that way because

01:28:06   it doesn't create, I don't think there is an easily sort of, there's no user model,

01:28:12   there's no mental model that people can latch onto for that. Mostly because there's kind of not

01:28:16   really an analog in the physical world, but because they're like, well, what? Because the

01:28:19   paradigm for iOS thus far has been the thing is the app, the app is the thing. And that is totally a

01:28:24   a thing, a paradigm that people can hang on to.

01:28:28   You wanna go back to the place

01:28:29   where all the other things are, you hit the home button,

01:28:31   and then when the thing goes, it is the device.

01:28:33   That's a simple one, but that is a very solid paradigm.

01:28:36   That is what is power, the smartphone revolution,

01:28:38   you know, this incredibly good

01:28:41   iPhone user interface paradigm.

01:28:42   Split View, I think, does not fit with the old paradigm,

01:28:46   and doesn't give the user a vocabulary or a mental model

01:28:49   that they can then parlay into,

01:28:52   now I can solve any problem,

01:28:54   because I know how split views work.

01:28:55   They're just more like a weird feature

01:28:57   that has been added on top of the old system.

01:28:59   Like, again, it doesn't have to do with learnability

01:29:02   or having to explain it.

01:29:03   It's just that it just seems like it is not of a piece

01:29:05   with the rest of the interface.

01:29:07   It is a tacked on kind of thing

01:29:09   that I don't think represents a new interface paradigm,

01:29:12   and therefore they haven't actually solved the problem.

01:29:14   - See, and I think that where we fundamentally disagree is,

01:29:17   to me, the only thing that you should be able to accomplish

01:29:21   by understanding and grokking split view on the iPad

01:29:25   is being able to put two arbitrary apps next to each other.

01:29:28   That is it.

01:29:29   I don't care if that lets you leap into new worlds

01:29:32   and go out into the great unknown and apply this knowledge.

01:29:35   All I care about is can your daughter have Safari

01:29:38   and Notes next to each other?

01:29:39   And then later on, can she have YouTube

01:29:41   and Tweetbot next to each other?

01:29:44   - But she has to understand why they're no longer

01:29:46   next to each other or why something else

01:29:47   is next to something else or how long they're expected

01:29:50   to be next to each other.

01:29:51   Like, you know what I mean?

01:29:51   There's, there's so many questions surrounding that in terms of like, what,

01:29:54   what is the paradigm, what is the user model?

01:29:56   What is the mental model?

01:29:57   How does this work?

01:29:58   Just because you can, I know how, if I'm using this application,

01:30:01   I can make another appear.

01:30:02   If there's no actual understanding or there really is no solid paradigm

01:30:06   underneath it, then every time you use some other application, you're faced with,

01:30:09   why is the thing not next to it now?

01:30:11   Well, I'll just go through that same motion I knew before to

01:30:13   put the thing next to it.

01:30:14   Why is this next to that now?

01:30:15   Well, I know how to get rid of the thing next to it and it becomes, it's

01:30:19   like you're fighting with the computer instead of it helping you. You're not

01:30:21   using it as a tool to help you solve a problem. It's just like every time you

01:30:25   know this is capability but when it doesn't work the way you expect it to

01:30:29   work because you have a different model of like the persistence or the or how

01:30:33   the interaction between the different applications is, when they're not that

01:30:36   way you can stab at the screen a few times to make it be that way but it's

01:30:40   not it's not as like it's not as straightforward as the the windows model

01:30:44   which again people aren't good at but at least is an understandable model. You

01:30:47   make the windows the sizes you want, you put them where you want. At face value, like that's,

01:30:52   you know, it's enough rope to hang yourself because if you don't know what size they should

01:30:55   be or where you should put them, an old Steve Jobs thing, you have to be the janitor. You

01:30:58   have to put things where you want them. We don't want you to have to be the janitor.

01:31:01   Well, whether you're the janitor or not, everyone can understand the model of windows. It's

01:31:05   just that the model doesn't help them manage their complexity if they're not good at managing

01:31:09   windows, which is why windows are generally a failure. But I just don't feel like the

01:31:12   split view gives any kind of understandable model. It gives a little bit more capability,

01:31:17   not as much as multiple windows, but does not give you a new model for managing complexity

01:31:21   going forward.

01:31:22   Yeah, I don't know.

01:31:23   I still disagree with you, but I don't know.

01:31:27   Either of us could be right on this.

01:31:29   The way we'll find out is, as you see people using iPads that are increasingly capable

01:31:33   of split view, see how many people you see using split view or using it confidently.

01:31:37   Well, see, I think that's two very different discussions, right?

01:31:40   Using split view, as I said, it's not terribly discoverable.

01:31:43   So that's one thing.

01:31:44   using it confidently, that's where I think that's, that is what will differentiate which

01:31:48   one of us is right. Because if somebody stumbles upon it and is like, Oh God, what has happened?

01:31:53   And then is trying, is obviously trying to switch what app is there, what have you, and

01:31:56   it's not working. Okay. Then you're absolutely right. It's, it's completely inscrutable.

01:31:59   But if someone has discovered split view and without too much effort is now using it confidently,

01:32:05   then I think then that indicates that I'm right. And that it really is useful and it

01:32:08   really is a paradigm that they've learned to help them get work done.

01:32:11   It may still be useful, but we all agree that it is less capable than multiple windows,

01:32:14   if only because it's only two things, right?

01:32:16   So the confidence I'm saying is if you see someone using it, you see someone doing their

01:32:20   work in a cafe, in the same way you'd see them using a Mac.

01:32:23   Now whether they're using full screen and they're swiping between, which by the way

01:32:26   I've seen a lot of the younger people who I work with, they're very confident in that

01:32:29   because they're the smartphone generation, I guess.

01:32:31   They do full screen everything on their Mac laptops.

01:32:33   They do do the multi-finger swipe between the applications, which I see is incredibly

01:32:36   inefficient.

01:32:37   But what they're basically doing is turning the Mac into a paradigm that they understand

01:32:41   because Windows are too difficult to manage.

01:32:43   But for split view, you'd want to see somebody

01:32:45   doing their task, using split views

01:32:51   to help make their task more efficient.

01:32:52   Not just one split view that they keep permanently

01:32:54   and their whole thing is like,

01:32:55   I need to have Slack and Twitter next to each other

01:32:57   forever and ever and ever and amen.

01:32:58   I wish I could tell the OS to never launch them separately

01:33:00   and to launch them as a single application.

01:33:02   That I would say is a super degenerate case

01:33:04   of using split view.

01:33:05   But just to say that they're arbitrarily

01:33:09   putting applications next to each other

01:33:10   as is appropriate for the task they're doing.

01:33:12   If it's too difficult to rearrange

01:33:14   to put this thing next to that thing

01:33:15   and that's next to this thing,

01:33:17   then people won't do it and they'll be like,

01:33:18   well, it's too onerous to constantly,

01:33:22   the same way that people find it too onerous

01:33:24   to constantly rearrange windows,

01:33:25   it's too onerous to constantly rearrange split views

01:33:26   for whatever reason,

01:33:27   so therefore I'm just gonna have one split view

01:33:29   when everything else is non-split view.

01:33:31   And I would say that's not a confident use of things.

01:33:33   But anyway, even if they're using split views like that,

01:33:35   even if they're using them

01:33:36   to always put the two most convenient applications

01:33:38   next to each other they need at any moment of time

01:33:40   and they have no problem doing it, and it's second nature, and they don't have to think about it, and it's very intuitive,

01:33:44   that's still only two things at once. And so it's still worse than Windows.

01:33:47   Yeah, but it's worse by your metric of how many thousands of things can I get distracted by at once.

01:33:53   No, no, it's worse because we know people need to do more than one thing at once.

01:33:57   Windows are a failure because people can't use them to do more than—some people can't use them—I keep saying "people,"

01:34:02   you know, we're trying to talk in aggregates here, obviously. Obviously all of us can use Windows to do more than two things at once.

01:34:07   We do it all the time, but most people,

01:34:10   when they deal with computers, are not successful at that,

01:34:12   which means Windows is successful for the people

01:34:14   who are good at using computers in the old way of like,

01:34:17   he knows computers, but worse for everybody else.

01:34:20   Smartphones, I would say, pretty much 100% of the population

01:34:24   is successful at both using and installing applications.

01:34:27   I pretty much think we've solved that there,

01:34:30   not that it can't be improved,

01:34:31   but we've hit the mainstream in that,

01:34:34   oh, are you good at using smartphones?

01:34:36   Do you know smartphones?

01:34:38   Very few people say that unless they mean like developing for it or hacking them or

01:34:40   something like that.

01:34:41   Everybody knows how to launch the Facebook app.

01:34:43   Everyone knows how to send text messages.

01:34:45   Like we have crossed the effectively 100% barrier there.

01:34:48   We have not even come close to crossing that at the "can I use a general purpose computing

01:34:52   device to do arbitrary things?"

01:34:54   And so we're still struggling to get larger adoption than we have with the world of PCs

01:35:00   and Macs.

01:35:01   I think I agree with you that the smartphone full screen everything model is pretty close

01:35:07   to ideally usable for a lot of people, but I think the windowing model is doing a lot

01:35:13   better in practice than you're giving it credit for.

01:35:16   I think a lot more people than you seem to be suggesting have figured it out well enough

01:35:20   to get stuff done.

01:35:22   And maybe not ideally, you know, I'm sure you look at everyone's window setups and

01:35:26   it makes you cringe, but you would look at my setup and it would make you cringe.

01:35:31   But I think people figure it out.

01:35:34   They've been figuring it out for decades.

01:35:36   Most people who use a computer on a regular basis are able to figure out windowing enough

01:35:42   to do what they want to do.

01:35:44   Well, you can get by with anything.

01:35:45   You can figure out, like the upsides is that you muddle through, right?

01:35:49   But what we see, we all know the things that are bad about windows.

01:35:53   Like the reason people use the desktop so much and the desktop is filled with icons

01:35:56   and that they feel nonconfident navigating the file system.

01:36:01   My desktop is filled with icons.

01:36:02   Yeah, I know.

01:36:05   It's basically, it's the reason everybody found smartphones to be such a breath of fresh

01:36:09   air.

01:36:10   It's because all that crap that they have been sort of muddling through on their PCs

01:36:14   at work or whatever is not there on the smartphone.

01:36:18   There are no files and folders, there's no save button, there's no desktop.

01:36:22   It was just, it got rid of all that stuff.

01:36:25   And so even though they could manage with PCs, that's why I'm calling the PC interface

01:36:30   not like a failure in the sense of like it was terrible and nobody could use it, but

01:36:35   to understand how much better it is, compare it to people's reactions to smartphones.

01:36:39   Like smartphones aren't even considered computers.

01:36:41   It is a discontinuity.

01:36:43   They have transcended the idea of a general purpose computer.

01:36:45   So you're right that people do get by zooming all their windows to full screen and playing

01:36:50   Minesweeper and clicking around in their web browser.

01:36:52   And the web is another paradigm, like a little miniature paradigm of like clicking on an

01:36:55   and underline words and stuff.

01:36:56   That was another simple enough one

01:36:57   that I think was more successful.

01:36:58   But it's not like the PC or Mac is a dead end,

01:37:04   but we've clearly pushed the limit of how many people

01:37:08   are going to feel comfortable using that interface,

01:37:11   not to its fullest, but just even in a merely competent way.

01:37:14   Like I think there are people who use like a computer

01:37:17   every day for multiple decades,

01:37:19   who still have no idea where the hell anything is

01:37:21   in their disc and can't navigate the file system

01:37:22   and are terrified by an open state of dialog box

01:37:24   just definitely want everything to be either in that one place they know how to get to

01:37:27   or on the desktop or something and that shows that interface is not succeeding because that's

01:37:31   not the way it's supposed to work whereas people are using smartphones essentially the

01:37:35   way they're supposed to work under the sort of very simplified iOS paradigm of a big grid

01:37:40   of icons that you swipe between and you launch and they fill the screen.

01:37:43   Like they're not using the phones in the degenerate case they're using the phones the way they

01:37:46   were designed whereas the Macs and Windows I think people are muddling through.

01:37:50   Not everybody, not the people that we know, but the entire mass of humanity, like thinking

01:37:56   everybody's a whole.

01:37:57   Yeah, I could see that.

01:38:00   I think I'm mostly with you on that.

01:38:02   Alright, our final sponsor this week is MailRoute.

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01:39:05   I've tried, once a long time ago,

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01:40:33   - So any other thoughts about this new iPad Pro?

01:40:36   - I was gonna talk about hardware,

01:40:37   but I think we should save it for next week,

01:40:38   'cause I think there's a lot to talk about

01:40:39   on the iPad Pro hardware,

01:40:40   but that'll keep.

01:40:41   - Yeah, I mean, I think it's worth, you know,

01:40:44   giving us more time to use it first.

01:40:46   I would say, you know, my very, very early impression

01:40:50   as like an overview of it is, you know,

01:40:53   like whether you should buy one, whether I want one,

01:40:56   for me, the question is no.

01:40:59   Tiff, I think, will probably keep this,

01:41:02   although even she's a little bit unsure right now

01:41:03   'cause it is so big and the software is so

01:41:06   not taking advantage of it yet.

01:41:09   These things will change over time.

01:41:10   I mean the bigness won't, but over time software will take more advantage of it.

01:41:14   I would say if you're not in a huge hurry, getting next year's is probably going to be

01:41:20   a bigger improvement than most single year improvements would be for these things, simply

01:41:26   because not only will the hardware probably be a little bit better, maybe it'll add some

01:41:29   cool stuff like force touch and better touch ID, but the bigger thing is I think we need

01:41:35   a year for both Apple and third-party developers to write good software for this thing because

01:41:40   it isn't there yet. There's some right now but it's going to be a while and it's going

01:41:45   to be a while before everybody can actually afford to take advantage of it. So the only

01:41:52   exception I would make to that would be if you are already a heavy iPad user, somebody

01:41:58   like Federico Fattici, if you already are able to do a ton of your work or all of your

01:42:02   your work on an iPad.

01:42:04   And you already are doing things like using third party

01:42:07   keyboards with it and doing multitasking and you need more

01:42:12   screen space.

01:42:13   If you already are using styluses to do artistic work or

01:42:17   note taking or annotations.

01:42:18   So if you are already an iPad power user, then by all means

01:42:23   consider this now.

01:42:26   But if things about the iPad have prevented you from

01:42:32   getting into it as a serious productivity device

01:42:34   for your work, I don't think this will change that.

01:42:38   At least not yet.

01:42:40   And maybe down the road it will

01:42:41   once the software gets there,

01:42:43   but I don't think it's gonna be there for a little while.

01:42:46   - And hopefully by next year they'll have

01:42:48   the iPad Air size device with a pen.

01:42:52   That would be something.

01:42:52   - Yeah, and that could change everything.

01:42:54   I mean, right now, if you want this awesome pencil input,

01:42:57   you have to get the giant iPad.

01:43:00   And so like for me, if I were to ever get into pencil stuff,

01:43:04   I would much rather have the iPad Air sized one.

01:43:06   - You start doing art snacks with TIFF.

01:43:09   - But you don't need an iPad.

01:43:10   They send you actual like paint brushes and stuff.

01:43:12   - I know, but the equivalent of like just having

01:43:15   a small task that someone else sends you to do

01:43:17   to draw something for the day, you know.

01:43:20   - I'd rather just play Pictionary.

01:43:22   - Yeah.

01:43:22   - No, actually I have kind of a fun idea for a game

01:43:26   that I might want to do, but it would require the pencil

01:43:30   and it would also require me to develop a game.

01:43:32   So I think this is unlikely.

01:43:34   (laughing)

01:43:35   But that's the only thing I could really see doing on it

01:43:38   and that's probably not gonna happen.

01:43:39   - Combination of flight control and worms, go.

01:43:42   (laughing)

01:43:43   - Sounds kind of fun actually.

01:43:44   No but, (laughing)

01:43:46   you actually found two games that I've played to me.

01:43:49   - I was like, you would draw the paths

01:43:50   that the projectiles take

01:43:52   and the other person can set up barriers

01:43:53   and you'd have to quickly draw between them.

01:43:55   The game writes itself.

01:43:56   Wow.

01:43:58   Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Casper, Lynda.com, and Mailerout, and we will

01:44:03   see you next week.

01:44:04   That game probably already exists too.

01:44:06   Oh, I'm sure there's like ten of them.

01:44:08   At least.

01:44:09   Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin, 'cause it was accidental.

01:44:18   Oh, it was accidental.

01:44:20   John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, 'cause it was accidental.

01:44:27   'Cause it was accidental, it was accidental

01:44:32   And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm

01:44:37   And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them

01:44:42   @C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:44:46   So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:44:51   ♫ Anti-Marco Armin

01:44:54   ♫ S-I-R-A-C

01:44:57   ♫ U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-S-A

01:44:59   ♫ It's accidental

01:45:01   ♫ Accidental

01:45:02   ♫ They didn't mean to

01:45:04   ♫ Accidental

01:45:06   ♫ Accidental

01:45:07   ♫ Tech podcast so long

01:45:10   - So, in other news, I got my car back a couple hours ago.

01:45:16   - Is it still white?

01:45:18   - It's still white.

01:45:19   The fender is repaired.

01:45:21   All is right in the world once again.

01:45:23   - I saw that picture of your car thing,

01:45:25   and I really, and people were tweeting like,

01:45:27   "Oh, if that happened to John's car,

01:45:28   "he would have burned it to the ground."

01:45:29   People don't understand how much damage to my car

01:45:33   I am both willing to tolerate and I'm forced to tolerate.

01:45:36   I have so many things on my car that are worse

01:45:38   than that thing that you just spent $1,000 to get repaired.

01:45:41   And the reason I don't get them to repair it

01:45:42   is 'cause I know it will cost an obscenely amount of money.

01:45:44   And I say, you know what?

01:45:45   I'm just gonna live with that giant white paint streak

01:45:49   that was added to my car by someone

01:45:50   park next to me the second week I got it. I'm just gonna live with the huge gouge in

01:45:54   my bumper from the person who re-entered me because my deductible won't cover it. It's

01:45:58   like just that's why I think about getting a nice car. I would just never be able to

01:46:03   drive it. Like just the world the world that I drive around in is just filled with too

01:46:08   many hazards. I mean hell my brand new car I dented the rim of my fancy alloy wheels

01:46:13   like in the first month that I got it from hitting a pothole. I had to get a new wheel

01:46:17   for 650 bucks. So I couldn't believe that you, is this the thing that only people in

01:46:22   the South or people who live in the desert do, like "Oh I have a tiny ding to my car,

01:46:27   my perfect car that is preserved as if it's in a museum because we have no weather to

01:46:30   speak of and no humidity" or "You have no humidity" and then it just, I don't know,

01:46:35   how can you be spending a thousand dollars to repair a quarter size nick to your fender?

01:46:40   Because it was down to the metal and for me it was a hundred bucks. Who cares, it was

01:46:44   the size of a quarter. No, it was really obvious if you had seen it. I know that picture was

01:46:49   not that impressive, but I assure you it was obvious. A thousand dollars. It's $900 of

01:46:54   all states' money and $100 of my money. Who cares? Your deductible is only $100? Yeah.

01:46:59   That's pretty good. That's fancy insurance. Yeah, I would have done it for that. I'm sure

01:47:03   I probably am paying too much for said insurance, but nevertheless. The problem that you have,

01:47:09   John, is that you drive in an area that doesn't believe in roads that make sense, roads that

01:47:13   function or drivers that know how to drive. They're not called "mapples" because they're

01:47:18   good at driving.

01:47:19   I agree. No, but roads are my enemy, other cars are my enemy, and I swear, more damage

01:47:23   has been done to my car while parked than anything else. Because the parking garage

01:47:27   at work has the spots, you know, when they paint the lines on the spots, they look like

01:47:30   they're made for, like, motorcycles, because they can fit more spots in the parking garage

01:47:34   that way. And the court is not a big car. It's a full-sized car, but it's not humongous.

01:47:39   And I swear, every time I park, I am making decisions about how many inches on either

01:47:44   side I have to.

01:47:45   You have to judge because you want, like, you have to think, most people are driving

01:47:48   are single drivers, so they're not going to open their passenger door.

01:47:51   So I want to get closer, but what if the guy backs in?

01:47:54   Then I got to figure out if he's a backing, if it's a Casey person, then his driver's

01:47:57   side is on my side.

01:47:59   So I have to, like, figure out where in between the lines I want to be just perfectly.

01:48:04   And then looking at the type of car, if I'm parking between two cars, how likely is this

01:48:07   person to be one of those people who doesn't even look and just swings their car door open

01:48:10   and jams it into mine. Anyway, everyone has their things they want to be perfect and I

01:48:14   admit I kind of did it with my mirror. That was my fault where I clipped the mirror coming

01:48:17   out of my garage, which is also sized for a motorcycle or a horse carriage or something.

01:48:22   I got that repaired, but that wasn't $1,000 and that damage was way more noticeable than

01:48:27   your little neck. But all this is to say that you are obviously care very deeply about the

01:48:32   particulars of how your car looks and I would like to care very deeply about how my car

01:48:36   looks but I just cannot bear the amount of money it would take to do that. And time,

01:48:40   frankly, to keep bringing the car in to get fixed and everything.

01:48:43   Yeah, well, one of them was the mechanical issue, which was weak, and then this was three

01:48:47   days for the body issue. However, I'm not the only one who is ogling white cars today.

01:48:52   Am I, Marco?

01:48:53   I drove a white car. I wouldn't say I was ogling. Is it ogling? Ogling? However you

01:48:58   pronounce that, I wouldn't say I was doing that to it. It just so happened that the test-driveable

01:49:04   model was white. Just like all of your cars just happen to be white when they fall into

01:49:08   your lap and you buy them.

01:49:09   Right. Yeah, I agree. I totally understand what you're going with here. I really do.

01:49:13   Anyway, so the whole family went for this test drive, though. Is that correct?

01:49:17   Anyway, yeah. So ever since I test drove the P85D last February, I think it was, I was

01:49:24   very impressed by it. But I also, at the time, I said that the P85D is so fast, I actually

01:49:32   found it unpleasant. I was like, I would probably never do this from a stop. Flooring it like

01:49:38   that, it hits you in the face so hard with inertia that I didn't really want to do that.

01:49:47   And I am, since then I've been thinking more about it, doing more research. I am almost

01:49:52   certainly going to get a Tesla next. I mean, I'm basically ready to place the order. Because

01:49:58   My lease is up in late March and there's like a two month lead time on them so I have to

01:50:03   decide pretty soon what I'm doing.

01:50:05   Today I went up to test drive, to first of all see a bunch of like colors and stuff in

01:50:09   person and also to test drive the non-P version.

01:50:14   This was a 90D so it's just like the 85 but with a little bit more battery so slightly

01:50:19   heavier probably but you know no speed difference really.

01:50:23   So overall I think I'm going to get that one.

01:50:26   I think I'm gonna get the--

01:50:28   - Really?

01:50:29   - Yeah, in Tesla's line it's not the slow one,

01:50:30   it's like the middle one, and none of them are really slow.

01:50:32   I mean, the slowest one I think is roughly

01:50:33   the speed of your car, Casey, right?

01:50:35   - I think that's right, I don't have the numbers

01:50:36   in front of me, but I believe you're right.

01:50:37   - Yeah, so none of them would be called slow

01:50:39   by anybody, really, but it's all relative.

01:50:41   So the middle one, I would say, in general,

01:50:44   the 90D is not as fast as the M5 at the M5's peak power.

01:50:52   So the M5, when you get that massive kick in the butt

01:50:57   of turbocharged torque, it is stronger feeling

01:51:01   and faster feeling than the 90D.

01:51:03   But the 90D, it's available right from zero.

01:51:07   And the M5, if you floor the M5 from a stop,

01:51:09   you'll just spin the wheels.

01:51:10   It doesn't have any traction,

01:51:11   and it's only rear wheel drive.

01:51:13   The 90D is all wheel drive with a really, really good

01:51:17   all wheel drive system, and you have all that power

01:51:20   right from the start, and it actually can put it down.

01:51:21   and actually can use it.

01:51:23   Overall, I would say it didn't feel like

01:51:25   I was really missing anything in the middle version

01:51:29   other than that extra big kick from really flooring it.

01:51:34   - Is that ugly or wheels?

01:51:37   - All the wheel options are all the same.

01:51:39   Now, I am torn on which wheels to get,

01:51:42   and I'm sure you have opinions.

01:51:45   I don't think they have any great wheel options.

01:51:47   - I agree, I think all the wheels

01:51:49   are middle of the road to ugly.

01:51:51   - Yeah, I would agree with that.

01:51:54   The base ones that Johnson in this picture,

01:51:57   they kind of look like the M5's winter wheels,

01:52:00   like it's a very similar design.

01:52:02   In person, it kind of looks cheap.

01:52:06   They don't look like premium quality wheels.

01:52:09   None of them do really, but I think the base model

01:52:12   looks the least good of all of them.

01:52:15   the 19 inch Silver Cyclone is kind of the halfway point

01:52:19   between everything.

01:52:20   Now the bigger ones do look substantially larger

01:52:23   and more aggressive in person.

01:52:25   And so the question is, how aggressive and sporty

01:52:27   do you want your car to look?

01:52:28   Also, I'm not quite sure I can pull off thin 21 inch wheels

01:52:33   on New York roads, which are only marginally better

01:52:35   than John's roads.

01:52:36   - Yeah, you're gonna dent the rims.

01:52:38   You should test drive the 21s,

01:52:40   'cause a lot of car makers are doing this now,

01:52:43   offering you obscenely large wheels

01:52:45   they look cool and everything, but they just turn the wheels into rubber bands and you

01:52:49   can't drive on railroads with that.

01:52:51   Yeah, exactly. So I think I'm probably going to go with the 19 Sliver Cyclone. So yeah,

01:52:56   that's probably what I'm going to do. The red looks really awesome in person. The black

01:53:01   doesn't look as bad as I thought, so I'm kind of torn between those two, leaning towards

01:53:05   red. Otherwise, I'm pretty much sold. I think I'm almost certainly going to do it.

01:53:09   What does Tiff say about the color? We never hear what her color choices are.

01:53:13   If she were buying a car for herself--

01:53:16   - The Kia, I know, yeah.

01:53:16   - Yeah, the blue is a very nice blue.

01:53:19   I just don't care for blue cars for myself.

01:53:21   Tiff really is being very supportive of me

01:53:25   getting the red, because--

01:53:27   - Of all your midlife crises, a red car is like,

01:53:30   good, this is good, go with that one.

01:53:31   - Yeah, exactly.

01:53:32   You know, like, the black is fine.

01:53:36   If I want to be subtle, to be mostly subtle,

01:53:40   or to maximize the subtlety of this car,

01:53:43   the black would be the right approach to that. But I've been getting black cars for so

01:53:47   long I think I'm ready for something different, unlike Casey, who always gets white.

01:53:52   So should we start reading the manual for you now?

01:53:54   Yes.

01:53:55   Yes. Casey will just download PDF.

01:53:58   Yep. I'll send it to you as soon as I find it.

01:54:01   [door closes]