ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► Want me to put more bad music on?

00:00:02 ◼   ► I have lots to choose from.

00:00:03 ◼   ► Actually, I have nothing to complain about anymore.

00:00:05 ◼   ► That music was fantastic.

00:00:07 ◼   ► Oh, yeah?

00:00:08 ◼   ► I have something to complain about.

00:00:09 ◼   ► It was like turning on the radio, like Top 40

00:00:11 ◼   ► Radio in the '90s.

00:00:13 ◼   ► That's not an attractive thing.

00:00:15 ◼   ► [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:00:17 ◼   ► All right, so how about that iPad Pro?

00:00:22 ◼   ► Yeah, I put that in there just to make a second run at this,

00:00:25 ◼   ► because after the last show where

00:00:27 ◼   ► we talked about this in the after show and hearing it back, I'm not sure I

00:00:31 ◼   ► Successfully communicate what I was trying to say was when I listen to myself

00:00:34 ◼   ► I don't think if I didn't already know what I was thinking I would have understood myself

00:00:38 ◼   ► So I thought I'd start by asking you two to see if you can summarize what I was trying to say about

00:00:43 ◼   ► The iPad Pro and then when you fail to say what is in my head. I will try to clarify

00:00:47 ◼   ► Wow dude that happened like a week ago, I don't remember what you said come on I

00:00:56 ◼   ► I have some idea.

00:00:59 ◼   ► Give it a shot.

00:01:00 ◼   ► You were asking why does anyone ever want an iPad for an iPad.

00:01:02 ◼   ► I tried to give you the reason why I think a larger, more capable iPad is an inevitable

00:01:06 ◼   ► thing that will happen someday.

00:01:08 ◼   ► I tried to explain why.

00:01:10 ◼   ► I think your reasoning for why it had to be larger was that as the OS gets more advanced

00:01:19 ◼   ► and allows more advanced types of usage, that you will have to at some point have some kind

00:01:25 ◼   ► of multiple window kind of arrangement, or the possibility for multiple windows, whether

00:01:29 ◼   ► it's split or, you know, whether it's like a fixed setup or a flexible setup, you know,

00:01:34 ◼   ► but it was something, it was mainly about it has to get bigger because it will get more

00:01:38 ◼   ► advanced and more advanced needs more window space. Was that the gist?

00:01:42 ◼   ► That was like the secondary thing we ended up talking about, but the main thing, I think

00:01:47 ◼   ► I'll take another shot at it here, the main thing I was trying to get at was what I have

00:01:49 ◼   ► in the show notes here, but it's the better for people metric. And we got back to it,

00:01:55 ◼   ► We circled around back to it a little bit at the end,

00:01:56 ◼   ► but I was thinking of it in terms of like,

00:01:59 ◼   ► in the days, the DOS days,

00:02:02 ◼   ► before the graphical user interface,

00:02:04 ◼   ► when the graphical user interface came along,

00:02:06 ◼   ► it was clear that GUIs are better for people,

00:02:09 ◼   ► meaning that, yeah, the command line with UNIX and DOS

00:02:13 ◼   ► and all the things that preceded it is good and powerful

00:02:15 ◼   ► and you can get stuff done and a lot of people can use it,

00:02:18 ◼   ► but overall, you look at the GUI,

00:02:20 ◼   ► you look at the command line,

00:02:20 ◼   ► you say the GUI is better for people to use.

00:02:23 ◼   ► more people are going to be able to successfully use a computer with the GUI. It's more pleasant

00:02:27 ◼   ► to use, it's easier, and maybe you guys didn't live through this because you don't remember

00:02:31 ◼   ► the debates, but there were real debates about whether this whole GUI thing is a useful idea

00:02:36 ◼   ► at all or whether it's just some silly diversion.

00:02:38 ◼   ► What do you mean we didn't live through this? I lived through this.

00:02:41 ◼   ► Well, you were very young. Maybe you were still fighting, though.

00:02:46 ◼   ► We were alive.

00:02:47 ◼   ► Yeah, you were alive.

00:02:48 ◼   ► We were also in preschool.

00:02:49 ◼   ► Well, no, that's not true. I mean, well, okay.

00:02:53 ◼   ► Well, no, in 1984 we were barely human, but I mean, if you consider that both of us were

00:02:58 ◼   ► PC guys, you know, we were around, or at least I was using computers before Windows had really

00:03:05 ◼   ► become a thing.

00:03:06 ◼   ► And I remember using Windows 3.1 and thinking it was a piece of crap, because, well, it

00:03:10 ◼   ► was a piece of crap.

00:03:11 ◼   ► And I remember slinging AutoExec bat files like you couldn't even imagine, and config.sys

00:03:16 ◼   ► files to figure out for which game I needed a mouse and which didn't and so on and so

00:03:20 ◼   ► forth.

00:03:21 ◼   ► We don't need to turn this into another retro podcast.

00:03:22 ◼   ► I'm just saying I was around for the transition in my own way.

00:03:26 ◼   ► Maybe not on an industry level, but on a personal level.

00:03:29 ◼   ► When you were that age, though, you probably weren't thinking about what the GUI means

00:03:33 ◼   ► for the future of the industry.

00:03:35 ◼   ► You know, like that type of thing.

00:03:36 ◼   ► The people who were writing articles in magazines about whether this was a good idea or not.

00:03:41 ◼   ► But in hindsight, it's so clear.

00:03:42 ◼   ► GUIs are better for people.

00:03:44 ◼   ► And there was a big debate about it, and it took a long time, and eventually all computers

00:03:48 ◼   ► said, "All computers are GUIs."

00:03:49 ◼   ► No, they're not.

00:03:50 ◼   ► I've got a command line on my Mac.

00:03:51 ◼   ► it's like, no, the GUI took over because it's better for people to use.

00:03:57 ◼   ► iOS, I think of in relation to the regular Windows mouse pointer

00:04:02 ◼   ► menus WIMP type interface.

00:04:04 ◼   ► I think of iOS as not as big a step from a command line to the GUI,

00:04:07 ◼   ► certainly not, but as another sort of discontinuity in that type of thing.

00:04:11 ◼   ► iOS and that type of touch interface is better

00:04:14 ◼   ► for people than having a mouse and windows and menu bars

00:04:17 ◼   ► right-clicking and docs and taskbars and all the stuff that regular Windows-type interfaces,

00:04:23 ◼   ► Mac-type interfaces use today.

00:04:26 ◼   ► iOS is better for people.

00:04:28 ◼   ► You see it yourself and how much more willing people are to use iPads and iPhones and all

00:04:35 ◼   ► these technology devices that people use that same people would be much more intimidated

00:04:41 ◼   ► by a "real computer" with a GUI.

00:04:43 ◼   ► And again, doesn't mean that the traditional Windows menu pointer interface is going away,

00:04:50 ◼   ► or that we still have the command line today, we'll have GUIs for a similar period of time.

00:04:57 ◼   ► But in general, the iOS interface, touch interfaces, are better for people.

00:05:02 ◼   ► And when I see that, that makes me think, there's no fighting against the interface

00:05:05 ◼   ► that's better for people.

00:05:06 ◼   ► Like, it will eventually become the most common way that people use computers, if it isn't

00:05:10 ◼   ► already if you can't like smartphones as computers and everything, right?

00:05:14 ◼   ► And when I see that, I think it can't be the thing that most people use for computing and

00:05:21 ◼   ► remain as limited as it is now.

00:05:24 ◼   ► Because otherwise, you know how many people today continue to have to use computers because

00:05:28 ◼   ► they can't get what they want to get done on this new thing.

00:05:32 ◼   ► And so my logic is the thing that's better for people to use is here.

00:05:37 ◼   ► It's not quite good enough or capable enough to subsume enough of the functionality of

00:05:41 ◼   ► other things.

00:05:42 ◼   ► Just like Windows 3.1 sucked, you couldn't do anything.

00:05:46 ◼   ► Things you can do on DOS or UNIX command line were not even close to being possible on the

00:05:50 ◼   ► GUI.

00:05:51 ◼   ► But eventually the GUI became good enough and subsumed enough of the functionality of

00:05:55 ◼   ► the command line that the command line was relegated to a very small window.

00:05:59 ◼   ► And in the same operating system, it's there, it's here, we can use it when we want to.

00:06:03 ◼   ► important for developers and stuff like that, but a regular person who buys a Mac does not

00:06:07 ◼   ► use the command line, and someday that'll be true of iOS.

00:06:11 ◼   ► A regular person who buys an iOS device doesn't have to use a Windows mouse pointer GUI.

00:06:15 ◼   ► So it's just that simple logical progression.

00:06:17 ◼   ► If that's going to be the progression, it's silly to think that this next thing that's

00:06:21 ◼   ► better for people won't have to become more capable and take on the mantle of the thing

00:06:28 ◼   ► that it's replacing in some respects.

00:06:31 ◼   ► That's what I was trying to get at.

00:06:32 ◼   ► And you can disagree with it.

00:06:34 ◼   ► You can say, well, I don't think iOS is better enough,

00:06:36 ◼   ► or I don't think iOS is really better for people,

00:06:39 ◼   ► or I think iOS will not have to take on any of the capabilities

00:06:42 ◼   ► of the Mac, and the Mac will stay exactly the way it is,

00:06:44 ◼   ► and iOS will just go off into the future,

00:06:45 ◼   ► and it does enough for people as it is.

00:06:47 ◼   ► But I see all the people who use a Mac every day,

00:06:50 ◼   ► and I'm like, that's not-- the number

00:06:52 ◼   ► of people who use a command line every day is really small.

00:06:54 ◼   ► The number of people who use a Mac every day is humongous.

00:06:57 ◼   ► Those people will want to move through the thing that's

00:07:00 ◼   ► better for people to the iOS-style touch interface eventually if that device becomes capable

00:07:06 ◼   ► enough for them to do their work on it.

00:07:08 ◼   ► How many of those people can you bring along?

00:07:10 ◼   ► How many people have to be stuck using a Mac?

00:07:11 ◼   ► Well, it's probably similar to the proportion of people who are stuck using a command line.

00:07:14 ◼   ► I use a command line every day.

00:07:16 ◼   ► Certain professions and contexts will require the use of a plain old GUI the same way they

00:07:22 ◼   ► require the use of a command line today.

00:07:24 ◼   ► But there's tons and tons more people who use a Mac who never use a command line, and

00:07:28 ◼   ► And those people will be using something like a tablet-type form factor that's much bigger

00:07:33 ◼   ► and more capable many years in the future when it becomes possible to do so.

00:07:37 ◼   ► So let me play devil's advocate for a second.

00:07:40 ◼   ► So everything you just said, which sounds reasonable, but everything you just said is

00:07:46 ◼   ► based upon an implied or stated assumption that the way that we have touch interfaces

00:07:53 ◼   ► and tablets now is better for people than the desktop and Windows and everything else.

00:08:01 ◼   ► What if that's not the case? So here's some things to consider. So first of all, there's

00:08:07 ◼   ► a few things about it that are worse. I think we can pretty much all look around regular

00:08:12 ◼   ► people and us and we can see that text input is definitely worse on tablets than on laptops.

00:08:18 ◼   ► No, don't include that at all, because there's no reason that you wouldn't have a hardware

00:08:22 ◼   ► keyboard.

00:08:23 ◼   ► Well, okay, so...

00:08:24 ◼   ► You know what I'm saying?

00:08:25 ◼   ► Like, what I'm talking about mainly is, like, a menu bar, windows with little window widgets

00:08:31 ◼   ► on, sliding them around on the screen, you know, clicking and right-clicking, having

00:08:35 ◼   ► a mouse instead of a finger, like, all of that is what I'm getting at.

00:08:39 ◼   ► The text input is an artifact of the form factor, you know what I mean?

00:08:44 ◼   ► Like the small tablet that you expect to carry with you, versus something that would sit

00:08:47 ◼   ► at your desk. I'm not saying people are going to have tablets and be walking around with them.

00:08:51 ◼   ► If you are in design or some field where you're going to be using this future thing,

00:08:54 ◼   ► I envision you having something as big as your monitor, but laid down on an architect's drafting

00:08:59 ◼   ► table with a keyboard in front of it or something, so that you can get your work done in that

00:09:03 ◼   ► context. Well, okay. So let's say this comes true. Let's say you have a keyboard. The text input is

00:09:12 ◼   ► solved for you. You have easy ways to reach the interface from the keyboard in

00:09:17 ◼   ► some kind of relatively ergonomic way so you know it wouldn't be like a tablet on

00:09:21 ◼   ► a stand and having to reach your hand up and touch the screen constantly. So you

00:09:26 ◼   ► have to address that somehow some kind of some kind of like precision pointing

00:09:31 ◼   ► of some sort more precision than a finger whether that's a pen whether it's

00:09:35 ◼   ► a mouse whether it's a touchpad kind of thing whether it's just a giant

00:09:38 ◼   ► touch screen so the touch targets are small enough relatively speaking that

00:09:41 ◼   ► They can be precise, who knows.

00:09:43 ◼   ► But—

00:09:44 ◼   ► It would have to be a stylus, I would imagine.

00:09:45 ◼   ► Because again, in creative fields, there are people already using styluses, so that's

00:09:48 ◼   ► not even that big of a change.

00:09:50 ◼   ► Right.

00:09:51 ◼   ► Okay.

00:09:52 ◼   ► So—and I actually enjoy the experience of using a pen, although I don't use one regularly,

00:09:55 ◼   ► but—because I enjoy a mouse more.

00:09:56 ◼   ► But I think a stylus is a perfectly fine solution to that, you know, out of everything that

00:10:01 ◼   ► we have.

00:10:02 ◼   ► So let's say you've added all this.

00:10:04 ◼   ► You have advanced ways for people to get more work done.

00:10:09 ◼   ► What if the reason why there's this idea out there in people's heads that the iPad and

00:10:15 ◼   ► everything is easier for people, what if the reason why is because it can't support all

00:10:20 ◼   ► that stuff, it can't do complicated workflows and much multitasking to speak of and all

00:10:27 ◼   ► this other stuff.

00:10:28 ◼   ► And then what if the process of adding those things to enable people to "get more work

00:10:33 ◼   ► done on iOS makes it more like traditional PCs and therefore removes that whole advantage

00:10:40 ◼   ► that it supposedly had by being so much easier? And is it possible to add all those things

00:10:47 ◼   ► without having that side effect? And I'm not sure it is.

00:10:50 ◼   ► It's the closeness of, you know, I was saying the gap between the GUI and the Mac is huge,

00:10:54 ◼   ► and the gap between the Mac and iOS is much smaller, but I still think it's significant

00:10:59 ◼   ► enough. And in the case of the, you know, the command line to the GUI, it was almost

00:11:06 ◼   ► not possible to bring over enough command line stuff to negate the advantage of the

00:11:11 ◼   ► GUI. I mean, Windows tried by basing it on DOS and by having you boot into DOS and having

00:11:15 ◼   ► so many things still involving DOS and having DOS underpin the thing for so long and having

00:11:20 ◼   ► it in your face and exposed to you. But that wasn't enough to kill the GUI. If you wanted

00:11:26 ◼   ► kill iOS, you could do that by bringing over all the bad things from the Mac.

00:11:30 ◼   ► But I think that you don't need to bring over too many complexities from the Mac to make

00:11:36 ◼   ► iOS more capable.

00:11:38 ◼   ► And I don't think anyone would make the crazy mistake of bringing over the worst things

00:11:41 ◼   ► about the Mac.

00:11:42 ◼   ► Like I don't think anyone would ever say, "I've got an idea.

00:11:44 ◼   ► Why don't we have a bunch of windows on our iPad screen with tiny little widgets in the

00:11:47 ◼   ► corner?"

00:11:48 ◼   ► Because if you've ever seen anyone deal with a bunch of overlapping windows, it's just

00:11:51 ◼   ► too much.

00:11:52 ◼   ► Why don't we bring over the file system?

00:11:53 ◼   ► how well people deal with navigating through folders and files. Why don't we just have a

00:11:56 ◼   ► big file system that they expose on the iPad? Again, I don't think that would ruin it. You're

00:12:00 ◼   ► right. But I don't think anyone would do that. Or at least I don't think Apple would do it. Maybe

00:12:03 ◼   ► Android would do it. Maybe they already have it. I don't know for about Android.

00:12:07 ◼   ► It is possible to ruin it because it is close enough. It's a close enough neighbor. It's not

00:12:13 ◼   ► some like a big, you know, or for example, bring over a mouse pointer and make you use a mouse

00:12:18 ◼   ► pointer for everything. Like, and then all of a sudden things aren't responsive to touch controls.

00:12:21 ◼   ► because it's like, oh, well, it's hard to use this app, because they expect you to have

00:12:23 ◼   ► a mouse pointer to work with the little window widgets or whatever.

00:12:28 ◼   ► I don't think that Apple, at least, would be dumb enough to bring over this.

00:12:31 ◼   ► If anything, Apple has been very reticent to bring over any of the more powerful things,

00:12:36 ◼   ► and they're bringing over very, very slowly, and there's just no way they would bring over

00:12:39 ◼   ► those horrible things.

00:12:40 ◼   ► And then most of the horrible things I'm thinking about are things people don't want to deal

00:12:43 ◼   ► with like, I mean, I guess stalling printer drivers is like a thing from, you know, the

00:12:47 ◼   ► ancient world, but Apple kind of already addressed that with AirPrint, saying we're not doing

00:12:51 ◼   ► the printer driver's ring anymore. It's your problem. We're going to tell you how we're

00:12:54 ◼   ► going to speak. You better deal with it." Which is one way to get rid of printer drivers.

00:12:58 ◼   ► And the file system, I don't think Apple's going to be bringing that back. Dealing with

00:13:02 ◼   ► apps the old way, I don't think that's coming back. I think the new way is better. Dealing

00:13:06 ◼   ► with Windows, Apple has to come up with something, but I don't think they would bring over plain

00:13:09 ◼   ► old Windows because that would be pretty stupid. So it's possible to ruin it, perhaps, unlike

00:13:15 ◼   ► it is in the GUI's case, from the GUI to the command line, but I think it's unlikely that

00:13:19 ◼   ► they'll ruin it. And as I said last show, the other alternative is rather than making

00:13:24 ◼   ► iOS more capable, why don't you make the Mac simpler? And I think it's easier to make iOS

00:13:29 ◼   ► more capable than it is to make the Mac simpler, especially since a lot of the complexities

00:13:33 ◼   ► the Mac have to live on, because some people will always need them the same way some people

00:13:37 ◼   ► will always need the command line.

00:13:38 ◼   ► Well, but they are making the Mac simpler. I mean, isn't that what things like Gatekeeper

00:13:43 ◼   ► and Launch Center Pad thing, whatever you call it, isn't that what that's all about?

00:13:48 ◼   ► But you can't get rid of the overlapping windows.

00:13:50 ◼   ► Well, you can run an app full screen.

00:13:52 ◼   ► Yeah, but that just adds complexity, as we talked about last time.

00:13:55 ◼   ► Now you have yet another mode that you have to worry about.

00:13:57 ◼   ► If you've seen people deal with windows, adding full screen doesn't help them, because now

00:14:00 ◼   ► they're trapped in some mode they don't understand.

00:14:03 ◼   ► It's very difficult to take away complexity from the Mac to even get it close to the level

00:14:10 ◼   ► of friendliness that iOS has.

00:14:12 ◼   ► Whereas if you add capabilities to iOS, it can remain friendly to the people who don't

00:14:15 ◼   ► want those advanced abilities in the same way that if you don't want to enable the multitasking

00:14:18 ◼   ► gestures, that doesn't bother any people.

00:14:20 ◼   ► If you don't know how to get to the multitasking switcher, you can just hit the home button

00:14:24 ◼   ► and go back to the home screen every time.

00:14:26 ◼   ► It still works for you in that simple mode.

00:14:27 ◼   ► They've added capability without adding complexity.

00:14:31 ◼   ► I'm thinking long term.

00:14:32 ◼   ► Like this gets tied up in, that's the other thing I think people are, it gets tied up

00:14:35 ◼   ► in like, will Apple announce an iPad with Pro at the end of its name this year and it'll

00:14:40 ◼   ► be bigger?

00:14:41 ◼   ► Like who knows, who cares?

00:14:42 ◼   ► Like it's not what I'm talking about.

00:14:43 ◼   ► about an upcoming imminent product or Apple's plans for the next year or two or what iOS 8 is

00:14:49 ◼   ► going to be. I'm thinking long term. And you're right, Marco, the entire thing is based on the

00:14:53 ◼   ► premise that iOS is better for people. And it's inevitable that many, many more people who

00:14:59 ◼   ► currently can't use iOS or anything like iOS to do their job will have to be served by this better

00:15:04 ◼   ► thing. Like it's that's the tide that's coming. Because if there's a thing out there that's

00:15:08 ◼   ► better for people and people use it all the time, and I think most people would agree

00:15:13 ◼   ► that using their phone or their iPad is better, they'll want to use that to do more stuff,

00:15:17 ◼   ► and if they can't, they'll want more capability out of it.

00:15:23 ◼   ► Another assumption that might be worth questioning is whether iOS's simplicity today is overall

00:15:30 ◼   ► easier for people, because as we discussed last episode with the storage limits and when

00:15:37 ◼   ► people hit their storage limits and it's kind of crappy to figure out where that's going

00:15:41 ◼   ► and how to recover from that.

00:15:45 ◼   ► iOS's simplicity, a lot of times,

00:15:48 ◼   ► will create the question in people's minds of,

00:15:50 ◼   ► how do I do this?

00:15:51 ◼   ► Or how do I fix this limitation?

00:15:53 ◼   ► And a lot of times, the answer is you can't.

00:15:55 ◼   ► Or it's so complicated that it's not even worth doing.

00:15:58 ◼   ► Simple things that on a computer might

00:16:01 ◼   ► be accomplished by drag and drop,

00:16:03 ◼   ► or by hitting the Open dialog button in an app

00:16:07 ◼   ► to open a file from somewhere else from some other app.

00:16:10 ◼   ► stuff like that, that people, you know, attaching files to emails, stuff that people generally

00:16:14 ◼   ► know how to do on computers, you know, after not that much usage. A lot of those kinds

00:16:19 ◼   ► of things are still even more complicated on iOS than they are on a computer because

00:16:27 ◼   ► of its design and because of its limitations.

00:16:29 ◼   ► >> You think more people would be more successful at attaching a file to an email using a Mac

00:16:32 ◼   ► than they would doing that same thing in iOS?

00:16:35 ◼   ► >> Definitely. No question.

00:16:36 ◼   ► >> No, I don't think that's the case.

00:16:38 ◼   ► Because in iOS you can't do it from the email.

00:16:40 ◼   ► Yeah, but I don't know if that's the way people think about it.

00:16:43 ◼   ► Just because that's the way it works in desktop mail application, we're used to it.

00:16:47 ◼   ► I think people are just as likely to... holding down your finger on a picture is not great,

00:16:51 ◼   ► but I think they're just as likely to figure out holding down your finger on a picture or hitting the little share icon.

00:16:55 ◼   ► I mean, it's not completely intuitive, but I think they're just as likely to come to it from that direction.

00:17:01 ◼   ► And the main problem with attaching an email on the Mac is drag and drop, forget it.

00:17:05 ◼   ► doesn't even occur to people, you can drag a little picture onto the... I just...

00:17:08 ◼   ► that's... I think that's outside the realm of most people's experience. But they do

00:17:11 ◼   ► know how to click the little paperclip icon, and when they click the little

00:17:14 ◼   ► paperclip icon and whatever their mail application is, they get an open save

00:17:17 ◼   ► dialog box, and then you're just off in the weeds and it's like 50/50 whether

00:17:21 ◼   ► anyone's gonna know what the hell to do with that, and they'll just maybe hope that

00:17:23 ◼   ► they know how to click on the thing that takes them to the desktop and they'll

00:17:25 ◼   ► find the file in the desktop, which is where all their files are because it's

00:17:28 ◼   ► the one place in the file system they can use. Running out of space, I

00:17:32 ◼   ► I think is another thing where it's like, there are limits.

00:17:35 ◼   ► There are hardware limits to any piece of hardware.

00:17:37 ◼   ► And when you run into those limits, at that point,

00:17:42 ◼   ► that's when the reality of the computer

00:17:44 ◼   ► smacks the user in the face.

00:17:45 ◼   ► And you can't do anything to protect them from it.

00:17:46 ◼   ► You don't have infinite space on your device.

00:17:49 ◼   ► Maybe some super clever cloud thing in the future

00:17:52 ◼   ► could make it appear as if you have infinite space.

00:17:54 ◼   ► But you don't have infinite space.

00:17:56 ◼   ► It's kind of like how multitasking makes it seem

00:17:58 ◼   ► like you have infinite memory.

00:17:59 ◼   ► They're trying to, they're never gonna say,

00:18:00 ◼   ► "Oh, you're out of memory.

00:18:01 ◼   ► please quit some applications so you can launch some more.

00:18:03 ◼   ► Well, the combination of virtual memory

00:18:05 ◼   ► and the expunging stuff is an iOS simplification

00:18:08 ◼   ► that makes people not have to worry about

00:18:10 ◼   ► whether an application is running or not,

00:18:11 ◼   ► or at least try to worry less about it.

00:18:13 ◼   ► When you run out of space,

00:18:14 ◼   ► have you ever seen anyone run out of space on a Mac?

00:18:16 ◼   ► First of all, the Mac OS X behaves very, very badly

00:18:19 ◼   ► when you're out of disk space, extremely badly.

00:18:21 ◼   ► Freaky things happen.

00:18:23 ◼   ► It's very easy to get into a situation

00:18:25 ◼   ► where the OS can't create another swap file

00:18:27 ◼   ► and it seems like your entire OS is frozen.

00:18:29 ◼   ► And you get those warning dialog boxes before that.

00:18:31 ◼   ► that the OS will warn you, oh, running out of space.

00:18:33 ◼   ► What do people do about that?

00:18:35 ◼   ► Like best case scenario, they randomly start

00:18:38 ◼   ► trying to drag things to the trash.

00:18:39 ◼   ► That's best case.

00:18:40 ◼   ► And like if you've seen people, this library folder,

00:18:42 ◼   ► I don't need that, do I?

00:18:43 ◼   ► Like that's the way they made it invisible.

00:18:45 ◼   ► Like God forbid they get into that library folder

00:18:46 ◼   ► and start going to their preferences folder,

00:18:48 ◼   ► or like I don't understand what this is,

00:18:49 ◼   ► I'm throwing that out.

00:18:50 ◼   ► Application support?

00:18:51 ◼   ► My applications don't need any support.

00:18:53 ◼   ► That's best case.

00:18:55 ◼   ► At least iOS protects them from doing that,

00:18:57 ◼   ► but you run into those hardware limits.

00:18:59 ◼   ► That's one of the hardest problems.

00:19:00 ◼   ► What do I do when all of the space for stuff is filled with stuff, whether that be memory

00:19:05 ◼   ► or Flash space or whatever?

00:19:08 ◼   ► You know, to go back a step, I almost think that the attachment thing is an example of

00:19:16 ◼   ► the iPad, or I guess I should say iOS in general, getting a little more strong is a poor choice

00:19:22 ◼   ► of words, a little better for power users.

00:19:24 ◼   ► And that's because, you know, Markowitz said, well, there's no way to attach something from

00:19:28 ◼   ► an email.

00:19:29 ◼   ► And you actually can.

00:19:30 ◼   ► get the little context menu up, and there may be a different term for that on iOS, but

00:19:33 ◼   ► the little black pop-up menu, if you go like 35 levels deep in that past bold italics underline

00:19:39 ◼   ► and all that, you can actually insert picture or video, I believe is the terminology used.

00:19:45 ◼   ► Wait, really? Yeah.

00:19:46 ◼   ► I knew you could copy and paste, but there's actually like a button there to proactively

00:19:50 ◼   ► do that?

00:19:51 ◼   ► Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

00:19:52 ◼   ► Wow. I didn't know that.

00:19:54 ◼   ► Exactly. And that only came in the last one or two versions of iOS. I don't recall exactly

00:19:57 ◼   ► when it was.

00:19:58 ◼   ► people who grew up on smartphones, though, it's more natural for them to start from the

00:20:03 ◼   ► picture that they want to send to somebody and then say, "Okay, send this picture to

00:20:06 ◼   ► Sue," instead of start from the email application, compose a message to Sue, and then insert

00:20:11 ◼   ► the picture. That's totally a desktop computer user's mindset, I think.

00:20:14 ◼   ► It absolutely is. And as someone who grew up on a desktop computer, that is what, up

00:20:18 ◼   ► until whenever it was in iOS that they added this feature, every time I wanted to send

00:20:23 ◼   ► picture to someone, I'm just hardwired to start an email, send it to Aaron, let's say,

00:20:30 ◼   ► and then go, "Ah, crap.

00:20:31 ◼   ► I got to start from photos."

00:20:33 ◼   ► And then I got to leave my email, start from photos, and then I've lost my email that I've

00:20:37 ◼   ► written unless I copy and paste, etc., etc.

00:20:40 ◼   ► And so once I discovered that you can actually kick off the picture and video chooser from

00:20:46 ◼   ► within an email, that actually helped me a lot because I'm so hardwired.

00:20:49 ◼   ► That's my internal mental workflow, is to start the email and then go get the attachment.

00:20:55 ◼   ► I think the most likely scenario for what I just described about the iPad Pro not coming

00:21:01 ◼   ► to pass is that it turns out that for the people who are currently using Macs and Mac-like

00:21:07 ◼   ► systems to get their work done, the advantages of iOS are not compelling enough to make them

00:21:14 ◼   ► leave behind all the things that annoy them.

00:21:18 ◼   ► They would prefer to use iOS.

00:21:19 ◼   ► They do prefer sitting on the couch with their iPad and browsing through the web in their

00:21:23 ◼   ► off time or whatever.

00:21:26 ◼   ► But all of the things that annoy them about the Mac and multiple windows and dealing with

00:21:30 ◼   ► multiple applications and dealing with the little fidgety things that you don't have

00:21:33 ◼   ► to deal with in iOS, don't annoy them enough to be willing to put up with what is the inevitable

00:21:38 ◼   ► transition period when iOS is not quite capable enough.

00:21:43 ◼   ► And there's going to be that middle period where, who's going to be the first person

00:21:48 ◼   ► to try to get their work done in iOS.

00:21:49 ◼   ► And you kind of see it now with the people

00:21:51 ◼   ► bravely trying to use an iPad when they should just

00:21:53 ◼   ► be using a MacBook Air just for the novelty factor of it.

00:21:56 ◼   ► But that's on a very small scale.

00:21:58 ◼   ► On a larger scale, you need to get

00:21:59 ◼   ► the people who are using their computers--

00:22:02 ◼   ► like they did for the GUI.

00:22:03 ◼   ► People are using their computers for real work.

00:22:04 ◼   ► There were some people who had to say,

00:22:05 ◼   ► I'm actually going to try this Windows thing or this Mac thing,

00:22:08 ◼   ► even though I'm not even sure how

00:22:10 ◼   ► I'm going to be able to get my job done,

00:22:12 ◼   ► because I do everything in VisiCalc.

00:22:14 ◼   ► And VisiCalc isn't available.

00:22:15 ◼   ► And I'll try this new Excel thing.

00:22:17 ◼   ► and maybe that'll work out, I'm not sure.

00:22:20 ◼   ► So that transition period could prevent iOS-type interfaces

00:22:26 ◼   ► from taking the mantle of the personal computer

00:22:28 ◼   ► in our lifetime.

00:22:30 ◼   ► That, I think, is the most likely scenario for it not happening.

00:22:33 ◼   ► You know, I can't help but wonder if the three of us

00:22:36 ◼   ► are participating in one long troll of the tiji in this topic.

00:22:42 ◼   ► He's like an outlier, I would say.

00:22:44 ◼   ► If you were like, make your living right about technology,

00:22:46 ◼   ► Those are the people who keep trying to do it.

00:22:48 ◼   ► Like, I'll see what it's like to do my work.

00:22:50 ◼   ► Do I need a laptop?

00:22:51 ◼   ► I'm going to leave the house without a laptop and just take my iPad and see how it goes.

00:22:55 ◼   ► And we're all trying that experiment to varying degrees.

00:22:57 ◼   ► If you have a laptop and an iPad, sometimes you might just take the iPad to see how that

00:23:00 ◼   ► goes and you learn whether it works for you or not and why it doesn't or does.

00:23:04 ◼   ► But I'm thinking of all the people who just spend all day at work in front of a computer

00:23:08 ◼   ► and that computer is not running iOS or Android.

00:23:11 ◼   ► It's running Windows or OS X.

00:23:13 ◼   ► All right.

00:23:14 ◼   ► Hey Marker, what's cool these days?

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00:25:20 ◼   ► You know, I have to say that somebody in the chat had already disappeared. Oh, Sulpene?

00:25:27 ◼   ► Anyway, they said Macs will be ARM within the next five years.

00:25:30 ◼   ► It's logically next.

00:25:32 ◼   ► And as someone who relies on a Windows VM in order to get their job done on a Mac, I

00:25:38 ◼   ► surely hope not.

00:25:40 ◼   ► Or I hope that I switch my career into a different segment.

00:25:45 ◼   ► Because unless I'm missing something, if Macs go ARM, that's going to make virtualizing

00:25:51 ◼   ► x86 really stinky, just like it used to be before Macs were Intel.

00:25:56 ◼   ► Arm just came out with their new server platform and they're sort of defining the platform

00:26:01 ◼   ► for Arm and the data center and trying to make a common platform for Arm-style, you

00:26:07 ◼   ► know, personal computers more or less.

00:26:09 ◼   ► I don't think that, you know, if you wait long enough, in theory, if the Arm destroys

00:26:15 ◼   ► everything comes to pass, then the Mac could be the last thing to switch to Arm and by

00:26:20 ◼   ► that point everything is running Arm and the data set is running Arm and all your servers

00:26:23 ◼   ► are running ARM and personal computers are running ARM and then Macs running ARM.

00:26:27 ◼   ► So then you'd be virtualizing Linux on ARM and Windows on ARM, inside your virtual machine

00:26:32 ◼   ► on ARM, and everything would work out.

00:26:34 ◼   ► But yeah, you don't want to be the first one to go there and have everybody else still

00:26:36 ◼   ► on x86 and then you lose your ability to do that virtualization.

00:26:42 ◼   ► I think, "Well, what do I virtualize?"

00:26:43 ◼   ► Well, I virtualize Windows because I have to for stupid work things because they still

00:26:46 ◼   ► use Windows.

00:26:47 ◼   ► And that is actually a legitimate concern about the future of computing because Apple

00:26:52 ◼   ► doesn't want that business.

00:26:53 ◼   ► The business being selling your company like their mail server and stuff.

00:26:56 ◼   ► Google kind of wants it.

00:26:57 ◼   ► They want them to use like Google Apps, but it's such a difference between having your

00:27:01 ◼   ► own software and doing everything through the cloud, especially Google's cloud, that

00:27:05 ◼   ► I'm not even sure that's a good fit.

00:27:08 ◼   ► So if Google isn't a good fit for that business, and Apple doesn't want that business, who

00:27:12 ◼   ► gets that business?

00:27:13 ◼   ► And if the answer is Microsoft keeps it forever, then yeah, maybe we'll forever be stuck running

00:27:18 ◼   ► Windows and a VM so we can use our works mail thing because I don't know yeah, but but that would be so much slower

00:27:25 ◼   ► I got to imagine like I remember even as a non Mac person

00:27:29 ◼   ► I remember many many many years ago that you could get some sort of card that was basically a PC on an expansion card

00:27:36 ◼   ► And you could virtualize within

00:27:38 ◼   ► OS 7 8 9 don't even know by using this PC on an expansion card you would know more about this

00:27:44 ◼   ► Do you know what I'm thinking of?

00:27:45 ◼   ► >> Yeah, they had like a 486 on a card that you could, they had them for the Mac LC even

00:27:49 ◼   ► so you could run like Windows software on your education computers inside your school.

00:27:53 ◼   ► Yeah, they, I know the cards you're talking about.

00:27:55 ◼   ► The better analogy for you is like virtual PC, which was you would emulate x86 on the

00:27:58 ◼   ► Power PC and it would barely sort of run, but it was super slow.

00:28:03 ◼   ► And that's, that's why my lovely Mac Pro is a dream machine.

00:28:06 ◼   ► It runs everything natively.

00:28:07 ◼   ► >> Yeah.

00:28:08 ◼   ► >> Unix, Mac, and Windows.

00:28:10 ◼   ► One of the reasons why the Intel switch was so easy for Mac owners for the most part is

00:28:15 ◼   ► because switching to Intel came with a massive performance boost also.

00:28:20 ◼   ► And so when combined with the awesome emulation by Rosetta, it was almost penalty-free to

00:28:27 ◼   ► emulate stuff on Intel that was made for PowerPC.

00:28:30 ◼   ► If we went to ARM though, we wouldn't have that kind of headroom in our likelihood.

00:28:35 ◼   ► We would probably be taking a step down in CPU performance at that point.

00:28:39 ◼   ► And so it would be really inconvenient to have an architecture change that did not come

00:28:45 ◼   ► with a giant performance boost also, where you'd have to emulate this stuff to some degree

00:28:50 ◼   ► if you wanted to run it, and it would not be pretty.

00:28:54 ◼   ► If you wanted the big boost, like, the reason Apple got the big boost for doing x86 is two

00:28:59 ◼   ► things.

00:29:00 ◼   ► One, their past CPU vendor stopped making them good CPUs, so like they were stuck with

00:29:05 ◼   ► with the G4s in the powerbooks because IBM wouldn't make

00:29:08 ◼   ► anything better to go in there.

00:29:09 ◼   ► And even on the G5, IBM's, you know,

00:29:13 ◼   ► well Steve said they were gonna give us

00:29:15 ◼   ► three gigahertz in a year or whatever,

00:29:16 ◼   ► whether IBM said that or not, they sure as hell didn't.

00:29:18 ◼   ► And we were stuck with the G5 for way too long

00:29:21 ◼   ► and it wasn't improving better.

00:29:22 ◼   ► So you have to have the CPU you're on stagnate.

00:29:25 ◼   ► And it doesn't seem like that's gonna happen

00:29:26 ◼   ► if we stay on x86, that like, will there be a period

00:29:29 ◼   ► when x86 stagnates?

00:29:31 ◼   ► Doesn't seem like that's anywhere in the near future.

00:29:33 ◼   ► The second thing is that not only did the CPU apples on stagnate the CPU they moved to

00:29:37 ◼   ► got out of a rut because the CPU they were going to move to was like in the netburst architecture that was crap and

00:29:42 ◼   ► Apple was sold on x86 by Intel showing them look

00:29:47 ◼   ► Here's the core architecture and trust us is going to be awesome and lo and behold the core architecture was awesome

00:29:52 ◼   ► So that's a combination of two factors that almost certainly is not going to exist again

00:29:56 ◼   ► Where the CPU Apple is using stagnates and gets crappy and the CPU they're going to jump to makes a huge leap over where it?

00:30:02 ◼   ► was because it's not like Apple switched from the awesome newly introduced PowerPC G5 to

00:30:09 ◼   ► the Pentium 4. That would not have given them a giant boost in performance. The G5 was reasonably

00:30:13 ◼   ► competitive with its contemporaries, but when they did make the switch, you're right, they

00:30:19 ◼   ► were able to hide the Rosetta thing underneath the carpet of this two-sided advantage to

00:30:24 ◼   ► make it so that they could do PowerPC software at a reasonable speed.

00:30:29 ◼   ► So let me ask you both, and I have a feeling that this is a you two are poor audience for

00:30:34 ◼   ► this question, but would you trade a somewhat significant hit in performance, especially

00:30:42 ◼   ► when virtualized?

00:30:43 ◼   ► Let's assume that non virtualized performance is roughly on par, but virtualized performance

00:30:46 ◼   ► is crummy.

00:30:48 ◼   ► Would you trade that in favor of dramatically improved battery life?

00:30:53 ◼   ► And I'm making this up, but you know, arm tends to be a little bit more power frugal.

00:30:58 ◼   ► So let's say that a Phantom MacBook Air that runs on ARM has twice the battery life of

00:31:04 ◼   ► whatever the modern Intel MacBook Air's battery life is.

00:31:07 ◼   ► So 30 hours instead of 15?

00:31:09 ◼   ► Well, no, seriously.

00:31:10 ◼   ► I mean, let's just suppose as a fun thought experiment, would you make that trade even

00:31:15 ◼   ► if Windows virtualization or any, well, anything, you know, x86 virtualization is crummy?

00:31:21 ◼   ► I mean, let's start with you, Jon.

00:31:23 ◼   ► I don't think that that's a hypothetical scenario that would never come to pass because I don't

00:31:29 ◼   ► believe that ARM can equal the performance of Intel and offer double the power efficiency.

00:31:34 ◼   ► And that's fair.

00:31:35 ◼   ► And even if ARM was fabbed by Intel, I don't think it'd do that.

00:31:39 ◼   ► It's not as if Intel has an easy doubling of, you know, it's like x86 is worth, it's

00:31:44 ◼   ► killing your performance.

00:31:45 ◼   ► So if you get twice the performance, the overhead of x86, as crummy as it is, is not, you know,

00:31:51 ◼   ► 50% reduction.

00:31:52 ◼   ► So I don't think that would ever happen.

00:31:54 ◼   ► And I also think that Intel is already good enough that like once you get your battery

00:31:58 ◼   ► life into the long enough to last for the entire waking time of a human, 15 hour battery

00:32:04 ◼   ► life on a MacBook Air, granted they're not retina yet and it's going to take a hit when

00:32:07 ◼   ► they grow retina.

00:32:08 ◼   ► But I think Intel is already in the ballpark.

00:32:11 ◼   ► So I don't think that that will ever be offered.

00:32:14 ◼   ► And if they did offer it, I personally wouldn't take it because my calculus would be battery

00:32:18 ◼   ► life is already all day long enough and is only going to get better by small increments,

00:32:23 ◼   ► give me the speed please. You know what I'm like, speed, I want the fastest thing. So

00:32:27 ◼   ► I would not personally take that and I also don't think that it could ever offer that.

00:32:31 ◼   ► And that's fair. What about you, Marco? Well, first I think it's hilarious that you're asking

00:32:35 ◼   ► this to two people who not only want speed but hardly ever use laptops. That's exactly

00:32:39 ◼   ► why I knew this audience was not the right audience. But nevertheless, indulge me. Alright,

00:32:44 ◼   ► So, I mean, for me, I mostly agree with John.

00:32:48 ◼   ► I think, you know, I wouldn't be that excited

00:32:51 ◼   ► about such a product because I'm not currently

00:32:53 ◼   ► having battery life laptop issues.

00:32:56 ◼   ► The modern laptops, especially if I'm gonna go buy

00:32:58 ◼   ► a new one, the new ones have even better battery life

00:33:01 ◼   ► than the ones I've had before.

00:33:02 ◼   ► And so, you know, even the new Intel ones

00:33:06 ◼   ► are really just awesome, and they're just only

00:33:10 ◼   ► gonna get better as we go through more process strengths

00:33:13 ◼   ► and more circuit shutoff technology steps

00:33:16 ◼   ► and stuff like that, it's only gonna get better.

00:33:18 ◼   ► So it's not really a problem that I have.

00:33:22 ◼   ► Already I have an awesome laptop that's two years old,

00:33:29 ◼   ► or a year and a half old, that is awesome

00:33:32 ◼   ► and has great battery life, and it's never a problem for me.

00:33:34 ◼   ► Like I never have not enough battery life on my laptop

00:33:37 ◼   ► for what I need when I am using it full time.

00:33:40 ◼   ► So that's not really, it's not really for me.

00:33:45 ◼   ► I think you can maybe judge the market for such a thing by how many people are walking

00:33:50 ◼   ► around all day with dead MacBook Air batteries, basically.

00:33:55 ◼   ► Because the MacBook Air, especially the 11 inch, where there's not nearly enough room

00:33:59 ◼   ► in there for a big battery.

00:34:00 ◼   ► So I think if you're walking around with an 11 inch MacBook Air and your battery is

00:34:04 ◼   ► always at 5% and dying and you've got to stop using your computer to plug it in for

00:34:07 ◼   ► for a while, then you're the market for this sort of thing,

00:34:10 ◼   ► 'cause you actually really need that.

00:34:11 ◼   ► You're pushing the boundaries.

00:34:13 ◼   ► But as the boundary keeps getting expanded

00:34:16 ◼   ► to have six hour battery life, eight hour battery life,

00:34:19 ◼   ► 12 hour battery life, we keep pushing this forward

00:34:22 ◼   ► by pretty impressive margin over the last few years.

00:34:25 ◼   ► So I think the need for making a dramatic

00:34:29 ◼   ► battery life improvement on a laptop is shrinking.

00:34:32 ◼   ► Certainly you can imagine some uses for it,

00:34:34 ◼   ► but I don't think it's a mass market use anymore.

00:34:37 ◼   ► For the 11-inch Air, I think if you had Broadwell and a low temperature polysilicon or whatever

00:34:42 ◼   ► that is, the more energy efficient LCD, Broadwell plus a better LCD would give you acceptable

00:34:49 ◼   ► battery life.

00:34:50 ◼   ► You'd be up to the point where I don't think many people will be walking around with a

00:34:53 ◼   ► dead battery in there at 11-inch Air anymore.

00:34:56 ◼   ► And that's like next generation, you know, a year or two from now.

00:34:59 ◼   ► It's not like way over the horizon.

00:35:01 ◼   ► So the window for an ARM would make any sort of sense for battery purposes.

00:35:05 ◼   ► It seems to be closing.

00:35:06 ◼   ► So we should ask you Casey, you're the laptop guy. Would you make the trade you just offered?

00:35:10 ◼   ► It depends on whether or not I'm still using Windows almost exclusively for my job and

00:35:17 ◼   ► If not, I probably would assuming that the performance penalty was not

00:35:22 ◼   ► egregious, which is funny because to be honest I

00:35:25 ◼   ► Accepting going to and from work. I for the most part treat my laptops like desktops

00:35:30 ◼   ► Well, my personal MacBook Pro, which is unusable because it has a platter hard drive, is effectively a desktop.

00:35:36 ◼   ► My work MacBook Pro, like I said, other than moving it to and from home, I generally speaking just treat it as a desktop.

00:35:45 ◼   ► And so it's kind of hypocritical of me to say that yes, I'd love tremendously more battery life,

00:35:51 ◼   ► but also consider that this is a pre-Retina 2011 MacBook Pro.

00:35:55 ◼   ► So I only get three, maybe four hours tops of battery life as it is, and it has dual

00:36:02 ◼   ► GPU's.

00:36:03 ◼   ► So anytime I have VMware Fusion running, that absolutely toasts my battery.

00:36:07 ◼   ► So I'm coming from a place of soreness, if that makes sense.

00:36:11 ◼   ► But I would make that trade if I didn't need to worry about virtualization and the

00:36:16 ◼   ► performance penalty was not absolutely egregious.

00:36:18 ◼   ► I would love to have a laptop with, wherein I didn't need to worry about the battery

00:36:24 ◼   ► ever.

00:36:25 ◼   ► You just need to buy a new laptop and you'll have that.

00:36:28 ◼   ► The current, especially like the Retinas have insane battery life.

00:36:32 ◼   ► I know they do, and we're issuing those at work now, but we're on a three year cycle

00:36:37 ◼   ► I think, and I'm on year one and a half, so...

00:36:39 ◼   ► Oh, who cares?

00:36:40 ◼   ► You're famous!

00:36:41 ◼   ► You can get one, you can get one faster than that.

00:36:43 ◼   ► You are Casey Liss.

00:36:45 ◼   ► Uh huh, something like that.

00:36:47 ◼   ► I've heard that our work is on an 18 month cycle, and my Mac on my desk is like five

00:36:53 ◼   ► years old.

00:36:54 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:36:55 ◼   ► Maybe trade that credit for Casey.

00:36:57 ◼   ► No, I'm saving that credit to trade up to a fancy iMac when the time comes, but I'm

00:37:03 ◼   ► not ready to give it up yet.

00:37:04 ◼   ► Yeah, but it's funny because I upgraded my iPad situation from a third-gen Retina

00:37:12 ◼   ► full-size iPad to a Retina iPad Mini.

00:37:16 ◼   ► And I don't know if I – I wouldn't say I have a lemon, but I don't know if it's

00:37:20 ◼   ► my particular iPad mini, but I feel like the battery life is not nearly as good as the

00:37:25 ◼   ► Retina iPad and certainly not as good as my original iPad.

00:37:32 ◼   ► And I find that to be really frustrating.

00:37:35 ◼   ► And this is the world's biggest first-person problem, or first-world problem, I have a

00:37:41 ◼   ► first-person problem, but I don't know, I feel like I'm charging my iPad a lot more

00:37:47 ◼   ► these days and that it kind of puts this fear in me. It's the same reason I don't put the

00:37:52 ◼   ► battery percentage on my phone because I know if I see it drop 2% I'm going to start stressing

00:37:56 ◼   ► about it. Come to think of it I should turn it off on my iPad. But nevertheless I feel

00:38:01 ◼   ► like I'm getting to the same point with my iPad as I do with my computer where if I'm

00:38:05 ◼   ► without an outlet for more than a couple hours I start freaking out. And I bring this up

00:38:10 ◼   ► because even what is probably a very small difference in battery life in this new iPad

00:38:15 ◼   ► has created an unreasonable amount of stress in my world, which probably says a lot about

00:38:19 ◼   ► me as a person, but having a lot more battery life in my laptop would be really tremendous.

00:38:24 ◼   ► And I think you guys are completely right that perhaps just a brand new laptop today

00:38:29 ◼   ► would be enough. But I don't know, the thought of an ARM laptop that would run for two days

00:38:32 ◼   ► straight, that's enticing.

00:38:35 ◼   ► - Because also, the massive gain that we had with Haswell in the last cycle, that was not

00:38:43 ◼   ► not part of a die shrink. So when they do a process shrink with Broadwell this coming

00:38:49 ◼   ► fall or whenever that's supposed to happen, it keeps getting delayed, but probably late

00:38:53 ◼   ► this year there's going to be the Broadwell shrink, that's going to be even better. I

00:38:56 ◼   ► mean, that might add another hour. If you have a 13, 14 hour battery, do you think that

00:39:03 ◼   ► would relieve your stress? And this isn't like the BS battery specs that we used to

00:39:08 ◼   ► hear back in the day. All the tests back this up and real world usage back this up. If you

00:39:13 ◼   ► If they say you've got 12 hours,

00:39:16 ◼   ► under regular usage, you probably at least get 10.

00:39:19 ◼   ► It's pretty good, it's pretty close to what they say.

00:39:23 ◼   ► How far do you think it would need to go

00:39:27 ◼   ► for you to have that stress relieved,

00:39:29 ◼   ► or will you always have that stress

00:39:30 ◼   ► because you grew up with very scarce battery,

00:39:33 ◼   ► like a laptop battery depression?

00:39:35 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:39:37 ◼   ► - No, you're absolutely right,

00:39:38 ◼   ► and I think to some degree I will always have that stress.

00:39:42 ◼   ► But I think, and this is going to take all the wind out of my own sails, but I think

00:39:47 ◼   ► if I had complete confidence that under whatever you define as regular use, whatever I define

00:39:54 ◼   ► as regular use, I could go an entire work day, like an 8 to 10 hour work day, without

00:39:59 ◼   ► even thinking about whether or not I need to plug in, that would be enough to make me

00:40:04 ◼   ► happy.

00:40:05 ◼   ► And the way it is right now, I absolutely cannot do that.

00:40:08 ◼   ► without VMware Fusion running and kicking on the discrete CPU, I would probably only be able to get

00:40:14 ◼   ► half a day-ish. And so to be able to go a whole entire workday without even blinking an eye,

00:40:20 ◼   ► and if I leave my power adapter at home, meh, oh well, that would be very liberating.

00:40:26 ◼   ► You should wait for Broadwell then, because even with the current crop,

00:40:29 ◼   ► you could make it through most of a workday if you're nice to VMware, but if you include

00:40:36 ◼   ► 12 hours, you're not going to make it working hard. It'll come close and you'll have much

00:40:41 ◼   ► less stress than if you just plug it in when you back your desk, but you'll have to wait

00:40:44 ◼   ► for Broadwell to get you into that type of thing where you can not have a charger at

00:40:48 ◼   ► work, not bring your charger from home and still be comfortable that you can do your

00:40:51 ◼   ► work without worrying about like, "Oh, am I hammering on VMware too much?"

00:40:54 ◼   ► Have you considered solving this problem by spending 80 bucks on a second power adapter

00:40:58 ◼   ► and just leaving it at work? Oh, I do. I do. I absolutely do. I have one

00:41:02 ◼   ► powered adapter at my desk at home and one at work and the the real cure to

00:41:06 ◼   ► happiness or the real secret to happiness is having an additional one in

00:41:09 ◼   ► my laptop bag so I never have to move the one at work or the one at home but I

00:41:13 ◼   ► don't transport the power adapter to and from work but nevertheless I I don't know

00:41:19 ◼   ► I wish I didn't have to even think about it and to go back just one quick second

00:41:25 ◼   ► a lot of people in the chat are saying well the reason your iPad rear-end iPads

00:41:28 ◼   ► battery life sucks is because you're using it more and that very well could

00:41:31 ◼   ► be but I feel like the battery drops the battery percentage drops quicker than I remember it having

00:41:36 ◼   ► done in other iPads. They should have made the Retina Mini thicker thicker than they did. They

00:41:43 ◼   ► did make it thicker by some tiny amount I forget how much but it's like imperceptibly thicker but

00:41:47 ◼   ► the iPad 3 was perceptibly thicker than the iPad 2 and so when the Mini went retina in order to get

00:41:52 ◼   ► the sim you know to keep to maintain battery life they probably should have made the Mini larger than

00:41:58 ◼   ► than it currently is to fit more battery in.

00:42:01 ◼   ► And then I think you would have been a little bit happier

00:42:03 ◼   ► with it.

00:42:04 ◼   ► You also got it around the same time as iOS 7 and background

00:42:07 ◼   ► apps.

00:42:07 ◼   ► So I would check if there's some background app doing

00:42:09 ◼   ► something stupid that you're not aware of,

00:42:11 ◼   ► and also turn off Bluetooth.

00:42:12 ◼   ► Bluetooth is off.

00:42:13 ◼   ► I will say that.

00:42:14 ◼   ► But you could be right about background apps.

00:42:16 ◼   ► I don't think-- off the top of my head,

00:42:17 ◼   ► I don't think there are any that are on there that would be

00:42:19 ◼   ► running, other than iOS just kicking on apps in general.

00:42:23 ◼   ► What I mean is it's not like pod wranglers sitting there

00:42:26 ◼   ► downloading podcasts constantly or anything like that.

00:42:28 ◼   ► But nevertheless, you very well could be right.

00:42:31 ◼   ► All right, that went to a place I did not expect,

00:42:35 ◼   ► but that's okay.

00:42:36 ◼   ► It was accidental.

00:42:37 ◼   ► ♪ Accidental ♪

00:42:38 ◼   ► - This episode is brought to you by our friends

00:42:40 ◼   ► at Squarespace, the all one platform that makes it fast

00:42:43 ◼   ► and easy to create your own professional website

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00:42:50 ◼   ► and use offer code Marco, because I'm the best ATP host.

00:42:54 ◼   ► No, that's just how I picked the code.

00:42:56 ◼   ► You'll get your code month, don't worry.

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00:43:38 ◼   ► All this just starts at $8 a month and includes a free domain name if you sign up for a whole

00:43:42 ◼   ► year. And really, they have really advanced stuff. They even have, we talked a few months

00:43:46 ◼   ► ago about their commerce platform. You can sell physical or digital goods on a Squarespace

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00:44:41 ◼   ► the show once again.

00:44:42 ◼   ► So really quick, I have to confess that the first time I actually used Squarespace myself

00:44:47 ◼   ► personally was a week or two ago when I was fiddling with a side project that may or may

00:44:51 ◼   ► ever may or may not ever come to be and it really is that darn good it really truly is and we've

00:44:56 ◼   ► been using it and by we I mean Marco has been using it since neutral but it is so easy to do

00:45:02 ◼   ► everything and I won't extend this ad read for another 20 minutes even though I could extolling

00:45:06 ◼   ► all the great things about Squarespace but even if you know what you're doing if you don't want to

00:45:10 ◼   ► Squarespace is the right answer if you don't know what you're doing Squarespace is the right answer

00:45:14 ◼   ► so thanks to them I was asking a minute ago did you guys get me anything gold today

00:45:21 ◼   ► All right. I ask because this is our 50th episode, is it not?

00:45:27 ◼   ► Now wait, which anniversary gift calendar is gold on 50?

00:45:32 ◼   ► Because aren't there like three competing gift calendars for that sort of thing?

00:45:36 ◼   ► Yep. And I'm looking at Hallmarks, and it says gold is the 50th anniversary.

00:45:40 ◼   ► I can get you some gold, Schlager.

00:45:42 ◼   ► I would be happy with that, actually.

00:45:45 ◼   ► Do you have a gold hypercritical t-shirt?

00:45:48 ◼   ► No, I do have a Hypocritical t-shirt, but it is blue.

00:45:52 ◼   ► Oh well. That would have been... That was my gift for you. I put up for sale a gold t-shirt that you did not buy.

00:45:59 ◼   ► Thanks, John. I appreciate it.

00:46:01 ◼   ► So your gift was the opportunity to buy a special shirt.

00:46:05 ◼   ► You would think it's a gift for the number of people who email me and say, "Hey, are those shirts still available?" The answer is no.

00:46:10 ◼   ► Missed out. Speaking of Hypocritical, you wrote a post about the 30th anniversary of the Mac.

00:46:15 ◼   ► the Mac.

00:46:16 ◼   ► Yeah, I should have put that in my calendar.

00:46:18 ◼   ► I knew it was coming up like three or four days ahead of time, like, "Oh, I should write

00:46:22 ◼   ► something about that."

00:46:23 ◼   ► And I tried to write something, but when I started writing it, it ended up being exactly

00:46:26 ◼   ► the same thing as what I wrote when Steve Jobs died, because I guess the two things

00:46:29 ◼   ► are linked in my life, Steve Jobs and the Mac, much more so than I think most people

00:46:35 ◼   ► who came to Apple stuff later.

00:46:37 ◼   ► So yeah, we'll put the link in the show notes.

00:46:41 ◼   ► It's not that exciting.

00:46:42 ◼   ► reason I put it in there was because Macworld was doing a podcast where they

00:46:46 ◼   ► were collecting short like five-minute remembrances from people who use the Mac

00:46:51 ◼   ► but it wasn't a like a live podcast with other people they wanted us to pre-record

00:46:55 ◼   ► stuff and I'm terrible at pre-recording things and that's all I had to bail I

00:46:58 ◼   ► couldn't do it but I did think of something I wanted to say about the

00:47:01 ◼   ► original Mac and after hearing Marco Perez's Mac newbie-ness on the talk show

00:47:05 ◼   ► I figured that was the most epic troll to you no no there's lots of people that

00:47:12 ◼   ► Lots of people will care.

00:47:13 ◼   ► Actually, a friend of the show Guy English was not happy.

00:47:16 ◼   ► Yeah, and he's like your age.

00:47:18 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:47:18 ◼   ► Maybe he isn't.

00:47:19 ◼   ► No one knows how old he really is.

00:47:21 ◼   ► It's very difficult to tell with Canadians.

00:47:24 ◼   ► It's the beard.

00:47:24 ◼   ► You just can't see past it.

00:47:26 ◼   ► What is he hiding?

00:47:28 ◼   ► Anyway, so here's my brief little remembrance thing

00:47:31 ◼   ► that I was going to do for Macworld,

00:47:32 ◼   ► but didn't, about the original Mac.

00:47:34 ◼   ► And I think it will be good for young people and noobs

00:47:36 ◼   ► as well.

00:47:37 ◼   ► And the thing I was going to say that I remembered about the Mac,

00:47:39 ◼   ► original Mac in 1984 was what it was like to walk up to the computer and turn it on.

00:47:45 ◼   ► Which sounds weird, but hear me out, I think it has some foundation.

00:47:49 ◼   ► Or not, we'll find out.

00:47:51 ◼   ► So the power button on the Mac was on the back and you used your left hand to reach

00:47:57 ◼   ► the back of the computer and flick it and it was a rocker switch that tilted up and

00:48:01 ◼   ► down and the Mac itself was very upright.

00:48:04 ◼   ► I don't know if people must know what the original Mac looked like, kind of like a vertical

00:48:07 ◼   ► rectangle in front of you with a little square screen near the top.

00:48:11 ◼   ► So you'd reach around the back left side and flick the switch.

00:48:14 ◼   ► And it was a big mechanical flicky switch that you would see on a 70s mixing board or

00:48:19 ◼   ► something.

00:48:20 ◼   ► This was not some tiny little button or a circle with a little power symbol on it that

00:48:24 ◼   ► depresses 3mm in.

00:48:25 ◼   ► This was a big switch that made a noise.

00:48:28 ◼   ► You flick that switch, the CRT came on, and the thing made a beeping noise at the start

00:48:31 ◼   ► of "beep".

00:48:32 ◼   ► Pretty loud, but not like cool chord music, but a beeping noise.

00:48:36 ◼   ► And the reason this motion of walking up to this vertical computer, reaching around behind

00:48:41 ◼   ► and flicking the switch and sitting down in the chair at the same time, sticks in my mind

00:48:45 ◼   ► is because you did it so often.

00:48:47 ◼   ► You didn't put the computer to sleep.

00:48:49 ◼   ► There was no sleep for the computer.

00:48:50 ◼   ► You didn't leave it on all the time because that would be crazy.

00:48:52 ◼   ► It would be like leaving your TV on all the time or a light on all the time.

00:48:56 ◼   ► When you wanted to use the computer, you walked up to it, you turned it on, and you used it.

00:49:00 ◼   ► And it would boot up and it would take forever to boot up off the floppy disk.

00:49:04 ◼   ► you know, you do whatever you're going to do with the computer.

00:49:06 ◼   ► And the second reason the power switch sticks in my mind was because when you're done using

00:49:11 ◼   ► the computer, you reached around the back of it and you turned the power switch off.

00:49:16 ◼   ► Right in the middle of what you, you know, there was no shutdown command at the bottom

00:49:19 ◼   ► of what was then the special menu.

00:49:21 ◼   ► No shutdown, no nothing.

00:49:23 ◼   ► When you were done using the computer, you turned it off.

00:49:25 ◼   ► And we like to think that the computers we're using today are just like fancy versions of

00:49:29 ◼   ► the Mac that was back then.

00:49:30 ◼   ► Like, "Oh, they got a GUI.

00:49:31 ◼   ► They got the menu bar.

00:49:32 ◼   ► or even the same file edit, the special menu's gone,

00:49:36 ◼   ► but the Apple menu is in the corner

00:49:38 ◼   ► that had Windows with widgets in them

00:49:40 ◼   ► and resizing and scrolling, it's like the same thing, right?

00:49:42 ◼   ► But the incredible distance between that and now

00:49:46 ◼   ► is represented by how we treated the computer.

00:49:48 ◼   ► We treated it like you treated the television set.

00:49:50 ◼   ► When you wanna use it, you turn it on.

00:49:51 ◼   ► When you wanna use it, you turn it off.

00:49:52 ◼   ► There was no software interconnect preventing you from,

00:49:56 ◼   ► or telling you when it was safe to turn it off

00:49:58 ◼   ► or preventing you from turning it off at any time.

00:50:00 ◼   ► Now, you can turn it off on Mac anytime you want now.

00:50:01 ◼   ► I got hold on the power button for 10 seconds like if it gets hard frozen or whatever

00:50:05 ◼   ► But clearly that power button is not a mechanical interconnect that you know, the computer had no control like when you flick that switch

00:50:10 ◼   ► Electricity stopped flowing to the computer that was it and when you turn it on, you know electricity started flowing

00:50:15 ◼   ► And so that is my one of my lasting memories of the computer that I think most people who are not around back then using

00:50:21 ◼   ► Computers can't relate to because maybe they're like, oh I turned on my common Commodore 64 that way that's how I use my Atari

00:50:25 ◼   ► That's how I use my NES and I think a lot of people I think like to think that's how they're using their current

00:50:30 ◼   ► PlayStation stuff not knowing those buttons are software buttons that just tell the thing to shut down because you can't turn off

00:50:35 ◼   ► You know a real game console like that without consequences most of the time

00:50:39 ◼   ► But back then it was just it was a GUI computer that looks like what we have today

00:50:43 ◼   ► But it behaved like a toaster you'd flick the switch on you flick the switch off

00:50:47 ◼   ► That I did not know that and that seems really wild to me. Oh and also there were no lights

00:50:53 ◼   ► No indicator lights telling you the drive activity. I was PC is it used to for a long time pieces

00:50:57 ◼   ► were still like that. You're like, "How do I know when I can push the eject button to

00:51:00 ◼   ► get the disk out? Oh, wait for the light to stop blinking. Is it done? Wait, no, one more

00:51:03 ◼   ► blink. Wait, no. Okay, now, one more blink." That was crazy making as well. No light on

00:51:07 ◼   ► the front of the Mac. So how did you know? What if it was in the middle of writing data

00:51:12 ◼   ► to a floppy disk and you turned it off? Well, you probably just hosed yourself if that was

00:51:14 ◼   ► the case. But there was no light, I guess, because they wouldn't want to have some stupid

00:51:18 ◼   ► blinking light. There was no eject button because they wanted the computer to control

00:51:21 ◼   ► that. You still had to unmount a disk by dragging it to the trash or hitting eject or whatever,

00:51:25 ◼   ► and it would safely eject and unmount the disk.

00:51:27 ◼   ► But when you were done using the computer, presumably,

00:51:30 ◼   ► you're not in the middle of saving

00:51:32 ◼   ► and don't have any outstanding stuff.

00:51:34 ◼   ► You would just reach behind and hit the switch.

00:51:36 ◼   ► See, that was the best thing about the original Mac,

00:51:38 ◼   ► is that wonderful, unintuitive design, right from the start,

00:51:43 ◼   ► of, oh, to eject a disk, you do the same thing you do

00:51:46 ◼   ► when you want to delete data.

00:51:49 ◼   ► Well, here was the best thing about that.

00:51:51 ◼   ► Well, so first of all, that was a shortcut.

00:51:52 ◼   ► Like, the way you were supposed to do it,

00:51:53 ◼   ► the same way you would do anything,

00:51:55 ◼   ► you select it and then select an item from the menu.

00:51:57 ◼   ► It's like you would select the noun

00:51:59 ◼   ► and select the verb from the menu.

00:52:00 ◼   ► So there was an eject thing you could get a disk out.

00:52:02 ◼   ► But the best was, since there was only one floppy drive,

00:52:05 ◼   ► and you couldn't get much done with one 400K floppy,

00:52:08 ◼   ► you could eject the system disk that you booted from,

00:52:11 ◼   ► and it would remain on the desktop

00:52:13 ◼   ► as a grayed out floppy disk icon,

00:52:15 ◼   ► and then you would put in, say, your Mac Paint disk,

00:52:17 ◼   ► which application on a separate disk, put that in,

00:52:19 ◼   ► and then the Mac Paint floppy disk would appear

00:52:21 ◼   ► on your desktop as a little floppy disk icon,

00:52:22 ◼   ► but not grayed out.

00:52:25 ◼   ► And you could launch MacPaint, and sometimes it

00:52:27 ◼   ► would ask you to swap disks back and forth.

00:52:29 ◼   ► Eventually, you get to the point where the system disk is back in.

00:52:31 ◼   ► You've got a grayed out icon of the MacPaint floppy disk on there.

00:52:35 ◼   ► And the MacPaint floppy disk is in your hand, right?

00:52:37 ◼   ► Then you would drag the ghostly image of the MacPaint floppy disk

00:52:40 ◼   ► to the trash, and nothing would eject, because you've already

00:52:43 ◼   ► got the disk out.

00:52:44 ◼   ► The ghost disk would disappear.

00:52:46 ◼   ► It was a very strange metaphor for, what am I throwing out here?

00:52:50 ◼   ► I'm not ejecting a disk, because it's in my hand,

00:52:52 ◼   ► but I'm throwing out this little image and the image does disappear. Did I erase everything

00:52:55 ◼   ► on the disk? But how could I have erased everything? The disk gets in my hand, but nothing ejected,

00:52:58 ◼   ► so I wasn't injecting. Very, very confusing. Of course, it made totally intuitive sense

00:53:03 ◼   ► to, you know, an eight-year-old, nine-year-old me because, like, anything you learn, of course,

00:53:07 ◼   ► that's how the way it works. Don't you know how ghost images work for diskes? You know.

00:53:13 ◼   ► Things make sense to kids that you don't question, but it was very strange.

00:53:17 ◼   ► Then the terribleness of the disk and virtual disk and ghost disk and disk image kind of

00:53:23 ◼   ► metaphor continues to this day when you still have Mac software being distributed in DMGs.

00:53:28 ◼   ► Yeah, at least those don't get grayed out.

00:53:31 ◼   ► But yeah, you're like, "Where is the disk?

00:53:33 ◼   ► Is it, what's a disk image?"

00:53:34 ◼   ► Like, what I'm saying is an image of a disk, not disk image, which is an entirely different

00:53:38 ◼   ► thing.

00:53:39 ◼   ► That's what you're talking about.

00:53:40 ◼   ► But still, it's like that whole thing with like, kind of complicating the disk metaphor.

00:53:44 ◼   ► uh... that yet

00:53:46 ◼   ► like that's that's about that was it was one of the weirdest things with the

00:53:49 ◼   ► magan the

00:53:50 ◼   ► thank god they they've mostly

00:53:52 ◼   ► dodged it now at the ap store

00:53:54 ◼   ► uh... you know but by pushing people to do that as the as the installation

00:53:57 ◼   ► method but

00:53:58 ◼   ► free for decades if he hears at least there will not none i guess i was ten

00:54:03 ◼   ► inches just images right so for

00:54:05 ◼   ► a decade

00:54:06 ◼   ► uh... like

00:54:07 ◼   ► the way to install software on a map you have to like tell your parents

00:54:10 ◼   ► was re-downloads disk image

00:54:12 ◼   ► it mounts it. It's a virtual disk. It's not a real disk. You have to look for where the

00:54:15 ◼   ► disks are in your computer and find this fake disk that you just downloaded. Don't run it

00:54:19 ◼   ► from there, though. You've got to move it to your real disk, then eject the fake disk.

00:54:23 ◼   ► Nothing will actually eject from your computer. And then you've got to delete this file that

00:54:26 ◼   ► represents that fake disk when it's not mounted.

00:54:28 ◼   ► >> Disk images existed before OS X, but before OS X, the way most software was distributed

00:54:32 ◼   ► was in stuffit or stuffit.hqx, because stuffit files had resource forks for a short period

00:54:37 ◼   ► of time, or any other compressed file format. And what you would get when you decompressed

00:54:41 ◼   ► is if you were lucky you would get an application,

00:54:43 ◼   ► and if you're unlucky you would get an installer.

00:54:45 ◼   ► And there was a series of bad installers

00:54:47 ◼   ► doing their installer thing.

00:54:49 ◼   ► But yeah, the root problem with disk images

00:54:53 ◼   ► is not so much that it's the concept of a virtual disk

00:54:55 ◼   ► image, but the entire concept of mounting and unmounting disks,

00:54:58 ◼   ► whether they're virtual disks, real disks, or not.

00:55:00 ◼   ► Mounting and unmounting is beyond the can of regular people.

00:55:03 ◼   ► Well, you say that, but it's actually beyond a lot of people.

00:55:06 ◼   ► So this past Friday, I was at a work meeting,

00:55:09 ◼   ► And it was all of the developers at my office, which

00:55:12 ◼   ► is only 10 or 15 of us, I'd say.

00:55:15 ◼   ► And a developer that doesn't typically use a Mac

00:55:19 ◼   ► ended up using my boss's Mac in order

00:55:24 ◼   ► to do a quick PowerPoint presentation.

00:55:26 ◼   ► And that also involved using Safari or Chrome

00:55:29 ◼   ► or whatever his browser of choice was in order

00:55:32 ◼   ► to show a few things that he had worked on.

00:55:35 ◼   ► And firstly, he had a really hard time figuring out

00:55:38 ◼   ► to scroll because there was no scroll bar, which in and of itself I thought was kind of funny,

00:55:43 ◼   ► but made sense. I mean, I can't fault him for that. Secondly, he fell under the same trap that

00:55:48 ◼   ► Erin falls under anytime she tries to use my Mac, which is, for most power users, I have to assume

00:55:54 ◼   ► that they have hot corners and they have gestures set up. And if you're not familiar and used to

00:55:59 ◼   ► that, it's very off-putting because you do, you feel like you haven't touched anything and then

00:56:06 ◼   ► then suddenly random crap happens that makes no sense.

00:56:09 ◼   ► Well, anyways, the reason I bring this up is because he had had his presentation on

00:56:12 ◼   ► a USB key, and when he was all done, what did he do?

00:56:17 ◼   ► Do you want to take a guess, John?

00:56:19 ◼   ► Just yanked out like they do in the movies.

00:56:21 ◼   ► Just like they do with Windows and just like they do in the movies.

00:56:23 ◼   ► And so he just yanked that bad boy out.

00:56:25 ◼   ► And of course, instantly, my boss's Mac goes, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

00:56:30 ◼   ► You didn't unmount that bad boy.

00:56:31 ◼   ► I don't even know what's going on with that thing."

00:56:33 ◼   ► It was interesting to me because, all jokes aside, here's someone who writes code for

00:56:39 ◼   ► a living and he knows what he's doing, but because he's not familiar with OS X, it didn't

00:56:46 ◼   ► even cross his mind to unmount the USB key.

00:56:50 ◼   ► Why would you?

00:56:51 ◼   ► You just yank the thing out like you do on Windows, right?

00:56:54 ◼   ► And so it was just interesting to me.

00:56:56 ◼   ► Well, even on Windows, you have to do the blinking light dance, which is why so many

00:56:59 ◼   ► USB keys have little lights on them, because you can yank it on a Windows, but if you yank

00:57:03 ◼   ► it out in the middle when the little light is blinking, your USB key now has garbage

00:57:07 ◼   ► on it. So congratulations.

00:57:08 ◼   ► Which, by the way, when I first got my Mac, my first Mac, and I think it was 2010, one

00:57:15 ◼   ► of the things that I found extremely disconcerting was there were no hard drive lights or anything

00:57:20 ◼   ► like that. And to this day, I still have iStat menus running constantly. And I don't have

00:57:26 ◼   ► it showing hard drive activity, but I do have it showing throughput through my network card

00:57:32 ◼   ► CPU load because I just I can't I don't know why but I

00:57:37 ◼   ► Feel you're one of those people who would have bought in the back in the day

00:57:40 ◼   ► There was a program for the Mac called disk light

00:57:42 ◼   ► It would put a little blinking black and white thing and your little black and white menu bar to make people like you feel comfortable

00:57:47 ◼   ► Well, and again, it's not actually about disk usage

00:57:50 ◼   ► But it bothers me if something is happening slowly which to be fair on my work MacBook Pro with its SSD is not

00:57:58 ◼   ► terribly often. But if something's happening slowly or if my jet plane, I mean my fans are spinning,

00:58:03 ◼   ► I want to know why. And so I run iStat menus, which is absolutely the best 30 or so dollars

00:58:11 ◼   ► I've spent in a long time. I look at my little menu widget, whatever that thing is called,

00:58:16 ◼   ► and I see my CPU usage right there. And if I click on it, I can see the top five most expensive

00:58:21 ◼   ► processes. And I don't know, it just freaks me out not having that there. And I keep telling myself

00:58:26 ◼   ► to get rid of it.

00:58:27 ◼   ► And like, for example, I've gotten rid of--

00:58:28 ◼   ► No, don't.

00:58:28 ◼   ► Well, and I've gotten rid of my memory meter,

00:58:31 ◼   ► but I still have CPU and I still have internet throughput.

00:58:33 ◼   ► You should get rid of it, because it's

00:58:35 ◼   ► kind of the quantum whatever uncertainty principle

00:58:38 ◼   ► of computer performance.

00:58:40 ◼   ► That by observing it, you are necessarily

00:58:43 ◼   ► altering the behavior.

00:58:44 ◼   ► And I always wonder, how much am I altering it by observing it?

00:58:47 ◼   ► I don't leave activity monitor open.

00:58:48 ◼   ► I don't leave top running in a terminal window,

00:58:50 ◼   ► and I don't run the iSTAT menu things.

00:58:52 ◼   ► Unless I'm curious.

00:58:52 ◼   ► If I'm curious about something, it's

00:58:53 ◼   ► like turning on all the instruments,

00:58:55 ◼   ► or running instruments in Xcode. Sometimes you want to fire all that stuff up to sea,

00:58:59 ◼   ► but people who run it all day every day? Not great.

00:59:01 ◼   ► Oh, okay. Well, I'll tell you what. Suppose you're buying a new Mac Pro. What CPU do you

00:59:08 ◼   ► get?

00:59:09 ◼   ► I don't know. I'm talking about laptops. Who cares about desktops? You burn all the power

00:59:12 ◼   ► you want.

00:59:13 ◼   ► Fine. Laptops. Do you get a 13-inch with only a dual-core, or do you get a 15-inch with

00:59:19 ◼   ► a quad-core?

00:59:20 ◼   ► I don't know what I would get with a laptop. What are you getting at? That I would want

00:59:23 ◼   ► a more powerful computer?

00:59:24 ◼   ► No, I'm saying, so I've been running iStat menus also forever. I ran, there were some

00:59:30 ◼   ► other thing that did the same thing before that and it was worse, so I switched to iStat

00:59:33 ◼   ► menus and probably, I don't know, probably four or five years ago by now, and I've been

00:59:39 ◼   ► running it for a while and just like Casey, I used to have the hard drive indicator on

00:59:43 ◼   ► there. Once I switched to SSDs I removed it because it was pointless at that point, but

00:59:48 ◼   ► I still have the CPU and the network ones up. So the network ones, first of all, is

00:59:51 ◼   ► very useful if you want to see like am I currently uploading tons of stuff on podcasting that's

00:59:55 ◼   ► bad and you can go check our check Dropbox check back please you know and then the CPU

01:00:01 ◼   ► meter is great because it gives you an idea of how much CPU power you're actually using

01:00:08 ◼   ► with the work you do and where you're hitting bottlenecks and what kind of bottlenecks you're

01:00:13 ◼   ► hitting so that you can make intelligent decisions about what to upgrade and then what to buy

01:00:17 ◼   ► off your next computer.

01:00:18 ◼   ► I still think that's an activity you could do when you're curious about that.

01:00:22 ◼   ► When your computer is feeling slow, take a look at why it's slow.

01:00:24 ◼   ► When you're interested in whether this application takes advantage of how many cores, fire it

01:00:29 ◼   ► up.

01:00:30 ◼   ► But I don't think you need to run it all day, because you're not looking at it all day.

01:00:32 ◼   ► It's mostly just in the corner, animating, distracting your eye, and you're not looking

01:00:35 ◼   ► at it to gain information from it during that time.

01:00:38 ◼   ► I glance at it a lot.

01:00:40 ◼   ► That's another reason you should get rid of it.

01:00:41 ◼   ► It's like the thing you always have to keep looking at.

01:00:43 ◼   ► It's like looking at the time on the clock on a wall.

01:00:45 ◼   ► Gotta keep looking up, gotta keep looking up.

01:00:46 ◼   ► the clock away, concentrate on what you're doing, and you'll spend less time looking

01:00:49 ◼   ► at the clock.

01:00:50 ◼   ► I don't know. I think basically whenever I'm being made to wait for something at

01:00:55 ◼   ► all on my computer, usually I will glance at that to see like am I maxing out a CPU?

01:01:01 ◼   ► Before it would be like am I maxing out a disk? It helps a lot to know what your performance

01:01:07 ◼   ► needs are, generally speaking. So I know now how much of my stuff is going to benefit from

01:01:13 ◼   ► having more cores and how much of it isn't and how much of it is going to benefit from

01:01:16 ◼   ► having like one super fast core rather than more cores that are slower.

01:01:22 ◼   ► I have a good idea of what I need because I've been running this for years and because

01:01:27 ◼   ► it's always running and so I can always just kind of glance up there so I know how my stuff

01:01:31 ◼   ► behaves and what my needs actually are.

01:01:33 ◼   ► Whereas if you don't do this kind of thing, you're kind of buying blind or your computer's

01:01:39 ◼   ► slow and you might think, "Okay, I guess I'll add some RAM or something," but you don't

01:01:41 ◼   ► really know, like, is it slow because of X, Y, or Z? And you're just kind of guessing.

01:01:46 ◼   ► I don't know how many conclusions you can get from just looking at that. Because when

01:01:49 ◼   ► my computer is slow, I mean, I go right either—I mostly go to the command line, because I'm

01:01:53 ◼   ► going to run sc_usage, fs_usage to see who's hitting the file systems, because for me and

01:01:58 ◼   ► my non-SSD systems, that's usually the big one. But I don't want to just know, oh, there's

01:02:01 ◼   ► a lot of I/O going on. How many IOPS are there in activity monitor? What is the data throughput?

01:02:06 ◼   ► I want to know who is using the file system, and what are they doing with it? What files

01:02:09 ◼   ► are they modifying?

01:02:10 ◼   ► So that's why I want the FSC usage with the wide output for the file system type to get

01:02:15 ◼   ► that information.

01:02:16 ◼   ► You're not going to get that from iStat menu.

01:02:17 ◼   ► I think you do, actually.

01:02:18 ◼   ► I think the main reason both of you are running iStat menu is probably the only reason you

01:02:23 ◼   ► should run iStat menu is because you like blinking lights and pretty things.

01:02:27 ◼   ► And that's a reasonably legitimate reason.

01:02:29 ◼   ► A lot of people run, for example, transparent terminal windows, which make things in their

01:02:34 ◼   ► terminal windows harder to read.

01:02:36 ◼   ► But they like it because it looks cool.

01:02:37 ◼   ► See, I disagree.

01:02:39 ◼   ► I really do think that I, everything Marco said, I was shaking my head yes.

01:02:45 ◼   ► In that if there's any delay on my computer, particularly my SSD MacBook Pro, I'm looking

01:02:50 ◼   ► at that CPU meter to see what's going on.

01:02:52 ◼   ► And if there's a spike that I don't expect, then darn it, I'm going to click on that CPU

01:02:56 ◼   ► meter to see what the top processes are.

01:02:58 ◼   ► And if air mail or if crash plan is going berserk, then I need to investigate why that

01:03:05 ◼   ► is.

01:03:06 ◼   ► And additionally, that's why, to go back in the episode, that's why I said I would probably

01:03:11 ◼   ► trade a less powerful Mac for a MacBook for one that has a much better battery.

01:03:17 ◼   ► If you want to get better battery life, why not just turn that off?

01:03:22 ◼   ► Actually when Mavericks came out, I did crank back the update frequency from like one second

01:03:27 ◼   ► to like five or something like that.

01:03:28 ◼   ► But anyway, the reason I'm so willing to make that trade is because I know generally speaking

01:03:32 ◼   ► my CPU usage really isn't that much.

01:03:34 ◼   ► Now when I have VMware running, okay, then it's not too awesome in that I'm using

01:03:40 ◼   ► probably a third of my CPU all the time.

01:03:43 ◼   ► But excepting when VMware is running, most of the crap I do on my computer I really don't

01:03:48 ◼   ► need a very powerful CPU for.

01:03:49 ◼   ► So that's why I think I would be willing to make that trade.

01:03:52 ◼   ► And that's why I think Marco is onto something with it gives you some kind of passive feedback

01:03:57 ◼   ► on where your bottlenecks are.

01:03:59 ◼   ► And if you're burning power unnecessarily.

01:04:01 ◼   ► Like if you have a four core machine and you got some runaway process burning 100% all

01:04:06 ◼   ► the time because it's stuck on something, you might not notice that for days because

01:04:12 ◼   ► it is not really affecting you at all.

01:04:14 ◼   ► And all that time then, your battery life's getting worse, your system's running a little

01:04:18 ◼   ► bit too warm or the fans are running a little bit too fast.

01:04:22 ◼   ► If it's a process that's writing log files, like I have this weird problem a lot of times,

01:04:27 ◼   ► I don't know if it's because of the hijacking setup

01:04:30 ◼   ► with this live stream.

01:04:31 ◼   ► I had this problem recently where iTunes agent,

01:04:34 ◼   ► some kind of iTunes airport agent

01:04:38 ◼   ► crashes repeatedly in the background

01:04:39 ◼   ► and it burns up a CPU for a while

01:04:42 ◼   ► and as it's doing this, it's dumping tons of crap

01:04:46 ◼   ► to the console log, like hundreds of megabytes of text

01:04:49 ◼   ► to the console log and the only way I can really tell

01:04:51 ◼   ► is either by looking up there and seeing,

01:04:52 ◼   ► oh, there's that core that's been running for a while.

01:04:55 ◼   ► I wonder what it's doing, and clicking the icon,

01:04:58 ◼   ► and it shows me what it's doing.

01:04:59 ◼   ► Or my terminal window will start taking forever

01:05:02 ◼   ► to reach the login prompt, and then you have to go purge

01:05:06 ◼   ► out the directory and find the Mac hint that does that.

01:05:10 ◼   ► But if you don't see, if you can't see those kind

01:05:13 ◼   ► of indicators, like if I didn't launch terminal for a while,

01:05:16 ◼   ► that would take days, and I wouldn't notice it.

01:05:18 ◼   ► I'd be sitting here burning power, and running too hot,

01:05:21 ◼   ► and filling up my disk with all this crap,

01:05:23 ◼   ► and not even noticing.

01:05:24 ◼   ► But the difference between you and I, Marco and John, is that we are not one with our

01:05:29 ◼   ► machine like he is.

01:05:31 ◼   ► He can feel the menu meters.

01:05:32 ◼   ► That's what it was called, menu meters.

01:05:35 ◼   ► If you don't notice that something is taking an entire core and you don't notice that something

01:05:39 ◼   ► is dumping 100 megs to your thing, then it's probably actually not a problem.

01:05:42 ◼   ► I know it's a problem and that you shouldn't be doing that, but I'm mostly content to wait

01:05:48 ◼   ► until my machine is not performing the way I think it is and investigate why that is,

01:05:53 ◼   ► versus if something like that happened and like it cured itself or I just never noticed

01:05:56 ◼   ► it, like again, I'm not using a laptop, I'm plugged in, I don't notice the fans going

01:06:00 ◼   ► up, I don't notice, you know, maybe I'm using slightly more power or whatever, but like,

01:06:04 ◼   ► I think for me, if something was dumping 100 megabytes, I would notice that and I would

01:06:08 ◼   ► go and, you know, investigate it like that.

01:06:10 ◼   ► You don't have an SSD yet.

01:06:11 ◼   ► No, yeah, that's right.

01:06:12 ◼   ► I would definitely notice it.

01:06:13 ◼   ► Hell, I would hear the hard drive going tick, tick, tick.

01:06:18 ◼   ► But things, there are many things that go off and you don't notice and I'm perfectly

01:06:22 ◼   ► content to let them be below my notice.

01:06:25 ◼   ► If the only reason I would notice them is because of the stat, you know, some kind of

01:06:28 ◼   ► stat counter thing, then that's like drawing my attention unnecessarily, right?

01:06:33 ◼   ► Like intellectually, yes, I would like to know that thing is crashing and see if I can

01:06:37 ◼   ► investigate it or do something about it.

01:06:38 ◼   ► But practically speaking, if I would not notice if it was not for the stat stuff, I'd just

01:06:44 ◼   ► as soon not notice it.

01:06:45 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

01:06:46 ◼   ► Because you don't run a laptop.

01:06:49 ◼   ► That's very true.

01:06:50 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:06:51 ◼   ► with a laptop I would say at least just decrease the upgrade frequency. Like every one second

01:06:56 ◼   ► is too much. And I really hope the people who make iStat menus get religion about the

01:07:00 ◼   ► Mavericks power saving stuff, because if you're going to make an app that's like that, there

01:07:04 ◼   ► are probably a lot of things you can do to your app itself to make it more power efficient,

01:07:09 ◼   ► even with the same update frequency.

01:07:11 ◼   ► Yeah, and usually, is it Django? It's B-J-A-N-G-O, I believe. I'm probably mispronouncing it,

01:07:18 ◼   ► I'm sorry, but they're usually pretty pretty on the ball with with getting the latest

01:07:23 ◼   ► I don't want I don't want to say trends that sounds dismissive, but but getting those newest features supported

01:07:29 ◼   ► Yeah, they're pretty good citizens on the platform. That's that's a much better way of phrasing it

01:07:33 ◼   ► Hey, do we have any other new sponsors this week by chance? We have one more new sponsor this week

01:07:38 ◼   ► It is our friends at cards against humanity

01:07:41 ◼   ► Wait, wait, wait what yeah cards against humanity that awesome game that you and I have played and it's fantastic

01:07:48 ◼   ► It's sponsored by Cards Against Humanity, but they asked us not to read an ad and to

01:07:54 ◼   ► just enjoy the show.

01:07:56 ◼   ► That was it?

01:07:57 ◼   ► That's it?

01:07:58 ◼   ► That's the whole thing?

01:07:59 ◼   ► Isn't that great?

01:08:00 ◼   ► I'm not at all surprised by this, but that's ridiculous.

01:08:02 ◼   ► Oh, those guys are the best.

01:08:04 ◼   ► Anyway, they didn't ask us to tell you, but it's cardsagainsthumanity.com, because they're

01:08:08 ◼   ► just awesome.

01:08:09 ◼   ► So thanks a lot to Cards Against Humanity.

01:08:12 ◼   ► That was our big moment?

01:08:13 ◼   ► I have been so excited for them to maybe possibly one day sponsor our show, and that's what

01:08:17 ◼   ► they decide to do. I'm both like a little sad and overwhelmed with happiness.

01:08:22 ◼   ► It's pretty awesome. Well thanks guys. Yeah. We should play that. We should do that on

01:08:28 ◼   ► air sometime. That, yeah, well we might lose our clean rating if we do. We just might.

01:08:34 ◼   ► Well I feel like we're dishonoring their, their, the motive there so we should just

01:08:39 ◼   ► move on. Alright, let's get back to it. Lenovo bought some things recently. Do we

01:08:44 ◼   ► care about that? Do we have time to care about that? I don't know, do we? Are we done? Is

01:08:49 ◼   ► that a hint? Only our show could spend the first, you know, almost hour and a half, today

01:08:56 ◼   ► of all days, with all the stuff in the news happened today, and we haven't talked about

01:08:59 ◼   ► any of it. Not even a bit. But is it like, is it news, is there anything that we really

01:09:05 ◼   ► care about if you don't care about like the meta-game of company vs company and who owns

01:09:10 ◼   ► what and stuff like that. I don't know if there's much about the industry that any

01:09:15 ◼   ► of these particular deals change other than continuing existing trends that everyone already

01:09:20 ◼   ► is familiar with.

01:09:21 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, I don't know. It seems like Lenovo is basically just becoming IBM's

01:09:26 ◼   ► hardware, and I know IBM still does big, big hardware, big server hardware, but, you know,

01:09:32 ◼   ► they took the PC business and, I don't know, I'm very hipster about all this, but

01:09:36 ◼   ► They killed the ThinkPad, and now they're taking the x86 server business, and apparently

01:09:42 ◼   ► Motorola as well.

01:09:43 ◼   ► Well, they're in an economy that's up and coming in a way that the US economy is not.

01:09:48 ◼   ► Like they are us many, many years in the past.

01:09:52 ◼   ► It kind of makes sense that businesses that are not interesting or profitable or profitable

01:09:56 ◼   ► enough or have enough growth potential for us could have enough growth potential for

01:10:01 ◼   ► them, be more profitable for them, more interesting for them.

01:10:04 ◼   ► So they would like to make a phone.

01:10:06 ◼   ► would like to sell PCs, they'll happily sell PC class server hardware.

01:10:12 ◼   ► I don't know how they remember that.

01:10:14 ◼   ► What is this?

01:10:15 ◼   ► The low-end server hardware.

01:10:16 ◼   ► Low-end just means x86, which is basically like the server hardware that almost everybody

01:10:20 ◼   ► buys.

01:10:21 ◼   ► Not a bad business.

01:10:22 ◼   ► I mean, I know you're upset about what they did to your beautiful ThinkPad, but for the

01:10:26 ◼   ► most part, Lenovo took IBM's PC business and didn't screw it up.

01:10:32 ◼   ► At the very least, can you give them that?

01:10:33 ◼   ► They didn't screw it up?

01:10:34 ◼   ► Yeah, they have a pretty good record of that, of not screwing up the things they've bought

01:10:39 ◼   ► too badly. I mean, I think even most people who are ThinkPad fans would agree that the

01:10:47 ◼   ► Lenovo transition really didn't change much.

01:10:50 ◼   ► Well, compare it to Google buying Motorola, and well, they screwed up Motorola, but Motorola

01:10:57 ◼   ► came pretty screwed up, so that's not fair. But a lot of times, you'll acquire a company

01:11:02 ◼   ► and just like you won't be able to figure out how to make any money with it and the

01:11:05 ◼   ► products will be worse under you and it will just fizzle.

01:11:08 ◼   ► People might say that Lenovo's products are worse in some ways than IBM or lost some of

01:11:12 ◼   ► the specialness they had with IBM or aren't as interesting as they were under IBM, but

01:11:16 ◼   ► it's still an ongoing business.

01:11:18 ◼   ► And that was my fear when they bought them because who would have ever heard of Lenovo

01:11:21 ◼   ► when they took IBM's PC business that in two years you won't be able to buy a Lenovo PC

01:11:28 ◼   ► because they'll not be able to make a go of this.

01:11:30 ◼   ► It'll just be fizzle out and they just won't be successful

01:11:32 ◼   ► But you can still buy Lenovo PCs and laptops and maybe they're not as special as I think bad with a butterfly keyboard

01:11:38 ◼   ► but

01:11:39 ◼   ► You know they're they're reasonable PC. It's like what would you rather have a Lenovo laptop or a Dell Lenovo or an HP laptop?

01:11:46 ◼   ► No slim pickings there, but is none an option exactly right?

01:11:51 ◼   ► Yeah

01:11:55 ◼   ► Fun fact my dad has worked for IBM for I don't know probably about 30 years and I vividly

01:12:02 ◼   ► vividly remember seeing think

01:12:04 ◼   ► pads floating around the house when I was really little

01:12:07 ◼   ► Because the think pad in case you didn't know is named after these pads that they used to hand out to the employees

01:12:13 ◼   ► It just said the word think on the front and that was it and I vividly remember seeing those all over the place

01:12:18 ◼   ► And so I grew up on on

01:12:20 ◼   ► on Thinkpads and I grew up using a trackpoint pointing device and if you've never seen the XKCD about this go go

01:12:27 ◼   ► Google it and check it out, but I still I still miss that I genuinely do and in Apple

01:12:32 ◼   ► Trackpads are are as good as they get or touch pads whatever they're called

01:12:38 ◼   ► They're as good as they're as those sorts of things get but I still miss and prefer the track point. I

01:12:44 ◼   ► Don't know maybe I'm the only one which actually I meant to ask you guys to either of you guys use the magic trackpad

01:12:49 ◼   ► No. No, what are you crazy?

01:12:51 ◼   ► Okay, that's what I thought too, but a lot of people I know are starting to get really excited about the trackpad.

01:12:57 ◼   ► I'm always suspicious of somebody when they tell me they prefer a trackpad to a mouse.

01:13:01 ◼   ► I tend to agree.

01:13:02 ◼   ► Any kind of trackpad. I know people who use that. I know people who use trackpads at their desk with their desktop computer,

01:13:08 ◼   ► and I also know people who prefer the trackpad, the centered trackpad underneath their keyboard on their laptop to using a mouse on their desktop.

01:13:15 ◼   ► And those people should be eyed with great suspicion.

01:13:18 ◼   ► All right, so we don't really care about them buying Motorola and Google unloading

01:13:24 ◼   ► Motorola?

01:13:25 ◼   ► I mean, it's like a terrible, failed, I don't know what.

01:13:30 ◼   ► I mean, they got the patents.

01:13:31 ◼   ► They're keeping the patents.

01:13:33 ◼   ► When they bought Motorola, the only interesting thing about that acquisition, like the A-store

01:13:38 ◼   ► is like, "Okay, they're just going to — they're buying Motorola for the patents."

01:13:41 ◼   ► Like, "No, but I think they might be buying them because they're going to make their own

01:13:44 ◼   ► phones and Motorola makes hardware."

01:13:46 ◼   ► And so that turned out not to be the case.

01:13:48 ◼   ► They admitted as much in their thing.

01:13:50 ◼   ► We originally bought them for the...

01:13:51 ◼   ► I guess there was a chance that if Motorola's new phones took off, Google would say, "Hey,

01:13:56 ◼   ► wait a second.

01:13:57 ◼   ► We can sell the OS to other people, but then compete with them by making our own hardware

01:14:00 ◼   ► that sells in huge numbers instead of the Nexus, which sell in smaller numbers, I would

01:14:04 ◼   ► imagine."

01:14:05 ◼   ► But turns out no one wants a Motorola phone either.

01:14:09 ◼   ► It's a shame because the most recent Motorola phones are pretty decent.

01:14:14 ◼   ► They're interesting, they're nice looking.

01:14:15 ◼   ► They work pretty well for Android phones.

01:14:18 ◼   ► They're not terrible phones.

01:14:20 ◼   ► I'm certain Lenovo will continue to make not terrible phones out of them.

01:14:26 ◼   ► Who knows?

01:14:27 ◼   ► They're well positioned to do well in China.

01:14:30 ◼   ► So if that business starts picking up, they're going to be right there, ready to sell cheap

01:14:34 ◼   ► Android phones to all of China.

01:14:37 ◼   ► Do you think it has anything to do with a possible Google-Samsung future partnership

01:14:42 ◼   ► of some sort?

01:14:45 ◼   ► getting Motorola out of the way.

01:14:46 ◼   ► You know, like Google couldn't buy Samsung, they're too big, as far as I know.

01:14:50 ◼   ► But do you think that, you know, the news came out today also that Google has apparently

01:14:58 ◼   ► pressured Samsung to stop doing their incredibly different interface on their tablets that

01:15:03 ◼   ► they were working on, and possibly on their phones as well.

01:15:07 ◼   ► I don't know all the details of it.

01:15:08 ◼   ► But clearly Google is pressuring Samsung to work more closely with them.

01:15:17 ◼   ► What if getting Motorola out of the way, besides being financially wise because they kept losing

01:15:23 ◼   ► even more money on it every year that they kept it, what if that helped that too?

01:15:27 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:15:28 ◼   ► It sounds like a stretch, but you never know.

01:15:31 ◼   ► Honestly, all of this makes me think that the way they bought Motorola out of the blue

01:15:37 ◼   ► and then spent way too much on it. Even back then, everyone said that was way too much.

01:15:42 ◼   ► Supposedly it was maybe for patents, but the patents turned out to not really be worth anything.

01:15:48 ◼   ► **Matt Stauffer** I think the patents are worth something,

01:15:51 ◼   ► not the crazy billion dollar numbers they're giving there, but they're definitely worth

01:15:54 ◼   ► something. They're not worth it in that you're going to be able to sue everybody else for

01:15:58 ◼   ► violating your patents, but I think having that big staple, it's like it sows enough uncertainty

01:16:03 ◼   ► in the people who are going to come at you with their stupid patents. They're like, "Well,

01:16:07 ◼   ► We have a lot of stupid patents too, and you're not sure and maybe the few they've used have lost in court

01:16:12 ◼   ► But it's a hell of a lot of patents, and they're really stupid

01:16:15 ◼   ► So I think it serves its purchase as as the mutually assured destruction sort of black bag of crap

01:16:21 ◼   ► You know that massive massively overpaid for that, but it's it's better than not having it at all

01:16:29 ◼   ► You know so I don't know and as for like the pressuring like Samsung saying all right

01:16:34 ◼   ► "Oh, if you want us to do more stock Android appearance, you need to get rid of that Motorola."

01:16:38 ◼   ► I don't think Samsung was threatened by Motorola selling the piddling number of crappy phones

01:16:42 ◼   ► that they were selling, and I don't think Samsung was in a position to bargain like

01:16:45 ◼   ► that.

01:16:46 ◼   ► At least they shouldn't have been.

01:16:47 ◼   ► If they made that threat and Google believed it and acted based on that threat being an

01:16:52 ◼   ► actual thing they should be scared of, that was stupid, because that's an insane threat.

01:16:57 ◼   ► The threat would be basically, "We'll do your default Android appearance thing, but you

01:17:03 ◼   ► have to do this thing for us." And Google will say, "Why do we have to do that thing

01:17:06 ◼   ► for you?" Well, if you don't, we're not going to make our phones use the stock Google appearance.

01:17:12 ◼   ► And we don't need your stinkin' maps, and we don't need your stinkin' Gmail. We'll do

01:17:15 ◼   ► everything ourselves, and Google should have said, "Okay, good luck with that." Because

01:17:18 ◼   ► I don't think Samsung is in a position—I mean, Apple was barely in a position to not

01:17:23 ◼   ► use Google Maps. I'm not sure Samsung is in a position to do away with all the things

01:17:28 ◼   ► that Google gives them. They're an Android vendor, for crying out loud. You know, it's

01:17:31 ◼   ► hard. They could do like the Kindle route where you're like Amazon's like we don't

01:17:35 ◼   ► really need anything from you Google except for your OS thanks. I don't think

01:17:39 ◼   ► that's a viable strategy for Samsung. It's possible that Samsung is diluted

01:17:43 ◼   ► enough that they think that's a viable strategy for them that they don't need

01:17:45 ◼   ► we don't need you Google any second we could go off on our own and we'll be

01:17:48 ◼   ► just as successful without you. I think that strategy would work for like a year

01:17:52 ◼   ► and then Samsung would realize they're not Google. So I'm not sure but I hope

01:17:56 ◼   ► Google didn't give any credence to that but I think getting rid of Motorola is

01:18:00 ◼   ► the right move, because if you're not going to use Motorola as your hardware wing and

01:18:03 ◼   ► become like an Apple-style, like we make the hardware and the software, if you're not going

01:18:06 ◼   ► to do that, what the hell point is there in having a phone maker?

01:18:08 ◼   ► All it's going to do is make your relationships with all the people you license your OS to

01:18:12 ◼   ► more fraught with angst than it needs to be.

01:18:16 ◼   ► And yeah, you pay $12.5 billion for it, but cut your losses.

01:18:20 ◼   ► So who has the real leverage between Samsung and Google?

01:18:24 ◼   ► Do you still think it's Google?

01:18:25 ◼   ► And I ask because it seems to me like most of the phones that I see that are Android

01:18:31 ◼   ► phones—and I won't even wager guesses to the percentage—but it seems like well

01:18:36 ◼   ► over half are Samsung phones.

01:18:39 ◼   ► So is Google getting to the point that they're getting beholden to Samsung?

01:18:43 ◼   ► I mean, what you just said made me think no, but do you think so?

01:18:47 ◼   ► No, because Samsung is making all the money in the Android market, and Google hates that.

01:18:53 ◼   ► not beholden to Google. They just want Samsung. They just want to, A, Google needs to figure

01:18:57 ◼   ► out a way to make money from Android. And B, the power of Samsung is making that more difficult.

01:19:03 ◼   ► They're making the money. And so that's Google leaning on them to say you have to have a more

01:19:06 ◼   ► of a default Android experience is them trying to say what we want is an undifferentiated sea of

01:19:12 ◼   ► people shipping on our OS on commodity hardware. They want to go back in time and pretend like

01:19:17 ◼   ► they're Microsoft and selling Windows to every PC vendor. And Samsung doesn't want to be every

01:19:21 ◼   ► PC vanger they want to differentiate but it's not as if Samsung like if Google's already not making most of the money in the Android ecosystem

01:19:28 ◼   ► What is Samsung taking away sometimes already reaping all the profits from Android right there are they've already done that to Google

01:19:34 ◼   ► So I don't see how Samsung has any leverage over Google say well

01:19:38 ◼   ► We'll just change everything to Windows phone and stop using Android like fine

01:19:41 ◼   ► We weren't making any money off you use an Android anyway, so it's sure their their relationship is not

01:19:47 ◼   ► they're not two happy campers next to each other and I

01:19:51 ◼   ► I don't know, Google at least has a stop gap of like,

01:19:54 ◼   ► well, this whole Android thing was silly,

01:19:56 ◼   ► we're gonna switch to Chrome OS for everything.

01:19:58 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think it's even, you can look at the relationship

01:20:04 ◼   ► between Apple and Samsung, not with the lawsuits and stuff,

01:20:07 ◼   ► but just with the hardware manufacturing deals

01:20:10 ◼   ► that they have where Apple still needs Samsung

01:20:14 ◼   ► for so much of their component manufacturing,

01:20:17 ◼   ► especially the more complicated processors and stuff.

01:20:20 ◼   ► and it doesn't look like they're gonna stop needing Samsung

01:20:25 ◼   ► in the next few years.

01:20:26 ◼   ► Maybe they'll slowly work towards that

01:20:29 ◼   ► by bringing up different fabs and stuff,

01:20:30 ◼   ► but they're gonna keep using Samsung

01:20:33 ◼   ► as a manufacturing partner for a while,

01:20:37 ◼   ► or a component partner for a while.

01:20:39 ◼   ► And so Samsung and Apple, you could tell

01:20:42 ◼   ► they don't really like each other,

01:20:43 ◼   ► but they keep working together

01:20:45 ◼   ► because Samsung will take the money

01:20:46 ◼   ► 'cause it's a lot of money,

01:20:48 ◼   ► and Apple needs their capacity and their chip manufacturing.

01:20:52 ◼   ► So I think similarly, Google and Samsung

01:20:56 ◼   ► kind of need each other too.

01:20:58 ◼   ► By having Android, Samsung is making a killing.

01:21:04 ◼   ► And Samsung, personality-wise,

01:21:07 ◼   ► it's pretty hard to get a read on them in much detail,

01:21:09 ◼   ► but it does seem like, personality-wise,

01:21:12 ◼   ► they're not like a stubborn, principled company.

01:21:15 ◼   ► If there's a way to make money doing something,

01:21:19 ◼   ► they're just gonna do it.

01:21:19 ◼   ► They don't really care what it is.

01:21:21 ◼   ► They're not gonna hold a grudge against Google

01:21:23 ◼   ► and say, "Oh, well, you're kicking us around,

01:21:25 ◼   ► "so we're gonna stop using Android."

01:21:27 ◼   ► No, they won't.

01:21:27 ◼   ► They might make their own additional line of phones

01:21:30 ◼   ► with something else on it,

01:21:31 ◼   ► but they're not gonna stop selling Android phones.

01:21:32 ◼   ► They don't care.

01:21:33 ◼   ► If they can make money selling Android phones,

01:21:35 ◼   ► they'll keep selling Android phones,

01:21:36 ◼   ► and they'll keep making a lot of money.

01:21:38 ◼   ► And Google needs them because,

01:21:40 ◼   ► yeah, like as you said,

01:21:41 ◼   ► there's not really a lot of other people

01:21:43 ◼   ► making Android stuff that serves Google well. Amazon is selling a good amount of it, but

01:21:48 ◼   ► that's not really helping Google very much. And there's other manufacturers, mostly regional

01:21:53 ◼   ► ones, like in China and India, there's manufacturers that also make a ton of Android stuff, but

01:21:57 ◼   ► that doesn't help Google very much because it doesn't run a lot of their services or

01:21:59 ◼   ► any of their services. So Samsung is probably the only company making a good amount of Google

01:22:08 ◼   ► service connected Android things and actually selling them worldwide. And so, you know,

01:22:14 ◼   ► they kind of can't afford to have animosity toward each other. You know, like, I think

01:22:18 ◼   ► you're right. Google wanted, with Android, I think they expected there be all these manufacturers

01:22:22 ◼   ► with a diverse ecosystem providing healthy competition. And in reality, everyone else

01:22:27 ◼   ► has died because Samsung was really good at it and everyone else was really bad at it.

01:22:33 ◼   ► And so it totally is dysfunctional to have one giant manufacturer making the majority

01:22:40 ◼   ► of your stuff.

01:22:41 ◼   ► Well, and not just the number of manufacturers.

01:22:44 ◼   ► They expected, "Well, we're going to make the software part, and the margins on software

01:22:47 ◼   ► are massive, so we're going to make huge margins on the software we sell, and those poor suckers

01:22:52 ◼   ► making the hardware are going to make tiny little hardware margins."

01:22:54 ◼   ► Where as it turns out, Samsung's making the bulk of the profit in what you would define

01:22:59 ◼   ► is the Android market because they make way more profit on the phones they sell than Google

01:23:03 ◼   ► makes on the licensing of the OS to Samsung. And so that's the imbalance there. The vast

01:23:10 ◼   ► majority of the money in the Android ecosystem is being made by a hardware manufacturer,

01:23:14 ◼   ► and Google's got to be like, "But doesn't software have higher margins? How are we not

01:23:17 ◼   ► making money?" And so I think Google's trying to go back to its bread and butter and saying,

01:23:21 ◼   ► "It seems like no matter who's out there, even if there were 15 hardware makers, the

01:23:26 ◼   ► accumulated profit made by those 15 hardware makers that evenly divided the

01:23:29 ◼   ► market would still dwarf the license fees that we get. It doesn't seem like

01:23:33 ◼   ► that we're gonna make money, you know, because they get the magic of like

01:23:38 ◼   ► subsidized phones in the US and getting all that money for giving you a

01:23:41 ◼   ► subscriber for a long period of time and the hardware itself has reasonable

01:23:44 ◼   ► margins and they're not making enough money off Android itself. So I think they

01:23:48 ◼   ► want to go back to their old style which is, alright, we're gonna make money by

01:23:52 ◼   ► people using Google services. And that's why they switched to, "Never mind all the

01:23:56 ◼   ► profit stuff, let's just make sure that the people who are selling Android phones

01:23:59 ◼   ► continue to, they continue to be a gateway to get people into our Google

01:24:04 ◼   ► services so we can show them our Google ads and get information about them in

01:24:07 ◼   ► Google+ and all the googly things we do." I think we're done. Thanks to our three

01:24:14 ◼   ► sponsors this week, Help Spot, Squarespace, and Cards Against Humanity, and we'll see

01:24:19 ◼   ► See you next week.

01:24:26 ◼   ► to begin, cause it was accidental. Oh it was accidental. John didn't do any research, Marco

01:24:33 ◼   ► and Casey wouldn't let him, cause it was accidental. Oh it was accidental. And you can find the

01:24:42 ◼   ► show notes at ATP.fm. And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at c-a-s-e-y-t-e-s.

01:24:51 ◼   ► You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:24:57 ◼   ► So that's Kasey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:25:02 ◼   ► Auntie Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C

01:25:07 ◼   ► USA, Syracuse

01:25:09 ◼   ► It's accidental (It's accidental)

01:25:12 ◼   ► They didn't mean to accidental (Accidental)

01:25:17 ◼   ► Tech podcast so long

01:25:21 ◼   ► I

01:25:23 ◼   ► Seem to recall maybe hearing about this somewhere on the internet

01:25:26 ◼   ► It might have been a pocketful some people saying oh, we'll get the email about this people in the show

01:25:30 ◼   ► People who preferred to play a first-person shooters for the trackpad instead of a mouse

01:25:34 ◼   ► What what that's the same reaction to have the people who prefer to play first-person shooters with a thumbstick instead of a mouse

01:25:40 ◼   ► But that's a whole other thing

01:25:41 ◼   ► But I pretty sure I've heard at least one person who preferred playing first-person shooters with a trackpad

01:25:45 ◼   ► It's just like people who grow up with trackpads. I don't there's something wrong with them

01:25:50 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:25:52 ◼   ► Kids these days with their input methods.

01:25:54 ◼   ► No, but like, it would be fine if it was actually better.

01:25:57 ◼   ► Like, if you could make a challenge where there was like a series of dots on the screen

01:26:02 ◼   ► and they would, you know, you ever see those challenges where a dot will appear in a random location,

01:26:05 ◼   ► you have to click on it and as soon as you click on it, another dot appears?

01:26:07 ◼   ► There are objective ways to measure how efficient you are with your input device.

01:26:12 ◼   ► And go ahead, trackpad people. Bring it on against the mouse person.

01:26:17 ◼   ► with first person shooters. Auto-aim has bred an entire generation of people who think that

01:26:21 ◼   ► they're better with a thumbstick than with a mouse, when in reality it's the game drawing

01:26:25 ◼   ► their fire to the enemy because they happen to be somewhere near where they are.

01:26:31 ◼   ► Paraps is swearing in the chat that he or she is much better with a trackpad, which

01:26:35 ◼   ► means he or she is crazy. Or using auto-aim and not realizing it, or

01:26:39 ◼   ► not wanting to admit it. If you're playing with a PC game, a Mac game,

01:26:44 ◼   ► It doesn't know you're using a trackpad.

01:26:46 ◼   ► I don't think it's auto-aiming because you're using a trackpad.

01:26:48 ◼   ► Maybe just people don't know how to use a mouse?

01:26:50 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:26:52 ◼   ► Maybe it's like grade inflation.

01:26:54 ◼   ► You want to just make everyone feel better, like they did better, even though they still

01:26:58 ◼   ► suck.

01:26:59 ◼   ► And they're like, "Oh, well, hey, you hit him.

01:27:00 ◼   ► We'll call that a hit.

01:27:01 ◼   ► Good job."

01:27:02 ◼   ► Everyone's a winner here.

01:27:06 ◼   ► One thing we should talk about at some point is what will we reflect on in 20 or 30 years

01:27:12 ◼   ► as being the clear sore spot in computers today.

01:27:17 ◼   ► And before--

01:27:18 ◼   ► - Spinning disks.

01:27:19 ◼   ► - I was gonna say exactly that.

01:27:20 ◼   ► So let's assume that spinning disks are already in the past

01:27:25 ◼   ► and we can't use that as an answer.

01:27:26 ◼   ► What would it be?

01:27:28 ◼   ► Because we all have gigs and gigs and gigs of RAM.

01:27:32 ◼   ► We generally speaking have big enough hard drives

01:27:35 ◼   ► that you could make an argument

01:27:36 ◼   ► that the SSDs being considerably smaller

01:27:39 ◼   ► because they're much too expensive otherwise.

01:27:41 ◼   ► I would allow that as an answer, but if not those, then what?

01:27:46 ◼   ► What's the bottleneck?

01:27:47 ◼   ► - Non-retinous screens, or are you gonna also put that in the past?

01:27:50 ◼   ► - No, I would allow that.

01:27:51 ◼   ► I think that would be fair.

01:27:53 ◼   ► - I would say having very short laptop battery lives, because that, depending on what time

01:27:58 ◼   ► you're talking about it, if we're talking about this year, then maybe not, but even

01:28:03 ◼   ► just three years ago, in that era where almost everyone at that point was buying laptops

01:28:09 ◼   ► if they were a normal person. Hardly anybody bought desktops even as of five years ago.

01:28:15 ◼   ► So laptops really took over in the last decade so strongly. But they weren't very good. So

01:28:22 ◼   ► I think having laptops being very hot and with short battery lives and maybe big and

01:28:27 ◼   ► heavy also, but that fixed itself towards the end of the decade, I think that might

01:28:33 ◼   ► be it. Because remember, we're talking about moving from desktops in the 90s to laptops

01:28:38 ◼   ► in the 2000s.

01:28:39 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:28:40 ◼   ► If you're already fast-forwarding us past SSDs and Retina screens, which I think is

01:28:43 ◼   ► kind of fair, because if you just start from the best of modern computers and say that's

01:28:47 ◼   ► the status quo going forward, like a baby is born and they never see a spinning disk

01:28:50 ◼   ► or whatever, that's not what they're going to ding us for.

01:28:52 ◼   ► So I think the babies born today will probably ding us for phones that break when you drop

01:28:57 ◼   ► them if we're lucky.

01:28:58 ◼   ► Ooh, good call.

01:28:59 ◼   ► Good call.

01:29:00 ◼   ► I mean, that's a tough call because you're not sure if there's going to be material science

01:29:03 ◼   ► breakthroughs that lead to that.

01:29:05 ◼   ► But all of us now know that you drop your phone on cement and you're like, "Maybe it's

01:29:09 ◼   ► going to break, maybe it's not, maybe it'll just get dinged."

01:29:11 ◼   ► But it's weird.

01:29:15 ◼   ► If there's a material science breakthrough that allows that not to be something we have

01:29:17 ◼   ► to worry about so much, it will look ridiculous that we have these things that were so fragile

01:29:22 ◼   ► that cost so much money that we carry around with us and it's like, "Well, if you dropped

01:29:25 ◼   ► it on cement, it was over."

01:29:26 ◼   ► It's like saying to someone today, "If you drop your keys on cement when you're fumbling

01:29:30 ◼   ► with them to get into your car, never mind that it won't need keys to get into cars in

01:29:34 ◼   ► that way because they'll all be Marcos' proximity key. But anyway, the idea that if you drop

01:29:39 ◼   ► your keys on the ground, your keys are still fine, right? Well, our phones, if you drop

01:29:43 ◼   ► them on the ground, they're not fine anymore. And I feel like it's possible in our lifetime

01:29:46 ◼   ► that it could be a material science breakthrough that makes that seem ridiculous.

01:29:49 ◼   ► And the same way that there could be a battery breakthrough.

01:29:53 ◼   ► And that also is worth pointing out too that, you know, we, in the same ways that like it's

01:29:58 ◼   ► kind of irrelevant to us what happens with mainframes these days. I think our kids are

01:30:04 ◼   ► not going to really care what computers were like in today's era. They're going to be talking

01:30:10 ◼   ► about what mobile phones were like in today's era.

01:30:12 ◼   ► And so from that point of view, maybe battery life is the thing. Because battery life on

01:30:17 ◼   ► laptops, as we said earlier, is getting pretty solid to the point where most people don't

01:30:23 ◼   ► really run into issues that often anymore with the newest models. And that's probably

01:30:27 ◼   ► going to keep going in that direction. Whereas with phones, it seems like we're kind of at

01:30:31 ◼   ► this standstill where the industry is still so competitive with moving the hardware forward,

01:30:35 ◼   ► making everything more powerful, making the screens bigger and brighter and higher density

01:30:39 ◼   ► and all this stuff. So we're kind of at battery stagnation where, and sometimes it even gets

01:30:44 ◼   ► worse, where as everything gets more complicated and more advanced and more powerful and bigger,

01:30:51 ◼   ► we're still getting about a day of casual use and less than a day of heavy use. And

01:30:57 ◼   ► we've kind of been there for a while now. Hopefully by the time our kids, at least my

01:31:02 ◼   ► kid by the time he's old enough to care, John your kids probably already care, but by the

01:31:06 ◼   ► time my kid's old enough to care, maybe having a multiple day battery life on a phone will

01:31:12 ◼   ► be the common case.

01:31:14 ◼   ► John: Phone batteries are tough because you have to transmit. That's the killer I think

01:31:19 ◼   ► on phones. Like you can make the phone consume zero energy for its screen and CPU. You have

01:31:25 ◼   ► to transmit so that some tower, I guess, you know, if they come up with whatever a successor

01:31:30 ◼   ► to LTE is able to use even less power, but I worry that that's the limiting factor.

01:31:35 ◼   ► It's like you are a physical distance and you must send, unless we have quantum entanglement,

01:31:40 ◼   ► where we can just, you know, convey information without transmitting radio waves.

01:31:45 ◼   ► Well, but look at how cell phones progressed over time.

01:31:48 ◼   ► Over time, cell phone towers have gotten more dense, so you have to transmit less distance.

01:31:53 ◼   ► have gotten more crowded and noisy as well, it's a separate issue, but they've gotten

01:31:56 ◼   ► closer to you most of the time, and we've switched to lower power and faster protocols.

01:32:02 ◼   ► The old analog phones had to use a ton of power to reach some tower that was 30 miles

01:32:06 ◼   ► away because there weren't a whole lot of them. These days we have these nice fast digital

01:32:10 ◼   ► networks that are much, much lower power on the transmit side, and as the networks get

01:32:14 ◼   ► faster it's like the race to sleep thing on CPUs. You can keep the radio on for a shorter

01:32:20 ◼   ► time, transmit more data, and then be done and go back into sleep.

01:32:23 ◼   ► Yeah, but what I'm thinking of it

01:32:24 ◼   ► is that eventually it will become the limiting factor,

01:32:27 ◼   ► because the other parts can progress

01:32:29 ◼   ► at sort of the pace of technology,

01:32:31 ◼   ► but the radio parts can only progress

01:32:34 ◼   ► at the rate of infrastructure.

01:32:36 ◼   ► Like how long does it take to build out new towers,

01:32:38 ◼   ► to convert the networks, to do all that?

01:32:40 ◼   ► That moves so much more slowly.

01:32:41 ◼   ► And if current trends continue, that

01:32:44 ◼   ► will become the dominant factor in power use.

01:32:46 ◼   ► Whereas right now, it's not the dominant factor.

01:32:48 ◼   ► The dominant factor now is if you

01:32:49 ◼   ► have some app that's running in the background all the time,

01:32:50 ◼   ► it will kill your phone before it gets a chance

01:32:52 ◼   ► to waste all its energy on cell phone,

01:32:54 ◼   ► talking to cell phone towers to get data.

01:32:56 ◼   ► But I think by the time our kids are up,

01:33:00 ◼   ► that especially given the way the glacial-pasted

01:33:04 ◼   ► infrastructure changes over in the US,

01:33:06 ◼   ► that talking to the cell network will be the dominant power

01:33:10 ◼   ► source, if we're lucky, I guess.

01:33:11 ◼   ► I mean, I guess they could continue

01:33:13 ◼   ► to do what you were just saying, which is like, well,

01:33:15 ◼   ► they never spend their energy on better battery life.

01:33:18 ◼   ► They always spend it on better features and CPU speed

01:33:21 ◼   ► stuff and just maintain parity in battery life.

01:33:23 ◼   ► And thinking about that with my dumb phone, I almost think that multi-day battery life

01:33:28 ◼   ► is a little bit of a curse as well as a blessing, because I forget to charge my phone, because

01:33:33 ◼   ► it lasts like six and a half days on a charge, right?

01:33:37 ◼   ► And if you have to charge your phone every day, if you have 18 or 20 hour battery life,

01:33:42 ◼   ► you're probably okay, but once you get like 50 hour battery life, now you forget to charge

01:33:45 ◼   ► your phone.

01:33:46 ◼   ► Yeah, that's true, actually. That's how I was with Kindles when I used them more,

01:33:52 ◼   ► Eint Kindles, is like, I would not charge my Kindle ever. And most of the time it wasn't

01:33:57 ◼   ► a problem. One day of every two months, maybe, I'd go to read and I couldn't because it

01:34:02 ◼   ► was dead. So I'd plug it in. And then I wouldn't care for two more months.

01:34:05 ◼   ► Yeah. I mean, that's the extreme case. I think that is acceptable. But with my phone,

01:34:09 ◼   ► my wife was always complaining because my phone's not charged. And why is it not charged?

01:34:12 ◼   ► Because there's no--I don't need to charge it every day or every other day, every three

01:34:15 ◼   ► It's like, seriously, maybe once a week I need to charge it, but I need to remember,

01:34:19 ◼   ► "Oh, you know, it's not once a week, it's like every five and a half days or something."

01:34:24 ◼   ► So…

01:34:25 ◼   ► I don't know, it's interesting to me trying to pick out what is the obvious downfall of

01:34:33 ◼   ► stuff today.

01:34:34 ◼   ► And the other thing that we haven't really mentioned that I wonder is, will home broadband

01:34:38 ◼   ► still be a thing?

01:34:40 ◼   ► And I'm not sure.

01:34:43 ◼   ► Because if you think about it, as I've said numerous times on this show, LTE, even in

01:34:49 ◼   ► reasonable speeds, is quicker than my broadband at home five years ago.

01:34:53 ◼   ► Granted, five years is a long time, but LTE at burst, ridiculously awesome speeds, is

01:35:01 ◼   ► almost as quick, if not in some rare cases as quick as my beloved Fios today.

01:35:06 ◼   ► And granted, Marco, you have the Super Baller Fios, but for us regular humans, it's almost

01:35:11 ◼   ► on par. And if it wasn't for bandwidth limits, then there's an argument that maybe we wouldn't

01:35:19 ◼   ► need home internet. And I keep thinking back to like AOL and back when, back when you would

01:35:25 ◼   ► have a limited amount of minutes, you actually you were talking about this on the talk show

01:35:28 ◼   ► when you had a limited amount of minutes, and it was like $3,000 a minute to be online.

01:35:33 ◼   ► And then eventually everything became unlimited, because even ISPs had that if memory serves,

01:35:37 ◼   ► or a lot of ISPs took that approach of it's timed, and you only get so much time a month

01:35:41 ◼   ► and so on. But eventually it was a race to, I don't know if the bottom is the right way

01:35:45 ◼   ► of phrasing it, but it was a race to unlimited. And I wonder if the cell phone companies will

01:35:52 ◼   ► eventually race to unlimited. It's kind of like what Sprint is supposedly doing. And

01:35:57 ◼   ► I don't know, I mean, there are places where that won't work, of course, where you're in

01:36:01 ◼   ► the middle of nowhere. But actually, I have some friends at work that do live in the middle

01:36:06 ◼   ► of nowhere, and the quickest internet they can get is a Verizon MiFi, or perhaps just

01:36:12 ◼   ► make their phone a hotspot, because the only other option they have is DSL. So sometimes,

01:36:18 ◼   ► in some certain circumstances, being in the middle of nowhere, that makes broadband—or

01:36:23 ◼   ► I'm sorry—cellular internet the best option.

01:36:27 ◼   ► I think that's in the even more distant future, because anyone who writes a sci-fi

01:36:31 ◼   ► book doesn't involve wires going to people's houses. The sci-fi book, like the super-fast

01:36:36 ◼   ► network that connects all the computers on the super advanced planet is always wireless,

01:36:40 ◼   ► right?

01:36:41 ◼   ► And I think the main thing that will make that happen for us is the inability of us

01:36:46 ◼   ► to do infrastructure projects in this country in a reasonable amount of time.

01:36:49 ◼   ► Because running wires to everybody's house, it seems beyond the capabilities of any private

01:36:54 ◼   ► company or government or the combination thereof, because it's some big combination of eminent

01:36:58 ◼   ► domain for the wires and the people owning the existing things and stuff like that.

01:37:02 ◼   ► So given that incredible screwed-up-edness, it's ripe for someone for wireless to get

01:37:08 ◼   ► good enough and say, "We don't need to do that stuff.

01:37:10 ◼   ► We don't need to dig trenches and run wires and deal with the government and stuff.

01:37:14 ◼   ► We just need to—I guess they still need to deal with the government for the spectrum."

01:37:17 ◼   ► But assuming they can make use of the spectrum that's already available, that they already

01:37:19 ◼   ► have, that's definitely ready for it to happen.

01:37:24 ◼   ► And it seems more sci-fi-like.

01:37:25 ◼   ► But I think if it wasn't for our complete inability to run wires to people's houses

01:37:30 ◼   ► in a reasonable fashion, that the wired would still maintain its hold because as fast as

01:37:36 ◼   ► wireless is ever going to get, again unless you go with some crazy quantum entanglement,

01:37:40 ◼   ► you know, super advanced sci-fi thing, if you have the technology to do that, think

01:37:45 ◼   ► of the technology you have for the wireless.

01:37:48 ◼   ► And even though you can't think of a use for 100 times faster than LTE now or a thousand

01:37:53 ◼   ► times faster, if you had it, you would come up with the uses for it.

01:37:57 ◼   ► not going to be 8K television. Who knows? It'd be like holograms or neural imprint.

01:38:01 ◼   ► We're talking far future or whatever. So, you know, maybe. I think wireless is inevitable

01:38:08 ◼   ► for us because of our inability to run wires, but I think if, you know, if everything was

01:38:13 ◼   ► on an even keel and you could get the wires to people's houses, that would continue to

01:38:17 ◼   ► be a thing just because it's so much more capable.

01:38:20 ◼   ► Well, but wireless has a pretty big problem where it has the ceiling at which it slams

01:38:27 ◼   ► into limitations of spectrum and space and density. Where wires, like wires can run in

01:38:36 ◼   ► a very, very dense area, in a very dense arrangement and doesn't really affect them. It doesn't

01:38:41 ◼   ► really matter that much. You know, they have some challenges at some of the big, you know,

01:38:45 ◼   ► bottleneck piping points of the backhaul,

01:38:48 ◼   ► but not major problems.

01:38:50 ◼   ► And most of the time that can also be solved

01:38:51 ◼   ► by just running more wires.

01:38:53 ◼   ► Whereas if you're in like a dense city area

01:38:55 ◼   ► and the radio spectrum is just jammed full

01:38:59 ◼   ► and it's still not enough capacity

01:39:02 ◼   ► and there's no more spectrum to be had

01:39:04 ◼   ► that's available in the area for a while or ever,

01:39:08 ◼   ► that's a problem.

01:39:09 ◼   ► You hit this hard ceiling with wireless.

01:39:12 ◼   ► - Well, but wireless is a wired system.

01:39:14 ◼   ► In cities, wireless is a wired system.

01:39:16 ◼   ► All you're getting rid of is that Latin, the last mile,

01:39:18 ◼   ► they call it, but in an apartment building,

01:39:20 ◼   ► it's that last 200 feet.

01:39:21 ◼   ► Because your cell tower could be connected by a fiber optic

01:39:26 ◼   ► cable to some backbone or whatever.

01:39:28 ◼   ► It's just that your house isn't connected to the cell tower

01:39:31 ◼   ► by any kind of cable.

01:39:32 ◼   ► You connect to the cell tower.

01:39:34 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

01:39:35 ◼   ► Especially in cities, where your building

01:39:36 ◼   ► would have some kind of cell tower in it,

01:39:39 ◼   ► but your building would be wired to the backbone.

01:39:42 ◼   ► So it's just getting rid of that last mile.

01:39:45 ◼   ► But what it means is that you don't have to have some wire

01:39:47 ◼   ► to your house that you pay for,

01:39:48 ◼   ► that you're paying for this amorphous service

01:39:50 ◼   ► that exists everywhere in the air.

01:39:52 ◼   ► I think that's what Casey's getting at.

01:39:53 ◼   ► Like when he says, broadband goes away,

01:39:55 ◼   ► you mean a thing I pay for that goes to my house.

01:39:58 ◼   ► Instead, you're just going to pay for access to the air

01:40:01 ◼   ► over the entire country,

01:40:02 ◼   ► and you're not paying for that one wired house.

01:40:04 ◼   ► But the wires are all still gonna be there.

01:40:06 ◼   ► It's just a question of how dense can you get the towers

01:40:07 ◼   ► and stuff like that.

01:40:08 ◼   ► And what Marco was saying about the limitations,

01:40:10 ◼   ► That's why having a wire going to your house, and not a wire, but like a fiber optic thing or whatever,

01:40:14 ◼   ► it's always going to win. Like, it's, you know, it's better to not have to send signals through

01:40:19 ◼   ► the air, right? It's much, you'll have much more capacity there. Just the question is,

01:40:23 ◼   ► you know, is the difficulty of running those wires to people's houses good to make it so that

01:40:28 ◼   ► wireless just comes in and, you know, disrupts them old fashioned disruption? Like,

01:40:32 ◼   ► while you guys are busy over there arguing about cable packages and fiber optic and last mile crap,

01:40:36 ◼   ► we're just going to offer this for everybody for free. They're already paying for it. And

01:40:39 ◼   ► to say, "Hey, it's good enough to be your broadband. Ditch everything," and we went.

01:40:43 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, I think it matters more in rural areas where you already have issues getting

01:40:50 ◼   ► high-speed cable and high-speed DSL and certainly fiber is out of the question in rural areas

01:40:55 ◼   ► where wireless covers them way more easily by area. So it's going to be, I think, a lot

01:41:01 ◼   ► like having well water from the city pump to you versus having to pump your own water

01:41:07 ◼   ► or having natural gas pipeline to your house rather than having to use liquid propane.

01:41:13 ◼   ► There's going to be the city hookups, the main infrastructure hookups are probably always

01:41:18 ◼   ► going to be better if you can get them. But the advantage is that you don't have to get

01:41:22 ◼   ► them in a lot of places. And wireless has started covering rural areas much more slowly

01:41:29 ◼   ► than cities, but it's covering them more slowly than you can get LTE in Manhattan, but a lot

01:41:36 ◼   ► faster than you can get Fios in the rural areas, you know?

01:41:40 ◼   ► Yeah. Although I want to go back a step. You know, John, you had made mention that there

01:41:44 ◼   ► will be some new thing like 4K TV or maybe even holograms that will necessitate a really

01:41:51 ◼   ► fat pipe coming into your house. But I don't know. I mean, I remember vividly trying to

01:41:56 ◼   ► download an MP3 from some weirdo FTP site that was surely installing a thousand viruses

01:42:03 ◼   ► on my Windows PC. And I remember doing this over dial-up and thinking to myself, I can tell,

01:42:09 ◼   ► even as a teenager at the time, I can tell that this is not going to be as painful in the future.

01:42:14 ◼   ► And then once it got to the point that I could download an MP3 with some modicum of a quickness,

01:42:20 ◼   ► then I would try to download a video and I could tell, you know what, this is going to get a lot

01:42:26 ◼   ► better in the future. And I think that maybe you're right, that maybe there'll be a hologram or

01:42:32 ◼   ► or something like that.

01:42:33 ◼   ► But I don't know.

01:42:34 ◼   ► Well, no.

01:42:35 ◼   ► I was saying that that's silly.

01:42:36 ◼   ► Like, it's not going to be like, you know, increasingly high-resolution video.

01:42:39 ◼   ► That's a silly extrapolation of what we have now.

01:42:42 ◼   ► But if you want to take something that we have now that will get worse in the future,

01:42:46 ◼   ► that already needs more capacity, as we talk about it all the time, it's backups.

01:42:50 ◼   ► And not from a backup perspective, but just like if you produce all this digital content

01:42:54 ◼   ► in your life, those video you create, the pictures you take, that's only going to get

01:42:58 ◼   ► bigger up to a point, you know, because it's the point where getting you're taking 4k videos

01:43:02 ◼   ► in your cell phone, it probably doesn't need to be much better than that, maybe twice as

01:43:05 ◼   ► good or whatever. But over a lifetime, you will build up a lot of that. And I still think

01:43:10 ◼   ► it's ridiculous to make people accept that that that stuff could go away at any time,

01:43:15 ◼   ► and you don't really own it and it just disappears. So if there was some way to sort of like,

01:43:19 ◼   ► again, I get back to the transporter ad, if, if there was sort of this series of little

01:43:23 ◼   ► devices at home at work at all your friend's house, and your data could be pushed among

01:43:27 ◼   ► it so that when your house burned down you know you wouldn't lose all your data.

01:43:30 ◼   ► Like that's the ultimate extension of the internet.

01:43:32 ◼   ► But to do that you need massive bandwidth between all these nodes.

01:43:36 ◼   ► How is it feasible to move a lifetime worth of information amongst these nodes in real

01:43:40 ◼   ► time?

01:43:41 ◼   ► Like can I move video as fast as I can grab it on my phone?

01:43:44 ◼   ► Of course you can't.

01:43:45 ◼   ► Ah, but if you have these gigantic pipes going to and from your house, many interesting things

01:43:48 ◼   ► are happening.

01:43:49 ◼   ► That's why I think like we don't need 10,000 times the bandwidth we have.

01:43:52 ◼   ► But if you go to someone, okay, picture that you have 10,000 times the bandwidth.

01:43:56 ◼   ► Can you think of something you knew you can do with that?

01:43:58 ◼   ► Those type of numbers, like water magnitude increases, open up things to the realm of

01:44:03 ◼   ► possibility that were not even a twinkle in anyone's eye, but you're like, "Okay, boom,

01:44:07 ◼   ► you have it.

01:44:08 ◼   ► Now what can you do?"

01:44:09 ◼   ► And, like, that's, you know, downloading video over the internet to watch movies and high

01:44:13 ◼   ► def.

01:44:14 ◼   ► If you had proposed that to someone in 1962, they would have probably thought of that.

01:44:17 ◼   ► They would have said, "Wow, if I have that kind of bandwidth, I can send moving pictures

01:44:20 ◼   ► to…"

01:44:21 ◼   ► And lo and behold, you can.

01:44:22 ◼   ► And, like, how did we get from point A to point B?

01:44:23 ◼   ► It's not like, "You need to build this network because we can send movies," and it's not

01:44:27 ◼   ► like, "We need to send movies, you need to build this network."

01:44:29 ◼   ► They kind of go hand in hand.

01:44:31 ◼   ► But data backup and moving all your personal data amongst this big cloud, that would require

01:44:36 ◼   ► massive bandwidth.

01:44:37 ◼   ► We'll have to rethink cities.

01:44:41 ◼   ► That to me is the best example.

01:44:42 ◼   ► Yeah, and if we all had segues, that would be...

01:44:44 ◼   ► Right?

01:44:45 ◼   ► I got that, Revens Margot.

01:44:47 ◼   ► No, I think that makes the most sense.

01:44:48 ◼   ► The backups makes the most sense because that's something that you're right.

01:44:52 ◼   ► I can tell today that that's too slow and it shouldn't be that slow and it probably

01:44:57 ◼   ► won't be.

01:44:58 ◼   ► But we wouldn't call it backups.

01:44:59 ◼   ► Like that would not be a backup.

01:45:01 ◼   ► That would be the the up.

01:45:02 ◼   ► There would be the it would be the up that we're backing, you know, like there is no

01:45:05 ◼   ► backup.

01:45:06 ◼   ► It's just like, of course, of course, all our information is just there.

01:45:10 ◼   ► And of course, it is redundant and separated and travels with us and synchronized between

01:45:15 ◼   ► these things.

01:45:16 ◼   ► And whether it's because we buy these little, you know, thumb sized transporter type things

01:45:19 ◼   ► and spread them around or whether there's some sort of cloud storage solution that somebody

01:45:23 ◼   ► does like this wad of data that we already make, we already each make this wad of data.

01:45:29 ◼   ► It's too big for us to do anything with. We can barely have one primary location and then

01:45:33 ◼   ► one backup that we put it to, let alone having it instantly synchronized everywhere. There's

01:45:37 ◼   ► not enough bandwidth for that and we've talked about it many times before. And that's just

01:45:40 ◼   ► with current generation video and current stuff. Algorithms will increase, but then

01:45:44 ◼   ► I think sole resolution will increase a little bit more. And think of people who have a lifetime

01:45:49 ◼   ► stuff versus people who started taking high def video in 2007? How about people who start

01:45:53 ◼   ► taking high def video in 2007 and they're eight years old and they do it for their entire

01:45:57 ◼   ► life? How much data are they going to have by the end of it? Maybe they don't want to

01:46:01 ◼   ► keep it all, but it seems like you're going to want to keep some of it somehow.

01:46:04 ◼   ► Yeah, that makes sense.

01:46:06 ◼   ► Oh, and before we leave this topic, I want to get back to the easy one that none of us

01:46:09 ◼   ► picked for Casey saying, "What's going to look weird to our kids?" The easy one that

01:46:13 ◼   ► I don't know if it's not worth even mentioning is that of course all our crap is going to

01:46:16 ◼   ► humongous and ridiculous. Like, of course it is. The same way when you look at, like,

01:46:20 ◼   ► full-height hard drives or your full-height tower PC case or, like, even our Mac Pro cheese

01:46:25 ◼   ► grater is eventually going to get used to these Mac Pros. Everything's going to look

01:46:28 ◼   ► gigantic. It's like, "You carried this around?" Like, I have a Newton on my desk now. My Newton

01:46:32 ◼   ► looks ridiculous next to my iPod Touch, right? Of course that's going to happen with everything.

01:46:36 ◼   ► Laptops, phones...

01:46:37 ◼   ► Well, will it?

01:46:39 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm not so sure.

01:46:41 ◼   ► Laptops and phones have both reached the point, and not even recently, they've both reached

01:46:46 ◼   ► the point where they're pretty much like as small as they can be and still have the screen

01:46:53 ◼   ► size that they have. And in the case of laptops, still have like the keyboard size that they

01:46:56 ◼   ► have. Like they -- there's not a whole lot of room to make them a lot smaller and still

01:47:00 ◼   ► keep those keyboards.

01:47:01 ◼   ► John Wallis if your iPhone 5 looked exactly like it does,

01:47:04 ◼   ► but it was the thickness and weight of a credit card, your current iPhone 5 would look ridiculous

01:47:08 ◼   ► compared to it.

01:47:08 ◼   ► John Wallis That's true. But we're talking about such

01:47:11 ◼   ► a small scale. Like the differences are so much smaller. And some parts of computing

01:47:15 ◼   ► have gotten bigger. I mean, look how small that original Mac looks. You know, it turns

01:47:20 ◼   ► out things that are good to get bigger, we've gotten bigger.

01:47:22 ◼   ► Well, it's like screen size. Like, even if you just look at the thickness of my 23-inch

01:47:26 ◼   ► Apple Cinema Display in front of me now, compared to the thickness of an iMac, which has a whole

01:47:29 ◼   ► computer behind it, that is thinner than my monitor. I mean, it doesn't have to be that

01:47:34 ◼   ► big of a deal. If I compare my current iPod Touch to the first generation iPod Touch,

01:47:39 ◼   ► that looks ridiculous. And the difference is like two millimeters. But you put it in

01:47:43 ◼   ► your hand, you're like, "Oh, how did you ever use this iPod touch?" It's like, you know,

01:47:47 ◼   ► twice the thickness of the, you know, it's not that big of a difference, but that tends to be

01:47:51 ◼   ► glaring to people in retrospect, how big and thick and heavy things were.

01:47:54 ◼   ► No, I think that's a good point. But I think that Marco's also right that in terms of

01:47:59 ◼   ► width and height, I'm not sure that most devices are going to get that much smaller. I think you're

01:48:04 ◼   ► absolutely right that in terms of depth, they will get smaller.

01:48:07 ◼   ► I mean, look at the Newton message pad has a small, it's similar, probably similar screen

01:48:12 ◼   ► size to an iPad mini, but way thicker and heavier. And so that's what stands out. It's not so much

01:48:16 ◼   ► that like the width and height, it's different proportions than an iPad mini, but the area is

01:48:20 ◼   ► similar. But it's because it's like a brick, then you feel like, oh, well, you know, it feels old.

01:48:26 ◼   ► You know, and it's funny, this is a bit of a tangent, but from our tangent,

01:48:30 ◼   ► I have a tangent of a tangent of a tangent. But on this show, yeah, exactly. I got for Christmas,

01:48:36 ◼   ► the Apple leather case, a black one for my iPhone 5s.

01:48:41 ◼   ► And I didn't typically, I had a bumper on my 4s

01:48:45 ◼   ► for a long, long, long time.

01:48:47 ◼   ► I probably, at least half the time I had the 4s.

01:48:49 ◼   ► And I liked it, but I mean, it wasn't my favorite,

01:48:51 ◼   ► but I didn't trust myself not to have a case at all,

01:48:53 ◼   ► which I don't really argue is the better way to go.

01:48:56 ◼   ► And I wanted to try the leather case for the 5s

01:48:59 ◼   ► because I felt like it would be a really nice compromise.

01:49:03 ◼   ► It didn't seem to add that much thickness

01:49:05 ◼   ► And it seemed to be pretty nice.

01:49:08 ◼   ► And I've had it since Christmas, like I said.

01:49:10 ◼   ► And I actually really, really like it a lot.

01:49:13 ◼   ► And it's the first real case I've ever had,

01:49:18 ◼   ► not a bumper or anything like that.

01:49:20 ◼   ► And I really, really, really like it.

01:49:21 ◼   ► I got the black one.

01:49:22 ◼   ► So as it fades, if it's faded, I can't tell.

01:49:26 ◼   ► But it doesn't add that much thickness,

01:49:30 ◼   ► which is what made me think of it.

01:49:31 ◼   ► Or I don't feel like it adds that much thickness.

01:49:34 ◼   ► having come from a 4S not that long ago,

01:49:37 ◼   ► it doesn't add enough thickness to make it feel

01:49:39 ◼   ► like it's ruined the phone.

01:49:40 ◼   ► And I really, really like mine.

01:49:42 ◼   ► I'm not saying that a case is right for you, Marco,

01:49:45 ◼   ► and I know, John, you don't believe in iPhones for yourself,

01:49:47 ◼   ► but I do really like it.

01:49:50 ◼   ► - I often wonder why it seems, I mean, is it just me,

01:49:53 ◼   ► and saying this as somebody who doesn't buy a lot of cases,

01:49:56 ◼   ► is it just me or is there basically no competition

01:50:02 ◼   ► for Apple's cases for the iPhone and iPad in how small and thin and light they tend

01:50:10 ◼   ► to be and also how high quality they tend to feel and look. Like, it seems like every

01:50:16 ◼   ► other case I've seen, there are high quality ones, but they're substantially bulkier.

01:50:22 ◼   ► And all the ones that are super small and thin are like, you know, silicone crappy things

01:50:27 ◼   ► that feels like crap and looks like crap.

01:50:30 ◼   ► Marco, how quickly we forget the iPad One case.

01:50:33 ◼   ► - Oh, yeah, that was a disaster.

01:50:35 ◼   ► - Or the current like non-leather wrap around

01:50:38 ◼   ► the back of the iPad cases, those are not good either.

01:50:41 ◼   ► - I have one, and actually I don't particularly care

01:50:44 ◼   ► for the one on the iPad Mini.

01:50:46 ◼   ► In fact, I take it off quite often

01:50:48 ◼   ► just while I'm using the iPad,

01:50:50 ◼   ► because the damn magnet that holds it

01:50:53 ◼   ► to the back of the iPad is nowhere near strong enough.

01:50:56 ◼   ► I feel like, John, you've said this in the past,

01:50:58 ◼   ► somebody has said this in the past, but--

01:50:59 ◼   ► Having the cases be minimal, though, I'm not sure if there's much competition, for example,

01:51:04 ◼   ► for the leather one.

01:51:05 ◼   ► And I think a lot of that is because I think people like big—they want to feel like they're

01:51:10 ◼   ► spending money on something like a big case.

01:51:12 ◼   ► It seems like if you're going to get a case, you want to feel a case, and if you buy something

01:51:15 ◼   ► and it's barely there, then you don't feel like you're getting anything.

01:51:18 ◼   ► So maybe that's why in the third parties, they're more of a marketer.

01:51:21 ◼   ► But I mean, remember, you've seen my iPod Touch case, right?

01:51:25 ◼   ► And everyone who sees the iPod Touch case takes a double take to think, "Does this

01:51:29 ◼   ► a case on it yet, or is this what the back of the iPod Touch is like? And it's just a

01:51:33 ◼   ► run-of-the-mill Belkin plastic case. But because the iPod Touch is so incredibly thin, with

01:51:39 ◼   ► the case on, it feels almost like there's no case there. And it's very tightly fitting,

01:51:44 ◼   ► and it's not made of some loosey-goosey material and stretchy around the edges and everything,

01:51:50 ◼   ► and the buttons line up with all the things and feel nice when you're pressing them. In

01:51:54 ◼   ► that way, like the leather case. It made me think of, as my wife's got, the red leather

01:51:57 ◼   ► case for 5S. In the same way where you're like, well, you're pushing buttons through the case or

01:52:01 ◼   ► whatever, it can be done well, reasonably well. And I think there are case makers who do sort of

01:52:06 ◼   ► compete in that realm, if only on the iPod touch in this case, but I bet there's something out

01:52:10 ◼   ► there for the 5S as well. But mostly when I see people with cases, they are comical and huge and

01:52:15 ◼   ► people love them. People love them. Although I will say very quickly, the Achilles heel of this

01:52:20 ◼   ► case is absolutely the lock button. The lock button feels considerably more mushy than it

01:52:26 ◼   ► did when it was caseless. You mean the silent, the ring silent button? Yeah, the one at the

01:52:31 ◼   ► top. The sleep/wake button. Whatever. It feels a lot mushier. And I was told, and I think

01:52:39 ◼   ► it's true, that it would get better over time, and it has gotten somewhat better over the

01:52:43 ◼   ► last month or so, but it's still not as crisp as I would like. You mean the power button?

01:52:48 ◼   ► The sleep/wake button. Whatever. The one on the top. The one on the top. I'm thinking

01:52:54 ◼   ► Speaking of the one on the side, they have a cutout for it.

01:52:57 ◼   ► You stick your fingernail in there and you switch it to ring.

01:53:00 ◼   ► That's what I was talking about.

01:53:01 ◼   ► That one is actually, they don't cover up, because I guess they couldn't.

01:53:03 ◼   ► It wouldn't make any sense.

01:53:04 ◼   ► But yeah, the squishiness of the button on top, you're right.

01:53:07 ◼   ► In that case, I think my cheap Belkin case from iPod feels better, because it's more

01:53:11 ◼   ► of a positive kind of click, because it's a material with less squishiness than leather.

01:53:16 ◼   ► Leather itself is going to give, so it's harder for them.

01:53:18 ◼   ► That's why I think they should have made a leather case with metal through buttons.

01:53:21 ◼   ► That would have been really nice and high quality, right?

01:53:23 ◼   ► I agree.

01:53:24 ◼   ► And it would have cost $80.

01:53:25 ◼   ► Probably.

01:53:26 ◼   ► Or $90, I don't even know how much that would have cost.

01:53:28 ◼   ► I don't want to know.

01:53:29 ◼   ► The leather case, it was a gift, but I want to say it was $40 or $50, I think.

01:53:33 ◼   ► Something like that.

01:53:34 ◼   ► I don't remember.

01:53:36 ◼   ► It was expensive enough that I didn't want to buy it for myself.

01:53:40 ◼   ► To me, that's the perfect gift.

01:53:41 ◼   ► It's where it's something that you want, but you don't really think you want to spend your

01:53:46 ◼   ► own money on it.

01:53:47 ◼   ► And of course, you could take this as a terrible thing.

01:53:49 ◼   ► "Oh, well, why don't you buy it for me instead?"

01:53:50 ◼   ► But that's the perfect gift, because it's something you know you want, but it's not

01:53:55 ◼   ► something you necessarily want to buy for yourself.

01:53:57 ◼   ► But man, if somebody else buys it for you, that's awesome.

01:53:58 ◼   ► Well, the best thing would be if your wife buys it for you with your shared pool of money.

01:54:01 ◼   ► Because then what have you done?

01:54:03 ◼   ► Nothing.

01:54:04 ◼   ► It's like this crazy mental game you're playing with yourself.