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50: Disk Light Observer Effect

 

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.

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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.

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

00:43:53   website. They take care of everything for you. All the shopping cart stuff and

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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.

01:54:06   [LAUGHTER]