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18: Aluminum-Colored Aluminum

 

00:00:00   Can we do the Accidental Car podcast for a minute?

00:00:03   Please?

00:00:04   Sure.

00:00:05   Pretty please.

00:00:06   We had a big week last week.

00:00:08   It was a good week.

00:00:09   It was a huge week for everybody.

00:00:12   For the show, for John Siracusa.

00:00:15   For everybody who matters, it was a big week.

00:00:18   I had such a great time at WWDC and I know I speak for both of you guys in saying that.

00:00:23   And it was especially peculiar for me, having kind of been that guy that hangs out with

00:00:28   Marco and John for the last couple years and now getting recognized occasionally.

00:00:33   It was the trippiest, most flattering and awesome thing.

00:00:38   I don't even know what to make of it.

00:00:39   I'm still like processing it all.

00:00:40   See, I told you that would happen.

00:00:42   When we started this podcast, I told Casey, "Look, just so you know, if you're on a podcast

00:00:48   and people listen to it, next year at WWDC, everyone is going to know who you are."

00:00:53   And sure enough, that's exactly what happened.

00:00:55   People were coming up.

00:00:57   John and I, people have known who we were at WBC for a few years, a little bit, but

00:01:02   Casey, oh my god, he was the star. Everyone's like, "Oh my god, I love you on the show!"

00:01:07   Everyone was so thrilled. Nobody gave a crap about us. Everyone was so thrilled to meet

00:01:11   Casey Liss.

00:01:12   That is a very flattering, bold-faced lie.

00:01:14   You were there!

00:01:16   Well everyone was excited, but I think it was like, "Oh, you're Casey! Oh, you're Marco,

00:01:20   and you're John." But no, all kidding aside, it was extremely flattering, and many thanks

00:01:25   everyone who had the chutzpah to say hi. I know we talked about it a couple shows ago,

00:01:29   but it was still extremely cool to meet all of these people that I perhaps wouldn't have

00:01:35   had the opportunity to meet otherwise because we would have both been just faces in the

00:01:37   crowd. So many thanks for all you guys and gals that said hi and had nice things to say

00:01:43   no less. We only had a couple verbal complaints about Neutral, and I consider that a moral

00:01:48   victory.

00:01:49   I was impressed that anybody actually listened to Neutral who came up to us at that conference.

00:01:53   That's true.

00:01:54   And we did have a few fans who really wanted us to bring it back.

00:01:58   Yeah, which was also weird.

00:02:00   And as a quick aside, I drove an M3 today.

00:02:02   Yeah, which generation was that?

00:02:04   E90.

00:02:05   Nice, all right.

00:02:06   Yeah, it was really cool.

00:02:08   It was like my car plus 10%, 15%.

00:02:11   It was fun.

00:02:12   We should do a podcast about cars sometime.

00:02:13   Yeah, maybe.

00:02:14   You think anyone would like that?

00:02:16   Hell no.

00:02:17   I don't think anyone will.

00:02:19   It's not bad the pricing on the M3 is not your car plus 15%.

00:02:22   No, it's not.

00:02:23   No, it's not.

00:02:24   Well, actually, I guess it's in the ballpark. How much does an M3 these days?

00:02:27   I think a well-equipped one is something like 70 or 80, right? I mean, I think it's like

00:02:32   in the 70s, something like that? I don't know. I never priced one out.

00:02:35   I mean, my car plus 15% would have been... Oh, no, you're right. My car plus 15% was

00:02:41   not even near 70. I'm dead wrong. Anyway, all right, so we should probably talk about

00:02:46   nerdy stuff that's not cars. What did you guys think of WWDC? Let's start with Mr.

00:02:50   Sirakusa.

00:02:51   Didn't we do a whole show about this last time?

00:02:53   Well, yeah, but a lot has happened since then.

00:02:56   OK, fine.

00:02:56   We can ignore everything.

00:02:58   I have things in the notes.

00:03:00   Consult the notes.

00:03:01   The notes.

00:03:02   The notes.

00:03:03   Actually, I've been pulling a Marco

00:03:04   and largely ignoring the notes, but I do have them up.

00:03:06   So with that in mind--

00:03:08   I don't even have Chrome open.

00:03:10   You don't have your Chrome jail open?

00:03:12   John, would you like to talk about any of the Mac Pro

00:03:15   details we've learned?

00:03:16   Yeah, I got a little Mac Pro follow up.

00:03:19   So we talked about it at length on the last show,

00:03:23   And there are two things that I want to talk about since then.

00:03:27   The first one is about this article that I wrote a while ago called "The Case for a True

00:03:32   Mac Pro Successor."

00:03:35   And it was me arguing the point before we knew what the fate of the Mac Pro was, that

00:03:38   Apple should continue to push the envelope in desktop computer performance for all the

00:03:44   same reasons that car manufacturers make these ridiculous cars that nobody buys that are

00:03:52   that are not practical and that cost way too much money,

00:03:57   and that lose money for the companies,

00:03:59   all because they want to push the limits of car technology

00:04:02   and performance.

00:04:03   And in the end, deep, deep down, because the people who

00:04:06   work at those companies love cars.

00:04:08   And that's why they want to make supercars or halo cars,

00:04:11   as I call them.

00:04:12   And so when the new Mac Pro was announced last week,

00:04:18   I thought I had addressed this in the last week's show,

00:04:20   but apparently not clearly enough.

00:04:21   of people ask me, "So is this a true Mac Pro successor? Does this meet the criteria

00:04:28   that you laid out in the case for a true Mac Pro successor, or are you still disappointed?"

00:04:32   And the fact that on the last show I was saying how this doesn't quite look like it's the

00:04:35   machine for me, so on and so forth, people are like, "Oh, I don't see how this isn't

00:04:39   a true Mac Pro successor, isn't it?" Well, so to be clear and spell it out, yes, this

00:04:43   is definitely a true Mac Pro successor. It completely fits the mold of the super-card

00:04:48   type things. It's ridiculous, it's crazy, it does not look like a normal computer. We

00:04:53   don't know the price yet, but I assume it's going to be really expensive, certainly more

00:04:57   expensive than the other things there. It has compromises that most people wouldn't

00:05:01   expect, like the dual GPUs that are going to be these big honking GPUs that maybe everybody

00:05:06   doesn't need, but at the same time it doesn't have any internal spinning disk storage, which

00:05:10   is kind of like a supercar that has like 900 horsepower but a trunk that fits one little

00:05:14   tiny bag in it, right? And I'm hoping, or I'm assuming Apple hopes that they sell way

00:05:19   more Mac Pros than people sell their top-end supercars, but this computer, despite or perhaps

00:05:25   because of the fact that it doesn't satisfy all of the practical needs of various pro

00:05:30   users and stuff, definitely fits the bill. So despite the fact that I was disappointed

00:05:35   in it last week for various personal reasons, as I thought I expressed in the last show,

00:05:41   I'm happy that Apple continues to innovate to use Phil Schiller's bird in this area and

00:05:48   to continue to chase the high end.

00:05:50   And the second thing about the Mac Pro is that my opinion of it has softened a little

00:05:55   bit from my own personal views since last week's episode, in that since then I've learned

00:06:02   or actually been reminded, and I don't know why I didn't think of this last week, that

00:06:07   the gaming performance, the thing that's really been holding me back, like, "Oh, I'm going

00:06:09   to spend all this money on this machine, and I'm going to have all these compromises with

00:06:12   no internal storage and everything, and I'm going to get a machine that's not going to

00:06:16   fulfill one of my main criteria, which is to be able to play PC/Mac games really, really

00:06:21   well, because it's got these pro GPUs in them.

00:06:25   And to people who aren't familiar with the pro GPU market, or maybe people who are familiar

00:06:30   — more familiar than I was — that sounds crazy.

00:06:33   It was like, "Well, these are super high-end GPUs.

00:06:35   Isn't that great for gaming?

00:06:36   aren't these going to be, you know, like they're, these are like $2,000 GPUs, and

00:06:40   there shouldn't you have awesome gaming performance on this? And if you look at like Windows benchmarks

00:06:45   and stuff for these pro GPUs that are used for like CAD and 3D programs, and they test

00:06:51   Windows games on them, the gaming performance of these GPUs is terrible. And you say, how

00:06:54   can I spend $1,500 on a video card and get terrible gaming performance? And the answer

00:07:01   is the drivers. The drivers are made to run Maya or AutoCAD or whatever other programs

00:07:07   and used for professional design. And those programs demand precision and repeatability

00:07:13   and reliability. They don't demand all sorts of the performance tricks that gaming GPUs

00:07:19   use. So you'll see a GPU that costs three times as much as another one not perform as

00:07:24   well in a game. And on the PC side, on Windows, when you buy one of those high-end GPUs, you

00:07:30   get these special, you know, certified OpenGL drivers to be used with whatever software

00:07:35   you bought and it works. And when you buy just like a gaming video card, even a super

00:07:39   high-end game video card, you get a totally different driver. And that one is optimized

00:07:44   to make sure you get really high frame rates in Crysis 3 or whatever, because they tuned

00:07:47   the driver for that. And a lot of that tuning has to do with cheating, where they can say,

00:07:50   "Yeah, the OpenGL spec says we're supposed to do this and that in terms of line precision

00:07:55   anti-aliasing or occlusion or whatever, but we found that in this game, we can detect when this game is running.

00:08:01   I don't know if they still did that, but in the old days they would detect which specific game is running

00:08:05   and perform some optimization that they knew wouldn't cause any noticeable graphical glitching in that game

00:08:09   just to get more performance out of it.

00:08:13   And that's why I was disappointed. Oh, pro GPUs, that means crappy game performance.

00:08:16   It's like the worst of both worlds, expensive video hardware and crappy game performance.

00:08:20   But, on the Mac, that is not the case.

00:08:23   on the Mac, historically Apple has shipped, used the same driver for the pro cards and

00:08:30   the non-pro cards.

00:08:31   And in the past that's meant that Apple's game performance sucked equally across all

00:08:35   the GPUs because they always optimized the drivers for correctness.

00:08:38   They would say, "Okay, let's do exactly what the OpenGL specs does and correctness first

00:08:42   and we'll worry about speed later and we'll try to tweak it and so on and so forth."

00:08:44   But over the past several releases, I think starting in 10.7, Apple has really tuned their

00:08:49   video drivers to actually get decent performance out of games by working with companies like

00:08:53   Valve and stuff to sort of do all those cheaty little things that you can do to make game

00:08:56   performance better.

00:08:58   But at the same time, those same drivers were also driving their high-end carts.

00:09:02   So it's my expectation that when I get this new Mac Pro, which I think I am going to get

00:09:06   now, it's going to use the exact same drivers as a Mac Pro that had a high-end Radeon like

00:09:12   a previous generation Mac Pro.

00:09:14   It's not going to be a special, slow, dumb, high-precision driver just for these things.

00:09:19   going to use the exact same driver as the gaming video card would use, and that means

00:09:22   it should have pretty darn good gaming performance, at least as good as it would have had a Mac

00:09:29   gaming card.

00:09:30   Now, it doesn't quite help me that much unless Apple also does drivers for boot camp, so

00:09:33   that if I reboot into Windows, I don't want to be forced to use the Windows slow drivers

00:09:37   for this Pro GPU or whatever, but just having decent Mac gaming performance on the thing

00:09:43   makes me feel a lot better, so I think I'm definitely getting one of these machines now.

00:09:46   Now, I have to ask, for your priorities as high performance, but also significant gaming,

00:09:54   now that we know what the compromises are for the next Mac Pro, at least we know most

00:09:58   of them, I think, why not a high-end iMac?

00:10:02   The video cards on those things are not desktop cards.

00:10:07   Some of them might be.

00:10:08   Don't some of them use laptop GPUs?

00:10:10   I think they're actually pretty good these days.

00:10:12   I mean, it's not going to be like the equivalent of like a $400 desktop card, but I think they're

00:10:18   pretty good.

00:10:19   Yeah, that's what I'm looking for.

00:10:20   They're not powerful and they're not replaceable, so I couldn't even upgrade them.

00:10:24   Not that the GPUs are in the Mac Pro replaceable, but if I'm going to buy a machine, I always

00:10:27   buy it with the very fastest GPU that's in it so that I can use it for five years or

00:10:33   whatever, and at the end of those five years it'll still be good.

00:10:35   Like I bought the highest end non-Pro video card that I could get with my current Mac

00:10:39   Pro. And to this day, I can still play modern games on it at the full resolution of my screen

00:10:44   with the settings on normal or even up on high. So I just want to get mileage out of the card,

00:10:48   you know? And that would be the 8800GT?

00:10:50   Yeah. I mean, think of a game that came out recently. Well, not that...

00:10:55   I'm the wrong person to ask. But I'm surprised that that... Because the 8800GT is now like,

00:11:00   what, five years old? I'm surprised, given the pace of video card innovation,

00:11:05   I'm surprised that you can still do that with a five-year-old card.

00:11:08   I mean, I can't play the very latest games, but I'm not playing the very latest games.

00:11:11   When Portal 2 came out, I could play it just fine.

00:11:14   Full frame rate, full resolution, anti-aliasing, everything, alright?

00:11:17   And that was only a couple years ago.

00:11:18   I think the most recent game I played was Walking Dead, which is not a graphically intensive

00:11:23   game, but it ran fine.

00:11:24   Diablo 3, when that came out, ran fine.

00:11:27   This is all going to be impaired by what I hope will be my retina screen on my Mac Pro,

00:11:33   right?

00:11:34   So then that video card maybe won't last quite as long, because, I don't know, I don't know

00:11:38   how many games will take advantage of their retina resolution going forward.

00:11:42   But that's what I want, especially in a machine where it's not replaceable.

00:11:45   I want to get the most mileage out of it.

00:11:47   So I wouldn't want to buy something that's OK performance.

00:11:50   It's obvious anything I buy is going to be faster than the 8800 GT.

00:11:54   But I wouldn't want to buy an iMac with a sort of mediocre desktop GPU with not too

00:12:00   much VRAM in it.

00:12:01   That's probably going to last me three or four years, and then I would have to not play

00:12:07   PC games anymore, think about upgrading it sooner than I wanted, especially since if

00:12:10   I bought an iMac, the screen will probably last me five years easy, because I would probably

00:12:13   hold out for a retina iMac, right? And I would be like, "Oh, I don't want to get rid of the

00:12:16   screen. The only thing that's wrong with this machine is this stupid GPU that I can't replace."

00:12:21   So better to get a machine where everything is maxed out to a ridiculous degree, and then

00:12:26   the whole machine will age sort of together.

00:12:29   So I had a thought about the displays, and a lot of the scuttlebutt at WWDC was, "Geez,

00:12:34   didn't release a retina display for the Mac Pro. I mean, they made some hand-wavy talk

00:12:41   of, "Oh, this supports 4K screens," blah, three of them, in fact, if I'm not mistaken.

00:12:47   But they never announced an actual Apple display. And one of the things that occurred to me

00:12:51   when the three of us were at dinner one night was, if the Mac Pro is this black—I believe

00:12:57   it's aluminum, anodized aluminum, whatever it is, it's black—so if they release a retina

00:13:02   display. If Apple releases a retina display, is that also going to be black? And is this

00:13:06   the first time that we have not aluminum-colored aluminum or aluminum devices from Apple that

00:13:13   are computers, I should say, in a long time?

00:13:16   Right, that aren't just iPods.

00:13:17   Right, right.

00:13:18   Their displays are already black, though. Like, the part you can see when you're sitting

00:13:21   in front of one. I guess the foot is silver, but they've already changed the surface

00:13:24   of the things to be black, like the frame around the display.

00:13:27   Not all of them.

00:13:28   And it goes edge to edge now, right?

00:13:29   Well, not on my high-res MacBook Pros.

00:13:31   I mean, your point is still absolutely fair.

00:13:33   I mean, the external monitors, like the external ones.

00:13:35   Yeah, they change the external monitors

00:13:37   to be black when they're facing you

00:13:38   with the exception of the foot.

00:13:39   And I think that still matches with the black computer.

00:13:43   You know, I don't think that clashes.

00:13:45   I think that's-- they're neutral tones, right?

00:13:50   So why no displays then?

00:13:52   Oh, I don't know.

00:13:53   I mean, maybe they haven't decided what they can do,

00:13:54   haven't decided pricing.

00:13:55   I mean--

00:13:56   Well, my theory is-- and I forget

00:13:59   I said this last week or not, that it's interesting that Haswell is out for laptops, but they

00:14:06   only mentioned the MacBook Airs and they only updated the Airs. So my theory is sometime

00:14:11   later this year, in quotes, probably alongside the Mac Pro launch, they will potentially

00:14:19   also launch new Retina MacBook Pros with Haswell with Thunderbolt 2. And alongside those, they

00:14:28   will launch Retina displays. And only then the new Mac Pro and the new Haswell Retina

00:14:35   MacBook Pros will be able to drive them.

00:14:37   Do you know if that's a possibility? Haswell, CPU, and chipset, does it support Thunderbolt

00:14:45   2?

00:14:46   Thunderbolt 2, from what I know, which I think the best person to ask for this would be an

00:14:51   An-Lol Shimpi, but the—and I'm sorry for the pronunciation if I got that wrong, which

00:14:56   which I probably got at least some part of it wrong.

00:15:00   I believe that the Thunderbolt 2 chip or chipset

00:15:04   or whatever it is that does it is separate

00:15:06   from the main motherboard chipset

00:15:08   and then can be installed or integrated

00:15:11   into any modern Intel board, I think.

00:15:14   And therefore-- - Yeah,

00:15:16   Chad Riggs says it does.

00:15:17   I suppose that's, I would have to know the dates on that.

00:15:20   I vaguely remember the code names

00:15:21   of those two different chipsets.

00:15:23   I think I only remember the, not the current one,

00:15:25   the next next one which is like Falcon Ridge or something but anyway I believe

00:15:28   I believe Falcon Ridge is Thunderbolt 2. I think that's the next next one. The next one is

00:15:33   something else Ridge. Anyway that is a reasonable reason why they those things

00:15:37   could have been delayed that they're gonna run Thunderbolt 2 but right because

00:15:40   it's weird that they didn't get any mention at all and yeah and those chips

00:15:44   are ready like it's what we think anyway I mean the other explanation is maybe

00:15:47   that Intel can't deliver those CPUs in volume yet that that's possible that's

00:15:52   certainly a more boring explanation for for the delay but Macbook Air doesn't use the same thing the Macbook Air uses the ultra low power

00:15:58   Vailing correct this big honking package thing which is totally different and apparently is enough of those to say hey the Macbook Airs are

00:16:03   shipping today right and

00:16:05   Usually I would expect those would be like the better binned parts because those are the ones that can run at super low voltages right

00:16:11   I mean like you would think if they can deliver those they can probably deliver the big ones

00:16:14   yeah, you would think so I think the

00:16:18   What do you call it?

00:16:19   The Thunderbolt 2 chipset thing could be the delay.

00:16:22   Or it could be they just have excess inventory

00:16:23   of the Retina MacBook Pros they want to get rid of

00:16:25   or something.

00:16:26   I don't know.

00:16:27   Or they're just holding it back until they

00:16:29   can launch the Mac Pro, which is at least Q3,

00:16:32   because the Mac Pro CPUs aren't out yet.

00:16:34   And so if they can do a big Pro launch, where they satisfy

00:16:38   all the Pros at once with a Mac Pro, new Retina MacBook

00:16:41   Pros, and a Retina display, that would be a nice little event.

00:16:45   And maybe they coincide it with a minor update

00:16:48   to Final Cut X or something like that.

00:16:51   Something like that.

00:16:52   It would make sense to combine those timers

00:16:55   and to coalesce those timers into one thing.

00:16:58   That whole Mac Pro announcement was just really weird.

00:17:03   I mean, it was acknowledged to be weird in the keynote,

00:17:05   where they're like, we normally don't do this.

00:17:07   It's like, yeah, you normally don't do this.

00:17:09   Like, where you say, this product is really off

00:17:11   in the distance, but we know that people

00:17:13   are going to freak out if we don't say anything about it.

00:17:16   It's almost as if last year at WWDC they said,

00:17:19   "I know you're all waiting for a Mac Pro announcement,

00:17:21   "and here's these ones that aren't really that new,

00:17:24   "but trust us, next year we'll have a good one."

00:17:26   I mean, they kinda did that by having a public statement,

00:17:28   or not a public statement, an email response

00:17:30   from Tim Cook saying, "Oh yeah, I know.

00:17:32   "Next year, we'll have something nice."

00:17:33   But like, pre-announcing products, it's just crazy.

00:17:36   And I guess they did it for damage control,

00:17:38   because if they didn't, we all would've come out.

00:17:39   I mean, that's why none of us expected

00:17:41   a Mac Pro announcement, we were even joking about it,

00:17:43   because we knew it couldn't possibly be ready,

00:17:45   because we knew what kind of CPUs it would have to use,

00:17:47   and those weren't ready.

00:17:48   And sure enough, those aren't ready.

00:17:50   But Apple said, you know what?

00:17:51   Screw it.

00:17:51   We're going to show it to you anyway.

00:17:53   Here it is.

00:17:53   You can't buy it for a while.

00:17:54   We won't even tell you if we have monitors for it.

00:17:56   We won't tell you anything about pricing.

00:17:57   But it's here.

00:17:58   It's shaped like a garbage can.

00:18:00   It's coming.

00:18:02   I think a good point, too.

00:18:04   QRS in the chat room said Aperture 4, maybe,

00:18:08   is something to consider here.

00:18:10   You know, the new Mac Pro has this pretty lopsided design where it has only one CPU

00:18:18   socket, so it can get a good amount of CPU power in there, but then it has this insane

00:18:23   amount of GPU power that seems, from the wording they've used and what's on their side, it

00:18:29   seems as though the dual GPU setup is not optional.

00:18:33   It looks like all the Mac Pros will come with the same GPU setup.

00:18:37   And if that's the case, and obviously that's going to have potential cost implications,

00:18:43   but that is a really lopsided power balance of, you know, you get some CPU power, but

00:18:48   what you really want to buy this thing for is the GPUs.

00:18:51   And what's interesting, you know, I've seen a few places report that only one of the GPUs

00:18:59   is going to be used to drive the displays, and that the other one is going to be used

00:19:04   exclusively for OpenCL-type computations.

00:19:09   So it's interesting that you're going to have this ridiculous amount of power that today only a few apps

00:19:14   really make any good use of, right? I don't think it's very widely supported yet.

00:19:19   Maybe Apple's Pro apps are going to be substantially shifted

00:19:24   over to put a lot of work into OpenCL, maybe more than they already are.

00:19:29   already doing some.

00:19:32   Aperture already uses the GPUs like crazy.

00:19:34   And it's not so much that one GPU is dedicated to OpenCL.

00:19:37   It's that only one GPU is connected up

00:19:39   to the Thunderbolt ports.

00:19:41   So what's the--

00:19:42   And so they're both available for OpenCL.

00:19:44   When you write an OpenCL program,

00:19:46   you'll see both of those GPUs as available as whatever

00:19:48   the-- I think what they call them, like computing resources.

00:19:51   You see one CPU and two GPUs.

00:19:53   So you can use both of them.

00:19:55   It's just that only one of them has a place

00:19:58   where you can plug in a display.

00:19:59   So the other one is never going to drive a display, but even when one is driving a display,

00:20:04   you could run OpenCL stuff on both of them.

00:20:06   Right, okay.

00:20:08   And then what's interesting about that is that now you'll have this Mac Pro that, for

00:20:14   other reasons, it probably is going to be a pretty bad deal.

00:20:18   It's probably not going to be a great value for its CPU performance.

00:20:21   It's not going to be a great value for its RAM ceiling.

00:20:23   There's all these different things.

00:20:24   I expect this thing to cost like $3,000 or $4,000 bucks base.

00:20:30   But if pro users are using these certain software

00:20:33   packages that make really great use of OpenCL,

00:20:37   then this machine is going to blow away

00:20:39   the entire rest of the Mac lineup so much.

00:20:43   Well, think about what those people would have to pay before.

00:20:46   During the lunchtime demo where the guy from Pixar, W2C,

00:20:49   was up there demoing that program

00:20:50   and saying how great it was.

00:20:52   If he wanted to get the equivalent GPU

00:20:53   power in another machine, like even just the current Mac Pro, it would probably cost him

00:20:58   the price of a new Mac Pro just to buy the video cards, because they're so ridiculous,

00:21:02   like $3,500 for the video card.

00:21:05   And that's another thing on the Mac Pro.

00:21:07   I was thinking about pricing.

00:21:08   I think I tweeted this at Dr. Wave this week, where when we both came out of the-- Marco

00:21:14   and I came out of the keynote, we both said like $2,999 was our base price for the thing.

00:21:23   But now I think I've changed that, and I think they could hit 2,500 for the lowest, lowest

00:21:29   end.

00:21:30   And I think the way they could do that is the AMD Fire Pro GPU line comes in a lot of

00:21:35   different sizes.

00:21:36   And if Apple decides to offer anything other than the super duper high-end one, they could

00:21:43   reduce the price a lot.

00:21:44   Because I think everything else in there is relatively cheap.

00:21:46   Like there's not as many moving parts.

00:21:47   There's just one Intel CPU that cuts like 500 bucks off the price right there, which

00:21:51   is nice.

00:21:52   Apple's going to have crazy margins on their stupid PCI Express SSD thing, I'm sure, whatever.

00:21:57   The RAM middling. And if they can get the "crappy" Fire Pro GPUs in there with much,

00:22:04   much less VRAM instead of the maximum, I think I read together the maximum.

00:22:07   I believe there's six gigs each.

00:22:08   Yeah, six gigs each. I thought it was six gigs combined. So six gigs of VRAM each. And

00:22:12   again, gaming video cards at this point have two gigabytes of VRAM, like the most expensive

00:22:16   gaming cards you can get. These are going to have six gigs each.

00:22:18   And you know it's not gonna ship with a base RAM of the whole machine of 12 gigs

00:22:22   You know like like the video cards are gonna have more RAM than the main machine

00:22:25   I think the base might be 16 gigs

00:22:27   But but anyway if they if they cheap out on the GPUs

00:22:29   You could they could have an entry-level model that no one wants to buy including me for a 2,500 bucks

00:22:34   So it sounds like both of you guys are in for one though

00:22:38   Marco's gonna buy one for every room in the house doubles a ways better

00:22:44   I think I'll probably buy one, but I'm not--

00:22:49   the big two questions about what the price is going to be, and whether there will be retina displays.

00:22:54   If this ends up being one of the only machines that can drive a retina display,

00:22:59   and maybe the only one that can do it really well when those eventually come out,

00:23:04   then I'll buy one, no question. Because I really want a desktop-sized retina display.

00:23:09   the only one that's going to be able to play games on the right

00:23:11   end of the display.

00:23:11   I know how important that is to you.

00:23:13   Right, yeah.

00:23:13   I don't care about that at all.

00:23:15   I would feel kind of like an idiot

00:23:18   buying this computer that has these two

00:23:19   ridiculous high-powered GPUs and using them most of the time

00:23:24   to display TextMate and a web browser or Xcode.

00:23:29   That's usually what I'm doing.

00:23:30   Someone asked on Twitter today, won't text editor developers

00:23:35   and the people who write Xcode now change their applications

00:23:38   to take advantage of those dual GPUs.

00:23:40   - Right, yeah, how?

00:23:42   - I'm having trouble thinking of a way

00:23:45   that you can use that kind of GPU power

00:23:47   in your text editor unless all the text

00:23:50   was like made 3D and flying through

00:23:52   some kind of world as you typed, I don't know.

00:23:54   - So we're getting the Matrix text editor.

00:23:57   - Right, Minority Report.

00:23:59   - Yeah, right.

00:24:00   All right, so is that all on the Mac Pro?

00:24:03   - I guess for now.

00:24:04   I mean, we really don't know much about it yet.

00:24:06   That's the big thing.

00:24:07   Like, until we know pricing and options,

00:24:11   and possibly retina question,

00:24:14   I think it's gonna be hard to make any other

00:24:17   really great statements about it,

00:24:18   just because we don't have it yet,

00:24:20   and there's so much we still don't know.

00:24:22   - All right, there's another piece of follow-up

00:24:26   that I think mostly John wanted to talk about,

00:24:28   then maybe we can do a sponsor.

00:24:29   So, John, tell me about the new Xbox

00:24:31   that just came out today.

00:24:33   (laughing)

00:24:34   - Yeah, this is the obvious joke.

00:24:36   You know, sometimes you wonder if these stories happen

00:24:42   because there's a perfect name for it.

00:24:46   They just couldn't resist.

00:24:47   So the show note and the million headlines

00:24:50   is Xbox 180, which is the obvious headline for the story

00:24:54   that Microsoft has reversed its decision on all of the DRM,

00:24:58   digital rights management, used game, always online things

00:25:02   about the Xbox One that everyone hated.

00:25:05   And so to recap, things that people hated were the Xbox had to check in with Microsoft

00:25:10   servers every 24 hours you were locked out of it.

00:25:13   People hated that.

00:25:14   People who were like, especially the military, are people who are going to be away from an

00:25:17   internet connection for a long time, even just people who didn't like the idea of having

00:25:19   to check in.

00:25:21   The fact that you couldn't sell games, game disks to people because the game disk was

00:25:26   just a convenient way for you to get the bits onto your computer and all the rights of the

00:25:29   game had to do with the DRM.

00:25:32   And so if you bought a game in a store and you got the disc,

00:25:35   selling that disc to your friend was pointless

00:25:36   because if they put that disc into their machine,

00:25:38   it would do nothing for them because it would say,

00:25:39   "Oh, you don't own this game

00:25:40   "because you don't have the rights to it

00:25:41   "according to our servers."

00:25:43   And game companies were allowed to not allow their games

00:25:45   to be resold even in digital form.

00:25:48   And so all these things pissed off gamers

00:25:50   and at E3, Sony hammered them in their presentations.

00:25:55   Sony's presentation was all about,

00:25:56   "Look at how much better we are than Microsoft."

00:25:59   And Sony was getting like standing ovations

00:26:01   for standard features of game consoles for the past two decades.

00:26:05   Like, "Oh my God, it's amazing!

00:26:07   I can buy a disc in the store and then sell it to my friend! Woo!"

00:26:10   Anyway, Microsoft was really getting hammered.

00:26:13   I saw one online poll, maybe it was Amazon or some other site.

00:26:17   It was like, "Hey guys, who's thinking about

00:26:20   getting one of the next generation consoles?"

00:26:22   It was just PS4 versus Xbox One, because no one cares about the Wii U.

00:26:28   Normally those polls like on the dawn of a console generation launch are always like

00:26:32   50/50 each because all the fanboys from both of the consoles go there and they all fill the ballot box and it's like you know

00:26:37   Pretty pretty much a dead heat and this was like not over 90% for the ps4 and like the rest for the Xbox one

00:26:44   So it looks like a blowout and that's just you know, one random poll could have just been a bunch of Sony fans

00:26:49   Who knows but like you never I've never seen that at all the console launches that I've been through

00:26:53   So things were looking bad for Microsoft and what they did which was kind of gutsy but also kind of

00:26:58   Lame and weird or whatever was just reversed everything. It said never never mind

00:27:03   It's exactly like the Xbox 360 you go to the store you buy discs and that's it

00:27:07   You can sell the disc it works exactly like the 360 and they also eliminated all the good features of the Xbox one where you

00:27:13   Know everyone in your family could play the game for free

00:27:15   Even if they didn't live with you like up to ten people in your family could play the game

00:27:18   So if you bought it then like your brother at college automatically got the game for free

00:27:23   he didn't have to buy it again, you didn't have to ship him a disk.

00:27:26   And pure digital downloads now, it's just like the 360 where you can do a digital download,

00:27:30   but if you buy a physical disk, the disk has to be in the drive while you're playing the

00:27:33   game, which sucks and is stupid because why does the disk need to be there?

00:27:36   Oh, it's because they just completely reversed everything they said.

00:27:39   I don't even know how they can do this at this late stage.

00:27:41   It seems like all the deals involved with publishers and all the software involved,

00:27:47   they're a completely reversing course.

00:27:49   And most people are happy about it.

00:27:51   They got rid of the Always Online thing.

00:27:52   They said you have to be online when you set up your Xbox one

00:27:55   But after that you can just be completely offline and as long as the game you're using doesn't need internet connectivity to run

00:28:00   Then you're fine

00:28:02   So this is kind of a mixed bag it it's good in that they reverse their stupid decisions

00:28:08   It's bad and that they got rid of all the things that might have been cool

00:28:12   And I think it's bad like long term because as I think I said when we originally talked about the Xbox one

00:28:16   Everything they were doing

00:28:18   It was done badly, but in broad strokes the idea that you don't own a physical disk instead you own rights to something online

00:28:25   That's good for all the convenience reasons

00:28:27   They just need to get the particulars of it right like once once that's the case you can't you don't use that to then give

00:28:34   The publishers more power and forbid people from reselling games and everything just make it instead

00:28:38   You should say okay now

00:28:39   It's even easier for you to sell a game to your friend sell it through our online thing you don't have to

00:28:43   You know bring the disk over to their house, and you don't have to do any of those stuff

00:28:46   and it's not tied to your account or whatever, you should be able to sell games, sell used

00:28:50   games, resell them, and let Microsoft take a little cut.

00:28:53   I think Apple has shown that people are not opposed to the idea that the middleman gets

00:28:58   some small cut from providing the convenience of buying and selling goods online.

00:29:05   So it's kind of a shame that we've kind of hit the reset button because Microsoft's policies

00:29:09   were so boneheaded, but the overall idea that spinning plastic disks are stupid and should

00:29:14   really just be an accelerated way to download things for you and really the entire marketplace

00:29:19   should be online. I mean Apple's proven. The entire marketplace is being aligned for everything.

00:29:22   For their desktop operating systems, for their desktop software, for their handheld software.

00:29:25   That model works. People like it. It's great. And Apple's taken 30%. I mean Microsoft could take

00:29:30   like 5% of used game sales and gamers would still love them for the convenience of being able to

00:29:35   one-click sell their game to their friend and get, you know, 10 bucks back or whatever.

00:29:41   So that's the story. I'm kind of sad about it. I was never gonna buy an Xbox One anyway.

00:29:45   It's just kind of sad to see Microsoft backpedal like that, when really what they could have done

00:29:49   is just fixed everything and kept the good and just got rid of the bad.

00:29:52   So thumbs up on this? I mean, it sounds like you are not pleased with this,

00:29:57   but you are pleased with where it ended?

00:29:59   It's better than what they had before. What they had before was just a terrible policy

00:30:04   that everyone hated. They just threw out the baby with the bathwater. And, you know,

00:30:08   Like, I like them trying to make progress.

00:30:11   They just went a little bit off in the wrong direction.

00:30:14   And their correction was history eraser button.

00:30:17   This never happened.

00:30:18   This thing just behaves like the Xbox 360.

00:30:20   Never mind, guys.

00:30:21   Marco, you want to talk to us about Squarespace?

00:30:25   I would love to talk to you about Squarespace.

00:30:27   This episode is brought to you, in fact, by Squarespace.

00:30:30   They have the all-in-one platform that makes it easy to create your own website.

00:30:34   For a free trial and 10% off, go to squarespace.com and use offer code ATP6 for Accidental Tech

00:30:41   Podcast the month of 6.

00:30:43   Squarespace has always updated their platform with new features, new designs, and more support.

00:30:47   They have beautiful designs for you to start with and tons of style options for you to

00:30:51   adjust so you can really create your own space online.

00:30:54   Hence the name, you know.

00:30:56   Squarespace takes care of hosting, SEO, and they even make sure your site has a responsive

00:31:00   mobile design so it looks great on any device.

00:31:03   It's incredibly easy to use, and if you ever need any help, they have amazing support that

00:31:07   works 24/7.

00:31:10   Squarespace starts at just $8 a month, and that includes a custom domain name if you

00:31:13   sign up for a year in advance.

00:31:16   As we said earlier, you can try Squarespace for free, no credit card required.

00:31:19   That's really nice.

00:31:21   You don't have to give them a credit card to start your trial, and then if you forget

00:31:23   to cancel it, they bill you.

00:31:24   No, no, no, it's not like that at all.

00:31:27   Free trial, no credit card required.

00:31:29   If you purchase, make sure you get 10% off and support our show by using the coupon code

00:31:33   ATP6.

00:31:36   Squarespace is everything you need to create an exceptional website.

00:31:39   Thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring.

00:31:40   Yeah, and I mean, our site is run on Squarespace and neutrals, and we've never had not one

00:31:45   hiccup.

00:31:46   It's great.

00:31:47   Wait, has that worked?

00:31:48   Never had not one?

00:31:49   You know what I meant.

00:31:50   I'm getting more and more southern with each passing day.

00:31:52   It's not terrible.

00:31:53   It's just different.

00:31:54   Well, you have to offset us.

00:31:55   Yeah, well, that's true.

00:31:56   So I want to talk about iOS 7 a little bit, and we have a couple of things in our accidental

00:32:02   show notes.

00:32:03   And I want to go off the rails a little bit, and I want to actually go back to ATP episode

00:32:08   1.

00:32:09   And the reason I want to do that is because ATP episode 1, before it was really a podcast

00:32:15   at all, was the three of us talking about an iPhone Plus.

00:32:20   And we were talking about how one could extrapolate and theorize what size it would be, whether

00:32:26   or not it would exist, et cetera.

00:32:28   And one of the things that's been bugging me

00:32:30   in a good way about what we saw during the keynote

00:32:35   was that gestures are a big deal in iOS 7.

00:32:38   And specifically, there's a gesture

00:32:40   to go back a screen in iOS 7.

00:32:43   And there's been a lot of talk about gestures in iOS 7.

00:32:47   And the thing that struck me about the gesture

00:32:48   to go back a screen is if it's very easy, kind of system-wide,

00:32:52   to go back one level, it may not be so terrible to have a back button that, at least for right-handed

00:33:00   people, is too far away. So, in other words, if you look at the iPhone 5, for most normal-sized

00:33:07   people, the back button is—and normal-sized right-handed people—the back button is way

00:33:12   up and to the left and is a little bit of a stretch to reach. Well, what if you didn't

00:33:16   have to reach that anymore? Then could the phone—would that be enough to make it not

00:33:21   annoying to have a bigger phone. Does that make sense?

00:33:24   Well, first of all, I think that you... it sounds like you're saying that right-handed

00:33:28   people have to hold their phone in their right hand.

00:33:31   That's true, and obviously, well, that was the assumption, but you're already making

00:33:34   a great point.

00:33:35   What's wrong? What? You do that?

00:33:38   I hold my phone in my right hand.

00:33:39   Yeah, I hold my phone in my right hand.

00:33:41   That's crazy talk!

00:33:42   Well, I mean, I don't have a phone, but you know what I mean. I hold my iPod touch in

00:33:44   my right hand. I mean, I do it lefty too, but...

00:33:46   You guys are nuts.

00:33:47   Well, think about the slide to open. How do you do that with your left hand?

00:33:51   That's weird. My left thumb. No, it works much better when you're

00:33:55   pulling your thumb towards them when you're extending your thumb out. Agreed.

00:33:59   You guys are nuts. Well, I think what's interesting also, and

00:34:03   I don't know, this might

00:34:07   I think I can safely say without violating the NDA

00:34:11   I don't think anyone's going to complain if I say that auto layout has been

00:34:15   heavily encouraged. And so you look at a few things. You look at that they're really pushing

00:34:22   you to use auto layout. And the new design of iOS 7 even, and the designs they're kind

00:34:30   of encouraging by example in the apps of things like shirping away ornamentation and big heavy

00:34:35   textures and everything else, the designs are probably pretty stretchable. And more

00:34:41   so than they used to be. You know, where it used to have, it used to be back before the

00:34:45   iPhone 5 that you could design like the old Tapbots apps before Tweetbot, it was like

00:34:52   Convertbot and stuff like that, where you could basically design a 320x480 screen and

00:34:58   that was it. That was your whole app. You could just design this one big bitmap because

00:35:02   you only had one screen size to deal with.

00:35:05   It was like web development with tables when you'd slice up everything into images and

00:35:09   to make everything about tables.

00:35:10   Exactly.

00:35:10   And iOS 7 is responsive design.

00:35:12   Exactly, yeah.

00:35:13   Like, iOS 7 is-- like, the visual style

00:35:17   they're going for-- you know, first the iPhone 5

00:35:19   told everyone, oh, crap.

00:35:20   You know, if your app is not just like a scrolling view

00:35:24   with bars on top and bottom, this

00:35:26   is going to be non-trivial to do.

00:35:28   But now I think the encouragement

00:35:32   to use auto layout, plus this back gesture,

00:35:36   plus the whole style of iOS 7 being so flexible, I think, more easily and breaking fewer things

00:35:45   visually. I think that all is, if not pointing to different iPhone screen sizes, I think

00:35:52   it would at least pave the way to make that a lot easier to do if they chose to. And reading

00:35:58   the tea leaves a little bit, it would not surprise me at all if they did a new iPhone

00:36:03   this fall that was, and maybe they do more than one,

00:36:07   but we talked before, I think they need a bigger screen

00:36:11   iPhone, because whatever Tim Cook says about the displays,

00:36:15   whatever people who are big Apple fans say about phone

00:36:19   sizes, the fact is the market is demanding them significantly.

00:36:23   And Apple is losing a lot of the high-end market,

00:36:27   which is the profitable market. They're losing a lot of that high-end market by

00:36:31   not having a larger screen phone.

00:36:34   - I saw a monstrous phone today.

00:36:35   I'm assuming it was a Samsung,

00:36:36   and it was in the hands of a young child,

00:36:38   and it just made it look even bigger.

00:36:40   It was like comically, yeah.

00:36:41   I guess it had to be one of those note things,

00:36:43   but it was ridiculous.

00:36:44   It looked like an iPad mini.

00:36:45   Yeah, there's a bunch of things in iOS 7

00:36:47   that lend itself to this.

00:36:49   Even like the lock screen with the gesture for swiping,

00:36:52   where you don't have to swipe in that one particular region,

00:36:53   you can swipe anywhere.

00:36:55   The icons in the home screen are bigger.

00:36:57   So, I mean, anything they make bigger,

00:37:00   you're like, oh, well, this will look more normal on a larger size.

00:37:03   Even in the navigation bar, the text that's in the buttons that would say the word "back"

00:37:08   for the back button, that text is larger because the buttons don't have borders around them.

00:37:13   And anything that they make larger, you think, okay, well, when this is on a larger phone,

00:37:17   it will fit in better there.

00:37:19   It's not going to complete extremes because they do have the adjustable text sizing.

00:37:22   Did they show that in the keynote?

00:37:23   I hope so.

00:37:24   I just broke it in the A.

00:37:25   I thought they did.

00:37:26   But whatever.

00:37:28   adjustable text sizing doesn't actually alter the size of things like navigation elements,

00:37:33   because that would force people to use auto layout.

00:37:34   You really use auto layout.

00:37:35   Right, like the bar metrics are all, I think, permanent.

00:37:38   Right, but like I said, the button text is bigger.

00:37:41   So they're trying to strike a balance.

00:37:42   They don't want everything to be bigger, because then it would look wrong on the smaller phone.

00:37:45   They don't want everything to scale, because that will make app development a nightmare.

00:37:48   But you know, auto layout combined with larger icons, combined with bigger text on the navigation,

00:37:52   but with the same nav bar sizes and all that stuff, it's like, I mean, as we were discussing

00:37:57   in the first episode of ATP, we don't expect a humongously bigger phone, just a little

00:38:01   bit bigger, and bigger in two dimensions.

00:38:05   And so I think iOS 7 is perfectly suited for an ever so slightly bigger iPhone that both

00:38:09   has a slightly higher resolution and also like a lower dot per inch, because then you

00:38:13   could, you know, those two factors combine, those two relatively small factors combine,

00:38:18   give you a phone that is bigger than the iPhone 5, but is not comically large.

00:38:23   Right, and before, when we were talking about this,

00:38:26   whenever that was, like five months ago,

00:38:28   or whatever that was, I had my theory about,

00:38:31   well, they can keep the same resolution,

00:38:33   just make everything a little bit bigger,

00:38:35   and everyone would be fine with that.

00:38:37   Now, I'm not so sure that's the case.

00:38:39   I think you're right that they could just increase

00:38:41   the resolution a little bit, and just make the panel,

00:38:44   give us, what is it now, four inches diagonal?

00:38:47   Give us maybe like a five inch one,

00:38:49   or even four and a half inch would look substantially larger.

00:38:52   larger. And I think they could do that and even just scale the resolution up proportionally

00:38:58   if they really want to. And I think now they're obviously preparing for non-fixed resolution

00:39:07   iPhones, if that makes sense. Or rather, for multiple sizes of iPhones. I think the pieces

00:39:13   are in place now that the T-leads are starting to line up to say, "This is probably where

00:39:18   they're heading."

00:39:19   It still doesn't quite address the Andy and Nocko issue that I think we discussed in that

00:39:22   first episode, which is that the reason he loves Android phones with larger screens is

00:39:25   not just that it's larger, which I think is at least half of it, but there's another part

00:39:29   of it is that Android phones, when running on larger screen, or Android software running

00:39:34   on larger screen phones, put up more UI, and a miniature version of what iPad version of

00:39:40   apps do.

00:39:41   Because once you have the iPad version, "Oh, I've got all this space, I can have a totally

00:39:43   different UI," well, a slightly bigger phone, if it's bigger enough, maybe you have room

00:39:48   room for a toolbar and before you didn't. Maybe you have room for one more toolbar button.

00:39:52   There are things that you can do to actually give you an application that doesn't just

00:39:55   give you more viewable area for your content, which is great and everything, and doesn't

00:39:58   just have larger text sizes and larger buttons, but also says, "Oh, this is room for a little

00:40:02   bit more information and maybe a feature that didn't fit on the phone can fit there." I

00:40:06   don't know if Apple's phone would be bigger enough to even give you one more toolbar icon

00:40:11   for the space or one more toolbar word in the new world of iOS 7 where they like to

00:40:15   words sometimes instead of icons, but it's possible. It's possible that applications,

00:40:20   like you've got optimized for iPad, right? So it's a totally different application, basically,

00:40:24   even though under the covers it might be very similar, but the UI can be very different.

00:40:27   And then you have your iPhone 5 size version of it, and then you have your iPhone 6 Plus

00:40:32   or whatever, where you get one more toolbar icon, or you didn't have a toolbar before

00:40:36   and now you do, or you have another little row of things on the right side or something

00:40:39   like that. I would really be interested in seeing that, but that's the last piece of

00:40:42   the puzzle. I don't think that's necessary. I think simply making a larger screen is plenty.

00:40:47   Bigger resolution, larger everything. People will still love that. But if it's possible

00:40:52   to optimize your app for it, the apps that do that to provide a little bit more UI and

00:40:56   features, I think that will be the icing on the cake.

00:40:59   Yeah, we'll see what happens. I just thought it was interesting that all the signs are

00:41:04   pointing more towards yes. And that gesture, I don't know why, but for me it really made

00:41:09   me think, you know what, this iPhone Plus or whatever they're going to call it, that

00:41:12   really could be a thing.

00:41:14   The other thing that's been noodling at me all week since I left the keynote was their

00:41:19   talk about iOS version adoption.

00:41:22   And the general gist of it is that, oh, everyone upgrades to the latest version of iOS immediately.

00:41:27   And of course, immediately is defined as a few weeks or whatever the case may be.

00:41:32   But people upgrade to the latest version of iOS very quickly.

00:41:35   And that's generally true, especially on point releases.

00:41:38   But what occurred to me was, I remember reading David Smith's iOS version stats and seeing

00:41:44   that adoption of iOS 6 was not that quick at all because everyone was freaking out about

00:41:49   Apple Maps.

00:41:50   Well, I think that's actually not supported by the data.

00:41:54   Oh yeah?

00:41:55   That's a very, very common theory.

00:41:58   But like, so basically the theory was, okay, everyone's holding back because they don't

00:42:03   want iOS 6 maps, etc.

00:42:05   And then the theory was that once Google Maps app comes out,

00:42:10   then you should see a big bump in 6 adoption.

00:42:13   And you didn't.

00:42:14   Like there was almost no change in the rate of adoption

00:42:17   when the Google Maps app came out for iOS.

00:42:22   And so it looks like that probably was not the reason.

00:42:26   I mean, for me, I think the biggest reason

00:42:28   why iOS 6 adoption-- I think it climbed

00:42:31   at a relatively normal rate.

00:42:33   And then it just kind of peaked at like 92 or whatever percent

00:42:36   that it is now.

00:42:37   And if you look, iOS 5 adoption-- like iOS 4 adoption

00:42:41   has shrunk proportionally, as you'd expect.

00:42:43   iOS 5 adoption has kind of hit a wall.

00:42:46   And my theory there is all about the iPad 1.

00:42:49   Granted, Apple has sold a lot more devices

00:42:55   that run everything else than the iPad 1.

00:42:57   But there still are a lot of iPad 1s in use.

00:43:01   because the iPad 1 was sold until like what, two and a half years ago?

00:43:05   Like it wasn't that long ago that it was still sold

00:43:08   and people were buying this like $500+ computer type device.

00:43:15   And it's not on a contract, it's not subsidized,

00:43:19   so they expect that to last more than two years.

00:43:23   So there are still a lot of iPad 1s in use that can't run iOS 6

00:43:27   And I don't know how much of the percentage of people still on five that represents. Probably

00:43:33   not even the majority of it, but I bet that's like a big solid chunk in there that just

00:43:38   is not going away anytime soon.

00:43:41   And you know what, you're probably right. I just know whether or not it was dated back

00:43:45   or not, maybe I made that up. But certainly anecdotally, I know a lot of my mildly nerdy

00:43:51   friends had said, "Oh, I can't get that new Apple Maps thing. It's terrible. I won't have

00:43:55   And either way, I mean, I was just trying to build up to the question, not argument,

00:43:59   of what do we think about iOS 7 adoption?

00:44:02   Do we think it'll be quick?

00:44:03   Do we think it'll be really, really slow by comparison to other versions of iOS?

00:44:07   My inclination is I feel like it will be kind of in the middle, which is, of course, the

00:44:13   worst hedging ever.

00:44:15   But I really think it'll be less quick than a lot of the less remarkable major releases.

00:44:21   But I think a lot of people are going to really like it.

00:44:23   And I think that, yeah, I think it'll be all right,

00:44:26   but I'm curious to hear what you guys think.

00:44:28   - I think it'll probably be driven,

00:44:30   like a lot of these things are,

00:44:31   they're driven and aided by the fact

00:44:33   that Apple continues to sell more and more phones.

00:44:35   Now, granted, the growth rate has leveled off a little bit,

00:44:38   but assuming iOS 7 launches with a new phone,

00:44:43   like, and the new phone's gonna come with iOS 7,

00:44:47   and people will very quickly stop buying the old one,

00:44:49   and so you get this immediate boost

00:44:51   just like all the iPhone 5s or 6 or whatever the heck it is, especially if it's an iPhone

00:44:56   6.

00:44:57   If they don't do a 5s and it's actually a different form factor, and if it's like a

00:44:59   bigger one or something, that will give iOS 7 a huge boost out of the gate and skew the

00:45:05   statistics.

00:45:06   But I have to think that the adoption will probably be about the same as it was for 6,

00:45:11   if only because that thing where they push the updates at you...

00:45:15   I mean, I know iOS 7's going to have automatic updates, and same for Mavericks and everything.

00:45:19   Again, I think these are in the keynote.

00:45:23   That will drive adoption going forward even more.

00:45:26   But even just the current model where they're like, "Hey, there's a new version of iOS.

00:45:29   Do you want to upgrade?" and people hit a button and then it does it, that's what's

00:45:33   driving all this adoption.

00:45:34   It's like Jeff Atwood's post from, I guess it's years ago at this point, of the infinite

00:45:40   version.

00:45:41   Google Chrome is one of the pioneers in this where you don't do anything, you don't have

00:45:45   to make any choices, you use it and if you don't know anything about it, if you use it

00:45:50   and quit that program and relaunch it, it is updating itself, unbeknownst to you. They'll

00:45:53   put a little colored arrow or whatever in the toolbar and if you notice that you can

00:45:57   go, "Oh, I can update Google Chrome now," or whatever. It used to be more intrusive.

00:46:00   Now it's just like, "Look, we're going to update your Google Chrome. There's nothing

00:46:03   you can do about it." I mean, maybe there is some way to stop it, but the defaults are

00:46:07   you're going to get updated. What version of Google Chrome you're using? Who knows?

00:46:11   The latest. That is the idea that you don't have versions of software that you get confused

00:46:15   comfortable with, like where you buy a 2002 car.

00:46:18   Sorry about the cars again.

00:46:19   And you're like, oh, I'm happy with this car.

00:46:21   If you went out in your driveway and it was replaced with a 2003

00:46:23   model, you'd be like, but I like the 2002 one.

00:46:25   I like the way the shifter worked,

00:46:26   and the seat fabric was nicer, and the radio controls were

00:46:29   better.

00:46:29   You just get used to what you have.

00:46:31   And software in the past has been like that,

00:46:33   where you get Photoshop version 3.0,

00:46:37   and you're like, oh, wow, layers, this is awesome.

00:46:39   And this program is great.

00:46:40   And then 4.0 comes out, and you're like,

00:46:42   oh, that's just weird.

00:46:43   I don't like it.

00:46:43   Actually, I should have done 2.5 to 3,

00:46:45   because maybe you like channel operations and not layers.

00:46:47   But anyway, you get used to a piece of software,

00:46:50   and you say, OK, well, this is the software.

00:46:53   And it continues to work, and I like it.

00:46:55   Why would I ever want it to change?

00:46:57   And if it changed underneath you, you're like, whoa,

00:46:58   what's this?

00:46:59   The menus change, and the keyboard shortcuts change,

00:47:01   and they change all sorts of things about this program.

00:47:03   What happened to my old program?

00:47:04   I want that one back.

00:47:06   Because you think of software as this one thing

00:47:08   that you get, like a physical thing, like a car.

00:47:10   Whereas with Chrome, you've shown

00:47:13   people can be trained not to think of software that way.

00:47:16   If you use Chrome, the program that you're using now is not like the one you were using

00:47:19   several years ago, and you didn't do anything about that.

00:47:22   You could have just never touched any button, never said yes to any updates, it just updates

00:47:25   itself.

00:47:27   And you come in and you're like, "Oh, Chrome is different today."

00:47:28   And for the most part, it's different, it's faster, it's better, it's more stable, it

00:47:31   has more features.

00:47:33   But also, it changes stuff.

00:47:34   Like, "Oh, the menus are different, and the preferences are different."

00:47:37   On the Mac version, things kept moving into browser tabs and out of real UI as they tried

00:47:42   to make everything web-based and that kind of annoyed me.

00:47:45   But I think that's the future of software and that's what's driving this adoption.

00:47:50   More than people saying, "Oh, iOS is 6, I want to get it."

00:47:53   It's because every single iOS device that can upgrade to iOS 6 showed a prompt that

00:47:57   says, "Do you want to upgrade to iOS 6?"

00:47:59   And it showed it again.

00:48:00   And I don't know how persistent it is, but people eventually hit the button.

00:48:03   Android has eight bazillion ancient versions because those phones can't even run.

00:48:06   Like, you know, it's up to the carriers to upgrade them and they're like, "Ah, screw

00:48:09   it, we're not doing anything."

00:48:10   If all those phones had little prompts, they'd all be running the latest version of Android

00:48:13   too, but they can't and they don't have those prompts, so they're not.

00:48:16   Well, and also, I mean, one of the biggest things, like you touched on earlier, one of

00:48:21   the biggest things driving iOS adoption is that all new iOS devices are always sold with

00:48:26   the latest OS.

00:48:28   And because the sales of iOS devices tend to still be growing quarter by quarter or

00:48:33   year by year, every year there's way more iOS devices added into the pool of actively

00:48:40   used devices and everything added past an OS's release date has the newest OS. Whereas

00:48:46   Android, you still have phones that are sold today that are running not the current version

00:48:51   of the OS. And sometimes they're running versions that are like six months or a year or even

00:48:55   more old. So iOS, as long as sales of iOS devices stay strong and you remain not able

00:49:03   to downgrade them, I think we're always going to see very, very strong version adoption.

00:49:08   Yeah, Apple had some stuff that I can't remember.

00:49:10   It was something like, you know, the number of iOS devices sold in the past year is more

00:49:14   than the number of iOS devices sold in all of history before that, or something like

00:49:18   that.

00:49:19   Right, and they've claimed that a lot, because in many years that is the case.

00:49:24   Right, I mean, growth has leveled off a little bit, so maybe they won't be able to claim

00:49:28   that next year, but that combined with the fact that they can upgrade, and like you said,

00:49:32   all the new versions, all the new hardware comes with the newest version, that drives

00:49:36   adoption.

00:49:37   it as a point like, "Our adoption is great because users really love our latest version

00:49:42   of the OS." And I don't really think it's the case. Not that it matters, but iOS 7 will

00:49:47   freak people out. But they're going to upgrade it anyway because the button's going to come

00:49:50   on the screen and they're going to press it and they can't downgrade. And it's going to

00:49:53   come on their new—when their contract expires, it's going to come on their new iPhone. So

00:49:57   guess what? 90% adoption. All right, I have more to say on that, but

00:50:01   first let me break for a minute to talk about our second sponsor for today. It's An Event

00:50:05   They are the design conference for people who make websites.

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00:50:42   an Event Apart is the conference you've been waiting for.

00:50:45   Go to an eventapart.com/atpfm.

00:50:49   Thanks a lot to an Event Apart for sponsoring the show.

00:50:52   I'm sad I can't go to that this year.

00:50:54   I tried to get finagle work into paying for me to go, but no luck.

00:50:58   Oh well, maybe next time.

00:51:00   So, back to iOS 7 for a minute.

00:51:05   So, you know, WBC happened, we did our show and we all gave our opinion of it.

00:51:09   Then I went home and I showed my wife the beta on my iPhone 4S.

00:51:15   And her immediate reaction was, ew, this looks really cheap.

00:51:20   You know, looking at the home screen, looking at those often terrible icons, like, she really

00:51:25   was very turned off by the appearance of the home screen.

00:51:30   And I think it was mostly because of the crappy icons.

00:51:33   And her initial experience was, I don't really

00:51:35   want to keep using this.

00:51:36   Like, I don't really want to play with this.

00:51:38   This is kind of gross, and I'm a little scared

00:51:40   of where they're going here.

00:51:42   And she played with it for another couple of minutes

00:51:45   at my urging.

00:51:48   And then later on that evening, she's

00:51:50   using her regular iPhone with iOS 6 on it.

00:51:54   And she's like, you know what?

00:51:55   This looks old.

00:51:58   And she's like, you know, I actually, I want the new one.

00:52:03   And I want a white iPhone now.

00:52:07   Because the current one's black.

00:52:08   The worst part of iOS 7 is it encourages people

00:52:11   to buy white iOS devices.

00:52:13   And I couldn't agree more.

00:52:14   I bet that's-- first of all, actually, I

00:52:16   have a white iPad Mini.

00:52:17   Because the new style-- so I have a black iPhone 5.

00:52:21   But I think, ultimately, I think the black aluminum is not

00:52:25   aging well.

00:52:26   The edges get the scratches.

00:52:28   and you can start seeing the color underneath.

00:52:30   And I don't know.

00:52:32   I'm not crazy about the way the black ones look in practice.

00:52:36   But anyway, I think this is going

00:52:39   to probably reflect a lot of people's opinion of iOS 7,

00:52:42   because when you first see it, you're kind of like, huh,

00:52:45   that home screen's kind of ugly looking.

00:52:49   But then once the whole OS sinks in,

00:52:52   and once you start to use it, you start to realize, OK, well,

00:52:55   some of those home screen decisions are pretty bad.

00:52:57   But overall, this really does look very modern, and it starts to really show you how dated

00:53:04   the old iOS appearance has become.

00:53:08   So did Tiff get deeper than just looking at the home screen?

00:53:11   Like, did she actually play with a few apps?

00:53:12   Yeah, I opened up Calendar and Mail and stuff like that.

00:53:15   I didn't have any third-party apps really installed on it, but I opened up a few built-in

00:53:19   stuff and she was poking around with that.

00:53:22   It was not a very long interaction, I will give you that.

00:53:25   But just having seen that, and only having seen that for a few minutes, she was then

00:53:34   able to recognize, "Oh crap, my current iPhone looks old by comparison."

00:53:40   And so she wanted the new one, just because it really is new and fresh and modern.

00:53:46   And I really think that's going to be a very common reaction.

00:53:50   Well, and I know Tiff pretty well, and she doesn't strike me as the "ooh, shiny"

00:53:56   kind of person, but is that going to be the reaction from your average Joe or Susie that

00:54:03   it's just new and shiny, or do you think it's deeper than that?

00:54:06   I happen to think it's deeper than that, but I'm a nerd, and so that's not unexpected.

00:54:10   I think it's going to be shocking to people who aren't paying attention.

00:54:14   They're going to be like, "Well, this doesn't look like my iOS," but at that

00:54:19   point they will have no choice and they will use it for a week and get used to it and three

00:54:24   or four things will continue to annoy them just like three or four things annoy them

00:54:27   about the old one but they'll get used to it.

00:54:30   It's going to be a differentiator.

00:54:33   That's the most important feature of this change from the regular person's perspective

00:54:38   is that it is unmistakably different than the previous one and as I said in the past

00:54:42   podcast, Apple needed to make a change.

00:54:45   is a change, that is an essential feature of this that customers can identify at a glance

00:54:50   that is different. Because that's what iOS needs at this point. It needs a clean break

00:54:55   with the past and something new. And as long as it's not completely unusable or just seen

00:55:01   as horrendously ugly, it'll be fine. I mean, think about Windows 8, which I think has some

00:55:05   horrendously ugly parts of it, but that's not what annoyed people. People weren't

00:55:08   more annoyed that Windows 8 was ugly. They were annoyed they couldn't find anything and

00:55:11   nothing worked and stuff like that. So as long as Apple gets the functionality part

00:55:14   of it right, and I think they're on the right track there, the individual decisions

00:55:20   about aesthetics are not as important as the fact that it is just immediately identifiable

00:55:27   as a different thing.

00:55:28   Yeah, I think that's right. And the fact is, it still does work roughly the same way.

00:55:35   There are a few little tweaks here and there, and there's slightly more updated or more

00:55:40   modern things like the back gesture, a more updated navigation structure and stuff like

00:55:46   that, but it all still works pretty much the same way.

00:55:51   And for people who have never seen the multitasking bar in iOS 6, they will continue to not see

00:55:56   it in iOS 7 and they won't notice that it's any different.

00:56:00   We look at every single thing that's different because we know every nook and cranny of iOS,

00:56:03   but I even wonder about, I mean, it kind of explains why Apple put that little upward-facing

00:56:08   arrow to say "hey guys, control center is down here" and it's a convenient way for you

00:56:12   to change stuff.

00:56:13   But that's another one of those features.

00:56:16   Maybe it's like notification center where the first time most people activate notification

00:56:19   center it's probably an accident and they're like "what's this thing?

00:56:22   I was in this app and this little thing peaked down from the top for a second and then I

00:56:25   went back to using it.

00:56:26   What is that?

00:56:27   And I did another app and this thing is up there!"

00:56:29   Eventually people will discover this thing down there but unlike probably notification

00:56:33   center, once people discover control center they'll be like "oh, fast way to turn Wi-Fi

00:56:37   on and off, like things that people can understand, you know, or change the volume or whatever.

00:56:43   I'm hoping that that will be a feature that people will latch onto.

00:56:47   For the people, again, for the people who don't know that you can open the multitasking

00:56:50   tray and go to the left and there's stuff over there that's useful, right?

00:56:53   Right, right, right.

00:56:54   Control Center is the much larger, nicer version of that.

00:56:58   Oh, yeah.

00:56:59   I mean, we—so I got my mother-in-law for this past Christmas.

00:57:04   She has this nice radio, this nice little radio thing in their living room, and she's

00:57:11   been using the iPad and she was getting it to Pandora.

00:57:13   So I got her an airport express so that she could then airplay the Pandora to the little

00:57:18   radio in the living room.

00:57:21   And having to describe to a relatively non-technical person all the steps involved in turning on

00:57:28   it, because of course Pandora on the iPad doesn't have an AirPlay button because their

00:57:32   their apps are extraordinarily mediocre,

00:57:34   but trying to explain to a regular person

00:57:38   how to go to the multitasking tray,

00:57:41   swipe over, find the AirPlay button, tap that,

00:57:44   tap the room, like now, it's swipe up, tap AirPlay.

00:57:47   Like there's like three fewer steps than there were before,

00:57:50   and it's way more clear.

00:57:52   And there's gonna be so many interactions like that

00:57:54   that are just so much easier with that.

00:57:57   - Yeah, and the other thing I wanted to note

00:57:59   was if you look at Apple's iOS 7 page, there's the big image of a white iPhone 5 with the

00:58:07   home screen.

00:58:08   There's a couple paragraphs of text, and then there's, what is this, 3, 6, 9, 12 images

00:58:14   of all the familiar apps.

00:58:16   Well, they're not images, actually.

00:58:17   I think they're little videos.

00:58:19   But they're all the familiar apps that they're showing.

00:58:23   The headline is "See iOS 7 in Action."

00:58:25   So it's clear that they're trying to—shop isn't the right word—but familiarize people

00:58:30   with what's coming.

00:58:32   So whenever the time comes that iOS 7 is out, then it won't be so jarring.

00:58:37   And I think Apple's a little nervous about it, and I think they should be, but I think

00:58:40   all in all it won't be bad.

00:58:42   Anyway, do we want to talk about Neven Mergen's thing?

00:58:47   I do, I do.

00:58:48   Sure.

00:58:49   Because I put it in the notes, that's why.

00:58:51   You're preparing a little too much, John.

00:58:53   It's one sentence and a link, and it's not even a sentence.

00:58:58   Getting a little nervous.

00:58:59   It's not long.

00:59:00   All right, so Nevin's post is another in a long series

00:59:03   of people with design backgrounds

00:59:06   and not commenting on iOS 7 about what they like,

00:59:09   what they don't like, and trying to divine the philosophy

00:59:12   behind it and reconcile what Apple

00:59:13   has said with the reality of the OS and all that stuff.

00:59:16   And Nevin's post was very focused,

00:59:18   and it's clear that he has chewed

00:59:20   on this design in his head for a long time,

00:59:23   and finally decided that some of it just looks wrong to him.

00:59:26   And he focused on the icons showing--

00:59:28   I think he showed the App Store icon, the little circle.

00:59:31   And the A conforms to the grid that Johnny Ive and his team

00:59:36   supposedly laid out for iOS icons

00:59:37   to make them all look the same, where they have

00:59:40   concentric circles and boxes.

00:59:41   And they made a point of showing how,

00:59:43   even though all the home screen icons look different,

00:59:45   they all sort of touch on important points in this grid

00:59:48   and conform to it in the right way.

00:59:49   And he was saying, but the grid is wrong.

00:59:52   look at that circle in the App Store, if I was designing this, it would be smaller.

00:59:56   And it should be smaller because it looks wrong when it's bigger.

00:59:58   And I read that post and I thought there was a couple of really obvious

01:00:03   RDE design type replies to it.

01:00:06   And I found one of them, I was glad to see someone tackle a lot of it.

01:00:09   This is from Ari Warner. We'll have his links in the show notes.

01:00:13   This is up on Medium, a site which I don't really like the URLs from

01:00:16   because you can't read them. But anyway, he responded to Nevin's post explaining how

01:00:20   wrong, this is not really applicable in cases of design because you need to talk about it

01:00:25   in context and whether it fulfills the role. It's not a piece of art, it's not just supposed

01:00:28   to be pleasing to the eye, it has a functional aspect and so on and so forth. And so both

01:00:33   those links will be in the show notes.

01:00:37   My main reaction to Nevin's thing was, and I think people, I'm not going to call myself

01:00:41   an artist, but I did do a lot of art-related things early in my life and still sort of

01:00:46   have that bent, believe it or not, as a programmer.

01:00:50   And one of the things I always found myself

01:00:51   doing when I was doing visual artwork, and even visual design

01:00:55   stuff, is trying to prevent myself

01:00:59   from giving in to the feeling that Nevin has, which

01:01:02   is when you make something and you're sort of artistically

01:01:07   inclined, you can look at it and see that it's not quite right.

01:01:11   And if you have a little bit more experience and a little

01:01:13   bit more skill, you can see that it's not quite right

01:01:15   and know what's wrong with it and fix it.

01:01:17   So that's what he did with the App Store.

01:01:19   I kind of said, this doesn't look right to me.

01:01:22   And actually, I can go further than that.

01:01:23   I know why it doesn't look right.

01:01:25   It's because the space around the circle is not quite right.

01:01:28   If I change the circle to this size,

01:01:29   now it's more pleasing to me.

01:01:31   And it's sort of like an intuitive sense that you have.

01:01:33   That's the word that Nevin used.

01:01:35   He made another tweet about intuition

01:01:36   being a data-driven process running

01:01:39   on a machine with thousands of years of evolution

01:01:41   behind it or something to that effect.

01:01:42   But you look at it, and you just feel that's wrong.

01:01:44   So what you can do if you're making a piece of art is just keep changing it until you

01:01:51   feel happy with it.

01:01:52   "Oh, that doesn't look quite right.

01:01:53   Oh, that doesn't look..."

01:01:54   And if you know what it is about it that's wrong, you can keep moving it more and more

01:01:56   towards that idea until you look away and you're like, "Now, that's it.

01:01:59   That looks beautiful."

01:02:01   And some people just don't have that.

01:02:02   They can look at one logo and another logo.

01:02:04   Like, "Ah, they're about the same."

01:02:06   Another person, one logo with a circle that's 5% bigger can look totally wrong and the other

01:02:10   one is like, "Oh, that's the one."

01:02:12   But if you give in to that feeling when you're making something, if every single aspect of

01:02:16   it you just use your intuition to say, "Okay, that's not right.

01:02:21   I'm going to make it better.

01:02:22   That's not right.

01:02:23   I'm going to make it better."

01:02:24   What you end up doing is painting the entire design with a sameness, especially like in

01:02:29   web design.

01:02:30   But even just when you're drawing a picture or something, then you step away from it and

01:02:34   you're like, "Oh, now I have made this entire thing pleasing to the eye in all aspects,

01:02:39   and it looks bland and boring."

01:02:41   So one of the first impulses I can remember having when I was taking art lessons as a

01:02:46   kid is that sometimes when you're drawing something or designing something, you take

01:02:51   some aspect of it and you intentionally make it look "wrong."

01:02:57   Not wrong in the sense of ugly or anything, but you push the limit of it.

01:03:02   This would look perfect and right and nice and beautiful and be like the golden ratio

01:03:06   and it would look like a beautiful woman and it would look like nature and it would look

01:03:09   like a fractal and it would just be so pleasing to the eye, but I want to push

01:03:13   it slightly more along one axis because it creates a kind of visual and emotional

01:03:18   tension. You can't do that with all aspects, then you just make something

01:03:21   ugly, right? But if you take one aspect of it and you press it a little bit,

01:03:26   sometimes with the purpose, but sometimes just because you're like, "You know what?

01:03:29   This will be more interesting if I make this one aspect of it not conform to

01:03:34   this ideal of beauty that I have in my head." And you're knowingly doing that, and

01:03:37   And I'm not sure that's what iOS 7 is doing, but when I look at it, I think there are parts

01:03:43   of this design that's unsettling, or some would say ugly.

01:03:46   Colors are easier to be ugly.

01:03:48   But the circles, yes, I saw them and they looked too big to me as well.

01:03:51   But I thought, look, they know that these circles seem too big.

01:03:56   Perhaps it's for readability, the icon needs to be readable instead of just visually pleasing,

01:04:03   because if you made it smaller, it wouldn't look quite as nice.

01:04:05   But it also could be that a design where everything is made to conform to that beautiful ideal

01:04:10   is more boring and lacks character.

01:04:14   And I'm willing to believe that some aspects of IOSM's design were done with that in mind.

01:04:21   That a design that is beautiful in all aspects and perfectly conforms to our ideal of beauty

01:04:26   is boring.

01:04:27   And I like it to push the envelope in some aspect, because that's more interesting.

01:04:33   alternative there is that maybe Johnny Ive isn't that good at graphical design, which

01:04:37   is a lot less interesting.

01:04:40   He didn't draw the zycons himself.

01:04:43   There are more boring explanations.

01:04:44   They made them bigger so they're more readable, and they're going to refine them.

01:04:47   And the colors are harder to go by, but it's the same kind of thing in colors.

01:04:51   Sometimes you just—especially if you've done art for a really long time, you get burned

01:04:56   out on just everything being beautiful and perfect.

01:04:59   Sometimes you make something intentionally unsettling.

01:05:00   And I think there's a tension in that kind of design that tickles the brain nether regions

01:05:07   of artists who look at it, and they find that nicer.

01:05:10   And you end up with something that's polarizing.

01:05:13   Regular people probably don't care, except maybe about the colors, which people will

01:05:16   probably interpret as ugly.

01:05:17   But I think these icons and everything else about it will be refined over time.

01:05:21   But I hope they don't do a lot of the revisions that you see, like, "Oh, I've redesigned

01:05:26   iOS 7.

01:05:27   See how it's better this way?"

01:05:28   And there's just this sameness to them of just making everything boring in beautiful

01:05:33   and conventional ways, or desaturating the colors and making it all beautiful and low

01:05:39   contrast and pale and grayscale and lots of other designer-y tendencies that, if applied

01:05:44   en masse to an entire OS, make the whole thing boring.

01:05:47   Yeah, I don't know.

01:05:51   I think it's too early to say whether they're just bad at this right now, or whether this

01:05:57   is intentionally along one side, I think time will tell.

01:06:04   I'm certainly interested to see what the fallout is from all the complaining about the icons.

01:06:10   Are they going to do a Microsoft Xbox 180 or are they just going to plow forward and

01:06:14   see what happens?

01:06:15   Convert them back.

01:06:16   I mean, Microsoft's design of Windows 8 was kind of, we have this bold direction, but

01:06:22   try to, like, in terms of shapes, I guess, if not in terms of colors, try to make things,

01:06:27   you know, reasonable. Like, there are no equivalents of those icons with the two big circles in

01:06:31   Windows 8 that I've seen, right? They fit things inside the boxes with, you know, correct

01:06:36   spacing and margins, and nothing is uncomfortably too big or too small within the borders, you

01:06:42   know, whereas some of those icons, like the grid itself, I mean, that outer circle is

01:06:46   just too darn close to the edges of that round rack, right? And it's uncomfortably close

01:06:50   for people with design sensibilities. And surely everyone inside Apple who has any design

01:06:55   sensibilities knows what Nevin put in there, that that isn't the most pleasing visual

01:07:02   arrangement. But I can think of lots of reasons why they would intentionally do that. So we'll

01:07:08   see.

01:07:09   Is that it?

01:07:10   I believe so.

01:07:11   Good deal.

01:07:12   All right. Thanks a lot to our two sponsors for this week, Squarespace and An Event Apart.

01:07:19   And I guess we'll see you next week.

01:07:26   They didn't even mean to begin, 'cause it was accidental.

01:07:30   (Accidental)

01:07:31   Oh, it was accidental.

01:07:33   (Accidental)

01:07:34   John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, 'cause it was accidental.

01:07:40   (Accidental)

01:07:41   Oh, it was accidental.

01:07:43   (Accidental)

01:07:44   And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm.

01:07:49   And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:07:59   So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:08:03   Auntie Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse

01:08:10   It's accidental (accidental)

01:08:14   They didn't mean to, accidental (accidental)

01:08:19   Tech Podcast So Long

01:08:24   For the live listeners, we should specify that the second show this week will be an

01:08:29   early recording. I know you kind of implied this, but it's an early recording because

01:08:34   Jon's traveling next week.

01:08:35   Right, so we're recording next week's episode this Friday, so in two days from now.

01:08:41   Hopefully Apple will not buy Nintendo on Monday.

01:08:45   What the hell made you think of that?

01:08:46   That would be hilarious.

01:08:47   I'm thinking of a story that it would kill me not to be able to talk about in a timely

01:08:52   manner and then you'd publish the show for next week and it would not be about Apple

01:08:57   buying Nintendo.

01:08:58   People are like, "What the hell is this?"

01:09:00   Well, Marco, has your Tumblr money come in?

01:09:03   Why don't you just buy Nintendo yourself?

01:09:04   It hasn't yet.

01:09:05   And then you can sell it.

01:09:06   Yeah, there you go.

01:09:07   I've gotten good at that.

01:09:08   Yeah, right.

01:09:09   Do you guys see this Mac Pro benchmark that was leaked like an hour, like 15 minutes after

01:09:17   we stopped talking about the Mac Pro? Oh, awesome. I clicked on it, but we had moved

01:09:20   on by then. I didn't get to read it, but... Show me the number. That's what I was so annoyed

01:09:25   about. Yeah, here they're doing it again. Don't compare the new Mac Pro to the old Mac

01:09:28   Pro. We all agree the old Mac Pro sucks. We want to compare it to like... I don't know

01:09:33   what to compare it to. Well, there's a few things that are interesting

01:09:34   about this benchmark. First of all, it is the first time we've seen, as far as I know,

01:09:41   it's the first time we've seen any benchmarks of the Xeon E5

01:09:45   V2 series.

01:09:47   Right?

01:09:48   I mean, this is--

01:09:49   I haven't been keeping up.

01:09:50   It's possible.

01:09:50   I don't even think--

01:09:51   I think this is the first time that a particular Xeon E5

01:09:55   model has even been leaked.

01:09:56   So now, if this is correct, now we

01:09:59   know there will be a model called the E5 2697.

01:10:03   It'll be 2.7 gigahertz, and it'll have 12 cores.

01:10:06   As far as I know, that's all new information.

01:10:09   But beyond that, I think the performance here

01:10:13   is really impressive.

01:10:14   It's obviously very impressive to get a Geekbench overall

01:10:17   score of almost 24,000 out of one socket.

01:10:21   Isn't that testing less than one third

01:10:23   of the transistors in this thing, though?

01:10:25   Well, there were multi-core tests and stuff.

01:10:28   No, but I mean the GPUs.

01:10:29   Most of the compute power in that device is in the GPUs.

01:10:32   Right, that's true.

01:10:33   I don't know how much Geekbench is stressing those.

01:10:34   So this is more of a CPU benchmark.

01:10:35   I don't think it does any GPU.

01:10:36   Or maybe it has a different mode for it.

01:10:37   I don't know.

01:10:38   But yeah, this doesn't mention GPUs at all. So I'm guessing it's all it's only a CPU benchmark

01:10:42   So it's kind of like it's like weird. It's like, you know

01:10:44   Come up with a good car analogy. It's like

01:10:47   Bench benchmarking

01:10:51   Benchmarking the the gas mileage of the Veyron. It's an interesting benchmark

01:10:55   But maybe not what that car is designed to do

01:10:58   And so this machine come right like it's basically a bunch of GPUs RAM and SSD

01:11:02   And oh by the way a CPU attached to the thing to run it all

01:11:05   In terms of like transistor count and may print like as Marco pointed out perhaps in terms of RAM count as well. I

01:11:11   mean the sad part is like

01:11:14   What they've been able to pull off this really great score that with one socket

01:11:19   blows away the the previous 12 core by something like 10 or 15 percent that did with two sockets, but

01:11:25   Imagine if they made a two socket version of this

01:11:29   Then you could have obviously have like a forty five thousand geekbench score

01:11:34   Well, can you find software that uses 24 cores? That's pretty difficult to find.

01:11:39   Video encoding software.

01:11:41   What about your magical script that you wrote way back when? I remember seeing that fly

01:11:47   by during your Tumblr days when you were trying to encode something.

01:11:50   Parallelize? Yeah, it's a script that you use. I think there's now an argument for X-ARGS

01:11:55   or something that does roughly the same thing.

01:11:57   Just make -j 25.

01:12:03   You know what annoys me when I edit this show is that MP3 encoding is not well parallelizable.

01:12:10   Because there's this bit reservoir or something. I don't know. There's some reason I was looking

01:12:15   into it why the lame encoder is just single threaded.

01:12:20   Why it's lame?

01:12:21   Yeah.

01:12:22   Because any compression scheme, the data depends on the data that comes both before and after it.

01:12:28   it so it's not easy to break it up into chunks because the chunks are related to each other.

01:12:33   And the video encoders are so insanely CPU intensive that I would imagine they were

01:12:40   designed from the very beginning to be more parallel-friendly.

01:12:44   But they have the same thing. Video codecs have the thing where the current frame depends

01:12:48   on the past frame and the future frame. Obviously these are parallelizable.

01:12:52   But there's blocks. There's the B frame or something and then there's a block and you can

01:12:56   you can pass one block to a different thread and--

01:12:59   - Yeah, like it's parallelizable,

01:13:00   but it's not as simple as something like,

01:13:02   you know, just chop the data up into pieces,

01:13:04   have those pieces process independently,

01:13:06   reassemble the results,

01:13:07   which would be like strict linear parallelization.

01:13:10   - Right, exactly.

01:13:11   But yeah, I don't know.

01:13:13   I think what concerns me about this 12 core

01:13:17   is that, let me see, I wonder if we can get,

01:13:19   let me pull up a comparison between the,

01:13:23   like the single threaded tests

01:13:25   of this versus my current 3.33 GHz, two generations old Xeon,

01:13:31   this might be slower in certain things.

01:13:33   Because I just have that raw clock speed advantage.

01:13:35   Who knows?

01:13:35   Anyway, I'll do that after the show.

01:13:37   But this is very interesting.

01:13:39   Or clock speed.

01:13:41   This is very interesting, though, that this tells us

01:13:44   quite a lot of new information.

01:13:45   That I think most people are like, oh, good,

01:13:46   the new Mac Pro is faster.

01:13:48   But if you look, this announces details about the Xeon.

01:13:51   It confirms certain percentage improvements

01:13:55   the previous Zeons. So this is very interesting to see.

01:14:00   So on a wildly unrelated note, Sam the Geek in the chat was asking how you and Marco you

01:14:04   and I met. And then I said it's a long and mostly uninteresting story. And then Simon

01:14:11   Kao, I said, and John Siracusa will tear apart why the friendship is not really that great.

01:14:16   Which I thought was pretty awesome. I don't feel like we should tell the story because

01:14:21   I think I'd rather watch all our friends in the chat just invent answers.

01:14:26   It's probably more interesting than the real story.

01:14:28   Oh, it's so much more interesting than the real story.