Upgrade - 168: Hail Hydrant

Episode Date: November 20, 2017

John Siracusa joins Jason to discuss the possibilities of an iMac with an A10 processor inside, the delay of the HomePod, whether Apple understands the concerns of professional Mac users, the return of Twitterrific for the Mac, and the proper way to refer to keyboard shortcuts.

from relay fm this is upgrade brought to you this week by fresh books encapsula and app optics i am one of your hosts for upgrade jason snell mike hurley obviously not here because he usually does the intro but he's not here. He is on assignment. And so instead, I had to get a replacement for Mike. And I'm happy to say joining me to talk about things on Upgrade This Week is John Syracusa. Welcome back. Hello.

This feels weird. Podcasting in the middle of the day. What's going on? I know you have a strict only podcasting after dark rule that you're breaking. Well, it's Thanksgiving week. Everything is topsy-turvy. That's right. Well, I'm like a mogwai.

No feeding after midnight, no water, no podcasting in the day. Bad things happen. Oh, well, get ready, everybody, because bad things are going to happen now, I guess. I don't know what those things are, but nobody cares about that, John, because it's time for Hashtag Snell Talk this week. A very special question for you from me which is from listener mark who wrote in to say john what is your favorite fictional car it seems like a softball but it's not i thought about it for a long time and i should be easy for me to come up with

favorites for almost anything and i like cars so surely i have a favorite fictional car but i really really don't so i had to try to come up with one try to think all right when i think of one now uh and i don't know why i went to movies although i have to tell you the first thing that came to mind when just considering what favorite cars might be was kit from night rider i think kit from night rider looms largest as the fictional car that was in my life the most because I watched Knight Rider when I was a kid. It's not my favorite car, though. I never was going to pick it, but when I just said, let's think of fictional cars, that's what came up. That and Herbie the Love Bug, of all things, right?

Also not my favorite fictional car, but this came to mind. So I had to dig deep. I have an answer that is not particularly satisfactory. It's not a terrible answer, but it only it's just it's what i'm coming up with if pressed i'm sure there's a better answer out there that's just not occurring to me but what i've got right now is the spinner from blade runner do you know what i'm talking about a flying car yeah that's right uh it is a it is various times a model and a full-size thing on a crane that is concealed with smoke uh at no point is it cg

because they didn't have cg back then but it is very cool looking and you know the car leaving and arriving and shots from outside into the car through a rain spattered windshields and such um make up a lot of the atmosphere of Blade Runner. And Blade Runner is one of my favorite movies. And not to spoil too much, but there are also flying cars in the new Blade Runner movie. But anyway, I'm picking the original Blade Runner, which I think is an iconic sci-fi car.

And even though we don't see it do much carring kind of stuff other than flying up and down, that's what I've got. All right. The two that came to mind for me uh were the delorean from back to the future yeah i wouldn't pick that now would you not pick it because the delorean as a car i tried to explain this when we were doing our back to the future commentary uh track for the incomparable members that i feel like i have to explain to younger audiences that the delorean in Back to the Future is not cool.

It is a joke. It is a joke that they're using a DeLorean. And now it's like, oh, man, that cool time machine car. And it's like, no, no, no. It's a punchline because nobody wanted a DeLorean. That's not why. And I take slight exception to that. DeLorean was rare and exotic.

If you're a car person, you knew it was not a good car. exception to that delorean was rare and exotic if you're a car person you knew it was not a good car but if you were not a car person which i think what they were going for in the uh in the back to the future movie was that most people are not car people have no idea what a delorean is other than that it is a rare car that they've never seen and that it has weird doors and it's basically exotic well i don't know because it was also john delorean they went bankrupt and he went to jail nobody knows that but car people oh no no that's not true because i'm not a car person i was just a kid in 1985 and i totally knew that and that was that moment where he says a delorean where i was like

oh it's a joke point and laugh at the silly car i think i think we now need the the oral history of back in the future and talk to you who wrote it would zemeckis write it who wrote the future he probably bob gale and rob and robert zemeckis write it? Who wrote Back to the Future? He probably, Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis both, maybe? Anyway, we'll have to see what they intended with that joke, but no, that's not why I didn't pick it. Well, partly because I am a car guy and it's not a good car, but it's different than picking, okay,

not the DeLorean, but the DeLorean from Back to the Future. I think it's fine, but, you know, it's, it never seemed like a cool car to me. It seemed like a cool prop in a movie that did stuff, but I never said, man, it would be great if I had a DeLorean with Mr. Fusion than the people. A lot of people now would say, in the world of the movie, I wouldn't want that car. But outside the world of the movie, as an artifact from Back to the Future, which is a movie that I love, I would love to have one of those cars. I also don't fall into that category, but I can understand that more. It's interesting how you define favorite.

This is how we do robot or not. It's all how you define it. So I will say the other one that I thought of, I didn't make a pick because the question wasn't for me. The other one I thought of was the Batmobile. Yeah. And I was actually thinking of kind of like the Adam west batmobile but also other batmobiles those are fun fictional cars but i think the flying flying car from blade runner is a good one that's a good one uh and the only other one that came to mind i hope that i'm getting this right there was a movie i gotta look it up on imdb called the wraith i believe uh that would show on crappy television late at night uh-huh from 1986 uh i think that's what it's called i don't know there's

a movie with the name very similar to that that i may or may not be able to remember at this point uh and it had a car in it that would appear at various times and speed by and it was like it was it was like a regular car that they just put a bunch of body cladding yeah i see it cool i got i got a link i put it in the chat room i'll put it in the show notes yeah and it definitely seemed cool in the movie because the whole deal was that this thing would just show up and speed by and its windows were all blacked out and it was mysterious and futurey and stuff like that but i also wouldn't pick that the spinner spinner is my pick of the ones that i could think got it but i continue to

believe that there is a car that i would pick over that that i just am not able to think of well it is had this been an epic snell talk so thank you to mark for your question um we have some follow-up uh i want to mention this is this is where we sell products so sorry about that but the people have asked for the upgrade t-shirt and the upgrade hoodie they you know it's a limited run we do it for a few weeks and then it goes away again for a while i just wanted to mention the links will be in the show notes the upgrade hoodie is available now from cotton bureau and the upgrade t-shirt is available now from cotton bureau and from teespring you can check if you're in europe the shipping may be cheaper from teespring. Cotton Bureau will have the fancy black on black version as well as there's a gray version and I think a red version.

And there's a six-color shirt available too. So we'll put links to all of that in the show notes. But if you would like to buy a t-shirt or one of our fabulous upgrade your wardrobe hoodies with the secret message on the inside, you can do that now through early December. I think it's December 3rd is the deadline for most of it. So check that out if you are needing a podcast t-shirt. Also, I wanted to mention another thing that's ending shortly, which is the AppCamp for Girls Indiegogo campaign is ending in a couple of days. They're trying to expand to three more cities by 2020 they have raised more than fifty thousand dollars which is awesome they were hoping to raise seventy five thousand dollars so if i think this is a great uh a great campaign for a great cause i

know john you've uh you guys have supported on atp as well and uh they've got a couple more days if people haven't supported them to give them a shot in the arm yeah you should read their blog too they have a blog on each i think it's each day they're uh having like an interview with someone who supports app camp asking them why they support it so if you're wondering why you might want to give money to these people um read the blog for a little bit read the various testimonials of the people who uh support the cause yeah it's pretty awesome uh so definitely check it out but we will put a link in the show notes to the app camp 2020 indiegogo campaign i had a couple quick follow-up items about things that mike and i have talked about a while that i just wanted to throw in here one is um about the ipad pro because you know mike and i talk about that a lot and there was a story this

week where satya nadela was in india i And at one point, he just walked past some journalists who were using iPads and said, get a real computer. I mean, I guess he's joking, but it's also kind of like a bully move or something. I don't know. And that prompted me, that actually happened like the same day that Apple released this commercial on YouTube. It's not a YouTube commercial. It's like an actual television commercial, but I see it on YouTube called What's a Computer, which shows a girl using her iPad for all these things. And at the end, she's asked, what kind of computer is that? And she says, what's a computer? Because it's not a computer, it's an iPad. And that prompted me to write a post where I was basically like mad at Satya Nadella a little bit because, you know, it's all in how you use these things. know my ipad pro is a real

computer that gives me some amazing flexibility in terms of using it like a laptop or putting it in a stand and using it kind of like an iMac or using a flip out keyboard in the case of the smart keyboard or just having it with no keyboard at all and it's a pure tablet and I wrote a a little post about it i kind of feel like it's a i was reminded of this when i saw like a video of like look at satchin adela when he was a young man working at microsoft that it is a an old person thing to say like that he is still uh you know fighting the last war or still in a mac versus pc apple microsoft mindset that is causing him to reflexively put down his quote-unquote competitors hardware get a real computer you shouldn't have an ipad and i know apple and microsoft are still competitive in that area because they both make laptops and tablet-y type things and in fact more competitive now than they were then because now

they're both hardware and software top to bottom, right? But it still strikes me as a conflict that only old people care about, as a comparison that most people don't care about, especially since his Microsoft has been the Microsoft that is expanding into, you know, being friendlier to Linux and working on cloud computing and having their office applications on all platforms including ios but they may have been writing in microsoft word on those ipads when he said get a real computer right but he can't he can't help it he's a he's an old man like us he he remembers the old wars and he'll never forget yeah just

come on let them as long as they're using microsoft uh office and uh and one drive so it was a tablet on every coffee table running microsoft software was that it yeah sure that's slightly wrong i'm sure that's a don't don't put it too close to the coffee though you might spill it and ruin your technology um i wanted to so on atp you've been talking about uh about the iphone 10 the last couple of weeks. And I'm assuming that almost everybody who listens knows that you're on it. The accidental tech podcast every week with, uh, with Marco Arment and Casey Liss. Um, is there, I was wondering if there was more to say about this. I imagine you'll follow up. I know you're, it's your wife's phone. So

that leaves you in this interesting position where you have to sort of like get some stolen moments with your wife's iphone so that you can talk about it but i was wondering if you have has anything popped up in in ongoing use of uh that either you or your wife have had with a phone that is has struck you or is it just sort of like settled in now that this is just what an iphone 10 is i still solicit feedback from her occasionally she said she's got a few uh face id failures still so i think she's still adjusting to what you have to do with yourself to make face id work and you know as i said on atp in the same way that we all have had to adjust what we do with ourselves to make touch ID work. And,

you know, eventually we all preemptively recognize the scenarios where it doesn't work. Like if we just washed our hands, like just type in your code, it's not gonna, it's not gonna go. Although,

um, as I've said in the past, if you train your phone on your wet finger, you can actually have some success with unlocking it. Like train, train it on your wet thumb as a separate finger from your regular thumb um you can have some success there but most of us i think either just you know try to dry our hands off or just go right for a touch anyway face id has the same thing so she continues uh to make adjustments in that area although i i will say getting out of

the shower and flipping open my iphone i had that moment every time where i'm like oh my god it just unlocked every time yeah it's a different it's a different set you get so used to one set of constraints that you know that's trading them for a different set is you know it's it's bad when it doesn't work in a scenario where it might have worked but the just the opposite like it seems amazing wow this is a modern technology i can get out of the shower and unlock my phone yeah but i was walking down second street the other day in San Francisco because I was visiting an old friend, and the sun was right behind me. It was like in that perfect position where it's shining right over my head and down onto the phone, and I had my first failure

that those people who were reviewing the iPhone X the first week were reporting about, oh, in certain conditions in bright sunlight, it fails. I actually had my first one of those. I'd been using it for weeks, and that was the first time i'd experienced it and i get the feeling like you've really got to have the right conditions for it to sort of swamp the sensor where it just can't see your face but um that was my first time i would like to see a i heard a lot of different reports of that i would like to see a scientific test showing like with an ir camera like some people using camcorders or other you know a good camera that is sensitive to ir to show that actually is what's the problem like

there's so much ir coming from the sun that the dots aren't visible essentially or if it just so happens that uh because of the position of the sun you squint or the phone is too close or too far or whatever and then people are associating with the bright sunlight because it makes sense so um the fact that it took you this long to come up with it could be just you're never the sun hasn't been bright enough because it's always foggy in san francisco i don't know yeah but i'm always i'm always wary of these sort of like uh you know strange tales of face id working or not working this is a thing we can test like yeah we can see those ir dots and we can see look at this person's face i can't even see the dots because there's just too much IR from the sun.

Or if that can never be reproduced, then it just may be something else. I also wanted to point people to a post that Dan Provost made just today from Studio Neat about lens switching on the iPhone X. And it turns out basically he's trying to figure out when the iPhones switch because the iPhone 7 Plus in low light conditions will opt for a digitally zoomed image from the 1X camera over the 2 the 1X digitally zoomed is actually going to give you a higher quality picture than the 2X in those very specific conditions. And it will switch you over even without you knowing. And basically what he found is that the iPhone X is better in low light conditions in the 2X camera. And so it has to go down even darker for it to switch over. But he made a cool video where he put the two phones in the glyph of course because studio neat and i thought that was a nice little tidbit speaking of people doing tests and actually finding out what happens i know right

we can we can theorize all we want but somebody could actually test it out and and see if only i had infrared camera i like how a lot of people found their old like i actually i actually do have one somewhere their old camera that has a night mode i actually i think my old sony camera has this too where it's the night mode is essentially an infrared mode and then you could actually like tape over the infrared blaster and then and then go into a dark place and actually take shots of uh of the the face id stuff but so everybody's pulling out their old cameras their old digital it looks like it's standard def instead of high def a better way it might be to take like a modern high def home security camera a lot of those have

modes and at least then you'll get an hd picture out of it and oh i wanted to mention steve trotten smith the person who likes to go through all sorts of code dumps and other things. And he's, he's hacking through operating systems and firmware and file formats. And he had a thread on Twitter that I thought was a really great where he found that, um, the portrait mode. So in iPhone eight and 10, eight plus and 10, if you do portrait mode, you get those portrait lighting effects um and they're uh they're editable you can actually edit them later you can edit them on the desktop on photos on high sierra because it also supports editing those um those depth modes later and what steve

troughton smith found out is that if you take those shots on iPhone 7 plus in iOS 11, where it's using the he format, the container format, um, to put the metadata in there and all of that, he actually was able to edit the metadata of an image shot on the iPhone 7 plus and iOS 11 and make it work as a portrait mode picture. Um, which interesting, because it suggests that for some reason, whether it's just for marketing reasons, or whether there were there was some lack of confidence in the result could be either. I don't want to say just definitively that it's a marketing constraint. But you can actually change those pictures shot on iPhone seven plus with 11.

I think they have to be on 11 because they have to have the depth data baked into the file format instead of just a flat file. It will work. And so theoretically, somebody could write a script that takes iPhone 7 Plus iOS 11 pictures and modifies them so that they can use a depth effect after the fact which is uh it's kind of cool and interesting i like that he did that i don't necessarily like the idea that apple may have hobbled that feature on the iphone 7 plus so they could sell new phones if that's the case well there's a grand tradition of uh you know doing that making features exclusive to a new product to make it more attractive and it's always always the game of people, depending on what your attitude is towards Apple, that they're sneaky and are always trying to get one over on you. That literally everything that can only be done on a new device is because Apple is sneaky and really it could be done on the old device.

And then the opposite of saying Apple would never do that. And the truth is somewhere in the middle, but more towards Apple tends not to do that, except in a few cases. And a few cases, it's like they just don't have enough to give a good value proposition to the new product. And even when it seems clear that they are doing it just to make the new product, to differentiate the new product from the old, there's usually a kernel of truth to the technical explanation. There's usually a kernel of truth to the technical explanation. So in this case, it's like, oh, the old phones would be too slow to capture to show the portrait effect in real time, rather. You know, like when you're taking the picture, you can see the effect and see which one. And the old phones can't do that.

They're not quite fast enough. That could be true. I don't know. Someone can unlock it and try it and see what it's like. Bottom line is, I think we all have to accept that even if it was was technically possible there's a cost to making it work on the older phones and sometimes if you're going to pick one or two features that are used to differentiate your newer products make it be like animated emoji and some slightly frilly portrait effects and that's fine that's much better than you know locking out a quarter of your battery capacity in a tesla right or something like that right like how would you feel if you got your new iphone

and it had a bigger battery uh than you thought but apple just wouldn't ever let you see the last 25 of capacity like that would be much worse so i'm i'm comfortable living with both the uncertainty and i would also be comfortable living with apple saying actually we made those for the iphone 10 because we need to differentiate our products and actually would have been some extra work to make them work on the older phones. I like the idea that somebody, some enterprising person can come up with a script to where you take your, you know, you make a smart, a smart album in photos with your iPhone 7 plus shots and drag them out and run the, know and have and process them and now

they look like their iphone 8 plus or 10 shots and you get those features that's cool that's fun that's a fun thing that you get from poking around in the metadata format so third-party opportunity but it would change the capture experience because if you can't see it in real time the process would be take the picture and then go to photos yeah and then bring up the little wheel and then pick the one you want and then go back to the camera and it's obviously much nicer to do it in the tent all at once yeah take the picture with the depth effect on and then capture that data and then modify it and all of that yeah um many more things to talk about but let me take a break and talk about one of our sponsors this episode of upgrade brought to

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that. Now, FreshBooks has more than 10 million users, but they managed to stay pretty small. They got the small giant title on Forbes annual list of the best small companies. If you're listening to this and not yet using FreshBooks, you can try it. There's an unrestricted 30-day free trial for listeners of Upgrade. No credit card required. Go to freshbooks.com slash upgrade. Enter upgrade in the how did you hear about us section. They'll know that we sent you and they will give you a 30-day free trial. Thank you, FreshBooks, for supporting Upgrade. So, there was a report over the weekend from a bunch of different sources. Steve Troughton Smith, again, was in this a guy named jonathan levin i saw uh i saw guillaume rambo was involved at some point with at least tweeting about it nine to five mac wrote

a story about it and then a bunch of other people picked it up from there which is this idea that there will be an a10 processor so that's the processor inside the ip 7, that there will be an A10 processor inside the iMac Pro when it ships, maybe by the end of this year. So full-on iPhone processor running inside a Mac. And the report suggests that there's an operating system called BridgeOS that will actually boot the computer and then bridge os which is running on the a10 hands off the you know the efi firmware stuff to boot on the intel processor so like you're the gatekeeper of this mac is actually an iphone processor what do you think about this well if you're going to put another fairly powerful CPU in a computer, it's great to put it in one where the price starts at like five grand.

Isn't that what the iMac Pro starts at? It's very expensive. So no real concern about, oh, how much does it cost? And honestly, I'm not sure how much an A10 costs, but I doubt it's even close to what the Intel CPU costs, just because it is, in many in many respects apple's ip so they don't have to pay another company for all of their id they do have to pay for the arm license and making it for more than a year so presumably the cost of manufacturers is per unit is down and

it's small it's just it's just plain small a lot of silicon is just like how big is the chip because you only get a certain number on the wafer and the fabs are expensive and so it's it's small so um it kind of makes sense that we've already got uh the arm chip in uh the macbook pros and stuff with a touch bar that's running the touch bar screen with the little you know miniature version of ios it's kind of funny now we always say that it's like a a miniature version of ios running on these chips whereas back in the day we used to say the phones are running a miniature version of mac os 10 right it's all the same thing it's all darwin that kernel and like various degrees of being stripped down same thing with the phone right not the phone the watch uh these are all it may seem like apple has a lot of operating systems

but these are all derived from the same family tree and they're just you know various specializations of it um anyway as for this being in the iMac pro it makes some sense to me uh like the the idea of continuing to some people would say continuing to lock down the Mac and I was just like continuing to try to make the Mac more secure make it follow in the footsteps of iOS devices which do much more to verify that the code they're actually running is the code that Apple expects them to run. That's why it gets increasingly hard to jailbreak them and to get in. You know, that's why it's hard to for law enforcement to get into someone's phone. Like it's it's meant to be secure.

And the best way Apple has to enable that security is to control as much as they can from you know from the boot process from this thing is completely turned off to it is now running they want to control aspects of that um why does it need to be an a10 if all it's doing is like verifying that the thing it's about to boot is what it expects it to be right and just you know using all the the expertise and technology that they've perfected over the years for the iphone on the mac a10 seems like overkill uh if on the other hand it is doing other important things while the computer is running like for example being there to listen for a hoi telephone just another thing that this uh this investigation has essentially revealed that is definitely a thing that makes some sense i mean do you need an a10 to listen for a hoi telephone

probably not i think they do that on the little uh m7 processor and you know they have like a little processor that just wakes up when it hears a hoi telephone or whatever um but uh the big one is face id which as far as everyone knows the imac pro does not have but presumably this is not the one and only iMac Pro that will ever be created. And if you wanted to make another iMac Pro in 8 to 12 months that has Face ID, that A10 sitting in there might be more help. Or maybe not, because this is the thing with the A10. And a lot of people think once you have that processor in there, it's like having an iPhone inside your Mac. It really depends on what that processor is connected to.

So one of the questions that I see here in the notes is, what about the iOS simulator? Developers who write their applications on their Mac to be deployed on iPhones and iPads have a simulator in the development tools that will run their application in a little virtual ios device on their screen and when that happens as you know up until today what happens is it compiles their code not for an arm processor on a phone but it compiles it for the x86 processor on their mac and then it runs natively in x86 on their mac and that used to be way faster than ios devices but nowadays depending on how how things are implemented it can actually be slower especially if like the open gl implementation is not efficient our friend james thompson said that the main reason i think that his about screen that's got the car game in

it um the main reason that that is in the mac version is because he needed to test it on the mac version because he couldn't like he can't test it in the simulator in ios because i i don't want to get it wrong but that was my understanding it's like the simulator in ios it he can't do it because there's too slow. Yeah, and there were some problems with it because they need to map from the world of Metal and OpenGL ES on the iOS devices to the world of the crappy old OpenGL implementation on the Mac, and sometimes that mapping is not done well or is entirely disabled because there's a bug in it

and it falls back to software mode and it just becomes unusually slow. But anyway, all this is to say that you don't need an ARM processor to run the simulator, but if you had one, wouldn't it be great? We can compile our applications down to the actual native ARM code for the A10 in this case and run it in the quote unquote simulator that's not really simulating. It's just really running it.

For that to happen, that A10 would have to be an active participant in the running of the system. It would have to have access to the program that's in memory and be able to influence what is displayed on the screen and so on and so forth that is mostly in conflict with its rumored role as the security gatekeeper for the boot process and also envisions a much more complicated system where two cpus of different architectures have equal influence over actual running applications that display things on the screen so with the limited information that's been revealed so far it seems unlikely to me that the a10 or whatever is inside there will be hooked up in such a way

that it can run applications and display them on the screen uh but who knows because like the thing that runs the touch bar that little tiny arm processor it has its own little screen to display things on so yeah like who knows what apple has planned for this in there but if it really isn't a10 i would have to think that their plans extend farther than verifying the security of everything before kicking off the boot process because that seems like an awful waste of computing resources the rest of the time the rest of the time the a10 is like ho hum good i did such a good job on boot i'll just i'll just power down here and i'll just hang out well yeah my gut feeling is that this is obviously going to do more over time like at least that's apple's intent but maybe not in the imac pro if if that makes any sense that i think apple says look we know we have these

these chips that we designed we know how great they are it's an advantage for us no pc is going to have this so we can use it to make the mac better to use our knowledge glean from building all of these other products to make the mac better without just making a mac that runs entirely on uh an a10 or an a11 necessarily um but maybe the first one is let's just have it do let's stick it in there and see what happens let's try these new things let's try the bridge os let's do the you know the siri kickoff listening stuff that max currently can't do maybe some other security stuff is baked in there but it's like let's just pick a few things and try it out and see and maybe you know maybe that's all that'll be above the waterline for the iMac Pro but they're

already you know planning a rollout that would do more over time um you know there was a Mark German report back in February I want to say where he talked about this like hybrid Mac that sounded and he was I think it was in a laptop context but it was something that he was reporting that suggested that was like low laptops could use it in a low power mode where it would like the the arm chip would be able to like check your email in the background and things like that which seem like you were saying that's a lot of weird kind of handoff and integration where you've got two processors that are that are running the same system that seems pretty bizarre but i could imagine apple saying you know once we've got this thing in there we can start to build the mac to be an operating

system that it takes advantage of this hybrid design instead of just running on the intel processor but you know it's not gonna you know the mac iMac pro would be like a first or arguably because of the touch bar, a second iteration on probably a long path to getting more of those features visible. It's like the starting point. Yeah. And also, I'm not entirely, again, without knowing how this is connected, like how it's connected hardware-wise in the system, what role does it play if you were to draw a block

diagram of this entire system? It's not even clear to me that it's what's powering the hoy telephone because i feel like an imac pro has cpu to spare to listen for like there's not a feature that you require an arm processor just because the hoy telephone came on ios devices first i'm sorry if i'm activating everybody's phones just because they came out on on phones first like oh now they're getting a 10 now they can do a hoy telephone the iMac pro is gonna have monster processors in it there's no reason you need to do a hoy telephone on a coprocessor it's just fun it'll work fine on the umpteen core xeon that is in there right so I

don't you know just because someone discovered that a hoy telephone is in there doesn't mean that it relies on the a10 processor maybe it could maybe there's some code sharing that they get away with that but it doesn't have to and so I'm left continuing to wonder what the a10 uh might be used for and really it really depends on how it's hooked up and as for the hybrid thing the i think i mentioned this on a past atp the thing that comes to my mind that actually also i believe is a hybrid x86 arm system that does other stuff with the arm cpu while the system is ostensibly asleep is the playstation 4 and it was designed this way with the same type of arrangement oh when you're using your playstation 4 we're using an x86 cpu and a really big gpu and you're playing your games

and stuff but when you put it into quote-unquote rest mode then we shut all that stuff down but there's another little processor off to the side that takes very little power and that does stuff when your system is basically off like the fan is not running anymore like maybe the light is pulsing on or whatever but it makes no noise and you think it's off this is the rest mode the playstation 4 has but because there's another processor available actually we can do stuff like download our software updates for your games like these multi-gigabyte patches to games so that when next morning when you go to play your game oh we've already downloaded that update for you in your sleep or maybe we've updated your entire operating system and rebooted the thing for you i've heard at various times that this hybrid arrangement was more troublesome than they had

expected and actually they merely run the x86 cpu in low power mode to get the job done but uh which maybe speaks to how difficult it is to have two different uh cpus and two different architectures sharing resources particularly the disk uh but maybe also memory uh and have that work in a seamless way uh but either way it shows that someone else had the same idea that uh i have a big hot cpu which the imac pro will have to use when you're really using it and i have a wimpy cool cpu to do stuff when you're offline but the architecture difference really makes me wonder what's going on there this is also the kind of thing where Apple doesn't is probably not going to come out and tell you like there's no WWDC session let me tell you how we implemented this uh

hybrid cpu arrangement unless it unless it's a developer facing API uh and maybe in that session someone will sit will brag about how they did it but otherwise it's just going to be people looking at how the things are connected and clever people like steve drought and smith and guillermo rambo figuring it out for us and telling us how is that connected to everything else and how can we work together to do something cool with it yeah i mean they there instantly you start to think about things like oh if they built a touchscreen mac that also had that could you know could you also run ios apps or could you reboot into ios or something like that it's like well maybe but that's super weird that's a hell of a waste of an iMac with an with no touchscreen on it by the way well no that's

what i was thinking is oh man if this if the imac pro is a touchscreen imac that runs ios too then i'm i'm i'm in but that's not happening you don't want people touch putting their grimy fingers on your 5k display probably not probably only when only when it's tilted beyond a certain angle it's a threshold of fingerprint acceptability vertical no touch no it starts tilting it starts tilting you're like at a certain point you're like all right you can touch the screen now it's like the what is it the surface studio the microsoft thing i'm not gonna let anybody touch my mac pro with me what if it was leaning really far down like almost flat yeah sure no i i think i'm gonna i'm gonna write an article at some point i i did the math a while ago about like the various screen sizes and all of that. And I, I, I totally would be into a, uh, a Microsoft, uh, surface

studio kind of thing running iOS. I, I, I, I want Apple to do that, um, sooner rather than later. I don't know if they will. I think that job one is to get the iPad sales growing, which they're starting to do. Um, but I would be be really i'd be super intrigued by a you know basically like desktop ish uh ios device um but i actually saw was it steven sanofsky i saw somebody uh interesting on twitter say that um you know one of apple's next steps may be not to make a weird hybrid mac thingy that is ios and mac but to just embrace uh the laptop form factor and just make an ios laptop like it's not an ipad with a case just like no this is a a little laptop that runs ios and it looks like the macbook but it's just ios and and you can't take the keyboard off

and enjoy like and and just see what would happen because people might love that or they might hate it i don't know yeah no i think that is a based on how they've been going that seems like a logical way station before you get to the 27 inch ipad pro right before you get to the ipad that is plugged in all the time essentially right the the the service because everybody's using their ipads including you as little crappy laptops with a bad hinge essentially like you have to find some way to prop up this floppy little keyboard and and you know like your support this was just and you have those logitech cases to sort of clamp onto the bottom of your ipad and make it into a little laptop it's like just apple just weld the suckers together give give me an ipad with a keyboard

attached to it it's a form factor we all know and love. It'll work great. And assuming they get their keyboard issues worked out, it should be so much better than even the best Logitech little clampy thing that turns your iPad into a keyboard. Because people, that's not a speculative use case. People are doing that today. I use my iPad as a laptop all the time.

I have the bridge keyboard, which has got a little clampy thing, and you just kind of drop it in and it's a laptop and then you pull it out and it's a tablet again. And if Apple could do that, if Apple could do that, the problem there is that

Microsoft has done that and a bunch of other companies have done convertibles and there are lots of ergonomic issues with it and I can see why Apple might not want to do that. But that's fine.

Just make it a laptop and see because an iPad in laptop mode is pretty great and i think people would like it yeah and it can be kind of convertible you don't have to tear the keyboard off like you don't have to go the full just fold it fold it back fold it back yeah exactly right totally do that i i think that's that's the next thing i want to see uh from ios honestly is i want some i want a weird ios device i want a not ainoff watch. The E-Mate running iOS. Right?

I mean, I kind of do. The E-Mate is actually a great analog, which is like, oh, wait a second. I thought this was just these little handheld things and you made a laptop out of it. It's like, yeah, I kind of want that. I want a weird iOS device that's not an Apple TV, not a watch, not some sort of spinoff device that runs a version of iOS. But like, no, this is running apps. It's not an iPad.

It's not an iPhone. It's this thing. And I would love for them to do that. I think that that's interesting questioning for Apple about what do you, sometimes I think Apple doesn't want to make any product unless it's going to be a hit. So like, they don't want to make a weird product that people might not like, like, well, no, if everybody isn't going to love it, then we won't want to make a weird product that people might not like like well no if everybody isn't going to love it then we don't want to do it um but at some point you want to have a product line right you want to have well you can get the macbook or the 13 inch macbook pro or the 15 inch at some point it's like yeah okay you've got the ipad pro and the ipad you've got this thing whatever it is you've got the you know you and take your pick slide it right in there i would love to see that

i know a lot of current mac laptop users who would love the key travel on the e-made i want to talk about laptop designs a little bit uh in a little while but first i wanted to mention another thing that happened last week which is that the home pod got delayed um this is one of those and i saw a bunch of people saying oh this is really surprising um and my reaction was no i i feel like apple introduces hardware in june and says it'll ship at the end of the year did we not not all those of us who observe apple go maybe maybe exactly like it was what they did was announce the thing that everybody else already knew yeah and so so when they did that i mean there are legitimate questions about why you announce

it there other than the fact that the the rumors were swirling. Like, did they need to announce it there? There was no developer story. I have a theory that they originally intended for there to be a developer story, and then they didn't have it ready. And so they didn't have a developer story. I'm starting to believe that way more now because I think iOS 11.2 has SiriKit for HomePod in it, which is not something they talked about in June, that there would be any kind of tie-in between SiriKit and apps running on iPhone and HomePod. And yet it seems to be happening now. it seems to be happening now. So that makes me wonder if like some of the delay here may be that the software and the, and this developer story, whether they changed course or whether it was always just kind of lagging and they were hoping to get it back up to speed. But I think it's arguable.

Like, did they really need to introduce it? Because it wasn't ready. All they were doing with the press was having them listen to the speakers. You couldn't interact with it in any way. Anytime Apple announces hardware and says it's going to be months before it's ready you for me i immediately go oh well if it's ready by then because you know when it's that far out there's just so many things that could go wrong well the tradition is that uh if they show hardware that early that the thing that's going to make it not ship is that the

software is not ready like this is the traditional apple way like oh the hardware actually is ready because the hardware team uh you know has their stuff together and they have a more limited domain but the software is the more difficult thing and yeah so when they only showed the home pod with music it's it was so clear even apple itself that this is not the full story of this product despite the fact that all we can show you is music in their brief presentation they alluded to non-music uses like will we be able to talk to the homebot oh yes of course you'll be able to talk to your homebot not today obviously like don't talk to it now it won't hear you but you know eventually you will and it's like what will i be able to say to the homepod will it be like a hoi telephone sorry i'm activating everybody's

things today will it be like the google home And Apple was not sharing anything about that. And so we were left to speculate. But it was clear that this was not iPod Hi-Fi Mark II, right? That you were going to be able to talk to this. It was cylindrical. And we all know if it's cylindrical, you can talk to it. That's the rule of the Internet of Things as established by Amazon. That's what I tell my fire hydrant outside my house every day.

You say, fire hydrant, what's the weather today? and it just doesn't answer hail hydrant i say that's the activation code for a very controversial plot development so yeah um and why didn't they demonstrate it like a feature that they said this thing is going to have but they can't tell us anything about it and they're not going to demonstrate it because the software is not ready right so i'm assuming that the software still isn't ready and that's why the uh yeah what do you call it is it i can't remember the name home pod there you go is being delayed until next year and it's fine like i'm i'm in no hurry like here's the thing when they say and it will be shipping in december it's like why why even

bother saying that even if you couldn't hit that date you've missed the holidays so why even bother like for bragging rights to for like participation medal we technically shipped on december 24 it doesn't matter you're missing the holidays if you're not shipping hardware in like october essentially so the imac pro can ship it on december 28th and it's fine it's not a big stocking stuffer exactly right but the home pod you could see that people were probably thinking oh that might be a great thing to put under the tree and uh that's not going to happen now i do wonder if there are home pods you know built and ready to go and it's all a software issue just like how a bunch of iphone 10s immediately wanted to do a software update like they got built so long ago they need a software update now they were ready to go um but that the software is just not

is not there i agree with you i think it's more likely that it's a it's a software issue than a hardware issue just because apple tends to be really solid with the hardware um and this is a complex new product that's got a lot of software in it and they just made a new introduction with the home kit stuff that was not there before so that's another piece of the puzzle that maybe i've seen a couple analysts say the state of the market has changed enough in the last six months that it's also possible that apple's decided to recalibrate the product a little bit and change a little bit about how it works i'm not sure if i believe that or not so much what can they change at this point

it's written by people who don't understand what goes into making a product like they can change the software they can change the software a little bit but i i think the problem is is that by the time it takes to make the change to take to catch up to the last six months another six months will have passed and you can at some point you just gotta ship it just get it out there and then if you can do some software updates later uh do them but but there's no doubt that whatever is going on like they would have sold as many as they could have made i think for the holidays and so this is a big thing in just in in terms of saying no we can't we can't do it spend essentially spend your stocking stuff or money your your 450 speaker money somewhere else or don't spend it at all but you can't spend it

with us because we can't do it but they said that in september that's that's the thing like when they made this announcement in september they were announcing we can't you can't buy this for christmas this year like even with their ship date if when they say shipping in december it's staying to the entire world so why so why announce it like i'm saying the entire world you will not be able to get this for christmas for anybody unless you are incredibly lucky but probably like you won't be able to get this for Christmas for anybody unless you are incredibly lucky, but probably you won't be able to. So they pre-announced their failure to make the holiday season, right? But why announce it at all? I think that announcing it was the right move because at that point,

it was an open secret that they were doing something like this, or it was such a fervent rumor and other competitors were making moves. I think Apple needed to put a placeholder, put a stake inent rumor and other competitors were making moves i think apple needed to put a placeholder but put a stake in the ground and say we are going to enter this market not today uh but as soon as we can and the end of the year date is one of those kind of let's be aggressive and let's look better in press releases because if it was next year across some line and everybody says apple announces a product but it won't even ship till next year whereas if you announce it as december then you get to do this delay later maybe they were aiming for december again and shipping anything in december

doesn't make any sense to me they did the same thing with the imax remember when they announced i'm not the imac pro but a while ago one of the imax was announced to ship in december or something and i think that one also slipped it like, it's an admission of defeat that we are announcing that we have failed to meet this holiday quarter, but it would make no sense to delay it till the next holiday. So we're going to get it out to you as soon as possible. But with the home pod, they just wanted the world to know Apple is entering this market.

So I think it was the right move to announce it. I do agree about the mental boundary of 2018. Cause they, the air power mat power mat is the example, right? They announced the air power mat and the new charging thing for the AirPods. And they're like, this will happen in 2018. And like literally I had this visceral response, which was like, 2018? Are you kidding? But if they had said, well, it's late 2017, I would have been like, okay that's not far this is 2017 that's this year great yeah it's like when you leave work for the holidays and

you say see you next year yeah it's the same yeah uh would uh would you buy one are you interested in this product you've got google home stuff in your house right i'm kind of interested in especially now that some leak has revealed apparently that you can't actually make them work as a stereo pair like one can be left channel one can be right channel well that that would be uh no that's no that's true that's true they told us that that they will you you can pair them they told us you can have more than one of them but but it wasn't clear to me from their announcement whether you can just have more than one of them and they'll figure out how to fill the room that was that was something they knew that they told us that at our at our not a briefing uh listening party in a grove somewhere that i can't admit that it happened

anyway that makes a difference to me because uh i'm not expecting this particular cylinder to be as good a conversation in terms of what can i say and how much do i have to think about saying it based on my experience with siri google home is far superior a far superior conversationalist so sure the main selling points for me uh for the apple thing are is it has ties to apple ecosystem and i have some things in the apple ecosystem so there could be some synergies there for example my photos are uh you know and apple's uh photos thing uh and what else do i have i don't have my calendar there so i can't use that uh but anyway there is some synergy there and the big pitch that they did make was this sounds really good

and google home does not sound good and i don't really have anything that i can talk to to ask it to play music that sounds very good so i might be interested to try one of these as a far superior way to fill a room with music uh at a with with the ease of a voice command unfortunately i subscribe to google play music and i don't subscribe to apple music so i'm not sure this synergy works out for me buying one so i haven't made a hard and fast decision yet most likely i'll read the reviews and see what everyone thinks about it i will probably succumb to my curiosity and buy one but i will also have to try to find a literal physical place in the house to put it because i don't have that much room for cylinders and it's not clear to me whether this

should be in the kitchen dining room area or the living room area or someplace else so i guess i count me as on the fence yeah so my big difference is that I am an Apple Music subscriber and I really like it. Like, I like it. I like the playlists that they make. I, you know, I'm at my desk a lot and working on my Mac. And for all the things that I can complain about, about iTunes, it works pretty well at playing my music uh and and even integrating and letting me switch very easily between my purchased music library

and my apple music streaming library and so i one of my frustrations with the echo is that it doesn't do that and to the point where we have the one sort of centrally located Echo in the kitchen, and I bought the one device Amazon music streaming package for that, which is cheap because it's only on a single device, just so that it has access to every song we can ask it to play. I would prefer to use Apple Music. I think the challenge is that this is a starkly an ecosystem play where Amazon wants you to pay for Amazon's thing, music thing. But I don't want to use Amazon's music thing on my Mac and my iPhone.

I want to use Apple Music. So the great advantage of the HomePod is that it would give us voice control of music using Apple Music, and I wouldn't have to worry about these other services. It does seem a little bit silly to have hardware based on services. It also seems a little bit silly to buy the same service, essentially, multiple times because you have different boxes from different manufacturers. And the nice thing about Sonos is that it does do Apple Music. The problem is that all their voice integration stuff that they've announced doesn't support Apple Music. The problem is that all their voice integration stuff that they've announced doesn't support Apple Music.

It supports Amazon's music service because Amazon doesn't want you to play Apple Music from an Echo for logical reasons. So it's frustrating, all that ecosystem back and forth, but it does make the HomePod more interesting to me just because I've seen how we use the Echo and if it sounded better and it had access to the entire apple music library and all my playlists and all of that you know which

it will it doesn't make it does make it more interesting to me the presence of siri does not excite me as much as it does apple music just because i am an apple music customer when that platform lock-in was so much simpler where it was just i've bought photoshop and microsoft office for the mac and if i switch to windows i have to rebuy that expensive software and that was it and now we're talking about i pay some company far away to give me access to all the world's music that they keep on their servers but i can only play that music through certain pieces of hardware devices that are either made by them or partnered with them but other people will sell me hardware devices that interact with other things that i pay people to store for me on their computers and it's just like this massively distributed huge

world-spanning virtual goods marketplace instead of i bought photoshop for the mac and it cost 600 and if i switched to windows i'd have to buy another cardboard box with photoshop yeah it reminds me of the vhs and beta days which were a long time ago but it's that same thing of like you must choose you must choose but it's so but it's so much more complicated as you just outlined like it's not just software and hardware match there's all these middle players and the things that we're buying are not even things that is like access to the world's music and access to like an arrangement of songs that that we either we established for you or that you've established.

Like you're, you know, my playlists are in Apple music, both the ones I manually made and the cool ones they make for me. And then the music itself is kind of the same for the services, but maybe one thing, one artist that I care about is on one service more than the other are from super into classical or video game music.

That's better represented on this service. And it's just, it's very complicated. It's, it's not as bad as the internet of things, home i think but it's close like there's there are fewer players and it's more well understood what it is that you're buying but uh it's not consumer friendly at all like we we just want we just want access to our stuff and the way that we want it when we want it on the things that we want and but these companies have other plans for us. Yes, they do. Yes, they do.

As consumers, we have the power to reject them, but they know how to get us. You can just keep using your iPod Hi-Fi. That's the question. If you get one of these and you listen to your music on it, have you already stopped using your iPod Hi-Fi? No, I use it. It's plugged in via the aux port. It's plugged into my Mac. So that's where I listen to all of my um music and audio from my

mac is is the ipod hi-fi all right but if you got the home pod would you disconnect that and just talk to your new little pudgy cylinder no no um because this is just all like controlled by my keyboard and stuff on my mac and so it's perfect it's basically a mac speaker i would put if i buy the um the home pod it'll be out in the living room, kitchen, dining area, somewhere out in that. As you know, we have one big room that is the kitchen and the living room and the dining room. It's all one big, long room. And I would put it somewhere in there, like we have the Echo. And that's what it would be for.

So would this be displacing another cylinder, or would this be augmenting? That's a real good question. It might be augmenting, which is then you've got them fighting it out, which is it out which is scary that's right you gotta have them talk to each other it'll be great oh boy uh let's take a break i want to tell you about another sponsor for upgrade this week it's encapsula it helps you delight visitors to your website that's what it does no matter how it's pronounced and it frustrates attackers because of bulletproof security options and a fast content delivery network. Right now, somewhere in the world, a website is being attacked.

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to macworld a couple weeks ago and they said, that sounds like a good column idea, because one of the things I do is I have my story ideas, and every now and then I'm like, that looks like a Macworld idea. I'll save that for the Macworld piece that I write every week. And so I was like, we'll do it next week. And the day I was sitting down to write it, Marco wrote his story on his website, noted blogger Marcoco armand who writes a blog post every so often about how he loves the 15 inch retina macbook pro and considers it the best laptop ever made and his point there is that apple is apple's current line of laptops are not the best laptops ever made they are a regression and my story was basically saying i'm trying to do some analysis of why people are grumpy

about the MacBook line, especially since Apple is talking about how Macs had record revenue and the MacBook line really drove the average selling price of the Mac up and all of these things. And my theory is that this is at least in part rooted in the fact that Apple is the single source for Mac hardware. at least in part rooted in the fact that apple is the single source for mac hardware and that if apple makes a uh a clever opinionated product decision as they so frequently do and put it across the board and it bites you you don't have anywhere to go you are cornered you are you are stuck and if you can't use that keyboard let's say say, on the MacBook Pro, Apple doesn't make a laptop. Nobody makes a laptop with a different keyboard that runs the Mac.

we hear in our circles is maybe uh a little bit of selection bias where nerds are bothered by this but the numbers show that other people aren't because they're still buying macbook pros this is always kind of an underlying fear of apple customers and it takes various forms but you can be afraid that apple is going to leave you behind sometimes that can be that they they just start making products that are not suitable for your needs and they go after a larger market and you feel left behind there um because you always liked apple's products and if they stop making products for you you you have to buy something else. You can't, like you said, you can't buy another person's Mac compatible, except for that brief time in the period of clones. Yes. You have to switch platforms then.

consciously deciding to leave you behind but it's more like they have traced a path uh to the future for users like you and it's uncomfortable and this has happened many times in the past and mostly apple has been successful removing lots of legacy ports is a great example where that annoyed a lot of people who are using their computers with those legacy devices but in all those cases after a fairly short period of time uh it was clear that they weren't actually leaving you behind as a customer you just needed to sort of get with the times and give up your adb peripherals and give up your scuzzy drives in favor of firewire and that's what people did and so that's uh it's different than they just decided they're not going to be in this market anymore they're saying this market is moving on and you need to come with it and customers adapt and they

grumble and then they adapt uh the tricky bit with the current uh laptop stuff is it's not entirely clear yet which scenario are we in has apple decided that they're not interested in these certain narrow kinds of quote-unquote pro customers or have they decided that the market is moving on and all the pro customers need to come and adopt this and it's complicated by the mac pro stuff where for a long time it seemed like apple had decided that it doesn't want that corner of the market anymore. The people who need a computer like the Mac Pro, Apple doesn't want to make a computer like that anymore. And Apple had essentially decided that the iMac Pro was going to be their answer. And that is clearly very different from the customers who use the big tower Mac, right?

And they were, you know, they were going to stop making making the cylinder which itself was different from the towers and they were just going to look the imac pro is the future and if you don't like it then you're a market that we don't care about but they changed their mind okay we we made a miscalculation we do want that market and we're going to make a thing for you right the laptops apple as far as i can tell does not think they're leaving the pro laptop market every time they show the macbook pros look at all this stuff you do people doing final cut and you got two 5k displays hooked up to it and it's super powerful and thunderbolt 3 is really fast and you got this big ray to ray connected to it and look at all you know they think they are making the product for pros right there so they're not leaving you behind where you feel like oh apple's

not you know like the poor aperture users apple just decided they don't want to be in this market for ProSoft or it's just me and Lightroom or that's it or whatever. Like Apple thinks they're not leaving you behind. What they think they're doing is like getting rid of SCSI ports and ADB ports and saying we're still going to serve that market. But that market needs to follow us forward into the future by using all these fancy peripherals and stuff like that. And it seems like there's an argument between a small subset of the market and apple about whether whether that future whether they want to come along like they're like a dog on a leash apple's trying to pull you into the future and they're saying no i don't want to go to that future because that future is worse and they elucidate all the reasons you can read

marco's post and so so yeah being cornered like being beholden to one company that makes a thing to your satisfaction is difficult. And there's always the danger that they will stop serving that market. And there's also the danger that they will, that that market will move on and that you will just not be able to move on with it. And I think we're in the midst of that argument. And based on Apple's turnabout on the Mac Pro, makes me think that there is some reconsideration of the exact shape of the future. It seems very clear to me that Apple does not think it's leaving behind these pro users like Marco. Marco feels left behind, but Apple thinks they're not leaving it behind.

So there needs to be a meeting of the minds here. There needs to be some kind of compromise because Marco can't buy 2015 laptops forever. can't buy 2015 laptops forever and apple can't continue to make laptops at this section of the market doesn't want and continue to think that it's actually serving that section of the market so in the same way even though it's a tiny majority like they sell like zero mac pros compared to like all the rest of the stuff they sell it's a tiny portion of the market but it's an important part of the market apple has shown it's important by saying we're going to make a new mac pro i think this tiny part of the laptop market that's annoyed with the new macbook pros is also worth addressing i think apple will address them and so i think there will be a

meeting of the minds here eventually yeah i think um i i think in some ways this instance of uh the unrest is driven in part by things that are actually good about apple like i think it's good that apple's saying we're going to do a totally different keyboard design and we're going to come up with something that's super thin but still has uh the appearance of responsiveness and you know it doesn't travel a lot of travel but you you you know we don't think regular people will notice or they'll like it because it's it still feels uh like you're doing something when you're typing even if the we're fooling you a little bit because the travel isn't very much um which is why i kind of fell into this cornering idea because i think the difficulty is when apple uh does this thing i mean i think what's stuck with a lot of macbook pro

users is that they put the macbook keyboard which was engineered for a super thin laptop and they put it on these other designs when arguably uh they didn't need to because they didn't really need to eke out that small amount of uh of space saved by having a super thin thing which they totally did on the on the macbook um and i i get that that's the that's the challenge here is like uh when i said i would love apple to do an ios laptop it's a similar sort of thing of like try some different stuff have a varied product line the good thing about having a varied product line is that people can kind of pick and choose it's like what i talk about the mac mini like i think i really believe the greatest feature of the mac mini is that it

lets apple do whatever the heck they want with the imac and and potentially the mac pro and say look you got a problem just get a Mac Mini and do whatever like it's there to do anything and it doesn't do uh any particular thing incredibly well but it does everything because it's just a box so the slim the slim keyboard thing though like I think that is another disconnect between us and Apple because when they you know when it was introduced on the on the little skinny macbook the macbook one the 12 inch it's i don't think apple presented the idea that that this keyboard is like that it is confined to this laptop because when we saw it like it came from the idea that the keyboard was off-putting like this is different than we're used to and i've tried it and actually i i don't kind of prefer it to the other one but so we explained it to

ourselves it's because this is the super skinny computer and they made a super skinny keyboard right so that we had said oh it makes sense keyboard that we don't like as much but it's for the skinny computer did apple say i think they told that as part of their story that along with butterfly switches and stainless steel whatever's i think they said you know this is this is all to get this thing to be thin and light keep in mind also that all of us were like well i mean it was unclear right because we were all like oh does what does this mean and when they did the magic keyboard um which was after everybody's like oh thank goodness they have another keyboard design that they did so they're not going to stick this in all the laptops.

Because we didn't know when we were trying to be reassured. And of course, that was wrong. The Magic Keyboard has not been reused anywhere else. And in fact, they did use that laptop design, the MacBook design. Although they did change it when they rolled it out and said, it's better. So they obviously heard some of it, but yeah. change it when they rolled it out and said it's better so they obviously heard some of it but yeah so and i think the main the main reason like you know that we were we were looking for that reassurance of the magic keyboard and thinking that it was reassurance where it didn't actually

exist because who knows those teams could be totally separate from each other but like the disconnect is over the sort of uh you know the second scenario where apple sees the future and wants to bring us all along to it and the disconnect was that i think apple thought that that keyboard yeah it was slim and yeah it's what you need to make the skinny laptop but actually it's a great keyboard yeah and why wouldn't you want it everybody should have it this is the best keyboard we've ever made and to give an example that people usually don't think about but like it just goes to show when it works we're all on board right if they come out with a new thing that seems weird at first but we all tried

and we go oh you know what apple was right this is better there's no fuss right an example the example is from more old people examples this is an old people show now um it's gone get rid of that whippersnapper um uh mouse balls apple apple mice used to have balls in the bottom of them and that's how mice worked and eventually not that Apple was the first to do this, but eventually Apple said, no, the new mice that we're going to make have this optical thing on the bottom. No more ball.

Right? And maybe you're an Apple user and had never used like a logic mouse, an optical mouse. And so this is the first mouse without a ball you're using. You'd be using a mouse with a ball that has a certain feel to it, a certain heft.

They behave in a certain way. You know how to clean your little mouse rollers and everything. And like a mouse without a ball that has a certain feel to it a certain heft they behave in a certain way you know how to clean your little mouse rollers and everything like a mouse without a ball it's going to be terrible but then you get it and you use it and you're like oh oh this is better and so when mice without balls sweep through the entire mac product line nobody's up in arms because we all basically yeah apple's right this is better right like the industry is right that yes this is the way to go and to this day no one is go back to the uh the track balls on laptops when they replace them with track pads it was like oh yeah this is weird it's weird but it's totally the right call you try it and then so when and

so when all the balls disappear from all the mice and all the laptops nobody is up in arms and saying i can't believe they that ball that uh midas trackpad that they put on that one laptop now it's on all of them and i feel cornered you don't feel cornered if everybody likes it and so i think disconnect is that apple really thinks that's a great keyboard and a small vocal minority thinks that it is not and this is before we even address the reliability issue which is independent of people's opinion like yes liability is the thing that they have to deal with but just you know and because of the timelines and the sequencing they're they're you know putting in the rubber gaskets to make the 2017 thing feel a little bit different. Makes me think that now they recognize that their high opinion of this keyboard is not shared by some part of the market that they care about, some small portion of the market.

But because hardware takes so long, it's not like they can scramble and put the Magic Keyboard in their next laptops like you know the 2017 laptops the best they could do was say what can we do in the time frame for the 2017 laptops well we can put some rubbery things in there and it feels different and it's less noisy good go with that all right and so again i think apple is there will be a meeting of the minds that apple is not vehemently arguing that this keyboard is great and you're just going to love it what they're saying is we hear you but you're going to have to wait for us to address your concerns at least that's what i hope they're saying because that's how i explain the 2017 change like we hear you we would like to address your concerns but hardware is hardware and it's not as if we can

snap our fingers and give you an entirely new keyboard for laptops i'm not entirely convinced that apple doesn't still believe that um that it's a great keyboard i'm not entirely convinced that apple doesn't still believe that um that it's a great keyboard i'm not entirely convinced that people bellyaching about it are not just written off as you know the nerds say that but then we've got our i mentioned this in my mac world piece is like what's the customer sat i i i know the revenue figure and i know the average selling price but what is the customer sat and what are you seeing in your markets and apple does research apple knows what the reception is here and that's the question is like are they seeing people say i don't really like the keyboard they're like oh customer satisfaction on the keyboard is down or what they're saying is well

the nerds don't like it but everybody else likes it and then who are those nerds and are they a key part of our customer segment that we are that we've made angry um My gut feeling is that they may or may not feel that, but the reliability issue makes me think that they'll change it because I can't conceive of people are like, don't buy a Mac laptop because when it's out of warranty, it'll cost you hundreds of dollars if a piece of dust. When one key goes bad, it probably will go bad. And it probably will.

That is really bad for long-term value of Apple laptops which really hurts the sale of apple laptops it makes the brand perception worse it's bad in so many ways financially that my my gut feeling is that that's going to change the keyboard before any belly aching by nerds about the key travel well but the reason the reason i think the belly aching is a factor is because even on the 12 inch when it first came out one of the complaints mostly from nerds who care about these details, was that it was too loud. And one of the big changes to the 2017 revision was that they heard that tiny but vocal minority of their customer base saying, hey, this keyboard is kind of loud. How do they know that? Like you said, they're surveying people saying, well, how are you satisfied with this new keyboard?

What do you think of it? Blah, blah, blah. Kind of loud. Must have come up a lot and so the revised version is slightly less loud that is that shows that they care what the tiny minority of people who have little picky complaints about the keyboard thinks if if that that tiny minority had said it's kind of loud and also the travel isn't deep enough there i don't think there's anything they could do in the 2017 laptop time frame to help those people with the depth they can put in gaskets for the sound but there's nothing they can do to say well look like the 2017 laptops hardware design was basically locked

long ago and we can do a last minute change to make them quieter but we can't like we hear you we hear you that you don't like them on the pro laptops but there's nothing we can do about it and so the fact that they did do something for a very picky minor complaint and only made it slightly quieter by the way it's still kind of noisy which i know as i type in mine in meetings right it's only slightly quieter makes me think they do care about what that minority thinks and it's just a question of timelines that they we have to wait and like you said ignoring all this the reliability which again we're just going anecdotally, but the reliability alone means Apple has to do something about this keyboard. The confluence of all these things that, you know, that the nerds who they appear to want more reliable then we'll say look they they addressed the reliability issue but they really didn't care

about your complaints about the keyboard depth right so we'll find out i actually think the noise was a feature that they were like oh we just you know give people more auditory feedback because as somebody who's bought some mechanical keyboards that the sound is part of it like that's part of the the keyboard experience and i think they were really planning on like well there's no tactile response or very little tactile response in terms of movement but we're going to make the pop when you hit that switch and we're going to make it really you can feel it and we're going to make it really loud and people are going to feel like yeah i'm typing on a keyboard and you know i think that was kind of their plan but um i don't yeah

anyway i don't think whether i like it or not it's going to matter this was another program i would say they're going to have pre-recorded audio clips of a buckling spring keyboard that they will play in response to your hitting the keys that'll be the bmw style feature yeah interesting idea i like that idea just you could have customizable soundscapes where you could say what would you like your keyboard clicky actually be totally silent but all all the sound is artificial it's just we've got some speakers underneath the keyboard that yeah they're almost there already and remember this is the same company that ships their ios devices with key click on by default which as we all know is an abomination i agree all right let's take one more break i want to thank our last sponsor for this episode

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I was listening to a several weeks old episode of Reconcilable Differences, your podcast with Marlon Mann on this very RelayFM podcast network. And you were talking about Twitter a lot. And you were talking about Twitter a lot. And I realized I wanted to talk to you about Twitter just because you and I were both vocal supporters of the Kickstarter for Twitterific for Mac. And when I first got the betas, I thought, well, this is different and new, and I don't know if I'm going to use it. And we'll see how it goes, and we'll see how it progresses. And I realized a few weeks ago that I've completely moved house and I am using Twitterific for Mac, which I had switched to the official Twitter client because the old Twitterific had been so old that I finally was like, I can't do this anymore.

But now I'm all the way back. And I wanted to check in with you about how you feel about the new Twitterific for Mac and how you're using it. I'm loving it because I'd never left it on both platforms, but they had diverged. The connection between the old Mac Twitterrific and the iOS one, it stopped being a thing.

The iOS version continued to progress and had all these great features and everything, and the Mac version just did not have them. Eventually, when they came out with the URL shortening thing where the URLs didn't count as much towards your tweet, the old Mac version wouldn't even show them. It would just link you off to the website so you could see the rest of the tweet. Yeah, that was it. It was so far behind.

That was it. That was the killer. Yeah, I kept using it even with that. And this factors into how I'm using Mac Twitter now. reason i was able to keep using the old crusty version of twitter before they updated it was because almost all of my twitter reading had transitioned to ios devices phone or ipad it kind of fell into the same category as me as like reading a long article which i'll tend to do on my ipad instead of sitting in front of my mac because i'm sitting in a chair in front of a computer or standing if i have a standing desk at work i'll put standing height um all day uh and i want that you know the steve jobs layback experience the reason i had a

little couch on the stage when they introduced the ipad and so that's that's sort of my my mode my posture for reading twitter and that means that i was able to read twitter on my mac much less now that i have a modern capable completely in sync with my ios version of twitter on the mac i no longer have that limitation i still spend most of my time reading on ios but when i'm on my mac it's so great just to be like right where i left off to have all the features to have cool features that aren't even on the ios one like the the detection of polls and the popping up on the poll web view so i can now participate in all these tweets like reading reading twitter on a third-party twitter client is a little bit different

and that it's mostly entirely better but occasionally you get a tweet where you have to surmise that there is a poll that invisibly you're not seeing yeah i've gotten really good sometimes it's not clear sometimes they say what do you like best colon like if they use a colon it's a pretty good indication because the tweet will just end there in the third party client but in the first party when you would see the poll but other times they say something vaguely cryptic and then have a period and you're like is there an invisible poll that i'm not seeing well now the mac version of twitter if it tells you oh by the way there's an invisible poll you're not seeing if you want

to participate in it click here and open web view and blah blah why does this have to happen because twitter and you know in their three years ago bad decision making decided that third-party twitter clients are a bad idea and uh did some bad things to them but but we hang on at least i still do because i i like the unified timeline i like the lack of uh you know the algorithm timeline trying to show me what it thinks i want to see i like the lack of ads and all the other things and so i am i'm enjoying it i still read mostly on ios devices but i love being on my mac and not being limited like full a full participant uh in in twitter even when i'm on my mac i'd say i'm kind of 50 50 because i am sitting at my mac all the time and writing and so i have it open here and then when

i'm in the rest of the house i'm on ios looking at it so having that sync which yes everybody who uses tweetbot we know that you already had that before but i didn't use tweetbot i have it i don't use it um it's nice to get that unified feeling again um and you know i have hope i built i built did you build a custom theme i thought about it because i had a custom scene on the old right but i it was like i didn't want the hassle of trying to maintain the custom theme especially during the betas like there were new betas all the time and things were changing i'm like i'll just wait and i got so used to it's not the default i have some settings changed but i don't have i'm not actually customizing it where you go you can pick the colors and the exact font

sizes like with the custom theme editor i'm not doing that so i'm just using the regular person preferences to make a dark window mode and adjust the font size and make the small thumbnails but i'm not haven't gone fully into a completely custom theme i am using one and it's uh it's nice i i enjoy it it's actually funny listening to people like marco talk about the oled display on the iphone 10 and how they want um you know a perfectly black background and all that. It's like, I like, that's what I like. I want a black background and I want, um, I don't want sort of like medium gray text. I want white or almost white text. Um, a lot of themes are just not contrasty enough for me, uh, for my tastes. And so I, I built my own,

which is great. Um, I'm hoping that maybe one day they'll sync themes across between iOS and Mac OS. That would be really great. If I could use my same theme everywhere. I love that the my you know, my mutes and things all all work. I was doing a lot of muting on the service of people, because that was the only reliable or semi reliable way of muting somebody. And now with with using Twitterific everywhere i just i can i can muffle and mute people on the client and that works just as well which is again something that if you had a unified set of clients before you got to experience but i didn't so um i'm really happy about it it's kind of amazing that i remain spoiler free for the force awakens

because at that time i was using the mac version of Twitterific that was not muting or filtering like the same way that my iOS one was. So the Mac was like a doubly dangerous place for me to be because I could think, should I look at Twitter? Oh, it doesn't have all my mutes. It might be dangerous. But I managed to make it through. Yeah. One thing I heard you and Merlin talking about that I was a little surprised by is I use I use Twitter lists all the time. Well, not all the time, but I have

a couple of Twitter lists. And basically what it does is it allows me to section off a subject area that I'm interested in. So like, I've got a science list, and I've got a sports list. And that allows me to sort of I've got my main list, which is mostly like tech people and some pop culture people I follow, but it lets me put the sports stuff on the side. So like when sporting events are going on, I can look at the sports people and I can dip in and check on the sports people, but there's enough of them that I wouldn't want them filling my entire timeline all the time. And so I just kind of put them on the side and i do that with the the scientist uh and science journalist people too and that uh that's great so i i'm surprised that that uh you don't use lists um because i love them well but i'm you know i'm the unified timeline

person i have one list of things to scroll through and that's it and lists are a separate place for me to go but i have to think too or at least as much as possible a completist yeah i was better at it before but yeah mostly i'm a completionist i want to i want to see all the tweets and i i you know i uh what do you call it i trim my follow list to make it so that i can get through all the tweets so that's my my axis of control is not oh i'm gonna skip my axis of control is this time to unfollow some people because i can't read through all these in the time allotted for twitter so i you know i do that control but if i had a separate domain like i've considered this for the one time the one instance where i actually use hashtags i tend not to use them because i feel like look if you're following me you get all of me uh which is a separate thing that you've talked

about in the past and that we're all familiar with but i do throw out a hashtag destiny on my tweets that are about destiny because they're so obscure and make no sense if you're not into destiny. And so I want to give the people as a courtesy, give people a way to filter out that. Not because I don't want to clutter up their timeline with it, but just because I don't want to have to entertain the questions about like, what are you saying? What is that? I don't understand. It's like, yes, you don't. It's a destiny thing.

Don't worry about it if i had a ton of people who i followed on twitter who were like a destiny community in the same way that you have a sports community uh i might think of confining them into a list i do actually have some lists made of subject areas i just never ever look at them so once i discovered that look i never look at these lists it's not making them um and so i haven't made a list for destiny uh it's all kind of in the mix for me. And that one hashtag is on the output side. The only thing I do to segregate Twitter in any way. And who knows that the people following me,

like they probably don't have destiny hashtag filters. Cause I, I tweet about with that hashtag like once every month and a half. So I feel like I'm not overwhelming my audience with destiny spam. Yeah. But if you don't like it, you can, you can mute that out and then it's gone. I do that occasionally now now and it's kind of nice to be like oh this is a actually for

one of my sports things i've got a uh a sports person i follow and half of what they do i'm not interested in and they are a pretty good hashtag or mention person and i could i could put put in a few mentions and then the stuff that i don't care about just doesn't show up and it's great in a few mentions and then the stuff that i don't care about just doesn't show up and it's great um yeah you don't need to use hashtags for that like just pick any word like i i keep we keep meaning to do this i'm going to talk about it now and maybe this will motivate me to actually do it i would love to put a mute on lucy k-o-i-h or whatever am i saying the name wrong do you know why i want to want to mute that this name that i can't spell maybe that's why i never put the thing because i remember the spelling.

Because one person I follow does a running joke about some judge that was mean to Apple like five years ago. Contra does that. I never want to see those tweets. That joke, it's played out. I get it. The judge was mean to Apple, right? You can't do that joke for five years. So I should just mute it, right?

Judge Lucy Koh, K-Oo-h i should just put in my mutes lucy co and i just forget to do it yeah that'd be good so that's you know you don't i guess it doesn't need to be a hashtag you can put any words there and the odds of lucy co coming up in a legit non-contra joke context are very slim so i don't feel like i'd miss anything um one more thing before we go because we do not have time forgrade, but I did want to ask you one thing, which is in the show notes as old men talk about keyboard shortcuts, since you mentioned earlier that this is just an all old people podcast right now. the right order for referring to modifier keys in keyboard shortcuts is, let me get this right, control option command, and it's actually control option space command. So if you had a keyboard shortcut that used all of those things, you would say press control option shift command N. So in other words, if you're taking a screenshot, what you should write or say is

press shift command three to take a screenshot. And this is actually there is an Apple style guide that you can get on iBooks. There's a tech note. Generally, all of Apple's publications do it in this order. And I was curious what you thought about this only because i completely disagree and command always comes first for me yeah so this just to give some context this was another thing related to this subject that comes up a lot in this conversation is the order of adjectives in english uh like that there is an implied order that nobody thinks about but if you hear it the other way it sounds strange and i forget what the whole sequence is. You can Google for it and find it.

But the easiest example is if there is a bear and the bear happens to be the color brown and the bear is also large, you would say you have a big brown bear. But if you had a brown big bear, people might think that you are not a native English speaker because you would not say a brown big bear. You say it's a big brown bear.

Everybody says a big brown bear. And that's just just size and color there's a whole bunch of other ones that they come in a particular order and we are sensitive to that order whether we know it or not now both of us being old fogies i think are sensitive to the order of describing corded keyboard shortcuts with modifiers on the mac probably for basically the same reason as the english modifiers you hear them and it just becomes sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy as you're growing up and you hear everyone refer to it this way. And you sort of, even for new things like this, where it's not like we're inventing color and size,

but like, oh, modifiers exist and computers exist and let's just all discuss them. And somehow we sort of settle on a sequence of talking about them and we do better than with gif-gif. And we sort of all collectively agree, Command-Shift-3 is how you take a screenshot. Everyone is going to say Command-Shift-3. And it only takes a couple of decades of hearing Command-Shift-3

to think that Shift-Command-3 sounds just as weird as Brown Big Bear. And I'm with you. Command-Shift-3 is how it goes. And in response to this conversation, I'm thinking, how do I add the other ones in? This is where you start getting into more obscure things because command fine command shift fine there's a lot of those command option are you with me on that one it's not option command it's command option right now you start throwing in control which used to not be a thing on apple's products especially not in keyboard shortcuts right yep

um start throwing that in i'm trying to think of let's see command control d that's how i would say that one uh uh let's see i would i do command command control option i think i wouldn't do command option control i would do command control option what do you agree with me on that one i don't think so i think what i discovered is that my internal style guide is the opposite of apples and goes out from the space bar so it would be command option yeah command option control shift once you get into the more obscure ones there's less societal sort of we've all agreed upon how to talk about this it's true fogey mac users there's less of that because there's less occasion to say these very in fact the only reason we ever had these very large sequences is usually if we're using like uh quick keys for the old people or

keyboard maestro for the new people like you're making up your own keyboard shortcut that's not taken by anything else and so you're forced to use this very large corded thing i think my sequence my sort of uh system for determining this once you get into the more obscure ones, is the sequence in which I lay my fingers down. So I would hit command, control, and then option with my fingers. Command with my thumb, control with my ring finger, or with my, yeah, with my ring finger. No. Yeah, let me see. Anyway, my fingers do it, and they do it in that sequence, which is why I would say, you know, command option shift,

because I would roll my finger that way, right? Yeah. But command control option, I would do command then control, and I would locate option by being the finger in between the ones I had on command and control. Anyway, I think it gets obscure after that, but if we can't even agree with the Apple style guide on command, I'm totally with you that if you talk to an old Mac user, no one is going to say shift command three. That will never leave the lips of an old school Mac user.

And how Apple has settled on that as their guide, probably because someone was found the regularity of it irresistible, that there was a system and then here's the order. And just we'll just always refer to it that way. But it flies in the face of decades of Mac culture. And uh you know i'm gonna have to give a hard note of that one yeah i agree i i just i discovered that mentally command is always first and there are there is i think you're right there are some ones where i waver i'm like oh i don't know whether that's right or not um and you're right also like control wasn't on keyboards for a while and wasn't used as a shortcut. I looked around. People theorized that maybe the reason that Control was not a major part of Apple's platforms was because on the Apple II, the ASCII Control characters were used for flow and stuff like they are on Unix, where, you know, they didn't want to interrupt those. And of course, the Apple key itself, that is command or Apple or open Apple, there was an open and closed Apple key on the Apple IIe, which was mapped to the paddle buttons on the little paddle game paddles.

There's a whole history here that starts to unravel when you do this. And I'll also point out control alt delete on Windows, control comes comes first and then alt, which is option. Um, because we all know about control, alt delete, which is a totally different sequence, but the Mac and windows have never really gotten along when it comes to keyboard shortcuts anyway. Yeah. I think I've brought this up at other times that we've discussed modifiers on Mac things, but one of the sort of great joys of my life, one of the small, great joys of my life one of the small great joys of my life and one of the smartest probably accidental things that apple ever did was to choose for the mac platform to have to use command as sort of the main modifier for its commands like that's your

go-to and then if you have to keep going to like shift and option and other stuff and to leave control alone because later uh well even in the early days when you had a terminal on a unix system but later when they actually based their operating system on unix it leaves control safely off to the side for the unix stuff so there's no conflict like when you hit ctrl c to send the interrupt signal stop a command there's no ambiguity that you're trying to copy text windows chose to use control and so any integration of unix style stuff into windows is a constant fight over the control key now yeah the mac does use the control key sometimes for some things but it's like your third or fourth

choice it is not the primary control key and that sounds like a little thing but you make that choice wrong there is no escaping it you are constantly doing shift insert and other ridiculous keyboard sequences but only when you're in the terminal program and other places you can do control c it is a huge quality of life issue for the particular kind of nerd who does unicy things on their computer on their their mac or pc and i i'm thankful for it all the time i'm thankful for it every time i have to do control insert or shift insert on some stupid windows thing i say oh just how can you live like this thank god for command and that we left control alone because we knew that in 1997 steve jobs would come back with a unix-based operating system everything would be great that was all part of the plan

you said we can't you said we can't escape it that was like a little keyboard joke um before we go one more thing i wanted to mention is just there's i'll put a link in You said we can't escape it. That was like a little keyboard joke. Before we go, one more thing I wanted to mention is just there's a, I'll put a link in the show notes. There is a folklore.org little bit by Andy Hertzfeld about why Apple went from the Apple key to the command key. Because the Apple key was this, was a thing that was on the Lisa, was on the Apple IIe. And the answer is, as you might expect, Steve Jobs burst into a building and declared that the Apple logo was in too many places, that it was ridiculous, and that they were taking the Apple logo in vain, and then demanded that that key be given some other symbol at which point susan care looked through her notes and found that you know interesting outdoor place of interest symbol that's in various places in scandinavia and uh and that's our little propellery command symbol to this day and then it was on

there with the apple for a while and then because they were some keyboards there was a key that could be connected to computers that had the apple key versus the command key and then over time it evolved to just say command with the little propellery symbol and and he was right i mean he never really changed his mind about that that's why there was no apple logo on the front of the iphone right like you you can use the apple logo but use it use it well use it strategically don't just say oh apple logos on everything cover everything we make with apple logos because it devalues the logo on the mac screen it appears in one place in one very important place and that's it um i'm actually kind of surprised that like the imax have

the apple logo on the front of it because that seems counter to what steve jobs might have wanted but uh you know he he was here when those imax came out so i guess they got past him but yeah you don't want you don't want your logo everywhere it devalues it you got to use strategically and that little you know place of interest swedish campground symbol that's a great symbol it is that's it doesn't really you know i don't know if it says command at all other than the association that we make with it but boy what a great symbol i agree i saw it once in denmark or sweden somewhere i saw it being used as the actual thing that it's supposed to be used for i was like oh my god there it is i took a picture of it it's like the command key did you put did you put a

letter after it so it can make a key sequence because it's just a command by itself that's nothing you're right it's a good point well, thank you so much for being my guest on this Thanksgiving week on Upgrade while Mike is traveling. It's always nice to check in with you and talk to you about what's going on and steal a little of your time away from ATP. It was a pleasure, Jason. I just have one more tech podcast to do today and then I'll be done. It's easy. It's easy, but that one's not going to come out for days, maybe. I don't know. Who knows? I don't know how you guys do it with the ATP with the atp but um but thank you for being here thank you to our sponsors

fresh books encapsula and app optics thanks to everybody out there for listening mike and hashtag ask upgrade we'll be back next week but until then say goodbye john syracusa goodbye john sir Syracusa. Goodbye, John Syracusa.