Upgrade - 222: That's Not a Plan

Episode Date: December 3, 2018

John Siracusa joins Jason to discuss the future of Apple's ARM processors and how they might change the Mac, Apple Music coming to the Amazon Echo and what that might mean about the future of Apple's forthcoming TV service, whether they're using their TiVos as much as they used to, and the prospects for an Apple-built external touchscreen display.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode number 222 upgrade this week is brought to you by away pingdom and luna display i am jason snell not mike hurley you can tell because i'm not english but i'm hosting because mike is on assignment this week and instead i have a special guest co-host it is john syracuse so you may know him from such podcast as reconcilable differences right here on relay fm robot or not on the incomparable and what's this accidental tech podcast that sounds interesting uh hi john hello jason i just noticed that this is episode two two two i'm really excited to get a uh a run of twos but nobody wants to talk about numerology john i do i really want to talk about it but that's not the premise

of the show uh so let's talk about snell talk the question that's not about anything that mike insists on asking me at the beginning of every show. And I thought maybe we could talk about, both of us could answer this question. Imagine that. Like, we'll see. We'll see. It is from Technotional, not his real name, probably. And Technotional asks, what's the oldest thing you own or is in your home?

And more judgmentally, why is it there well i was super confused by this question and the notes let me tell you why first of all i thought technotional was trying to say what's the oldest thing in your house related to technology or something because this is a technology podcast but technotional is not really a word and i'm like is this a segment that i just don't know about no it's just the name of the the entity that has this the the essential nebula that sent us in this question it's a pocket now i have to rethink the whole question because it's not a dimension yeah it's it's not the oldest technology product which is what i was thinking like the oldest computer oldest you know electronic thing right but like like

the oldest thing thing don't let you go first and you live in massachusetts for all i know your house is the oldest thing although it's not in your house it is your house but um okay so the oldest thing in my house and there's some there's some good layers here uh we have an upright piano it is a for those imagine they're probably even piano podcasts out there for those piano nerds who are listening in it is a kanabe upright piano from 1892 and it was restored in the 70s my family bought it from the person who restored it so it's not a family heirloom it hasn't been in my family since 1892 or anything like that but it was restored in the in the late 70s and my parents bought it from the restorer and the most i would say notable interesting thing about it is that

when they restored it they decided to make it to install in it a computerized player piano system so it is a player piano in addition to being a regular piano but um you notice i said computerized player piano system so it is a player piano in addition to being a regular piano but you notice i said computerized and i also said late 70s it has inside it a circuit board from the late 70s a system called piano quarter it used to have a cassette tape deck underneath the far right edge that you could rotate out and pop in a cassette and play the the cassette was a data cassette if you played it in a regular audio player it made this hideous uh sounding noise like data tapes of the period because you had cassette drives on computers and stuff like that too but when you played it in this cassette deck that was attached to the player

system you flip flip on the switch there'd be a little spark it's always scary um and it would it would take off and it would play and and we had a christmas cassette that my dad would just play and these cassettes are like 15 i think they were double speed i think it's like 15 minutes on a side and he would just like 15 minutes flip it over 15 minutes flip it over and that that music would just run forever um does it still work the answer is yes shockingly the player technology and it still works but about 10 years ago maybe more might be more like 15 years ago now you always drop a decade that's what merlin taught me um the uh i replaced it with uh i replaced the cassette deck with, uh, you can basically,

there was a guy on the internet who was selling these conversion kits where you pop off the bottom of the piano and pull out the cassette deck thing and you could plug in, uh, it's a wireless transmitter. It's a wireless audio transmitter. Um, and that's the receiver side and the sender side. And it was, it was basically patched so the sender side and it was it was basically patched so that it would plug it was plug compatible with where the uh cassette deck used to feed in and the sender is a usb audio transmitter audio standard usb audio device

and that guy who had this hardware setup also had literally every tape that they ever made for that system converted into mp3s that you could play in itunes and just essentially airplay to a player piano and it totally works to this day although i don't use it that often but i will at christmas time which we're just about to start decorating uh this week i will get that that tape that i have committed to memory because my dad played it endlessly during the holidays um so little 70s tech little 2000s tech and a piano from 1892 and that's my answer what about you did your piano from 1800s get upgraded for airplay 2 or no uh no it's still using well it's still it still sadly has to use this only it's not quite new enough to be considered vintage like the uh airport express so but it does require this proprietary uh usb uh audio transmitter thing but fortunately usb will be with us forever and it just shows up as a standard audio device so it doesn't require

the guy who sold it like he had this whole thing where it was like in winamp and you were supposed to use winamp with it and all of that and i said i'm on a mac and i could run winamp in emulation but i'd really rather not and he said oh i can just send you the audio file version the mp3 version instead of the because he was using like a midi translator or something like that because he had he'd taken all the tapes and like converted them back to their source like data he knew the data format that they were in. It's pretty amazing that this guy did this. And I think he was getting his master's degree or something in mechanical musical instruments or something. It was all part of this thing.

And I just kind of fell into it. But it works. It's pretty amazing. And so, yeah, I have a special custom iTunes library on my server. I have a special custom iTunes library on my server, the separate library that is just all the beeps and chirps of the piano quarter playback. You could have like a creepy reenactment of Westworld going on in your house.

You've got this... Oh, yeah. It's totally jangly piano. The only problem is that I don't have any Radiohead because it's from the late 70s, early 80s. That guy's probably got updated tapes. Yeah, there is a command line utility that you can run that'll convert midi files into piano quarter files but it just doesn't it really only sounds good when it's the original tapes that they

because it it before i switched it out you can put a blank cassette in it and press play and record and to play on the piano and it would record it which is kind of mind-blowing um and that's how they made all the tapes is they they were recording it on a you know device that was using this system and the midi conversions that i tried sounded okay but they were never a match for the kind of uh uh piano performances that they got on these things well that's pretty neat and i definitely don't have anything a i don't have anything that old and b i don't have anything that interesting uh the oldest thing in my house is probably a mouse turd uh because my house is house is from the 30s and it's you know full of mouse turds that's like when we opened up the wall to redo to the doorway to the garage um and we found a can of of beer an open empty

burgermeister beer can that was presumably from the people who built the house in the in the 50s yeah yeah that's so that's probably all but that doesn't really count as like a thing that i own or whatever i do own that technically technically right um i'm probably gonna go with like so my grandparents passed away many years ago we uh sort of collectively uh the grandchildren raided their house of all the things that nobody wanted right so all the all the you know belongings and cherished belongings go out to the siblings so on and so forth and eventually there's nothing left that anyone wants and so that's when the grandchildren get to come in and go through grandma and grandpa's beautiful picturesque

sort of frozen in time Levittown suburban house. I'm not going to say unmodified because that generation when they got these houses, they all did stuff to the house. My grandfather put like a back porch thing and extended the roof and did a bunch of stuff to the house, right? So it wasn't original, original, none of them were, but it was frozen in amber compared to like the neighboring houses and the inside as well. If I could have taken the whole house with me i would have um but i couldn't do that so i had to you know what what's left that nobody wants and what i ended up taking was a bunch of kitchen utensils that i remember from like going over my grandmother's house for you

know dinner on on weekends she only lived like 20 minutes away from us and used to go over there a lot so i have some wooden spoons. I have a like tin funnel, you know, a bunch of kitchen supplies that are all older than me, probably older than my parents. So one of those things surely wins as the oldest sort of possession in my home. That's nice. That's nice. I have, when my grandmother died, she had a whole bunch of glass paperweights. And I remember going to the i forget where probably my uncle's house there was a kind of a collection they're like yeah we've got we've got a bunch of

them some it already been raided a little bit but we've got a bunch of them if you want to take it and i remember um i remember one of them was this or there were a couple that i remember there's this glass turtle and there was another one that was this sort of pink seashell-y kind of thing and i have both of those and it's just it's a nice little thing i always think of my grandmother when i look at those um and then i realized i also have um my wife was talking about this the other day because she really likes the fact that we have my mom's kitchen aid mixer when she when my parents moved into a motor home they had no need for heavy appliances anymore and we got the kitchenaid mixer we had registered for one when we got married and they were too expensive

we were in our early 20s nobody we knew had the money for a kitchenaid mixer um but we ended up getting the one that my mom bought in the you know late 70s it's avocado green it's so old that that the color it is has come back into fashion so that's it's gone gone a whole cycle but it still works great so we you know i made sweet potato pie with it like for thanksgiving this year it's great old tech some old tech survives i it's funny um some some old tech really lasts and stands the test of time i think maybe they were designed to like that circuit board in that piano i it blows my mind that it's still functional all this time later 40 years later but it is well i mean the the environment of a piano is not subject to undue stresses and

hopefully wild swings in temperature and everything was so big and chunky back then like the traces on the board are probably like you know the thickness of pencil lead and they're just the chips are huge it's just gargantuan right so even if there's a little bit of corrosion and moisture whatever it takes a lot to really damage it yeah i think so and where it's been in that piano you're right like we don't store that we don't the piano doesn't live in the in the damp cold part of the house right and you're in california everything just is preserved out there too it's our streets our streets are fine too it's it's uh it's just fine all right we do have a few follow-up items before we get into the topic believe it or not old technology was not our topic uh but thank you to technotional that the entity who supplied our snell talk question i want to remind everybody the upgradeys

uh nominations and votes are still going on i'll put a link in the show notes again uh this will be the fifth annual mike really loves it when we use annual things for uh for stuff on upgrades so the fifth annual upgradies uh voting will close on christmas eve and then that show will come out uh and i think new year's eve so that'll be really exciting uh hundreds of votes already but uh plenty of time to still get your votes in the next few weeks. I had a couple of follow-out items because basically I wanted to... So here's the thing, John. I listen to ATP.

If I'm not listening live, I listen as soon as it comes out. And I know all you guys, and that just adds even more frustration to the fact that you can't hear me when I'm talking back to your podcast. But I've got the chat room is for yeah it's true it's true well when i'm cooking dinner i it's harder to be in the chat room usually i'm listening to you when i'm listening live i'm actually cooking dinner and then i send pictures of what i'm cooking to to casey you can probably make some kind of serious shortcut so that you can just yell things into the air while you're cooking it'll end up in the chat room that's right that's actually that's an interesting idea some emoji i'll just communicate via emoji in the chat room um i do have some follow-ups so one of the things you

guys were talking about was about um sleep shutdown and sort of a mac idle techniques that people have and i i was fascinated by this because i so i have an iMac pro at my desk before that i had a 5k iMac the whole time i've been well after like the first couple of months in in this office full-time i bought an iMac a 5k iMac when those came out and then an iMac pro um i at the end of the day, when I'm not going to be coming back in, I'm going to close the door and I'm done for the day. I hold down the option key and move up to the Apple menu and I choose shut down and my computer shuts off and that, and then I walk away. And I was fascinated to hear all of the stories of putting your computer to sleep or leaving it on. I get why Casey leaves it on.

That's why I have a server is so I don't have to leave my iMac on to run Plex. But you made a case for putting your computer to sleep instead of shutting it down. And I guess this is the point where you judge me i wasn't really making a case for putting it to sleep like to give a little more context here for the younger people listening for all the ulcers we remember computers as a thing that existed in your house in a dedicated single place sometimes called the computer room and when you wanted to use it you went into that room you turned the computer on you used it and when you were to use it, you went into that room, you turned the computer on, you used it. And when you were done using it, you turned the computer off and you left the room. To leave the room with the computer on would be like leaving the light on.

Like these computers didn't sleep. There was no sleep mode or anything like that. They're on when you're using them and they're off when you're not using them. And, you know, if you want to go back far enough, it's before there was any kind of shutdown process. It's like, well, I'm done. And you'd flick the switch and turn the thing off. And again, if you didn't, if you left the room, it's like you forgot to turn the computer off it would be like leaving a blaring spotlight on it was just great wasteful so lots lots of people have habits formed

in those times and you know or similar habits for light switches or anything else faucets stuff like that they're just like well when you're done using it you get up and leave you turn the thing on shut the thing off or whatever on atp what i was mostly saying is if those are your habits and you've never thought about the fact that all modern macs have some way that they can sleep that you should give it a try now you're not i'm not speaking to you when i'm doing that segment you know about sleep it's like you don't need to know anything but like it was just for the people who it hadn't occurred to them that things had changed or that they had they had built habits based on other things that are not like modern computers one of the examples i gave was uh people who have ios devices iphones you know

i've never seen an apple watch but iphones or ipads or whatever and when they're done using their iphone or their ipad they will hard power down the thing like just hold down the power button slide that little red slider shut it all the way down. Yeah, that's madness, madness, madness. And then, you know, 15 minutes later, like, I'm going to check my email again. And they'll hit the power button and the white Apple logo will appear. And they'll wait for their iPad to boot and they'll check it. And I know real people in the real world who do this. And I've not been able to convince them not to do it.

And I think it has to just be based on those type of habits of, like, a light bulb or whatever. So, what I was basically saying is, if you've never never tried it if you've never tried not shutting down your computer but just putting it to sleep consider trying it now i don't know if you've this is something you've tried obviously you know about it but i don't know if it's something you've tried and rejected but i find that it is a big upgrade because the computers are basically silent when they're off yes they do sip some small amount of power but it's not that bad and when you want to use it you just come up to it and you hit the space bar and it's ready to go right where you left off yeah so my reasoning so i i used a laptop as my primary for a long time and so obviously it would be sleeping it would that would be its state right you close it it

goes to sleep why but why is that obvious it's only because that's what happens when you close it yeah well it's because you could shut down your laptop that's true that's true i i i feel like yeah that that would be i mean it's such a natural thing to close it when you're not using it that that that's the trick right if you talk about the ceremony of turning off a light switch closing a laptop is the ceremony i feel like so you don't need to do shut down or whatever you just close the laptop but with the iMac here's my rationale I think it's a couple of things that fitting in part of it is ceremony which is I kind of like the idea that when I'm done at the end of the day and I'm basically signing out I actually am

placing a slight barrier to me coming back out and going back to work which is I shut down the computer I had that happen this weekend where I was going to come out here and look at something really quick and I was like oh I shut it down didn't I well that happen this weekend where I was going to come out here and look at something really quick. And I was like, oh, I shut it down, didn't I? Well, forget it. I'll just look on the iPad. And I just kind of like blew it off. So I think part of it is the ceremony of like, I'm done for the day. I'm not going to come back in here.

This is it. Like a little bit of a barrier to going back to work. I'm going to go out in the other room, going to be with my family. Part of it is that I've got a, or do I? I don't anymore. I had for a while a voltage sensing power strip that would turn off some other devices when I turned this off. Actually, no, I do still have that. When I turned the computer off, and I don't know if that will work with sleep or not,

but basically like a couple other things, like my iPod Hi-Fi that I use as an external speaker, and that thing use as an external speaker. And that thing will just stay on forever. And when nothing is plugged into it, it emits a slight hum. And it's super annoying. That doesn't sound good. When I shut the computer down, it's not well engineered. When I shut the computer down, it powers off.

And I like that. If I go to sleep, will it also? Maybe. But really, my big motivator is that use all those years using the laptop. My feeling was every now and then it would be like, uh, I don't know how many days or weeks since I had last restarted or shut down and I would need to restart because the computer was misbehaving. Um, and I thought, and, and, and this may be completely cargo cult but my

my rationale in part for shutting down my computer at the end of the day and starting it up in the morning is look it's a fresh start essentially start fresh it's a it's a fresh reboot everything's coming up from zero and uh and and i'm not gonna have at some point in the middle of the day a moment where i'm like i guess i better restart because things are things are a little bit wonky because i feel like if you leave the computer without a restart eventually things get a little out of whack and you got to restart because my like my mom this was always her thing with her laptop is oh my laptop is really acting strangely and i'd say have you shut it down and restarted it because that will probably solve it it always solved it that was always the thing and so you know part of me is just like why not wipe the slate at the end of the day and i don't need the

computer to be active and it doesn't take very long to start it up in the morning because it's a pretty fast computer and uh so that's what that's what i do so a sign of a modern uh high quality computer is that it doesn't deteriorate over time to the point where you need to restart it like a like a inter mob warfare and the godfather just to get out all the bad blood every once in a while you don't you just gotta clear out the bugs you gotta you gotta get a fresh bowl in there i mean if you have to do that it's a sign that something is wrong yeah i think these are habits from a long time ago but i also it's the feeling like you know if you've got a memory leak in something um but it only manifests over you know 96 hours or whatever over 100 or 150 hours of uptime and i restart or i shut down and and power up every day i'll never have to deal with that but how much of

that is reality today versus all that time ago i don't know i think in the end it comes down to the ceremony more than any anything else i kind of don't mind it it does mean i'll tell you something though john i don't think people at apple shut down their computers and the reason i'll tell you this is there has been a bug in the startup, which I believe is BridgeOS. I believe this is not even macOS. It's the IndieBridgeOS. There has been a bug since I got my iMac Pro, and they still haven't fixed it. And it's a year now, and they type it in quickly and hit return, the next thing that happens is it puts up the text that says incorrect password, incorrect password, it blinks it incorrect password, you can actually start typing other things. And it will delete the text in the bullets in the password box and let you input more text. But at some point after about 10 seconds, it just continues on because it

was the correct password all along and it'll boot your system it is it is so perplexing and um i think they never see it because i think the people who are in charge are not starting up their computer every morning they're not as fast the typists as you are maybe that's it maybe that's also that yeah they don't they're not booting their computer impatiently every morning because they just put their computers to sleep yeah and but some computers you know if you're listening this is why i have to restart my computer at least once a week or it gets wonky that is still definitely a thing that happens but it's a sign that something is wrong i don't think people should accept it that oh that's that's just the way computers are it's not just the way computer it's the way some computers are computers with weird you know

hardware or software issues or that are breaking around the process of breaking like there's many things that can cause this to be the case i find laptops are much more likely to be like this i have to hard reboot my laptop basically every two and a half weeks and i think it's terrible like i'll come in from a weekend i'll come in from a weekend and i'll lift the lid on my laptop and it will just be like nope nothing doing like either it'll be totally black or the screen will come up it'll just get a beach ball forever and i'll try to wait it out and it's like well guess what you're getting hard rebooted and that's one of the reasons i really dislike my laptop it shouldn't be the case that when i lift

my lid it you know either doesn't turn any of the screens on or shows me all my stuff and then a beach ball and i just there's no getting out of it you can't force quit anything you can't ssh and you can't do anything that's just and then i have to hard reboot every two and a half weeks or so 10 years of using my laptop as my primary and having it attached to an external monitor at work most of that time i cannot tell you i mean that that's partly what has trained me for this is that i, yes, it will betray you at some point. And it will often happen when you're just opening the lid and something has gone wrong in the background. Although the worst one is always that you take your backpack off when you get home and it's hot because the computer's been running and blowing the fan on the inside of a very small space inside your backpack because it didn't properly go to sleep when you unhooked it

and put it in your bag that's the worst that happened all the time yeah laptops are terrible but uh and there's not not all laptops i've had some laptops where there's not been the case i don't remember this ever happening with my 2011 macbook air that we had at home just this particular work of a laptop which is a 2017 macbook pro um but i i find that unacceptable you know but the desktops have i would find it even more acceptable desktop this this 2008 mac pro that i'm sitting in front of the only time it gets reboot is for system updates like it just and there's not many not many of those anymore because it's still running on capitan and it just it just runs forever and ever i just put it to sleep every day i'm not doing it as some sort of weird uptime contest

or whatever it's just the way i use my computer when i want to use it it's ready to go when i don't it is completely silent and sitting over there in the corner ready for me to use it so if you haven't tried that uh listeners uh give it a try it's kind of fun to have to know that your computer is silently waiting for your return even desktop computers can go to sleep um okay i have more to talk about much more to talk about we should probably take our first break and let me tell you about our first sponsor this episode of upgrade is brought to you by away away is the perfect gift for everyone on your holiday list what is the gift it's a suitcase smart premium suitcases so your luggage doesn't

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That's awaytravel.com slash upgradepodcast and the code UPGRADEPODCAST for $20 off any of their suitcases. That's awaytravel.com slash upgrade podcast and the code upgrade podcast for $20 off. Thank you to Away for supporting Upgrade and all of RelayFM. All right, we do have a little bit more follow-up before we move on to topics, which is just that you did your thing on ATP last week where you had your shared Google Sheet with Geekbench scores and prices for ipads and for uh macbooks and for mac mini too which i actually took out when so i made some charts too because it was fun um i'm not sure what it really tells us somebody somebody wrote me on twitter and said you know it has the big the biggest multiplier of all of a geekbench score to dollar uh price is probably the apple tv 4k and i was

like okay well yeah but no i i think that goes a little bit far but the point was you know the ipad and the macbook are different and it's true but it's still kind of fascinating to think of just as a just as a a vague kind of processor power that's in these ipads for what they cost um and and it is impressive when you think of it that way that for the 799 of the 11 inch ipad pro there's a lot of processor power in there it's it's a uh the arm processors that apple is using in its current iPads are way more powerful, given the price, than the Intel processors in the MacBooks. And there's a lot going on there, and there's no like, ha-ha, so I've proven it. But it was a fun exercise to go through that. So thank you for talking about it and sharing that spreadsheet with all the data.

Again, I would say more kind of entertaining and thought-provoking than proving any particular point but i i still found it worth the uh the uh the time to think about it yeah i thought it was i mean i originally made these charts back when the new ipads were introduced so i was thinking of here are these new products and how do they stack up with apple's existing products and you know we're talking about different aspects of them. And, you know, it's useful sometimes to graph things. If I had to do some more graphs, and if you want to do some more graphs, I would encourage you to do this.

Like, the interesting story is how iOS devices, iPads, iPhones, all that stuff, started as this curiosity that it was so amazing that it could run anything you know based on os10 as steve job said like that he could run a miniaturized version of this full-fledged big bad operating system on a phone and do it successfully because the phones were tiny and had incredibly weak processors couldn't even shoot video to begin with like they're just such uh you know small scale weakling little sister products and if you could graph like the relative performance

of or just just graph the performance period to pick any metric that you want whether it's geekbench or something else of the mac line the, the various Mac lines, and the iOS lines. And in the beginning, the Macs, of course, are these big, bad, you know, desktop and laptop computers, and they do all this great stuff, and, you know, how could you ever get the operating system that runs on those in any form onto this weakling little phone, and the phone just had no memory and was super slow. What, there was like 200 megahertz i don't know i guess what the clock speed was the original iphone someone is looking up wikipedia right now and will tell me in a moment um but eventually when you're not paying attention every year it's like oh the new

phones are great they're faster than ever oh the new phones are great they're faster than ever and these new ipads look how fast they are oh there's an ipad pro you assume that okay but yeah but the macs are getting faster too right but these lines cross at a certain point and first it's just it's the ios devices crossing over the low-end products and then the medium end and now i feel like with these latest ones it's very difficult to find a you know how many macs does apple even make that are faster at a reasonable suite of compute intensive things than the ipad and the answer is not many like we just it's just among the portables but the two very fastest macbook pros are faster and then presumably the imac pro although the ipad pro did beat the imac

pro in a couple of benchmarks which is mind-boggling when you think about that five thousand dollar computer with all this cooling and you know all this stuff that the ipad can be doing anything literally any operation it doesn't make any sense unless there was some dedication but this was the lvm compiler benchmark like that one aspect of the geek bench mix um and so seeing that story like seeing that over the years over the decade and you know 11 years or whatever it's been for the iphone just to watch those little devices just crawl up out of the muck and eventually overtake almost the entire mac line i think that's a fascinating story uh this is stagnation of intel and all the other issues but like the charting them as i said in atp my my goal with the charting the reason i took the

mac mini out of a bunch of my graphs i put it in the bottom ones but in the top ones and took it out is i wanted to be like if you just glance at this chart it would be like oh here's the price and performance of single core and multi-core of the apple's laptop line and then i'd be like well the type's really small i hid the ipad in there can you guess where it is and you would never guess just offhand that it would be way over there on the right hand side with these especially with the big separation of single and multi-core so you can you could graph this stuff endlessly i i still think it's a it's a fascinating story and it's one of those things that sneaks up on you if you don't like take a chance to look at it now your scatter plot that

you did is even more interesting uh especially since you've got these circles around the different different regions or whatever and then you know the mini and the macbook pro is way up in the upper right of uh performance and cost uh i i guess i mean i bet apple doesn't view its products in this way i can't imagine any chart like any of these ones that any of us have made ever showing up in something inside apple because that's not how they it's not how they view their products not how they market their products and realistically speaking it's not how we should think about their products either because there's so much more to them than these you know benchmarks numbers or whatever exactly i had a bunch of

people say well yeah but the ipad doesn't have a keyboard and the mac mini because i took it out of mind because i wanted to just be on mobile but the mac mini scores incredibly well the new mac mini because it's cheap and it's and it's got a bunch of pretty fast processor options but of course that doesn't have keyboard or display or anything like that and and that's all true right like the point is not to that's what i meant by sort of it doesn't prove anything like yeah there's a lot going on here that is not addressed in these charts and and yet it is kind of enough to to scratch your chin a little bit and be like well look at that isn't that interesting where the ipad manages to sit and and where the uh you know where the macbook is versus the macbook air and

and all of that because we are asking these things to do some of the same things like they're they all they both run photoshop right so you can photoshop on an ipad or on a mac and you would think well of course it'll all run on a mac because it'll do much better on a mac it's like well which mac do you have let's see if that's really true and the idea of when apple says um that the ipad pro is faster than 90 of the of the laptop shipped in the last couple of years there is that moment of like well okay i i hear you but what does that really mean and and and it lets you visualize that it's like no these are faster than every macbook other than at least in these tests no, these are faster than every MacBook other

than at least in these tests. And again, these are semi-synthetic benchmark tests, but faster than any MacBook other than the 15-inch MacBook Pro models. And that's, again, it's different. There are lots of caveats there. I had a bunch of people dropping into my Twitter mentions saying, ah, yes, but the iPad is useless because it doesn't whatever. I'm like, whatever. i don't really care and i'm not going to engage in that um it's just kind of fascinating to see that power there i honestly think that the most

interesting thing about this uh discussion is not about the ipad it's about an apple built processor in a mac like that was always the question is like well they can't really and you guys talked about this on atp last week um the ipad pro shows that there is a vast swath of apple's product line that could be converted today with existing processors and be no slower than they currently are and be better yeah better have longer battery life be either faster or have fantastically longer battery life or both wikipedia says the original iphone was a uh was underclocked to 412 megahertz the samsung processor it was a 620 megahertz processor underclocked to 412 megahertz yeah uh good times the thing about apple not not thinking and these graphs never appearing in

apple's uh headquarters as they envision their product line is like, this is how we see the external face where they show, here's our lineup of products. And I like to put them in size order and have increments of price. They always have this slide somewhere in the presentation of like, here's this one and it costs this much. And then you can step up to this one and it costs this much. and then you can step up to this one and it costs this much and they like to they seem to like to have nice gradations of price where you add 100 or 150 or whatever as you go up to the next one and they come in you know three or four sizes you know they have product lines it's almost as if they're they like to think of them as you know almost physically a physical family like nesting dolls or like i don't know a match set of things um the the physical attributes and

the prices as one of the as an almost physical attribute as far as apple is concerned and yes also the capabilities but never would they say okay and let's see how these devices spread out over any specification whether it be ram or clock speed or performance on a mixed set of benchmarks or application performance, like they never do that. And it's mostly because the results are not sensible and really never have been sensible. Here, we're trying to highlight how the iOS line has come from behind and overtaken the Mac line. But just forget about iOS, just within the Mac line, the layout of the dots and any scatter plot of the Mac line, but just forget about iOS. Just within the Mac line, the layout of the dots and any scatter plot of the Mac line has never been,

look at this beautiful curve. You pay more money and you get a better product. It's always been all over the place because when you get to the high end, the margins get bigger and things get more wildly out of whack and there's these tight clusters around certain capabilities based on the processors they're using at the time with a few outliers.

It's not how Apple thinks about their products and certainly not how they present them to the time with a few outliers it's not how apple thinks about their products and certainly not how they present the outside world and i don't think it's how they think about them internally and i don't think it's healthy for us to think about them that way but this is this is purely a technology story of like when does you know when does our max become feasible when does it become inevitable and i this the turnaround of the october imax is like now it's almost becoming inevitable until really gets a fire lit under it or apple makes its own x86 chip or there's a bunch of other alternatives that we talk about at infinitum on atp but uh it's it's not looking good for uh

intel basemakers i i used to be a believer that apple wouldn't switch the mac away from intel mostly because i felt like in that era and i think this was actually how apple felt at the time they didn't care enough about the mac to put in an effort to do a trip a chip transition but then we had the whole you know uh let's come on down and have a rap session about the mac and and uh we we feel everybody's pain and there's gonna be a mac pro and you know and stay tuned for that imac pro at the end of the year and all that stuff that we got in 2017 and they revised the mac mini for crying out loud right right like this is i i would guess that at some point maybe early last year apple had a something happened where apple was like okay

we're changing our assumptions about the mac we're either gonna do the mac or we're not gonna do it we're gonna do it or we're not gonna and and i feel like a lot of this stuff is all kind of a part of a whole which is bringing in bringing in the the mac pro and and uh revising the mac mini but it's also like the marzipan stuff i think you can throw in there like i think their new strategy is traditional uh computer form factors will still be the mac but they'll be running they'll be able to run all of the software that's in the ios app store as well and at that point when i see them doing all of that making all this effort i look at and i go oh okay well now you will totally switch to arm because uh we've seen that the processor are capable of it especially on the laptop end and so i yeah in a year i've gone from i don't think they i guess a year and a half ago i

thought i don't think they care enough a year ago i thought i don't know if they're going to be able to do it when will they be able to do it and this year with these ipad pros especially it's just like oh well they're there like it's just a matter of how they able to do it, when will they be able to do it? And this year with these iPad Pros, especially it's just like, oh, well, they're there. Like, it's just a matter of how they want to roll it out. They're already present. Once you get to the point

where you are looking forward to and anticipating and wanting, like you start thinking, finally, I would love to have a laptop with this processor in it, right? When you lust after that product, that product that doesn't exist, then it becomes so much more real. Related to that, I wrote a piece for Macworld a couple weeks ago,

which was based entirely on just a moment of realization while Apple was talking about the iPad Pro and the MacBook Air, because they were at the same event, right? And I had that moment where I thought, you know, what's interesting is the ipad the macbook air does not have processor configurations it's one processor for the for your your uh son's homework computer your kid's homework computer right it's there's the one processor you don't have a well you can build in with an i7 for an extra 300 no there's one processor that's available for it and i had that moment where i thought oh you know that's just like all the And I had that moment where I thought, oh, you know, that's just like all the iOS devices. They don't let you vary it and build your own processor configuration. There's just the one. And when you say Apple internally isn't

thinking about it in the terms of like, well, there's this thing and this thing and that thing, I think that's true. I also think that there's a tendency inside Apple, is my guess, to really think of the product as what's this product for and what do we want to build it? And I think the idea of kind of old school configurator where, you know, there was, you know, Dell was so successful with it in the early 2000s, right? You remember this, that there was huge pressure on Apple. I think Tim Cook was probably a part of this. Huge pressure on Apple to be able to uh reduce their their channel inventory and let you customize your order online that was like dell mastered that and everybody else felt

the pressure on doing that you want to reduce your channel inventory because it's very expensive to build computers and not know if somebody's going to sell them or not and if nobody or buy them if nobody buys them you're you gotta put them in a landfill or something or you gotta put them on sale and uh but a part of that was custom configurations and i remember how big a deal it was when you could build to you know configure to order build to order uh a mac and choose it but internally at apple when i think about how they are designing these products especially the ios products like the last thing that they want to do is make something maybe like the the mac pro right but for most of the computers they don't want to have things that are like totally modular and there are like 16 different variations

based on ram and storage and like they want to minimize that as much as possible and on ios they've done that where basically you've got storage and color and that's it like those are your options storage and color and if you want a different set of features get the other model like get the get the 10r or get the 10s or buy the iphone 7 get the regular ipad or get the ipad pro and on the mac right now they don't do that but i looked at this error when it came out and i was like that that seems more apple to me today of just saying uh no it's got the processor that it's that's in it and if you don't want that processor get a different model that's mostly a consumer-friendly move because i think people are relieved only to

have to pick storage size and color for their phones because that's those are for the most part you can't give you don't want to give consumers too much to think about right um but there are lots of examples of products where they do seemingly intentionally give consumers a lot to think about and buying a car is one of them depending on what kind of car you buy a lot of car makers have tons and tons of options and it's like oh geez to really have to think of all the something i mean the more in fact the more expensive the car you get sometimes the more options are where you can customize every aspect of the interior down to every single color and materials for the seats and the dashboard and the floor like oh just can you just make me a car that's like you know and they have presets or whatever but uh there's something to that and that when apple offers

you like you just said i'll upgrade to the i7 for 300 bucks those options very much like car options tend to cost way more to the consumer than they do to apple right big markup on those um and if you do the generally consumer-friendly thing of saying oh the macbook air it's got one cpu option apple forgoes these fat fat margins on upgrading the cpu for some minor bump in speed that is noticeable and measurable but not in proportion to the amount of extra money it will look at look at the chart look at that chart that scatterplot chart i made that's got the macbook on there with the two build to order options on a faster processor in the 12 inch macbook and it it it does nothing like except raise the price it moves everything all the all the items move very slightly upward and off to the right and it does cost apple more especially with intel because intel marks up

those those things like it costs apple what it costs apple is that they've got to build it so that it can have different processors in it right that is the one thing that is the fundamental cost for clock speed and the pinouts are the same it's not that that big of a difference but like what we're getting is like the in the in the mac line there's been this expectation that certain things are customizable and it's given the product designers like the like not not the actual physical product but like the thing for sale like sort of price designing it that they have these knobs that they can turn they They can say, okay, well, here will be our base model, and here are the three dials that people are going to turn. Hard disk space or screen size, CPU, there's all sorts of things.

And all of those, kind of like the phones were, I don't know if this is still true, but historically, iPhone buyers have always wanted to buy the fanciest model, and it sells even better than the cheaper model in most cases, that a surprising number of people uh phone iphone buyers have always wanted to buy the fanciest model and it sells you know even better than the cheaper model and in most cases that a surprising number of people will forego the base model to the point where at various times apple has made the base model sort of undesirable to get people to get the option sort of like the car that doesn't come with the floor mats it doesn't come with air conditioning even though i know everybody wants air conditioning right i am very much in favor of reducing some of these options because i

i hope i think and i hope what it will mean is that they will not put like the not so great cpu and if they have to pick one cpu they have to pick a pretty okay one because if there are no other options there's no way to upsell that's the one computer everyone's going to be testing and trying and if it's a slug people are going to say this whole computer is a slug whereas before if it's a slug it would be like the reviewers would say oh just make sure you get the upgraded cpu option back when back when actually it did make more of a difference than the macbook or whatever um and same thing with storage i'll make sure you don't get the 16 gigabyte phones they're a little bit tight right nobody did buy them who got you know in our circle of friends we were like don't that's too little right that's like good it's the

good better best buying psychology, right? Nobody wants the good if they can get the better. They always buy the middle one. And so you can say, hey, it starts at $9.99, but the middle one is $11.99. And at that point, yeah, it actually starts at $11.99. But the $9.99 will get you in the store. Although, you know, every new car that I've ever bought has had all those options. And then they've said, well, we we really only got three on the lot um so you can and so you can either wait in nine months and maybe we'll get

you one that has been built to your specifications or you can look at the three we've got and choose the features or colors and drive it and uh both of both of the new cars that i bought in that fashion have been that essentially which is like, this one has seed heaters? Great. This one's dark gray and super boring minivan? Yeah, okay, whatever. It's here. We'll take it.

Yeah, the figurative and literal weight of inventory in the car world is slightly different than it is in Apple's market. Because, look, you've got these big, giant, bulky, heavy things on the lot. And the physical reality of that is such that they are much more likely to price that to move whereas apple's putting things in ever tinier boxes and doesn't yeah have that problem but anyway i do hope that apple uh takes this as an opportunity to reduce options that are not meaningful but like i mean my dream would be that they all come with the good one because it's like it doesn't cost that much more and just put the good one in there.

And it seems like they will be able to transfer all the obscene margins to store. Yeah, exactly. Because if you look at the prices to get like a one terabyte SSD in a Mac, it's like, well, double the price. Yeah, no, I think that I think that is what they've shown on iOS is that storage is where you build in the margins. And I mean, that's why I bring up that iPad Pro is like I feel like the iPad Pro has the good processor. Right. It's not that's why I bring up that iPad Pro. I feel like the iPad Pro has the good processor, right? It's not, that's like the A12X, it's... Yeah, that's not like downclocked

and they could have put a slightly faster one in there. Or there's some different variant that has nine cores instead of six or something like that. They put the best one in. Or that the 11 has a slightly slower one and the 12.9 has a faster one. No, it's the A12X. Everybody gets it. It's good. And would you has a faster one like no they're it's the a12x everybody gets it it's good

and would you like a terabyte of storage with that yeah although they do they do hold the ram which they don't talk about you know the first rule ram club in ios no one talks about ram club it only gets so at six gigabytes on the one terabyte model yeah which is which is nonsensical and further confuses people who can't distinguish between ram and storage but like they're those two things are not connected they don't that's why i don't talk about it yeah they're connected in that they're both the highest they can go so if you give us the most money i'll give you an extra extra two gigs of ram i feel like the the current and especially in the next like two or three years we're going to see this is going to be the era where all of the learning that apple has done

in the last decade on ios is actually going to get applied to the mac in a way that it hasn't really been up to now and that's that thing i said about how they turned the corner last year i think that they made a change in how they perceived the mac but i feel like we're on it now like this is it's it's about to happen where a whole bunch of those kind of like classic mac computer assumptions uh that were actually magnified a little bit by going to intel because it's like now it's just an intel pc like follow all of those assumptions about how you build and order and configure a computer and apple has spent the last 10 years 10 plus years with ios and i think that they're gonna apply a lot of ios learning to the mac and it's going to

change the mac it's going to make a the mac a different place and i don't know if this will be specifically what they do but it just it feels like that is coming where there's got to be a reckoning where where apple can reconcile these sort of two different worlds that it's making products in with the mac versus ios devices and kind of get them back kind of on the same page it's going to be interesting hopefully eventually you will stop shutting down your mac because you don't shut down your ipad every night do you i do not i never never do that although you are going to be along for that ride you gotta leave behind little habits my mom doesn't have her laptop anymore but every now and then i have

to have her turn off her ipad but she doesn't turn it off every day i just every now and then i have her turn it off and turn it back on and then guess what john everything works fine after you turn it off and turn it back on you just don't need to do it every day uh you're not gonna yeah it's fine it's fine in fact it goes so long that my mother says oh yeah i forgot that's right you just turn it off and turn it back on yeah Yeah, that's it. All right. Let's take a break. And let me tell you about our next sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Pingdom, the company who make website performance monitoring very easy. I just got my monthly report from Pingdom about my website because I use Pingdom for it to just say, how often was my website up pingdom will warn you when your website goes down

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That's it. Go to pingdom.com slash RelayFM right now for a 14-day free trial, no credit card required. When you sign up, use the code UPGRADE to check out. You'll get 30% off your first invoice. Thank you to Pingdom for telling me that my site was up 99.97% of the time, warning me the one time that it went down in the last month for supporting download and all of RelayFM. So this is a little bit later than we usually do upstream in the show, but I thought that we could talk about it because you and I are, we're TiVo owners. We're paying attention to media stuff and Mike and I talk about media stuff and what apple is doing and i think one of the most interesting things to happen on its own maybe not as interesting as what it might mean is the news that came out last week amazon announced that apple music is going to be on amazon echo devices and this is not the first third-party speaker to have apple music on it the sono stuff all supports apple music and has since it was beats so since the very beginning um and i've been listening to apple music stuff on

my sono speaker for quite a while now but i do think it's really interesting because this is core amazon echo now you're going to be able to use the lady in the canister to play your apple music and i i wonder given a conversation that mike and i had last week and i wrote a piece at mac world last week about it about apple trying to balance the classic apple we make money on profit margins on the hardware we sell with this services narrative that we're growing money we get from people in our ecosystem that is a service we sell them in addition to the hardware and how when you think about them spending a billion dollars on tv content to roll out next year it's hard to imagine what my piece says is it's hard to imagine that the profit margins on the apple tv are ever worth justifying over getting people to watch your streaming service and making a more

affordable uh piece of hardware that you can attach to a tv set that lets you watch apple's video service because the services narrative is really strong and how much money can apple really be making from the apple tv anyway um and i used an example our friend steve lutz who wanted to buy the buffy the vampire slayer complete series on itunes but uh he and he's got an ipad and he's got an iphone but he was never going to buy an apple tv so he could watch it on his tv set and uh then this amazon echo apple music thing happened and i thought, is this an outlier? Is this just like it being on Sonos and not a big deal? Because it feels a little bit like it might be Apple saying, we're changing a little bit about where our services are available, because growing our

services revenue is important. And not like we're going to take it to Amazon and we're going to convert them all as much as it is that a lot of their customers already have one and their service doesn't go there and that makes it less valuable. I don't know. What do you think about this idea that Apple is trying to maybe change how it views growing services revenue versus its sort of traditional strategy with hardware? I think, I mean, it's hard to tell because we don't know what's going inside apple but from the outside it still seems like they're the apple is hesitant um yeah so they want to want to expand apple tv but on it has been a few rare cases where apple has fully committed to this if you look at the

competitors you can it's a stark contrast like netflix is a great example netflix's business was they want you to subscribe to Netflix. That is the most important thing about their business. And if there was a barrier, like Steve Lutz who wants to watch something, like what's stopping you from subscribing to Netflix? If your answer is, I don't have any way to watch Netflix on my TV, Netflix addresses that problem by going to anybody who has any device that can show video in any possible way over the past decade or so and said

let us help you build netflix into your thing to the point now where televisions come with remote controls where there's a button on the remote control that says netflix that's the level of dedication netflix has to getting it so you have no excuse not to subscribe to netflix your tv does it your cereal box does it your car can play netflix like there's nothing in your life you cannot play microwave your refrigerator right by the way the roku for people who don't remember this far back the original roku was called the netflix box it was not even called the roku it was called the netflix box and it was a essentially a uh deal between netflix and roku because roku was making like audio players and they wanted to get into video and netflix

desperately wanted to box it could point people to and say here's where you can do your netflix what was it instant watch or something when it was branded as like not a dvd uh and you got it free with your dvd subscription that was the that was like the beginning of that strategy where they're like we need a box that you can plug into your tv and watch netflix and now every yeah every uh microwave and garage door opener will play netflix if you want yeah and that and they were doing those deals and making those boxes and getting you know all that stuff in while they were involved in the five to seven year process of getting any kind of software onto televisions because dealing with television makers it's a

long lead time and smart tv wasn't there and it was bad and like you know so but but that's if you are truly committed as netflix surely is because it is their one and only business truly committed to people subscribing to your service you want your service to be available to everyone yep apple for for has services but thus far has not shown a netflix level of commitment to making any of its services available to everyone it's mostly they're available to people who buy apple products sure and yes they have apple music on android and the on sonos or whatever so like they're dipping their toe and like we would like more apple music subscribers surely they would people who are who work for apple music are like hey we should make

those subscriber numbers go up right how do we do that but they're not taking the full court press apple music has to be everywhere in the entire world they're just not i mean that part of it is because they feel like there's a certain minimum level of experience they have to maintain. But part of it is just that it's not in Apple's DNA to do that. The biggest counterexample, obviously, although, you know, you're an old man like me, so I don't see if we have the same thing. What is the thing that comes to mind when you think of the case where Apple actually

did this and went wide? The one that comes to mind is when they did the, what, thirdod and put it on windows yeah that's it like so you they could have sold mp3 players to mac users with firewire attachments for 500 bucks for a long time and they you know they started doing that uh but eventually it's like look do you want you know eventually the the ipod eventually the itunes music store do you want to sell music to mac users do you want to sell music to apple customers or do you want to sell music to everyone and they you know it was a difficult internal argument and they weren't the steve jobs was against it right steve jobs was against it and and they and in the beginning this is not what they did they didn't introduce

you know wasn't from the beginning it had to come later that's what made itunes itunes right in the days of you know purchasing digital music itunes was king because it went out to everyone and you know every it was simpler world where everyone just basically meant mac and windows like there wasn't but like this moment feels very much like that in the sense that you've got, I feel like you've got this internal culture at Apple that is like, this is what we do. And in that moment, it was what we're not going to make this work on Windows. Like this is our advantage is that it only works on the Mac. other force that's saying, wait, wait, wait, there's a greater opportunity here. We should go big with this because this is a bigger thing than just being ancillary to our existing products. We want this to be a thing that's much larger. And that's why when I look at it, I think the real question is not, does Apple want a lot of people to subscribe to the service that they're spending a billion dollars on content for because of course they do um the question to me is how

badly do they want it and can they override some of the those feelings because the two things they could do one of which is they could just let other boxes play itunes content or play this tv content like roku and the fire tv and your microwaves and your you know whatever else they could do that where like you literally don't even need any apple hardware at all and you can get the apple video service the other thing they could do is take the apple tv and make it more affordable and you still need an apple product and i'm not i'm not sure which one they're going to do because on one level keeping saying look we make premium hardware like think of the home pod we make premium hardware it's really great home pod so awesome it's got all these things this is apple talking although

i like my home pods now that i have two of them and I really like them. Would I have gotten them if I could just talk to my Amazon Echo and got it to play Apple music? Maybe, maybe not. But with that, what they're saying is, look, we have this premium hardware that has a big profit margin for us, which is the home pod. And you can listen to Apple music there, but you can also listen on Sonos. You can listen on Amazon Echo. It's fine. So if they do that model for video what they should do is let you play apple video stuff and maybe airplay as well on roku's and fire tvs because um they still have a premium hardware product that you can get that they'll say is nicer and it's got this great remote that isn't that great and that you can play games but there aren't that many games. But there it is, right? So that feels like they could do that strategy.

And yet, I have a harder time imagining Apple's video stuff running on a Fire TV than I do with Apple making a $75 version of Apple TV. I wonder what they say to themselves in their meetings. Because, like you noted before, they're spending, what, is it it billions is it multiple billions of dollars on like original I think I think the report is that they they were going to spend a billion dollars on video content but you know it's ongoing process so there was an initial report of the hundreds of millions of dollars and I think that's more like a billion dollars now but it's it's all very vague because you just get these kind of like leaked wall street journal reports about it but they're spending a huge amount of money and to keep this as an ongoing concern they will need to continue to spend a huge amount of money for this content because you know this year's content will cost this well there's still next year's content so i let's just say for a round number it's a billion dollars a year on content and it's almost like it almost feels like a trial balloon because it's like, this will be our initial thing. And like, they don't seem committed to it

in the same way that Netflix has been. Like, they're going to spend all this money, but it's like, all right, so you're going to spend hundreds of millions or a billion dollars. If it turns out really well and you get lots and lots of subscribers to the Apple service, forget it.

And you haven't done anything. You just still have the Apple TV, no new cheaper Apple TV, no expansion or whatever. Like like what what do you see is how does this evolve over time what is what is the progression what what defines success if you could say uh and i'm going to project forward five years in the future of apple's video service and here's what it looks like it's inevitable that you have to either like decide that you're always going to be a minor player and live in the shadow of the big ones or if you're going to spend all this money you need to be able to sell these shows that you're paying to be made to as many people as possible like there's no there's no way out of that right so and even if your plan is like oh we make a cheaper apple tv that's not a plan

like that doesn't get you an apple apple video button on your television remote right that's a tiny step for someone who's reluctant like well people don't want to buy the big apple tv maybe they'd buy it you know people don't want to buy anything they just want to buy a tv and press the button and be able to watch like if you're successful with your content and you have you know insert unknown name of new intellectual property video program you know whatever your thing is of new intellectual property video program, you know, whatever your thing is, whether it's Game of Thrones or Orange is the New Black or like, you know, Serial and the podcast word. If you have some amazing content that people want to see,

the barrier to entry has to be basically zero if you want to be able to sell to the most people. The barrier to entry in Netflix isn't zero because people don't have smart TVs or whatever, but it's as close to zero as possible. Netflix is constantly working to bring it down to zero. Apple is not working to bring the barrier to entry down to zero. Apple is, you know, like dipping its toe in, but at the same time spending a billion dollars

on content. I would never want to spend a billion dollars on content that can only be seen by people who own Apple TVs. That is madness. Right, right, right. Well, I mean, you can watch them on iPads and iphones and i'm sure they'll regardless of whatever else happens like if you can't watch it on android that's 80 of the world so i here's here's what i think they are trying to do is i think they're not trying to reach everybody in the world i do think that

they want to reach everybody who has a foot in their ecosystem so that they can you know again services revenue is all about kind of accumulating more money for people who have a foot in their ecosystem but where it breaks down so so if like no you don't own an apple product and you hear about that new jennifer anderson reese witherspoon show and uh you know yes maybe you're like oh how can i can i get that even though it's on apple i don't have any apple things that is that would be an argument for being on roku and fire tv and stuff like that but i think at the very least what apple wants is that if you own an apple product you should you should they want you to watch that show they want you to be into it and if you're

like our friend steve and you've got the apple stuff but you're like yeah but i want to watch that on the tv and you're gonna be making me pay 150 bucks to put it on my tv like that's never going to happen so like there's there's this intermediate step which is just get the people who are already in your ecosystem and are already paying you money to pay you more money for this video show but what you can't do what seems to be a bridge too far for probably most of them is for that to sell them another piece of high margin hardware like that is too far that that seems to be too far to go yeah i still i still feel like it's a it's still like a bargaining stage where it's like oh you can do this and that'll get everyone in their ecosystem i was

thinking before about uh itunes being this you know not an apple phenomenon but being a world of music phenomenon it's hard people to remember in the days of streaming but buying digital music basically equaled itunes for a long time um the iphone arguably the next mass market even though android has massively more market share the iphone was and is as successful as it is because you don't have to be a mac user to get an iphone absolutely just the math of it you can't i mean there have to be i always say this to people and they're like that doesn't sound right which is there have to be more iphone users who use pcs than max otherwise the math doesn't work like they can't not be and it's interesting to think about that in that that the the reason that happened i mean whether it was conscious or not it piggybacked

on itunes on that one itunes decision how could apple sell iphones to people who didn't have max well when you get an iphone you have to hook it up to your computer to itunes which already ran on windows which was the only other computer platform that mattered right so that one decision to go wide with itunes and digital music So that one decision to go wide with iTunes and digital music basically allowed them to immediately go wide with the iPhone. Again, iPhone does not dominate the way iTunes did in its heyday, but it would be considerably smaller if you needed to have any Apple device other than an iPhone.

Most people have iPhones. I wonder if that's their only Apple device because it is so popular. They sell so much of that stuff and ipads are you know i think ipads sell about the same amount as max these days well they don't report unit sales anymore so who knows at this moment before we go over the precipice of that we can we can guess that yeah there are there are more ipads being sold than max because they're cheaper and they're generating i think roughly the same revenue so i think think in unit sales, there are maybe like twice as many iPads being

sold as Macs. But everyone's watching YouTube and Netflix on those iPads. They're not watching Apple's... So anyway, Apple's investment... Apple putting so much money in it gives me some hope that someone's going to be in some meeting and go, like, this doesn't make sense. We can't spend this kind of money and limit and still, like,

as your point, be held hostage, essentially, by the people who make 150 you know high margin black puck that people attach their televisions you know what show us your numbers and your projections let's if we give away your product for feet for free here are our projections like not that apple's ever going to do that but like it feels like like the the right way forward is that which is to say this is kind of a beachhead and it also allows us to say that this experience is best on apple tv so that we make a we make premium hardware it's the best experience here but yes you can also watch it on your cheap tv stick and that's fine too just like they can say yes you can play apple music on your amazon

echo but the home pod is awesome and you should go buy one that costs you know a lot more they need everybody to be talking about have you seen the house of cards and they need the conversation to be about this great show that and if you want it you have to get netflix or apple you know apple video or whatever that needs to be the conversation if the conversation switches to what do i have to buy to watch this something has gone wrong they need to get on netflix as well and i think the answer is probably for them to take the tv app and put it in other places because the tv app if you haven't noticed uh on the apple tv especially like apple's basically poured all their video into the tv app like itunes purchases are in the TV app. You know, obviously

their service is going to go in the TV app. Other services are in the TV app. I feel like that TV app, although it's been, its debut was underwhelming and it's still not a very good app. I was just trying to play. I saw that Arsenal was playing this morning and I'm a I saw that Arsenal was playing this morning and I'm a fake American soccer fan. And I opened the TV app because I got like a push notification and it was like, watch now on NBC. And I tapped on it and nothing. Oh no, I tapped on watch now and the add to watch list button, which was below it clicked. And I thought, well, that's a mistake.

I must've tapped the wrong one. It's early in the morning and I'm bleary eyed and i haven't had my tea yet and so i pressed the play button again and again it it took it off the watch list and it was literally the one button was clicking the other button i thought well this is ridiculous and i kind of quit the app and i went back to it and then it then it wouldn't accept touch input on that one little tile at all it was like what is happening here i switched to the nbc app and played the played the soccer match and it was fine but uh so the tv app is a mess is what i'm saying that said that kind of makes sense to me to for apple if it's going to do this to say basically we're going to open the gate to itunes rentals um per itunes purchases and uh you know all of our itunes

all the card stuff plus our tv services plus we will resell you other tv services all inside this app on whatever device it is and that might be actually the smart thing about why the tv app exists is what if the tv app is actually apple's whole strategy for embedding video in other stuff but i don't know that in the end to me john it comes back to culture which is even if we all look at this and say you can't spend a billion dollars over there and not do this over here the the part over here is counter to so much apple like culture there's so much cultural baggage about like no no we can't put the crown jewels on roku or fire tv because we're a hardware company and the truth is they're not a hardware

company they're more complicated than that now this services narrative says that they're really not a hardware company or they're a hardware company to the extent that they that the hardware is like a uh a personal seat license at a stadium it is the thing you buy that gives you the right to spend more money uh but i don't know that that's a big leap for them to change like that and i i wonder internally if this is if this is the sort of mixed feeling struggle it may also be that because we don't know we until they announce it we won't know that this was a struggle but it's it's over now that may entirely be because it's hard to believe that the person who authorizes a billion dollars in outlay for entertainment is also going to be like oh no but

we have to protect our apple tv margins that's very important yeah well the the more cynical take is that the entire uh narrative about services revenue is apple needs something to point to that's growing and doing well while they work on the next big thing which is insert whatever thing whether it's a car ar glasses or you know so and so forth apple tv is not going to be the next big thing is not it but like you could say the company could still be committed to selling you high margin hardware and everything else is in service of that it's just that they haven't found the next high margin hardware product to sell uh they thought maybe the watch would be it but not quite and maybe ar glasses and maybe a car and you know i don't believe that but like if you wanted to get

a cynical take you could say i don't i think this services narrative is just like look over here a line that's going up on a graph that doesn't seem right to me because i think apple again based on the amount of money they're spending on our original content you don't do that as a distraction while you work on hourglasses yeah exactly before we move on i wanted to at least ask you this is something that i just noticed in myself which is um i'm not using my tivo as much and some of that may be just like what i'm watching but i found that the last few months I've been using my TiVo for some live TV and a couple of shows. And I've been spending a lot more time on my, um, on my Apple TV input,

watching stuff from streaming services. And it's not like I'm not using my TV subscription, my cable subscription. I am watching a bunch of stuff still that kind of comes through that gate, but I'm also watching so much stuff that's coming through streaming and i just i don't know have you felt like a trend in this direction too because i feel like i'm not anywhere near at the point where i can be like okay a traditional linear tv is over for me i i i am not going to be able to do that for a long time i think but i am feeling like traditional linear tv and what's on my tivo hard drive is way less important to my entertainment life than it used to be yeah i think it's a it's a content issue it's a proliferation of content it used to be that there were you know well there were fewer channels and then there were you know

what were they you probably know the right terms for this but like the seasons of television right like the fall lineup of television what is the other one the spring lineup i don't know but yeah mid-season whatever yeah yeah um and and those were the shows and the other one the spring lineup i don't know but yeah mid-season or whatever yeah yeah um and and those were the shows and the shows were the shows and then they expanded out into channels and there were more channels but then they had their shows and now i think i don't know if it's the majority but a huge amount of of video content is not quote unquote on television you know basically we just talked about apple spending a billion dollars why the hell is apple making tv shows because everybody's doing it netflix makes tv shows there's a hulu

original shows and cbs puts things that are only available in the cbs app and not on regular tv like and for me what that means is that a lot of the things that i watch are part of some other non-television subscription that i subscribe to i pay for hulu pay for cbs all access to watch star trek pay for netflix what i pay for amazon prime that has its own original content many of those just aren't on the television so of course the tivo is not going to you know show those and for my particular taste lots of you know sci-fi or gritty fantasy stuff there's stuff that's maybe not suitable for television and you know or at a non-premium cable television, it means that more and more of my watching is not something that the TiVo could record.

Or sometimes it is like, sometimes Hulu has shows at the same time as they're on television and I can watch them in either place. And that gets really confusing, but I think that's basically what it comes down to. Now, the other weird thing for me is when my TiVo records something, like, you know, I could watch Game of Thrones when it comes back eventually

on my iPad or on my Apple TV. But I also subscribe to HBO, like the real full cable HBO. Yeah, me too. And my TiVo records. Yep. And when everybody else is having streaming problems for the season premiere of Game of Thrones, I don't because my tivo has it or i can watch it live and that never fails unlike the stampede of people trying to go to their ios app so i'm comforted by that so sometimes when i do

have the choice of which venue to watch it in or what service or whatever i will watch it on the old-fashioned tivo and the second thing is often often my tv will record lots of random stuff that i will watch on my ipad from my tv in in my house which is another interesting thing it's like well you know it's it's one of those one of my ipad shows where it's not worthy of the big television and i'm already in bed and i just want to watch you know maybe you want to watch a little one little program before i go to bed and i'm already tucked in and everything and i'll just pull out my ipad and my ipad can let me watch anything i can watch you know all the apple stuff apple proprietary stuff all my services have apps on the thing and all there's also a app and i can watch my show off of my tivo so does that count as using my tivo i suppose so but it's

not the same as it uh traditionally do you do you put in headphones for that oh yeah yeah okay i can't can't be disturbing people yeah well that's that's what i was gonna say is that would be really terrible if you were like watching a show that your wife airpods i use my airpods great okay that's good i approve that works that works yeah i don't know it's uh the reason i watch you're gonna love this um the reason i watch hbo i would say hbo go i have not had any any stream failures on hbo go with game of thrones i watched the entire last season of game of thrones on hbo go and i think the previous season and the reason that i do it is because um the full hd version on my local cable

system is the pacific feed which means hbo go or uh hbo on 8 in hd shows it at 9 p.m but at 6 0 1 p.m 9 eastern the episode drops on hbo go and so i can just watch it so i can watch it three hours earlier than they would otherwise give it to me by watching it on streaming you can pretend you live in the one true time zone i know it's it's uh i'll tell you john i'm a big believer in the west coast but the one place where the west coast really lets you down is the inability to watch shows um there are all these like the podcasts i do about like that are the flashcasts that are right after a show airs those are all shows that i that are available uh that air somewhere where i can where i can watch it or get it in advance because um like network shows

I can't do it the people I know the tv critics I know who live in the west coast have like a um either have a uh like a waiver for like direct tv to show east coast channels or they've got like a sling box in New York at the corporate office in new york that lets them watch the shows because there are all these sort of like uh you know shows on at eight o'clock eastern and you can't wait three hours and then watch it and then write about it if you're if that's your job um so that's that's the thing where the west coast is way behind but hbo lets me lets me do that which is really nice and actually my cable company does that they've got a bunch of like live tv channels that are the east coast feeds so if i if i really want to see something you have to watch it with commercials if it's a commercial

channel but you can get some of those as well but yeah it's hard out here we the world is not made for pacific time it's sad all that said about the tevo i do hope the tevo stays in business makes new non-bent tevo boxes because i will keep buying them for as long as television is a thing and it is still a thing the thing that i'm dreading is that comcast i'm a comcast subscriber um for lots of reasons uh i did direct tv for a while and it was fine but i was happy to go back when they came out with the tevo romeo i was like this is the time i'm gonna go i'm gonna switch to comcast is at some point here they're gonna have they're gonna start rolling out like real hd like real 4k channels in a way that they rolled out hd channels way back when it hasn't happened yet

there are a very small number and you you know they did the world cup last summer in in 4k but it was only on one satellite provider and at&t only had it with their like or comcast only had it with their special dvr that that and it was all a day later it was really bad but at some point that the log jam is going to break and everybody's going to start doing 4k channels and that's the moment where i'm going to be like all right i gotta get a new tivo now i guess the best thing then is we'll have three layers of tivo menus the standard deaf menus the hd menus and the 4k menus and for like five years the only menu that will be 4k is the home screen yeah no i really do wish them luck although all that said again getting back to the graph things

of like graphing the performance of ios devices versus max if i graph the number of shows that i watch like my top 10 or top 20 shows like ranked by how much i care about them uh they used to all be on television and then all of a sudden here comes this line that's like shows that are not on tv right shows that are netflix originals shows that are hulu originals shows like it just starts crawling up right and i don't know if they've crossed yet or whatever but the tv line is going down right so at a certain point the tv line goes down to the point where it's like i don't need a cable subscription anymore because all the television shows that i care about are not on quote-unquote television i'm not there yet but i look at the trends and i'm like that that could be my future when that future happens i won't need tv anymore

but it's not it's not today so i hope tivo stays in business and i will continue to pay them i'd pay them so much money they have no idea how much money i'd pay for new tivos i already spend like a thousand dollars in each tivo i get because i get the lifetime thing and i buy their fanciest box but i really hate that bent thing i bought one don't get me wrong i bought one but i hate it and i want them to come up with a new non-bent box that is quieter and more powerful yeah i have the non-bent uh tivo rome Romeo, and I'm going to hang on to that as long as I can, but hopefully there will be another generation box down the road that I can get to replace it, and I'm there with you. As a sports guy, it's extremely impractical to cut the cord.

I would need to immediately then subscribe to one of these over-the-top services that has the sports stuff that has, uh, the sports stuff that I need on it. And at this point I, I, I kind of like, yes, when, when my shows are in season and they're piling up on my TiVo hard drive, it makes me happy. Um, I have, uh, one other topic to talk to you about, and then we'll do some ask upgrade as well but first let me tell you about our final sponsor on this episode it's luna display have you ever looked at your ipad and wish you could use it as a second display from your mac luna display lets you do it i i bought one i got i have two now i have two luna displays i love so much. One for my old systems uses mini display port and another one for my new systems, USB-C. It's amazing. Your iPad already has a beautiful

retina display and you can always use some extra space when working from your Mac. Or if you've got an older iPad, you know, it may not even have a retina display, but it's another display. And if it's in a drawer somewhere, especially, you could repurpose it, turn it into a Mac monitor. Luna Display provides crystal clear image quality, reliable performance, and wireless flexibility. Pop a little piece of hardware into your Mac and you're good to go. And if you don't have access to a Wi-Fi connection, no worries, you can connect via USB as well. When using Luna Display, you can set up your workspace anywhere you want to go. Be more productive at the office, in the studio, or on the go. Back when I was working at IDG, one of the

things that frustrated me is I traveled with my 11-inch MacBook Air, and I really wanted a second display. And this setup today would be super easy because I could just use Luna Display with my iPad, and now I would have two screens on the go. You get more screen real estate without buying a new screen. And who is traveling with, you're not going to travel with like an external display when you're going into a hotel room or something like that, but you've got your iPad with you. It's perfect. Luna is a complete extension to your Mac. It's going to support your external keyboard. It's going to support your Apple pencil and touch interactions. So you can actually use touch to interact with your Mac. It's going to support your external keyboard. It's going to support your Apple Pencil and touch interactions. So you can actually use touch to interact with your Mac

with just the swipe of a finger. Super easy to set up. Works great. I've used it wired and wireless. If you're on a good Wi-Fi network, wireless is not a problem. But you can also just set it up to use it wired and then you don't have to worry about it at all and i was able to use the full retina display on my ipad pro next to my imac and have a little uh like calendar display off to the side it was really cool and for travel i i just cannot tell you how much i would have used this product back in the days where i was doing a lot of corporate travel because i have my little laptop screen and I always brought my iPad with me and letting them work together so that I could have more screen real estate. Just, yeah, absolutely.

I want to do that. I want to go there. Listeners of Upgrade can get an exclusive 10% discount on Luna Display. Just go to lunadisplay.com and enter the promo code UPGRADE at checkout. That's lunadisplay.com, promo code UPGRADE at checkout. Thank you to Lunauna display for supporting download and all of relay fm all right john before we go to ask upgrade i wanted to talk to you about basically i want you to fact check me i want you to i want you to throw a splash of cold water on

some of my crazy ideas can you do that for me go for it all right the one that i keep coming back to is the external display thing and this is i I admit that this is kind of a dumb idea. And yet I also think it's kind of a brilliant idea, which is if Apple's going to make external displays, what about touchscreens? Like this is my counter to the whole Surface Studio argument, which is what if Apple made a USB-C 4K touchscreen that if you plug it into a Mac, it's just a screen, but if you plug it into an iPad Pro,

it becomes a giant iPad Pro, 24-inch or whatever iPad Pro. Is that a wacky idea? Is that an unlikely idea? What do you think? I seem to recall reading on Twitter from one of the tech nerds who dives into the guts of Apple. Steve Troughton Smith or Jim Rambo. from one of the tech nerds who dives into the guts of Apple's operating system. Yeah, there might have been.

Yeah, there's some other person who goes by the handle Longhorn that I've been following on Twitter. Anyway, it might have been them, it might have been somebody else. Talking about how the capabilities to have external touchscreens, there's nothing really preventing that, technically speaking, in terms of the connection and the APIs and the protocols like that it ought to work it ought to be a thing that you could do um as for the usefulness of that i've been long time proponent of much much bigger ipads before they even went 12 inch i was asking for bigger ipads when the 12 12.9 inch came out i'm

still asking for bigger ipads before the surface studio i'm all in on big ipad one way to get that a semi-reasonable way to have an external screen bypasses a lot of the concerns because you're like who's gonna buy something like the surface studio just ask microsoft probably not that many people because it's like well it's not a super high power pc but i also can't pick it up and use it as a tablet if you have it as an external display you're like well my ipad is my ipad but i sort of dock it this is a well-known pattern that we have where you have something small and portable like your laptop or your duo dock or whatever and when you sit down at your desk you get a bigger richer experience than when you get up you take it with you i think that's perfectly feasible and would would be great and apple could do a really cool

product like that i'm not sure if apple will i look at the ipad pro doesn't make me think that they're leaning in that direction uh but you know i that's that's one way to address this market because with photoshop on the ipad and with the ipad stuck in being a portable product like for the surface studio seems like it's not a particularly successful product but i think it proves an approach like that sort of drafting table very large display uh you know pencil stylus pen input on a big screen maybe not the big cylinder thing you stuck on the screen but that that whole idea i think that has legs for sure um as a way to do sophisticated what we can typically think of as personal computer style stuff where you got a full big keyboard and maybe you got a mouse and you've got the pen you got all that

stuff uh does it have to be related to ios can that be a really fancy touchscreen mac apple's got the whole os issue to figure out but i don't think external touchscreen is particularly wacky um i think it is one way where they can get to someplace that i think they do need to go there are other ways they can get there but that definitely is one way right well i mean one of the other ways to get there is like the marzipan apps coming over from ios which are initially designed with touch in mind and then are presumably retrofitted for traditional mouse and keyboard. You know, when those apps are around and a part of the Mac platform, I think it reopens the question about if Macs could accept touch input, because then they're a little bit like, not quite,

but a little bit like what Microsoft has done on Windows, where there are some apps that are traditional apps that are really they need to be mouse and keyboard driven and then there are other apps that are more touch friendly apps and that would be another way because my feeling is like ideally you would have the ability to have a big screen and have touch and right now the way apple's demarcated the platforms is you can either have a little mobile thing with touch or you can have a big screen but you can't have both like and i'm not sure i understand why you can absolutely not have both other than that right now it's sort of like the mac is reserved

for this part and ios is reserved for this part but at some point you'd think that the that that the two might come together and the advantage by the way of of something over the surface studio that's that's more like a monitor is that it's not a computer so you don't need all the guts you need you know wait to hold it on your table but you don't necessarily need all the computer guts that the surface studio has because it's got a whole iMac essentially inside it in that little base that it's got yeah it's like a docking station for your laptop when you take your laptop away you're not left with the whole computer it's just the stuff that's on your desk that you hook up your laptop so would they go the other way do you think would would they would they are they

going to go down the path of touch once they've got marzipan apps on on the mac because I think that's one of the great unanswered questions right now is if you've got apps that started as as touch apps and now they're running on the mac it does at least make you it like opens the door for the question of well why would you not let those macs now have touch screens so those touch apps could still be touched or use the keyboard and mouse so apple's the the distinction you just drew of like touch means small and portable big screen means not touch apple draws that distinction but in the mac market that distinction doesn't exist because there are tons of people who work every day on very large light up screens that they touch with the pencil that are bigger than an ipad those very large the

cintiq you know cintiq tablets right that what they see on those screens is a straight up mac absolutely is not a touch interface and they touch it with the external monitor you know that's how the mac sees it it's an it's an external monitor and and they use a stylus and they're very big and the interface does not adapt to them so there's there's absolutely no reason other than apple not making this product that they couldn't come up with a mac today aimed at designers that they use an apple pencil with that shows a straight up non-mars band just plain old mac user interface right mars band definitely that's your point makes it now you can use something other than the style so you can use your finger because mars band apps are already designed for those metrics and it's reasonable to do and presumably those mars

band apps they won't like intentionally regress them by making everything be tiny and require pixel precise tapping or you know like as long as you don't get rid of the things that make it accessible to touch it will continue to be accessible but i i think there's no problem having an interface that is you know a mac desktop or laptop experience that has aspects of the interface that are amenable to touch probably most of the the important ones but that doesn't expect you to have to use touch for everything there is an expectation that you have some precise pointing device whether it's a trackpad a mouse or a pencil i think that's a perfectly fine assumption and i think the the existence of all the people weren't using macs with uh stylists today yeah shows that it's not you know it's it's fine like that can be your distinction your distinction is uh an ipad or

a phone or whatever does not expect or demand that you have a precise pointing device and a mac does expect or demand that you have a precise pointing device but it doesn't mean you can never touch your mac screen or you can never touch you know so i i think some sort of non-religious hybrid arrangement is definitely possible on the mac and hopefully we'll get there eventually yeah hopefully we'll we'll see i i feel like that is another one of those cultural things where there's some interesting baggage inside apple um and apple overrides that all the time i mean i i feel like some some culture is probably internal to apple and some culture is is external to apple and that's all the people who you know we're talking about how there would never be a

stylus for an ios device because steve jobs made that line that is totally misinterpreted because it was about requiring a stylus um but that was you know they're everybody's got their taboos and then sometimes the world changes and you need to say oh that taboo doesn't make sense anymore yeah they got that pro workflow group which hopefully has some of the people who have cintiqs and like huh this is interesting why do you have this gigantic screen that you stare at all day instead of looking at your actual max monitor and you're using a pen on it how does that work for you it's like we've been doing this for years get with

the program maybe you could make us something that would help with this well and and i think the logical thing when photoshop is on the ipad at um at a 12.9 inch screen is that people are gonna end the 11 and they're gonna use them and they're gonna be like wow this is great you know what would be greater better for the bigger screen yeah like that is going to be one of the very first things that happens when Photoshop is on the iPad Pro. It's already happening with Affinity and other applications. Sure, but it's just all those people who are going to come over, people who are artists who have to use Photoshop

because it's the workflow for their industry, and there are lots of them. A lot of people I hear from who are like, why don't you just use Affinity Photo or something? It's like, well, if you're industry, it's just like writers. If you're a novelist, your stuff's going to end up in word i'm sorry it's going to end up it's going to end up in a draft for a script there's yeah like there are standards and photoshop is a standard and there are features that are only available in photoshop and i've talked to artists about it and so they're going to be really thrilled

it's like finally i can use my ipad for not just noodling around or doing sketches but i can do my whole job i've got my photoshop files i got my layers and all that and then then then like 10 minutes later it's going to be like yeah i need a bigger one of these now and what is that maybe it's a maybe it's an external display with with touch who knows so that they can work on that thing at their desk at an easel or something like that kind of form factor and then walk away unplug and they've got their 13 inch display or 11 inch display that they can go they can go well we'll see uh want to do some ask upgrade i am ready okay here we go pk13 wrote in to say how does john see i told people you're going to be on the show how does john feel about the new ipad pros the last time i checked he had not gone to an apple store to check is there any update there i still have not been to an apple store to see them i was in costco and

they had a big display of ipads all the old ones so i still haven't seen one in person how do i feel about them i think they're awesome i would love one i'm not sure i'm going to buy one because i'm not sure i actually need one right okay um some conversation that i've seen and this is a steve trout and smith thing i think that i saw him talking about it too. Um, there are, uh, so you use are famous in some circles for having a lot of browser tabs open. I have, I never have browser tabs open. Uh, I, I browser tabs just live and die and browser windows live and die for me, but, but I, I'm also not a web developer. Um, there are conversations out there about how like Microsoft is doing tab sets. And I think the fuchsia thing that is being developed by Google also has this kind of

concept, the idea that maybe the future of multitasking and app switching is tabs like the Windows 10 stuff. The idea there is that you can have a tab set and it's got different apps in the tabs. So you can have the same window window from the same app and other apps, and they're just grouped together as a set. As a tab person, do you think that that's an interesting way forward in terms of like multitasking and windowing on especially like touch devices? especially like touch devices so when doing when doing on our devices has always been kind of in an uncomfortable spot like the the beautiful simplicity of the original iphone and the single thing taking up the whole screen it was just such a clean model and now we've dirtied that model up by bringing in the ugly reality of multitasking and attempting to divide our ever larger screen

into different regions the thing about tabs though is that like in sort of the the natural hierarchy of how you can divide up this this real estate um so you've got the entire screen and then i've in the traditional paradigm within the screen you have windows and then within the windows you have tabs uh and the the windows 10 thing of the tab sets of sort of inverting that sort of like a safari forest toppy tabs that uh steven hack was mentioning today um to say no no no it's not screen window tab it's screen tab window and that tabbing is actually a way to arrange windows right thing is there there's a lot of gymnastics going on in ios for a good reason

but still gymnastics to avoid having windows because people are terrible at managing windows it's a thing you want to avoid and yet windows are incredibly useful and so you get to split and maybe you get to tab and maybe you get to rearrange i'm not entirely convinced based on my personal experience that people are any better at managing tabs than they are managing windows i think they are better at managing splits because it's a simpler model right it's not you know but tabs you know we don't know we're just speculating about an implementation but tabs as we know them gives people more than enough rope to hang themselves i posted to a slack that i think we were both on that uh a screenshot from a co-worker's computer oh yeah incidental like

their share they share their screen as part of like a meeting and they're showing you something and then i inevitably look up at their at the the browser chrome and they have so many tabs open that everyone is only visible as a tiny little icon in chrome just so many tabs and it came up in the chat for all the tabs that i put i've never done that because i i manage my tabs and windows in a hierarchy in that sort of my windows are all you know for my browser windows are kind of proportioned like sheets of paper and within that there's a limited number of tabs but i wouldn't just keep cramming them in and cramming them in and yet every time i see someone's computer uh at work or in real life who uses tabs either they don't use tabs at all or they have all the tabs like just tons of tabs and tabs where they're totally useless where you

can't tell what they are where it's the same site icon a million times in a row or it's like google docs google doc sheets sheets docs doc sheets sheets to google you know whatever it is that they're doing maybe there's a theme maybe there's not maybe there's 75 tabs open in amazon and all you can see is the amazon logo like your screenshot by the way has 62 tabs i just can't and and this is not like a power user or some super computer nerd it's just somebody just a random person at work who i don't even remember if they were in the engineering department like this is this is what happens when you give people tabs as a means to control things and the same thing with windows like if you give people windows they don't know what to do with them there's too much freedom right um now all that said it doesn't mean the way apple

implements tabs has to be the way chrome implements tabs you can be much more limited they implement splitting in a very limited way that keeps you from having 100 things right so maybe you can have four tabs or five and you avoid this problem and maybe they make a way to rearrange them that is more intuitive than browser tabs and you know you have to deal with accidentally closing them and there's lots of issues involved i think it could be a reasonable next step uh in dealing with uh screen real estate but i also think that collectively we as humans have not yet come up with a good solution for how to manage information on a two-dimensional display uh i think the mac interface or the you know the classic mac interface and you know various various things in the PC world have come close to coming, coming up with some very good solutions for extremely sophisticated

technical users, whether it be like X windows, heavily customized or a Mac with a million extensions or whatever, or the way I use my computer, which is not the way I expect most people to use computers that those capabilities, the the capabilities exist allow people to work in very sophisticated ways but very few people and that's not a good technical solution the beauty of the iphone is that it'll let essentially anybody be successful with a with a phone that was really a little computer right we don't have that solution for doing for doing more than one thing at a time on a screen period full stop i don't expect apple to come up with that solution miraculously especially on the ipad all we're hoping for now is give us a little bit of the freedom that we experience on the desktop which is itself i think kind of stuck

in a rut in terms of how it deals with windows and it could do much better uh without making giving users enough uh you know enough rope to hang themselves um. So I think it would be a nice addition. And I think people, especially iPad power users, are sick of being limited in the ways that multitasking limits them. And so I would mostly give that feature a thumbs up. But I do not think it is an end state. I don't think it's not really a solution. It is just another

another stop gap on the road to coming up with uh something that at least lets us use ipads in as sophisticated a manner as we use desktop computers while also not making them as big a mess as desktop computers tall order i know yeah that is well we can dream aaron wants to know on an infinite time scale both the iphone and the apple watch will stop being produced which will stop being made first the iphone or the apple watch and why oh that's tricky um well well humans uh humans will have evolved past the need for for for arms the thing the thing about the wear thing about the watch is that it's not like it is a technology product but there's also a fashion aspect.

So if you fast forward really far with the technology, I think they will diverge from each other. You'll be able to make such an amazing watch eventually that fulfills all the jobs of an Apple Watch, which are limited, as we've learned. People aren't going to be using really complicated applications on a tiny little screen. It's mostly just going to do the stuff it does now, but be smaller and cooler looking and have one or two more features and be much lighter and be on all the time and battery lasts forever, blah, blah, blah.

I feel like the watch line will slide off in that direction to the point where it doesn't matter whether or not the phone exists, like that they're divergent. But I think the only reason apple would stop making the watch is because it just becomes uninteresting technologically speaking uh whereas the phone i feel like the phone has longer legs and will be more interesting technologically for longer than the watch so if i did put money on one i'd put it on the phone yeah i agree with you for much the same reason i think at some point the need to embed tech in a thing that's on your

wrist will the you know like the advantages of that will go away because that tech will be elsewhere and then putting something on your wrist will kind of recede back into being it'll be less of apple's core competency it's like well if it really becomes more of a pure fashion blight because the tech is is no longer interesting that's not really apple's forte uh last question this is from copula uh there's a knock at your door it's eddie q you can have the new mac pro to review three months prior to the announcement under embargo or you can have any ferrari you want to drive for three hours you must choose but choose wisely uh the way this question is formulated doesn't make it a difficult choice at all three

hours is not a long time and i would be terrified of messing up a car three months is a long time i would take the mac pro in a second three hours you can you'd hardly be able to get over my nerves at driving the thing in three hours so what if eddie q says okay uh how long how long do you want to have this ferrari so that i don't give you this mac pro uh if it was also three months and those three months were in the summer and i didn't have to work i would take the ferrari all right okay yeah who needs that i was gonna have to pay for any damage to the car yeah right i think that's embedded in the question of course okay i mean he's going to give you the car to drive yeah yeah you know all right well that's good john but eddie you know you can always bring both you sure actually that's the reveal of course is

that the mac pro is in the trunk of the car so you know just pull it out of there and then eddie speeds off down the down the street and you're left with your Mac pro for, for three months. That's a pretty good deal. Uh, John, thank you so much for being on upgrade. I like to have you, uh, have you visit from time to time. Uh, it's fun. You and I talk about lots of things that aren't computers on podcasts and, uh, and art robots and our movies and things like that. And like I said, I listen to you talking about this stuff every week on atp and i talk about it every week here but it's fun to talk about it with you so thank you for being on i always enjoy our visits especially when i can talk to someone who uh is closer to the same age and has all the same weird old apple mac i remember the old times i

remember the old times we're the best steven hackett just did a thing where he was posting about oh here's this interesting apple event and it was the event where they did the ipod hi-fi and and what i didn't say on twitter i was like we should you know he and i should do a like old times podcast someday of like apple history before i forget all these things but what i didn't say is that was a terrible event it was a disaster on all fronts it was should not have ever been called it was like here's our hundred dollar leather ipod case and here's the ipod hi-fi enjoy everybody and then there was a weird demo room where they had like a fake dorm room set up like a set from a movie that you could wander in and it was super creepy but uh

from steven's perspective it was like oh i found this youtube video of this weird apple event it's interesting like i was there it was not interesting it's only interesting in hindsight deep deep hindsight so yeah it's nice to to talk about the old times we can talk about uh system 6.0.8 sometime oh yeah good times good times well i want to thank not only john but our sponsors away We talk about System 6.0.8 sometime. I don't know. Oh, yeah. Good times. Good times. Well, I want to thank not only John, but our sponsors, Away, Pingdom, and Luna Display. You can find me, Jsnell, on Twitter. You can find John at Syracusa.

That's S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracusa, on Twitter. And we will be back next week. Mike will return from his brutal assignment. Remember to vote in the upgradies and of course listen to john on his podcast accidental tech podcast reconcilable differences and robot or not and he's also on the incomparable a lot with me so you should listen to that too and uh until next week say goodbye john syracuse goodbye john syracuse goodbye John Sargusa