Siracusa Says

John
I’m living in your future. Someday you will all listeners and co-hosts have a quantum dot OLED television probably. And you’ll like it a lot.

John
We are at the moment where every, uh, you know, iPhone, current model, iPhone, the iPhone 16 or whatever, will come with as much base RAM as the low end Macs.

Marco
Oh my God,

Casey
that’s so bad.

John
How soon before every new iPhone you can buy has more base RAM than say a MacBook Air, because apparently Apple will increase the RAM inside its, inside its iPhones, but they will not increase the RAM inside the Macs.

John
Did they say howdy in Tennessee? Is that a howdy state?

Casey
I don’t even know.

John
It definitely seems like a howdy state.

Casey
I mean, I’m in a y’all state, so who am I to really throw stones on that issue?

Marco
Honestly, I kind of wish I was in a y’all state.

Casey
Oh, it’s the best.

Marco
The second person plural is extremely useful, and the rest of English doesn’t really…

John
I think y’all is spreading. I think I need to see the y’all map. I think it’s spreading. I don’t think it’s South only anymore. I hear it a lot around here. I used it myself a lot at work. I heard it a lot at work at my jobby jobs. Yeah.

Casey
I cannot fathom…

John
Like, unironically, not trying to do…

Casey
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John
I think it’s not common, but I think it’s spreading. That’s my opinion.

Casey
Man, I am here for you, Mr. John Syracuse, saying y’all. Like, that…

John
I’m sure I have. I’m sure I have said it on the show, and I bet you two didn’t even bat an eye at it.

Casey
Well, I certainly wouldn’t.

John
Because you’re so used to hearing it. Like, I didn’t say it with a Southern accent.

John
My practice has always been more or less what you said. We do also have compost and we also have garbage disposal, though we use it much less now. After it clogged and I asked the plumber, is there anything I can do to avoid having this problem in the future? He said, yeah, don’t use your garbage disposal. So thank you, plumber, for the advice. But anyway, we compost now.

Casey
Anyway what’s wrong with ceiling fans? John what is your ridiculous angst against them?

John
I’m not it’s not angst, i don’t say there’s anything wrong i just didn’t know Marco was a fan person. Fan people are people who need to have fans blowing on them in most of the rooms in their house

Marco
I wouldn’t say need to but

John
I would say need to

Marco
What a fan does is it it buys you some headroom from needing like the air conditioning to be colder. So for instance

John
Speaking of headroom, fan people tend to be shorter no offense

Marco
How low are your ceilings that you’re going to hit your head on a fan?

John
My ceilings are very low and in my in-laws house where they are fan people i am forever dodging fans with my head.

Marco
How tall are you?

Casey
Yeah, John, you’re not 17 feet tall, my word!

John
I’m tall enough that fans are a threat to me

John: The second question you were getting to is, okay, but what if the cereal floats?

Jason: Yeah.

John: Because now as you’re putting liquid in there, the cereal is moving because it starts to float. That’s why you have to have different amounts, different rules sort of for filling things based on how much you know the cereal floats.

Jason: Density of the cereal, right.

John: Yeah. And that happens when you put the cereal in. When you put it in the bowl, if it’s a floaty cereal, you can’t put as much in because as you put the milk in, it’s going to rise and then the cereal is going to spill over the edge before the liquid gets to the edge. You know what I mean?

Jason: It’s true.

John: Yeah. I have precise amounts for all different kinds of cereal brands and I know how high I have to put the milk in my bowl. And unlike you, my goal is not to be done with everything at the same time. My goal is to have a little bit of milk left because I like to have the second little helping of cereal to get rid of the milk that’s left because one bowl of cereal is just not quite enough with the size of my bowls.

John: With the car project, Apple, like all those excited scientists in the 70s that I was reading about, and like so many other companies in the world, decided that cars that drive themselves are probably right around the corner.

Look what we can do now. It’s pretty impressive.

And if we just extrapolate and say, if we just continue along this path and our computing resources get better, like in, you know, five to 10 years, all of our cars are going to have no steering wheels and they’re going to be driving ourselves.

Because look at our progress and look what we’re already able to do in such a short time.

Surely by, insert year that has already passed here, all cars will be self-driving and driving will be obsolete.

John: Back before the internet, I would spend hours and hours and hours and hours, kind of like John’s parents feared he would, sitting in front of my computer. And this computer was not connected to any network. I had no way to get new software onto it. It was just a computer in my house, no modem, no internet, no BBS, no America Online, nothing. It was just me and that computer.

And in that little world, it was just like playing with a tiny, you know, electrical dollhouse. I was rearranging everything. I was setting things up the way I wanted. I would launch applications. I would use ResEdit to manipulate them. It was like being in a garage with your car and your tools. And there’s nothing else there. Like once or twice a year, I’d go to my grandfather’s house and get a new floppy disk from the Mac user group. And I’d have some new software.

But for the rest of the amount of time, I try to talk to my kids about this. I would use a computer for hours with no access to the internet and no new software. And like, what were you doing? And a lot of what I was doing was spending time in the Finder, you know, manipulating things, launching new things, moving things around. You know, I’d go into applications and I’d go back to the file. I should still put up on my old computers. I had everything so arranged. All the windows were arranged the way they were supposed to be at custom icons and everything.

It’s just it was beautiful. It was a lovely place to live. Well before we all like lived on the internet, I lived inside my computer and the Finder was my house.

John: Yes, he was not shy about saying when we make something, it’s almost, here’s the thing. I think in his mind, it’s rude for people to try to make another phone that works like the iPhone. It’s just not quite, it’s rude. Like, no, you shouldn’t do that. And once you do that, you’re downgraded his book as bad manners, right? And it’s just a very naive view of the world. But he just really like this, we deserve this. He would be very gung-ho and he loves the patents.

And it was like, we came up with this idea. It’s ours. No one can copy it. And the sad fact is they totally can copy it and they can find a way to copy it without technically violating your patents. And if you try to fight them out, it’ll just burn up time and money. And it’s a waste of everyone’s time. Like the look and feel lawsuit that no one remembers anymore. It’s just, it’s a, it’s a tar pit for everybody involved. But his sense of justice is once I’ve done something and I do the good one, no one should have the nerve to copy us. And that’s not way the market works, nor should it be.

Gruber: It is some sort of innate sense of justice that I think is at least in jobs was misguided.

John: Yeah. It’s like a toddler’s innate sense of justice. Little kids have the same sense of justice that is just, they think things should be the way they are and it’s not really a real sense of justice.

Jason: As a guest, it is John Siracusa. Hi, John.

John: I’m like a substitute teacher.

Jason: A little bit.

John: I’m not your normal Mike Hurley. I’m a substitute today, so we’ll probably just watch a movie.