Hypercritical

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin end the Hypercritical podcast with a discussion of the show itself, followed by a final Q&A where Dan asks the questions and John attempts to provide sensible answers. Many thanks to all the listeners and the folks in the 5by5 chat room. The journey was the reward.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin follow up on iTunes 11 and Apple's continuing failure to grok online services, then discuss the Wii U, starting with the painful setup process and continuing on to New Super Mario Bros. U, Nintendo Land, and, inevitably, the Wii U GamePad controller.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin follow up on taping out silicon chips, Apple's seemingly bottomless silicon ambitions, and the pitfalls of labeling people, then discuss Twitterrific 5, the new Google maps app on iOS, iTunes 11, Tim Cook's national news tour, and Apple's upcoming "Made in the USA" Mac.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin follow up on silicon chip making and misogyny in geek culture, then dive into Hypercritical's first—and likely only—listener Q&A show. All questions entertained! Some questions answered!

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin reveal John's Wii U in transit, then talk more about Apple, Intel, ARM, and silicon chip fabrication, and finally, the Fake Geek Girl meme, misogyny, and problems with Geek Culture in general.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin discuss the upcoming end of this show, more on Intel vs. ARM, Apple's CPU/GPU needs, and the newly revealed internals of the Wii U console and GamePad.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin revisit the topic of voting technology, then discuss the possibility of Apple using ARM processors instead of Intel processors in its Macs: RISC vs. CISC, process nodes, the x86 burden, and…sewing machines.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin talk more about Forstall's departure from Apple, Surface storage, and Fusion Drive, then discuss US voting technology, Google voice search, and how Apple's design problems are more than skin deep.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin discuss the latest information about Apple's Fusion Drive and the first big executive reshuffling at Apple in the post-Steve Jobs era: Forstall and Browett are out; Ive, Cue, Federighi, and Mansfield are in.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin discuss the new hardware announced at the October 23rd Apple event: the latest Retina MacBook Pro, whether the new iMac is too skinny or too fat, the little information we currently know about Fusion Drive, and, of course, the new iPads, both mini and Retina.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin ponder the upcoming Apple event, assess picayune physical details of the iPhone 5 and iPod touch, compare the newly announced pricing for the Microsoft Surface to its possible competitors, and discuss John's approach to getting value from Twitter.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin relax on a Sunday afternoon and chat about Apple's taste for brute force solutions, the foibles of decentralized systems like Tent and email, and The Magazine, Marco Arment's new Newsstand publication.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin discuss the latest events in the burgeoning App.net community, then explore the competing(?) Tent.io protocol for decentralized real-time social networking.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin follow up on Apple's slippery little devices and Apple's mapping woes, then discuss the new iPod touch and iPod nano. John's hypothetical Ferrari is briefly mentioned.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin discuss the new iPhone 5: its physical design, the case for cases, the new lightning connector, and Apple's trouble with maps. Let the iPhone 6 speculation begin?

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin discuss all the things that went wrong during John's Mountain Lion ebook publishing experience. There's more than enough blame to go around. Please note that this episode was recorded before the September 12th Apple event.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin discuss Amazon's new Kindle and Kindle Fire products. Is Amazon Apple's most dangerous competitor, or are the two companies not really in competition at all? Who is Amazon's ideal customer? Finally, John and Dan make their predictions for next week's Apple press event.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin discuss the Apple v. Samsung court case, the near-comprehensive rumors and leaks about the next iPhone, the possible internals of the rumored iPad mini, and which company we'd like to buy Twitter, if it were actually for sale.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin finally complete their discussion of John's Mountain Lion review. Topics include power management, UI simplification, automatic termination, Facebook integration, and plagiarizing from yourself.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin discuss the latest round of Twitter API changes that further marginalize third-party "traditional" Twitter client applications, with the inevitable follow up about App.Net, the nascent Twitter-like service that takes money directly from its users, rather than selling access to its users to advertisers.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin continue to discuss John's review of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. On this episode: iCloud storage APIs and user interface, sandboxing, Gatekeeper, Retina/HiDPI, Scene Kit, Objective-C enhancements, and a bonus diversion into one of John's pet OS X topics: spatial interfaces.

John Siracusa is on vacation this week, so we instead present its ersatz replacement, 'Kindacritical', with Dan Benjamin, Marco Arment, and Merlin Mann.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin discuss—what else?—John's review of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. There's so much to cover that this will have to be a multi-epsiode topic. On this episode: purchase and installation, interface and document model changes, and bundled applications.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin talk more about a potential smaller iPad, OUYA's challenges, what makes a successful Kickstarter project, how the Penny Arcade Kickstarter could have been more attractive to funders, and finally, the strange case of App.net.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin discuss the OUYA Android-based TV gaming console Kickstarter project, the unprecedented Penny Arcade Kickstarter project to remove ads from its web site for a year, and the Kickstarter phenomenon itself. Also, check the show notes to find a poll about doing an episode all about the PlayStation 3 game Journey.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin discuss rumors of a new, smaller iPad, Marco Arment's experience with and reporting of this week's App Store data corruption problem, Apple's response, and the continuing, unhealthy separation of developers and their customers in the App Store.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin discuss alternate motivations for the Microsoft Surface, Google's new Nexus 7 tablet, the history and value of reparability in computer hardware, and the possibility of electronics that "age well." Also, there's a robot that feels no shame.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin discuss the Microsoft Surface. It's a tablet! It's an ultrabook! It runs Office, Windows, and your existing x86 applications…unless it's the ARM version. And why is Microsoft making hardware, anyway? It's all very intriguing.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin discuss—what else?—WWDC: the hardware and software announcements, John's chances of getting his review done on time, John's WWDC survival gear, and the one time a year where he meets the fans face to face.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin discuss the latest crop of iPhone 5 and WWDC rumors, E3 2012, the current state of the traditional game console market, and the elephant in the gaming living room: Apple.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin discuss more optimistic prospects for a new Mac Pro, the latest round of iPhone 5 hardware rumors, and the intriguing possibilities for WWDC implied by the large number of sessions on the schedule that are labelled "To Be Announced."

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin talk a bit more about patents and copyright, revisit the sources of lag in human/computer interactions, revise the probabilities of retina-display Macs, MacBook Pros without ethernet ports, any Mac Pros ever again, and the various ways to deal with a possible taller iPhone screen.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin, inevitably, revisit the topic of patents, attempting to address a wide array of listener feedback. For the hearty listeners that make it through the patent talk, there's a bonus discussion of the new MacBook Pro rumors, and a brief consideration of cutscenes and trailers in video games.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin discuss the various ways that Apple takes money from transactions involving the App Store, lessons from gaming and gamers for the larger software world, why nothing is ever good enough when it comes to technology, the Instagram acquisition, and the sad state of the US patent system and how it might be fixed.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin discuss meeting Apple employees at WWDC, the latest round of iPhone rumors, RubyMotion (a new product for writing iOS apps in Ruby), the distinction between producer, consumer, and performer in gaming and other arts, The Kids Today, games as art, and Dropbox-related App Store rejections.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin discuss the WWDC ticket sales kerfuffle and the potential future of the conference, then revisit the topic of gaming as a form of art with some uncommon characteristics. Finally, the new Gmail user interfaces goes under the microscope.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin revisit software updates (paid or otherwise), then discuss various screen size possibilities for the next iPhone, the historical and ongoing dilution of the concept of a "gamer" (and Apple's role in that phenomenon), and the extremely unlikely possibility of any sort partnership between Valve and Apple.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin talk more about paid upgrades in the Mac App Store, how Apple is reshaping the software market (intentionally or otherwise), Readability's role as a middleman as compared to another prominent middleman, the App Store, and finally, the Flashback malware scourge and what it says about Apple's preparedness.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin try to put the topic of car engine noises to bed, then discuss value of "enterprise" businesses, RIM's possible future as a services company, Readability's business model, and Wil Shipley's case for paid upgrades in the Mac App Store.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin discuss the display of large images on iOS devices, Apple's latest web standards proposal and "rogue" implementation in WebKit, RIM's new enterprise-centric strategy, and the popular new iOS game, Draw Something. Plus, a Very Special epilogue all about Marco Arment's dream car, the F10 BMW M5.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin discuss the puzzling UI of iPhoto for IOS, the magnetic polarity of iPad Smart Covers, the Apple TV's ability to work with any remote, the iPad's lack of a number in its name (again), automotive platform awareness in Germany, video signal value ranges, DVRs in the UK, statistical significance, the Apple TV remote (again), and finally, Mike Daisey, Apple, and China.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin follow up on John's TiVo and smoke detector woes and the angst about the lack of a number after the name of the new iPad. John reviews his new Apple TV. Finally, the videos showing Chris Pirillo’s dad exploring Windows 8 and Mac OS X for the first time are mined for insights about computing in 2012 and beyond.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin do some brief follow up on file systems, then dive into this week's Apple press event: the new Apple TV, the new iPad, specs vs. product names vs. Apple PR vs. sanity, and how we all still miss Steve Jobs. Plus, John reviews his new TiVo Premiere Elite and, of all things, his new smoke detector.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin talk more about file systems: the origins of Btrfs, how file systems might change in the new age of SSDs, the possibility of a Grand Unification of storage and memory subsystems, and why snapshots, clones, block-level diffs, and deduplication are awesome features of ZFS that would make Time Machine a lot better than it is today. The show ends with John's predictions for the new iPad, which we all assume will be announced at the Apple press event next week.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin talk about file systems: what they do, what makes a good one, and who needs a new one, badly. (Spoiler: it's Apple.) File systems discussed: Microsoft's ReFS, ZFS, and HFS+.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin discuss this week's announcement of OS X Mountain Lion: what it means for John's reviews, how the new release schedule might influence adoption and reliability, and how features like GateKeeper will affect Mac users and developers.

There's no Hypercritical this week, so we put together something special for you instead.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin revisit gamification in education, talk briefly about the Nest thermostat, then engage in an ever-so-slightly more considered discussion of Wikipedia, attempting to address the mountain of feedback on the topic. No Wikipedians were harmed in the making of this episode.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin talk more about iBooks Author, Apple's real and stated motivations for entering the textbook market, and what really matters in education. This is followed by a long, ill-considered rant about Wikipedia. (Warning: original research, no neutral point of view.)

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin briefly recap the iPhone ringer/silent switch controversy, then discuss the new iBooks Author application, Apple's ebook ambitions and prospects, and the role of technology in education.

John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin revisit the world of console controllers, addressing the flood of listener feedback by expanding the discussion to include aftermarket and third-party controllers, and attempting to address the objections of PlayStation fans. A few comments about CES and how to deliver a truly Apple-like keynote presentation round out the episode.