You Can’t Outlaw Math
John:
we're in for a long show tonight are we not i don't honestly i don't know how long the fbi thing's gonna last i hope you put that on the pre-show marco's classic honestly i don't think there's much to say oh he says that i never say it's gonna be a short show though that's always you but that you say it in a different way that's the way you say it can tell i have a cold my my streak is over i thought i was gonna go two whole winters without getting sick almost made it out of this one so close
John:
can we just drive you over to craig's house you can fix your cold i recognize that wasn't the best use of that metaphor but i just cannot get tired of that metaphor it's so good yeah it's it's kind of mean though like this gets back to what i was saying on the past show we were talking about uh the new open apple and coming on podcast or whatever it's so easy to make fun of that but that type of story is an example of people opening up like it's the type of thing that in a more controlled pr environment would never come out
John:
And it's slightly unfortunate that that's the story that they put out there because even on the merits, it's kind of like, well, you're trying to make an emotional appeal, but realistically speaking, that's not an effective way for an organization to address problems, to have the head honchos of these huge swaths of the biggest company in the world be addressing problems on an individual level with their own particular Macs.
John:
That's not...
John:
you need better tools to manage this problem.
John:
Uh, so it just seems like you're trying to sway me emotionally with this anecdote, but it doesn't even make sense.
John:
But that's the type of thing that you do when you, uh, open up about yourself and your personal life.
John:
And I'm sure it really is true.
John:
And so I'm glad we know that that's what's going on.
John:
And now we can, I guess, make our own judgments about the, uh, the effectiveness of the strategy of driving things to Craig fitter.
John:
I don't know.
John:
It's also trying to say how passionate they are, that even these big, important people are, uh,
John:
are not above getting down to a problem that they encounter, that they're not going to leave it to the lower people and say, oh, they'll take care of that, that they really want to fix every little problem they found.
John:
So it's multifaceted.
John:
It's personal.
John:
It's human.
John:
It's flawed.
John:
It's everything that the new open Apple, the new more open Apple is about.
Marco:
so i only have a few questions about it first of all uh in what part of a ferrari does an imac fit they have a lot of cars if you have here's the rule of thumb if you have a ferrari it is not your only car that's fair okay uh second question can you imagine being federiki and basically being like the tech support team for the entire company i wonder if that's like a power move like do you know it's like that if you have something wrong with apple music do you like drive your computer over to eddie's house well see that's
Marco:
I feel like it's unfair because all of Eddie's stuff is all cloud and services.
Marco:
You can't really drive a broken iTunes store request over to Eddie's house.
John:
Well, you just bring your computer and say, why is all my album metadata messed up?
John:
Fix this.
John:
And you come back on Monday and you say, is it done?
John:
Did you fix my album metadata?
Marco:
I think it's even funnier to imagine, like, you know, you're Craig Federighi.
Marco:
You're, like, sitting down at dinner with your family.
Marco:
And, you know, you hear this, like, loud, you know, V12 pull up in the driveway.
Marco:
You're like, oh, God, again.
Marco:
Oh, Teddy, again.
Marco:
Hold on, everyone.
Marco:
Does he have the 599?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I don't know if Ferrari's well enough to even... I was just guessing there was probably a V12 one.
Marco:
There is.
Marco:
Is there only one?
John:
There's only one.
John:
Well, there's the FF.
John:
Is that a V12?
John:
Casey, do you remember?
Casey:
I thought so, but I, too, am not an encyclopedia of Ferrari models.
John:
There's two front-engine V12s, I think.
John:
One's really ugly and four-wheel drive.
Casey:
That's the FF.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
Is that even a Ferrari?
John:
It really is.
John:
If it's ugly and four-wheel drive?
John:
It still is.
Casey:
John would suffer through.
John:
Oh, I wouldn't.
John:
If I got that, I would sell it immediately and buy a better one than that.
John:
oh man anyway we should probably do some follow-up shouldn't we uh tell me about figma which i don't even remember talking about it was that vector thing remember that app that was gonna uh yes let you draw vectors in a different way and i and i said on the website basically they had a big sign up button instead of a big download button so i was like oh there's nothing to download if you know like you can sign up and i guess they'll tell you more when it's ready like as in the thing wasn't out yet
John:
and david klein tweeted to say that he's uh i believe figma is 100 in the browser nothing to download so when it does arrive apparently it's going to be a web app um but i still think you can't yet try it but uh anyway um if i can try it for free online i definitely will because i'm interested in how it's going to work fair enough that was quick and easy and uh why don't you tell us about everyone's favorite font comic sans
John:
yes uh friend of the show and uh flophouse adjacent micro celebrity john mccoy and a friend of mine pointed out that in all our discussion of comic sans um or microsoft bob rather we didn't mention that comic sans the much hated font was created for but not shipped with microsoft bob so you can read the wikipedia entry on comic sans and you will see that it was
John:
created to try to fit in with the microsoft bob world which explains why it's so awful but it didn't it didn't make it in time so it didn't ship with it so yet another thing you can blame on microsoft bob have you ever used microsoft bob john i don't think so i think i only i've read about it in magazines when it came out um but i don't i don't i didn't have a pc obviously and none of my friends who had a pc had it
Marco:
Alright, John, stop listening for a second.
Marco:
Casey, we have to, for April Fool's Day, somehow find a way to put Microsoft Bob on a computer in John's office.
Casey:
I don't remember using it.
Casey:
I bet you I did at some point, but I don't remember having done so.
John:
I installed Windows 8 on a VM on my Mac, and that felt really weird.
John:
Well, to be fair, Windows 8 felt really weird to Windows users also.
John:
I know, I know.
John:
Have you ever tried, like, doing an edge swipe with a mouse cursor on a windowed VM?
John:
It's really hard.
John:
Wow.
John:
Again, in all fairness, doing everything in Windows 8 is really hard.
Casey:
Well, just remember that was my life, boys, until just a couple weeks ago.
Marco:
Oh, congratulations again for getting out of that.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
I'm so happy.
Casey:
I really am.
Casey:
Anyway, we are done with follow-up, are we not?
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
Just two small items.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
Look at us go.
Casey:
Let's celebrate by talking about something awesome.
Marco:
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Casey:
So there's been big breaking news that has happened since we recorded last.
Casey:
And I think it's important we talk about it.
Casey:
Microsoft has bought Xamarin.
Marco:
I'm sorry.
Marco:
I just, yeah.
Marco:
That news is fine.
Marco:
I really appreciated your intro there.
John:
I didn't think much about Xamarin, but if you had asked me, hey, does some company own Xamarin now?
John:
I would have maybe guessed Microsoft.
John:
I know, like, didn't, like, Netware own them at some point?
Casey:
Something like that, yeah, yeah.
John:
But I had basically, honestly, I had lost track of who owned them.
John:
And they've been so closely associated with Microsoft that if you had told me, oh, yeah, no, Microsoft owns Xamarin, I would have been like, oh, yeah, that sounds right.
John:
So the fact that Microsoft bought them makes sense to me, I think.
Casey:
Yeah, so let me catch everyone up.
Casey:
So Xamarin was originally called Mono, and it was an open source re-implementation of .NET that was designed to bring .NET to other platforms.
Casey:
And initially this really meant Linux, but over time it became more about allowing you to write .NET code, usually C-sharp code, that ran on Android and iOS.
Casey:
And I looked at it way back when it was Mono 1, or I'm sorry, it was a long time ago, right when they first started supporting the iPhone.
Casey:
I forget what version that was.
Casey:
And as we've talked about a handful of times on the show, it felt like exactly how I would have written a bridging platform to go between the world of C Sharp and iOS.
Casey:
That's a compliment.
Casey:
It felt really, really good.
Casey:
Now it's still a total hack, but it felt like it was really well designed and really, really well done.
Casey:
And so Microsoft has since bought Xamarin, which, again, used to be called Mono.
Casey:
So now it's being folded into Microsoft.
Casey:
And this is kind of an extension of what they did a year or so, maybe two years ago, when they open sourced a lot of the .NET framework.
Casey:
So in part, see that Xamarin and other people like them could use Microsoft code in order to get the bits of .NET they needed.
Casey:
And then Xamarin could go back to doing the thing they were good at, which was just building that cross-platform layer.
Casey:
So Microsoft is buying Xamarin.
Casey:
We'll see what that means.
Casey:
This reminds me of our conversations in the past about Project Islandwood, which was slash is, I haven't really kept up with it, a cross-platform setup that Microsoft had to bring iOS apps onto Windows 10.
Casey:
I think that's mostly died.
Casey:
Is that true?
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
Was it ever alive?
Marco:
I mean, I know they released that in some form, and I know people looked at the code and it was horrendous and full of tons of temporary hacks and to-do implementations and everything.
Casey:
Well, because wasn't it like a re-implementation of UIKit on time?
Marco:
that was the idea and i remember it didn't come out like right after swift was announced and there and is not compatible with swift at all and so there was that issue and then the other issue is yeah like they basically it tries to be a layer so that you can write you basically you can port your ios app right over to windows phone or windows in general i don't know which version of windows but right over to windows something or other and it would just implement you know all the all the basic ios frameworks and
Marco:
I honestly have not heard of anybody using it for any reason.
Marco:
I mean, the reason why iOS developers are not making their apps for Windows is not because we can't cross-compile them.
Marco:
It's because we don't care because there's not enough of a market.
Marco:
Literally.
Marco:
I mean, I'm not trying to be mean.
Marco:
It's like, if we wanted to make apps for those platforms, we would just make them correctly, using their native tools and their native apps.
Marco:
The fact that there's this weird half-compatibility layer that is kind of half-baked and kind of half-works and is probably only half-supported by anybody, that's not really going to change anyone's mind meaningfully.
Marco:
That might...
Marco:
help out a couple of consultants on really tight time constraints but even then like are the clients even asking for windows apps like it there just seems like there is so little demand and will for people to make windows apps this is not going to meaningfully change that you know if this was the 90s the old story was like um don't bother trying to make a linux compatible implementation of the the common language runtime or dot net and
John:
Because you're just playing into Microsoft's trap.
John:
And even though Microsoft says all these things about, oh, you know, cross-platform, runtime, virtual machine, environment, C Sharp, blah, blah, blah, really what they're just trying to do is trap you.
John:
So that's why the Linux computer always kind of looks at them, you know, with a little bit warily saying...
John:
i don't really want to make any linux apps using this microsoft like no no it's not a microsoft technology it's totally open it'll be just like i don't know about that and if we were still in the 90s and microsoft was still that company that everyone was scared of and everyone suspected they were going to you know embrace extend extinguish all this other stuff what everyone would be saying was see we were really smart not to try to build anything in linux based on the the common language runtime or dot net because if we did now microsoft bought them and guess what all that cross-platform stuff
John:
That they were doing before.
John:
Well, that's all over now.
John:
And everything that is in Xamarin is going to become Windows only.
John:
And nothing's going to be cross-platform anymore.
John:
Because, you know, it was just like it was a trap, basically.
John:
Get people to distract Linux, which was a big threat to Microsoft in their own mind back in the 90s.
John:
And to use Microsoft technologies.
John:
And then take those technologies away.
John:
And make them proprietary from that point on.
John:
But, of course, the modern Microsoft buying Xamarin for exactly the opposite reasons.
John:
because they're a company that has shown that they're good at doing things cross-platform.
John:
And the new Microsoft wants to sell whatever it is they have to sell to as many people as possible.
John:
And they're moving away from the only way to get this is to get it on Windows.
John:
Azure Web Services are an example of courting iOS developers and stuff.
John:
You can use these web services with your iOS app.
John:
They'll sell anything to anyone because they think they have valuable things, and they're no longer in a position where they can say,
John:
We have valuable technology, and the only way you can get it is to be Microsoft and Windows and proprietary from top to bottom because nobody does that anymore.
John:
It's not even an option.
John:
So I think this purchase of Xamarin would have blown the minds of Linux advocates in the 90s, the idea that they're buying them because they're so good at cross-platform stuff and that surely what they're going to do with those people and that technology is more cross-platform things, not like, oh, now finally we can stop people from using our technology to do anything except for make apps for our platform.
Marco:
So here's a question.
Marco:
I haven't looked too much into this, so forgive me.
Marco:
But back in the 90s when Sun Microsystems made this really, really expensive custom proprietary hardware and software to run custom Sunboxes.
Marco:
And then Sun invented Java, and Java is seen by many as kind of a big strategic blunder by Sun because the whole point of Java is to make proprietary platforms and hardware completely irrelevant and marginalize them and make the same software run everywhere.
Marco:
And so many people think that was Sun kind of eroding their own company's strong points and their own revenue sources.
Marco:
Trying to apply that today, I mean, what does Microsoft get big picture-wise, long-term-wise?
Marco:
What do they get out of making Linux servers a first-class platform for .NET development?
Marco:
Because right now, Microsoft makes a big portion of their revenue with Windows servers and Windows server-side components and licensing from that.
Marco:
And how does that...
Marco:
Obviously, with Satya Nadella's new leadership focused more on services and enterprise stuff, it seems like this might be the opposite of what they wanted to do, right?
Marco:
It seems like this is long-term, removing them from being required to use their tools.
Marco:
So now, the server-side stuff, now, before...
Marco:
one of the biggest reasons why people would buy Windows servers was not because they're particularly amazing, but because they had to run their .NET server stuff because the .NET stuff was what they were comfortable developing in or what they used already or what was best for them for whatever reason.
Marco:
So Microsoft had a lot of server-side software sales from people who were kind of forced to use Windows Server who might have chosen Linux if they could have.
Marco:
And the Mono project and then the Xamarin project
Marco:
thing like this this is not new but it's always kind of been like a second class citizen it was always kind of like well if you were the it manager you probably wouldn't choose that because you'd be you'd be scared of compatibility or whatever so what how does it help microsoft now to have linux be or become soon a first class citizen to run their their server side stuff which means nobody wants nobody needs to buy windows servers anymore
Casey:
Why does it help Apple to make Swift compatible with Linux?
Casey:
That's a better question.
Marco:
Well, I think, first of all, that Apple needs Swift on Linux because they need to run their own services on it.
Marco:
I think that's a big thing right now with Apple is that their services are built on what is rumored to be a lot of web objects and old Java stuff and just like old stuff that either is not maintained anymore or is maintained only by Apple or is not the right tool for the job or is just in disrepair.
Marco:
And so I think Apple really wants...
Marco:
swift on linux for themselves for their own service division with microsoft i don't know how much they need i don't know i i don't know if that's why i'm asking like this this is i don't know if this is necessarily even a good question but just like is this a good idea for microsoft long term to to make windows server unnecessary oh but they don't make their money off windows server as much as they make it off exchange licenses and office licenses and stuff and like
John:
they're like oracle is a great example oracle is an enterprise software company that makes tons and tons of money uh and they don't sell they don't force you to buy an operating system i mean they do have oracle enterprise linux right but it's linux right they don't sell hardware uh they're just selling you their software and it's qualified in certain pieces of hardware and there's relationships with people who will sell you the hardware and what os you should have or whatever but
John:
this when you sell what they're going to what they want to sell you is an exchange license for a certain number of people or whatever and it's not as if doing this makes it more likely that there will be a successful exchange competitor like google's always tried to do with google apps and everything which is an entirely different approach and much more server side but as far as microsoft's concerned you mentioned like apple like oh well apple has its own linux server so of course they want swift on linux it's not unreasonable to imagine that
John:
Microsoft might decide kind of like, I mean, you're talking about Sun before.
John:
One of the things it did Sun in was Linux, right?
John:
The idea that you can only run Exchange on a Windows server, it's crappy for kind of everyone, including Microsoft.
John:
Would Microsoft ever want to, you know, can you imagine a world where Microsoft sold you Exchange and Office, all of which ran on the Linux of your choice, but there's a couple that Microsoft recommends, including maybe a Microsoft variant of Linux?
John:
Sure, because...
John:
If that means that Microsoft doesn't have to spend money maintaining a proprietary server OS that was never quite as good as Linux anyway, then that's a win.
John:
And that's sacrilege in the Steve Ballmer thing.
John:
What are you talking about?
John:
Windows is the crown jewel and blah, blah, blah.
John:
But this is a brave new world here.
John:
And if you're really going to do services, you can't be tied to a particular server platform, especially when it's one that's more difficult to manage.
John:
It has fewer companies behind it.
John:
I mean, Linux is basically...
John:
raced across the entire server side ecosystem erasing every single proprietary competitor so much so that former proprietary competitors say okay well we'll just have our own variant of linux and everyone's okay with that and just like that's like that part of the ecosystem has not been become the part where you make your money in an enterprise it's never been you make your money off support contracts and licensing and charging per seat or per cpu or whatever the heck you do you don't make it off selling them uh hardware boxes or os licenses
Casey:
Yeah, I couldn't agree with that enough.
Casey:
I remember being tangentially involved with pricing quotes for things like SharePoint and BizTalk and all of these big, big, big software packages that are not the server.
Casey:
These are the things you're installing on Windows Server.
Casey:
And I can't remember the details now, but oftentimes it was by processor.
Casey:
Then when multicore processors became a thing, I think at some point some software might have been moved to a by core installation cost.
Casey:
So if you have a 15 core computer, that doesn't make any sense.
Casey:
A 16 core computer.
Casey:
with, you know, I don't know, four processors, then you're paying 16 times whatever the single amount is.
Casey:
Like, they make absurd amounts of money off of the software, just comically large amounts of money off the software.
Casey:
And to come back to one of your original questions, Marco, like, why would...
Casey:
What is Microsoft in?
Casey:
What do they get out of this?
Casey:
I think what Microsoft gets out of this is it would be neat for them if writing C-sharp was kind of the lingua franca of server-side programming.
Casey:
And obviously there will never be one language that's the standard language of server-side programming, but...
Casey:
In the same way that Java is huge today, in part because it's open source, so much of .NET is going open source now that why couldn't .NET be the new Java in the future?
John:
Because it's the old Java?
John:
Well... It's better than the old Java.
Casey:
It's a lot better than the old Java.
John:
It has better support.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Especially now that Sun has been gobbled up and everything.
John:
Like, who is...
John:
I mean, I guess Java lurches forward.
John:
But if anyone was going to compete against Java, as like he said, is this sort of default safe enterprise server side language, it would be C sharp.
John:
And part of the thing that's been hurting Microsoft's story is, yeah, but then we got to buy Windows servers.
John:
And everyone knows that feeling, like, especially if you have an organization that has all their other servers that are Linux based, and everyone's happy with them.
John:
And they're all
John:
They have an entire organization built up around managing those servers.
John:
They like the idea that they can buy different hardware from different vendors and change different distributions and everything like that.
John:
And then someone comes in and says, hey, you guys should use C Sharp and write all your server-side stuff in C Sharp using this server-side framework.
John:
And it's like, oh, but then we have to introduce Windows servers.
John:
Nobody wants that.
John:
You can't really mix.
John:
It's almost like they keep those people separate.
John:
You have one set of people who manage the Linux-based servers.
John:
And one set of people who manage the Windows-based servers.
John:
And I don't know if you bring those people into the same room that they will just collide and annihilate.
Casey:
And I think the other thing we should say, a couple of quick notes.
Casey:
First of all, C Sharp is a great language.
Casey:
It really, really is.
Casey:
I know there are going to be people out there who are rolling their eyes.
Casey:
But truly, C Sharp is a wonderful, wonderful language that can be many, many, many different things to many, many, many different people.
Casey:
And I've been writing a lot of Swift over the last couple of weeks, and I'm really loving Swift.
Casey:
But C-sharp is also a truly wonderful language and fixes many of the ills that Java brought to the table.
Casey:
And let's assume for a second that your firm or your staff is really into C-sharp.
Casey:
Maybe they've never touched Microsoft servers, but they're really into C Sharp and they think to themselves, man, I really want to go to the cloud with the C Sharp instead of staying on premise with Linux or on premise with Microsoft.
Casey:
It doesn't matter.
Casey:
What cloud environment should we go to?
Casey:
We could just go to Azure, which probably will do very well with a C Sharp based deployment.
Casey:
And even if Azure is Microsoft servers behind the scenes, who cares?
Casey:
Because you don't have to worry about it.
Casey:
So anyway, so I think that there's plenty to gain from Microsoft by doing this, but we'll see what really ends up happening.
Casey:
I don't know how much Xamarin specifically will make a difference, but the idea of Microsoft pushing to being everywhere or to having C Sharp everywhere, I think is a good thing.
Casey:
John, any other last thoughts?
John:
Yeah, one minor point.
John:
Speaking of both Oracle and Sun, yes, of course, Oracle was the company that bought Sun, which means that Oracle does actually sell hardware now, because Sun used to sell hardware, and now Oracle sells hardware through Sun, so they sell ZFS storage devices and stuff like that.
Casey:
Ding.
Casey:
Does that count?
Casey:
Does that count?
Casey:
Does that count as a ding?
John:
ZFS storage devices?
John:
There are file systems on them.
Marco:
I don't think it counts, but that's a tough one.
Casey:
All right, I rescind.
Casey:
I rescind my ding.
Marco:
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Marco:
fracture prints are great and they make great gifts for family friends and loved ones because they're already the perfect way to celebrate a shared memory with something that's also unique and modern and they're really affordable and they look really good so check it out today go to fracture me.com again use code atp10 for 10 off your first order there i have fractures all over all over all over our house now they used it started off in the office they're now spreading to the rest of the house now
Marco:
And everyone always compliments them.
Marco:
People love these things.
Marco:
They look great.
Marco:
These great photo prints right there on glass.
Marco:
These nice, thin, lightweight pieces of glass.
Marco:
It's not going to fall off the wall with this giant heavy pane.
Marco:
It's a nice, thin piece of glass.
Marco:
And it sits there nice and flat against the wall.
Marco:
And it just looks modern and clean.
Marco:
You don't have to get it framed.
Marco:
You don't have to try to flatten the paper within the frame against the glass.
Marco:
None of that stuff.
Marco:
Easy, simple.
Marco:
They look great.
Marco:
They're incredibly well-priced.
Marco:
Check it out today at FractureMe.com.
Marco:
Use code ATP10 for 10% off.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Fracture for sponsoring our show.
John:
uh yeah so there's been some interesting things going on with the united states government and apple and um i don't even do we really need to recap this i guess we probably should give the short short version an overview would be helpful for people who listen in the future yeah although anyone listening to the story in real time as we noted this story came out right after we recorded last week so presumably everyone listening to the show when it's released knows all these details but we should summarize
Casey:
Does that mean I'm the one summarizing?
Casey:
I can take a crack at it real quick.
Marco:
You do seem to be the chief summarizer on the show.
Marco:
Maybe John, you and John are close for that.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Co-chief summarizers?
Marco:
I'm certainly not.
Marco:
So I know I'm safe.
Marco:
I can sit back here and drink my tea.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
How about I'll take a stab at it here and you guys can interrupt when you're ready.
Casey:
So there was a terrible, terrible, terrible shooting in December, I believe, of last year in San Bernardino, California.
Casey:
A couple of people took it upon themselves to commit this really heinous act and kill a lot of people.
Casey:
And that's really, really terrible.
Casey:
And there's no discussion about that.
Casey:
It's terrible.
Casey:
It was a terrorist act.
Casey:
It's something that's really unfortunate.
Casey:
These two people, suspects, perpetrators, whatever we like to call them, one of them, it was, I believe, a husband-wife pair.
Casey:
The husband had two phones, two iPhones, as far as we know.
Casey:
One of them was destroyed.
Casey:
That was his personal phone.
Casey:
His wife's personal phone also destroyed.
Casey:
He also had an iPhone 5C that was issued to him by his job, which coincidentally is the San Bernardino government.
Casey:
The iPhone 5C has a passcode on it, and it is quite possible that it could be set up such that if you enter the passcode incorrectly 10 times in a row, it will nuke everything on the phone.
Casey:
The iPhone is in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI...
Casey:
The FBI wants what's on that phone, but they can't get to it because it has this passcode.
Casey:
It could have the destruction setting turned on such that if they enter the wrong code 10 times, it will destroy itself or destroy all the data.
Casey:
Additionally, they were advised by Apple at some point or another, hey, we have iCloud backups.
Casey:
We don't have any from the last six or so weeks.
Casey:
I forget exactly how many.
Casey:
It doesn't really matter.
Casey:
We don't have a recent iCloud backup.
Casey:
We have a semi-recent one.
Casey:
And you know what you should do is you should take the phone and bring it to this guy's work where presumably there is a known Wi-Fi network and you should turn the phone on and just let it sit overnight.
Casey:
Plug it in, let it sit overnight.
Casey:
And presumably if everything has been set the way it usually is set,
Casey:
That will back up, the phone will back itself up to iCloud one more time.
Casey:
And the implication from what we've read is that not everything in iCloud is as well encrypted as perhaps we'd like it to be.
Casey:
Thus, Apple could get to that data and hand it over to the FBI and everyone's happy.
Marco:
Honestly, I'm pretty sure from Apple's point of view, nothing in iCloud is encrypted.
Marco:
That may be.
Marco:
You can do the encrypted backups through iTunes on your desktop, and it's off by default.
Marco:
And so for a while, as we all learned, whenever we get a new phone or our phone would die, we'd have to get a replacement one.
Marco:
we have to re-enter all of our passwords.
Marco:
And the reason why is because anything that's encrypted on the device in the keychain, which is where all your passwords and stuff are stored, any unencrypted backup does not include those things.
Marco:
So by default, the iTunes backups wouldn't include them unless you check the little box saying Encrypt My Backup...
Marco:
Which we all do because we are professional iPhone restorers, but not everyone knows that.
Marco:
And then with iCloud backups, there is no option to encrypt iCloud backups, at least not today.
Marco:
Maybe in the future there will be as a result of this.
Marco:
Well, they are encrypted, but Apple has the key.
Marco:
Well, right.
Marco:
So they aren't encrypted to Apple.
Marco:
And so as a result, nothing that's encrypted on the phone in Keychain gets backed up.
Marco:
So but almost everything like any kind of like content, you know, text messages, I assume would be there any kind of, you know, app data that's that's marked as as be as being for backup.
Marco:
So documents you've made in apps and everything, those would be included.
Marco:
And Apple has access to all those.
Marco:
And Apple gave access to all of those to the FBI before this even blew up and became a thing because Apple had access to them through iCloud.
Casey:
But they only had an older backup, several weeks old.
Casey:
It doesn't matter how many.
Casey:
So they advised the FBI and San Bernardino police, take the phone to the San Bernardino government, whatever particular branch this person was in, leave it on overnight, and it'll back itself up to iCloud.
Casey:
At which point, the police and FBI awkwardly grabbed at their collars, pulling them away from their necks and said, about that.
Casey:
We might have changed his iCloud password already.
Casey:
So that phone is going to try to back up to iCloud maybe.
Casey:
And it's going to see that it doesn't really have the right password.
Casey:
So that's not going to work.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So the FBI has decided to ask Apple for a few things.
Casey:
It would like Apple to write a custom build of iOS that, as far as the FBI is concerned, they are happy to be signed in such a way that it would only work on this particular device.
Casey:
it will allow them to it will bypass the setting that will self-destruct the encryption after 10 failed passcode attempts so they can attempt as many as they'd like additionally they'd like any sort of time delay to go away if there is one and i forget exactly when those came in and when they're when they're there and when they're not but suffice to say if there is a time delay they'd like it to go away and additionally they'd like to be able to enter the passcode not by meaty fingers on a screen
Casey:
but by Bluetooth or Wi-Fi or a cable or any way so that it can be automated with an external computer.
Casey:
The FBI has said we'd like to do it at our place or, Apple, if you'd prefer, we can do it at your house.
Casey:
That's fine, too.
Casey:
The end game for the FBI is they want to be able to throw a gazillion passcodes at this thing in a very short window of time to brute force their way into it.
Casey:
So that, by some measures, and we'll get into what we think here in a second, but some people are of the opinion that that's a perfectly reasonable point of view from the FBI, that they only want it for one phone.
Casey:
They only want to do it this once.
Casey:
And they're even willing to have Apple do it in Cupertino and Apple's own environment.
Casey:
And the FBI will either come to them or if Apple gives them like remote access to a machine that can enter passcodes, the FBI will do it remotely.
Casey:
They don't care.
Casey:
They just want it this one time for this one phone to see if possibly maybe something on that will indicate that this was part of a wider terrorist plot rather than a couple of crazy people doing something that is really, really just uncool.
Casey:
That's the FBI's perspective.
Casey:
Apple's perspective is, hey, if we do this once, that's establishing a legal precedent.
Casey:
That means you can ask us to do this many, many more times.
Casey:
Not only that, but we would have to write code to do this.
Casey:
And that seems a bit unreasonable to tell us to write a bunch of code to allow you to brute force your way into a phone that we've spent a long time trying to make sure that isn't possible.
Casey:
Beyond that,
Casey:
A lot of government entities have come out of the woodwork over the last 48 hours saying, you know what, if this works for the FBI, we have a bunch of iPhones we'd like you to do that for too.
Casey:
Okay, cool.
Casey:
Sounds great.
Casey:
So Apple is of the opinion that this is a backdoor.
Casey:
And
Casey:
Again, we'll get into what we think in a second, but Apple says this is a backdoor.
Casey:
And in fact, just earlier today, Tim Cook did a special with ABC News where he used the analogy that creating this is like creating a software version of cancer.
Marco:
Which, by the way, I think a virus would be a better analogy there.
Marco:
Didn't test as well.
Yeah.
John:
yeah i thought he he hammered that analogy a little too hard because it isn't that great of one he had a handful of talking points and unfortunately the interviewer had more than a handful of questions so it was just like after the first round it was like which one of my talking points am i going to use as a reply for this question
Casey:
Yeah, it was the same thing just over and over and over again, which is really too bad.
Casey:
But in any case, so Apple is of the opinion this is a backdoor.
Casey:
Once we've done this once, we're going to be asked to do it a thousand times.
Casey:
We don't think it's fair to do it even once.
Casey:
We don't think it's fair to us.
Casey:
We don't think it's fair to our customers.
Casey:
We're not into it.
Casey:
So Apple is saying we're not going to do it.
Casey:
And more than that, Tim Cook said in this interview, we are willing to go all the way to the Supreme Court fighting this because we think that's what's right.
Casey:
Is that a pretty reasonable summary of where we are today?
Marco:
Yeah, pretty much.
Marco:
I mean, like, there's a lot more detail here that we could just, just by stating everything we have either learned or that's been talked about over the last week or so since this really broke, we could fill the whole hour and a half with this.
Marco:
And we shouldn't because it'll take too long.
Marco:
I think let's assume that everyone who wants to know more about this will go and read up on whatever is new and whatever has happened so far.
Marco:
And I think it's probably safe for us to talk about it now rather than just keep going over the details of it, right?
Casey:
Good deal.
Casey:
All right, so what do we think?
Marco:
It makes me sad.
Marco:
Every part of this makes me sad.
Marco:
There's so much of this that is just like crappy politics playing each other out, and mostly on the government side, honestly.
Marco:
I mean, listeners of this show should know that we do not shy away from criticizing Apple when it is warranted.
Marco:
we will call them out on things that we think are BS or things that we think are worse than they should be or are just not good enough.
Marco:
In this case, though, I think Apple is mostly in the right, and not 100% in the right.
Marco:
And again, we should point out also, none of us are lawyers, so I apologize to anybody listening to this who knows more about the law than we do, who's screaming at whatever we don't mention or get wrong.
Marco:
the one thing that i think makes this a weaker argument for them is that it is technically possible for them to do this and i i wonder in the future you know i i assume it's already somebody's project at apple if it wasn't already uh i assume it is now somebody's project project at apple to to head an effort to actually make this impossible to do in the future to to remove their technical ability to do anything like this
Marco:
And there are a number of ways that they could do that.
Marco:
There are a number of challenges to that.
Marco:
But ultimately, I think I mostly agree with Apple that they I stand with them that they that they ideally shouldn't do this.
Marco:
But it does weaken their argument a little bit that they can do it.
Casey:
When you say can do it, what you mean is don't let me put words in your mouth.
Casey:
I'm just trying to make sure we're on the same page.
Casey:
What you mean is they could write a custom version of iOS that is specifically for this one and only one phone that would get the FBI what they're asking for.
Marco:
I think.
Marco:
Now, first of all, it is definitely worth reading this article, and please forgive me for the pronunciation if I get it wrong, by Jonathan Giarski.
Marco:
I don't know him, but he appears to be somebody who specializes in iOS forensics and testifying in court using iOS forensic tools and creating forensic tools.
Marco:
And his post here kind of explains the legal implications of everything Apple kind of would have to do if they make this instrument the FBI is demanding that they make.
Marco:
I don't think the FBI is really asking for just this one phone to be decrypted once and that's it.
Marco:
I think they're asking for the continuous ability to do this whenever it is warranted or whenever there is a court order or a warrant to do it.
Marco:
And even if they aren't asking for that now, that's really what they're asking for.
Marco:
Even if they're not asking for that in the legal text, that is what will happen here because this will set precedent and then it'll be so much easier next time someone asks for this to be like, oh, well, you did it for that.
Marco:
This is just as important.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And I think Tim Cook covered that pretty well.
Marco:
Honestly, ultimately, I think his interview on ABC News, I watched it right before the show tonight.
Marco:
I think his interview actually was very good overall.
Marco:
There were some parts that were a little bit uncomfortable and cringeworthy, but overall, I think it was very good.
Marco:
And I think he came off very well.
Marco:
And I think at a time like this, this really shows the strength of Tim Cook and how we are lucky to have Tim Cook as the CEO of Apple during times like this.
Casey:
I could not agree more.
Marco:
This is exactly where he shines.
Marco:
He is clearly, and he's shown this in the past, but this just shows more now.
Marco:
He's clearly very principled, and he won't be pushed around if it goes against his principles.
Marco:
And I think this just shows, I mean, you're not going to see any other company or any other executive put up the fight that he's going to put up on this.
Marco:
It's simple as that.
Marco:
I mean, you're not going to see anyone better than Tim fight this on that side of it.
Marco:
um that you know and again i could nitpick a few little things he said but overall i thought it was very good so honestly i i really do think that uh apple is totally in the right to fight this only again only with that asterisk that it sure would be better if their actual answer was we actually can't technically do this it is impossible
Marco:
because then it's then it's you can argue whether that whether it should be legal to make things like that but you can't argue about this case anymore then because everyone's playing off everyone's emotions on this ever like and tim did this too with his responses he kind of had to but like you know like the interviewer's like well think about the victims and the fbi is all about this this is this isn't about our ability to decrypt phones forever it's about these 14 families victims and yes it is it is about them
Marco:
Because this horrible event happened.
Marco:
People were killed.
Marco:
There's nothing about that that is anything but horrible and a huge tragedy.
Marco:
But the FBI is also using this for their political gain.
Marco:
They knew that.
Marco:
They set this case up as a perfect fighting battleground to fight this issue on that they believe they are entitled.
Marco:
And this is not just the FBI.
Marco:
This is all law enforcement and federal intelligence in America.
Marco:
They believe they are entitled to access any information and any possessions and any people that they want to, that they believe they need to to get their job done, or that they just think might be a problem or might be relevant to crimes that might happen or might have happened.
Marco:
They believe they are entitled to it all, and they get it most of the time.
Marco:
I made a quick little blog post about this.
Marco:
Look at everything we've learned from Edward Snowden's revelations about the NSA over the last couple of years and everything that's spun out from that.
Marco:
It's very clear between that and between things that happen at lower levels of law enforcement where they're just murdering people and getting away with it.
Marco:
It's very clear that the culture of law enforcement in the whole country from national down to local is incredibly entitled and just kind of mad.
Marco:
They operate like a lawless military dictatorship where they are entitled to everything they want in their minds.
Marco:
and they usually get it.
Marco:
And even when it's illegal, they do it anyway, and they get away with it most of the time, if not all the time.
Marco:
They get away with it almost all the time.
Marco:
So they are above the law in their minds.
Marco:
They believe they are entitled to everything, and they'll say it's about national security, but that's the kind of angry, macho, neocon craziness.
Marco:
In reality, this culture that they have is that they are entitled to everything all the time,
Marco:
whatever they want they're entitled to, to do their job, you know, whatever.
Marco:
They think they're entitled to everything, right?
Marco:
And our country so far in recent years, if not ever, in recent years supports that.
Marco:
We support by what judges say, by what the people do and don't get mad about, by how quickly we all forget things.
Marco:
We, the people and the courts and all the way up to the presidency, everyone in this system is complacent and permits this to happen.
Marco:
So the reality is it doesn't really matter what's legal here.
Marco:
What matters is what we will tolerate.
Marco:
And they know that, and so that's why they're playing all these emotional buttons.
Marco:
They're talking about the victims and families, and Tim's talking about kids being – everyone knowing the location of your kids.
Marco:
This is why this whole thing just makes me so sad.
Marco:
It really does because – oh, jeez.
Marco:
I mean –
Marco:
Let's just say that there are reasons I don't usually talk about politics.
Marco:
If you think I'm negative and bitter about Apple stuff, this is how I feel about politics.
Marco:
So I try to avoid it as a topic for my own happiness and sanity.
Casey:
I just wanted to make one quick thought, and then I'd like to hear what John has to say about this.
Casey:
As I was watching this interview tonight, which I think was a little bit unfortunate, because as you had said, or one of you had said, you know, it was the same talking points from both sides just repeated over and over.
Casey:
I feel like the entire interview could have been like four and a half minutes long.
Casey:
But anyway, I caught myself sitting there as I'm listening to this.
Casey:
And I thought to myself, this is why we have Tim Cook.
Casey:
You know, this is why Tim Cook is here is for this very moment right now.
Casey:
Because I don't doubt that maybe Steve Jobs would have fought it the same way Tim is, but I don't know if he would have done as good a job at it.
Casey:
And I am so unbelievably proud of Tim Cook and all of Apple for standing up for what I believe to be right and for doing the right thing, because this is not easy for really either side or anyone involved, but particularly for Apple and Apple.
Casey:
All the credit in the world to Apple.
Casey:
As you said, we have a tendency to call it like we see it, and sometimes we see it to be not so sunny.
Casey:
But I could not be more proud of Apple and Tim Cook than I am right now.
Casey:
John, what do you have to say about all this?
John:
I was thinking about how Steve Jobs might have handled that interview.
John:
At the very least, he would have.
John:
I mean, Steve Jobs has more sort of natural charisma than Tim Cook.
John:
I feel like a lot of the things when you're watching it, if you're supportive of Apple's position in this,
John:
Uh, the interviewer would ask some leading questions to try to, you know, get, uh, get Tim to say something.
John:
And Tim would just go back to his talking points, not falling for the trap.
John:
Jobs would have said the things that we're thinking like the sort of, you know, come back at him and, you know, take, take more digs at the government and law enforcement or Tim was always like, you know, we respect law enforcement.
John:
We want to work with them.
John:
We want to work together.
John:
Jobs would have let the fact that he is pissed be clear that he is pissed at how this is going.
John:
Tim Cook got a little bit closer.
John:
Now, it's a question of whether that would have been actually better in terms of PR.
John:
It would have been more satisfying for people who agree with him already.
John:
Would it have been any more convincing for people who don't in the court of public opinion?
John:
I don't know.
John:
So anyway, that's a sideshow.
John:
One thing that Marco said that stuck out to me was the idea that this feels worse because Apple can technically do this.
John:
And again, I'm not a lawyer.
John:
I don't know about the legal consequences.
John:
But when I think about it, I think that is not relevant at all.
John:
Because legal question-wise, there's two parts to this.
John:
One is what Marco alluded to when he said, well, it would be better if they made a system that Apple couldn't break into.
John:
Because then Apple would just say, well, you know...
John:
we can't do anything.
John:
Oh, well, sorry, we can't help you.
John:
Like, technically, we can't help you.
John:
There's nothing we can do.
John:
All the money and all the time in the world wouldn't solve this for us.
John:
That immediately leads to, okay, we're just going to outlaw cryptography, which would be a terrible, stupid rule because you can't outlaw math.
John:
And, you know, so whatever.
John:
So that's one end of that.
John:
But that's what I think this case is about.
John:
When I think about it is just because Apple can do it doesn't mean the government can order them to do it.
John:
Like, the government...
John:
can't make any one of its citizens or corporations or entities or whatever do compel them to do something just because they feel like it right there has to be established law as in when we issue you a search warrant you have to let us search right that's you know you can't just say you know it would be nice if apple wrote uh you know a custom operating system let us crack into this phone yeah that would be nice wouldn't it but do you the government have the power to compel a corporation to do work for you because you think it would be cool
John:
like that's why this is a legal case like this will be decided in the courts and with legislation and so on and so forth but the idea like marco said that law enforcement you know they can technically do this why don't we just ask them to can't we make them do that aren't we like in charge here like and the answer is no you can't really make them and if apple doesn't want to they're going to challenge you and you're going to have to go through the legal system and try to figure out whether this is something you can even ask them to do
John:
So I always think it is, as I have in the notes here, cryptography versus conscription.
John:
Can you conscript a corporation to write software on your behalf if you are law enforcement?
John:
Because you feel like it, not based on any existing law in the books or any legal precedent or whatever, just because it's a thing that's possible.
John:
And one of the things I think about, not this is the same thing at all, but like the idea that
John:
individuals and corporations can have rights um the idea that uh the government can't demand that you testify uh against yourself you have the right to remain silent they cannot compel you to speak against yourself they may ask you you know where you were you on the date such and such and if they're accusing of something you can just not answer them and they can't compel you to answer because it is you could answer
John:
Oh, it's much worse because, you know, you have a voice.
John:
You could answer them if you want.
John:
Why won't you answer the question?
John:
They can't compel you to because it's your right to keep that.
John:
And again, this may or may not be speech or whatever.
John:
But the whole idea that someone is capable of doing something does not mean, well, if you're capable of doing it, the government should be able to compel you to do it.
John:
That doesn't make any sense.
John:
So that has to be sorted out in the law.
John:
And then conceptually,
John:
Since we're late to the story and everyone's gone through all the details and we went through a lot of them already anyway, the thing that really boggles my mind about this conceptually is the short view so many people have.
John:
People who are on the wrong side of this issue, as in people who don't agree with me, right?
John:
um the incredible short view they have like just big picture like pull back from this issue pull back from this one phone pull back from details about like how it's been tailor-made to set legal precedent and how you know like all the details of the other things wanting to decode stuff and whether you can do it for this one phone and think of the children and the terrorist victims and all this other stuff and the details of whether there's anything on the phone and
John:
And, you know, also, by the way, the code is probably 111 or 1111 or 1234.
John:
They should just try those two codes and they would be unlocked.
John:
But even if they did, they would quickly lock it again because that's not what this thing is about.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, if also if you're talking about like what's most likely.
Marco:
There's nothing on the phone.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It's way more likely that like that the person's work phone.
Marco:
They had personal phones that they destroyed or were destroyed.
Marco:
It's way more likely the work phone has nothing useful on it.
Marco:
But the FBI knows that, and that's why it isn't about that.
Marco:
It's about they chose this case to publicize.
Marco:
They chose to publicize it and not do the negotiations in secret where Apple requested it.
Marco:
They chose this because they knew that emotionally that the will of the people would probably be on their side because they can play the angles of terrorism and victims and everything.
Marco:
Well, that's what I'm getting at, the will of the people, right?
John:
So I would be speaking to the people at this point, the people who don't agree that this is the right thing to do.
John:
Just keep pulling back from this case, from this thing, from phones, from encryption, from all the details or whatever, and just think...
John:
over the last several decades or whatever, the general trend in American government has been people being afraid and looking for anyone who promises to make them safer and giving up rights to get that imagined safety.
John:
From 9-11 on, but even before that, the whole idea was if you scare enough people and say, someone is going to kill you and your family unless we can tap all your telephone calls and read all your mail and do all your communication, whatever it is, just the general trend.
John:
If you put it on a graph, you can argue about specifics or whatever, but there is no arguing that the general trend has been away from civil liberties and towards government has access to more and more stuff.
John:
And that has been motivated generally by...
John:
people being afraid either people making them afraid or people legitimately being afraid and people taking advantage of that fear to say now we in law enforcement can do our job better because you're afraid you need to give us these rights and time and again law enforcement and government have proven that once they get the rights they don't give them back they use them in the ways that they didn't say that they said they weren't going to use them they abuse them there's no repercussions for that and it's a ratcheting mechanism that never slides the other direction it only goes to more and more and technology is enabling to do this now
John:
every individual point you can argue with like oh do i agree about this and what about phone wiretapping what about snowden or whatever you can argue every individual point but when you put it on a big graph this is a massive trend a massive long-term trend away from civil liberties and towards a loss of individual rights right specifically when it comes to law enforcement surveillance and privacy and so
John:
Even in this individual case, you just have to, like, you have to color all of your thinking to say, should we just continue to play out this thing on these individual battles, slowly ratcheting our way up?
John:
How does this all end?
John:
Like, such a long slide, you have to at some point say...
John:
There's a limit.
John:
You just can't keep asking for more and more and more and generations of people living and dying and just getting used to what the government does until... You just can't keep going in that direction forever.
John:
It has to be a pendulum.
John:
It has to be a cycle.
John:
There has to be a swing.
John:
And at some point, you have to start swinging in the other direction.
John:
At some point, the people... Your fear of being killed by terrorists has to be trumped by the, granted, much more intellectual ideas that are, you know, the country is supposedly founded on of, you know...
John:
some amount of individual liberty and rights and again let's have swing back and all in the other direction like we have freedom of speech but we also have you know slander laws and you know can't yell fire in a crowd theater like it's just like the basics of civics 101 there are extremes and we are headed we've been headed in this other direction for so long that i just think that every problem that touches on this issue at all has to be viewed in the context of the humongous long clear unidirectional slide that we've been in for so long
John:
And so anybody who's for this, I have to say, don't think of this individual issue.
John:
Do you agree that we've been going this direction for far too long?
John:
At what point do we need to turn around?
John:
At what point do we need to start swinging in the other direction?
John:
I think, personally, we're way past that point.
John:
But even if you don't think we're past that point, if you're not thinking about that point, if just every time something comes up that you're afraid of or that you knee-jerk, you know, support the troops, law enforcement is always right, the government is our friend, blah, blah, blah, if every single time something comes up,
John:
it's never going to even occur to you to look at where we're going and how we have to swing in another direction and i'm far from you know a libertarian individual rights nut job type of person like i'm far from that but i'm just saying like no matter where you are if you never if you never considered like this movement this graph this spec then it will never occur it'll just and there's no like oh it'll be too late like there is no too late it'll just be the new normal the new normal the new normal the only thing we'll have to compare ourselves with
John:
is the rest of the world that is hopefully slightly more sane in these matters, although the UK shows maybe not because they've got surveillance everywhere too.
John:
Things need to eventually swing back in the other direction.
John:
And it just seems like anybody who is at this point against this thing is showing that they're thinking entirely with...
John:
their their heart and their fear and all those things you know that do them credit in general but when it comes to establishing legal precedents and giving powers to the government to uh you know uh rights to privacy and again it's all these details like people don't know these details about encryption and all like it's too esoteric it's too that's why it's the perfect case for the government it's too tim cook can't make the real case because it's too detailed and your eyes glaze over and you're just like but terrorists bad give the government what they want right that is exactly the same thing that's got us doing all the crazy things we've been doing since 9 11 and
John:
And I just feel like you can't continue to go in that direction forever.
John:
Everybody should, at the very least, every time they make any argument about it, they should have to explain why not only is this the right thing to do in this case, but I believe that it is essential for us to ratchet this thing up one more notch.
John:
you know, for invading our privacy and for giving law enforcement government more power.
John:
In fact, that is essential.
John:
And this, because if anyone says it's just this one time or it's just this one thing or whatever, it's like they haven't looked at history, recent history or ancient history or any kind of history.
John:
That's not the way it works.
John:
Once someone gets power, they don't give it up again unless you take it from them.
Marco:
Yeah, but honestly, I totally agree.
Marco:
First of all, I think everything you said is gold.
Marco:
But looking at history and looking at the present and the direction and everything, I don't think I see a lot of evidence that it ever really does swing back in the direction.
John:
Well, you know, America itself was a swing in the other direction.
John:
There was more authoritarian government control under a king than there was under a democracy.
John:
There was a huge swing in the other direction.
John:
It does go back and forth in cycles.
John:
Like if you just study history, there are times where the government has more power over its citizenry and then less power and then more and then less.
John:
And, you know, it's clear which direction we're going in now and it's clear why in America anyway.
John:
um there's no reason we can't reverse that trend and you would think like oh well you know people like being under the king because uh it provides a measure of safety and without a king like the you know the mongol hordes would come and kill them or whatever like there's always some reason to be like yeah it's terrible but it's better than the alternative right but at some point people like you know
John:
f the king we're chopping his head off and we're gonna have our own system of government or you know whatever like we're throwing his tea overboard like those are big messy calamities but there are smaller victories as well i mean just look at the constitution it's been amended many times to give people more rights and and take rights away from the government say uh you know previously you could own people now we think that's not such a great idea so maybe write that into the constitution or for the example you can't drink alcohol anymore no never mind you can't
Marco:
you know previously we had the right to stop you from drinking alcohol then later we said no we probably shouldn't have that right yeah but on the other side of it like like maybe i mean first of all you know there's different there's different versions of like a government that has too much power that's too oppressive that people revolt against or overthrow um you know like it i granted this is way out of our usual comfort zone so please forgive me for anything i'm butchering here
Marco:
But if you think about the way that we are being oppressed by the surveillance and police states here, it's in a way that most people don't care about because they don't think it affects them.
Marco:
And so it's hard.
Marco:
If the government is taxing the crap out of you or taking your land and stuff like that, if that's happening to a whole bunch of people...
Marco:
that's enough to make people revolt in most cases historically.
Marco:
But if they're just keeping records of your text messages in these weird secret things that no one really thinks about or knows about, and then even when we're told they exist, everyone's like, eh, well, it doesn't really matter.
Marco:
And then we all forget and go watch The Bachelor.
Marco:
I feel like the ways in which things are going so badly that we're talking about here are ways that people don't care about enough.
Marco:
Well, they care about them when there are consequences, though.
John:
Well, but for most people, there are no consequences to this that they see.
John:
It doesn't matter if there's not consequences for most people for anything.
John:
It just matters that there are consequences for somebody.
John:
You just need basically an attractive young person to encounter a problem.
John:
For the same perfect storm that makes these things a great case for the FBI, there's the opposite, too.
John:
And here's the thing that makes me optimistic about it, because in general, despite insane gerrymandering and all sorts of other things, we still have a system where people vote.
John:
And so if people get angry enough, the people who are in power get voted out and new people get voted in.
John:
So it's always up to someone else to find a way to exploit the public to get them elected.
John:
And people are always motivated to do that.
John:
And there are smart people trying to get them elected instead of somebody else.
John:
And so there will always be at least some way for us to affect change.
Marco:
Yeah, but also like – but over time, as technology has progressed, as the world has gotten more – just more kind of globalized and as like everything including manipulation and centralization of power has progressed –
Marco:
What if oppression by government and by police apparatuses, what if this has actually gotten so good that now they're so good and things are so big and there's so much power concentrated in so few hands these days –
Marco:
And the science of manipulating people and manipulating the media and controlling the messaging of everything, that has gotten so advanced.
Marco:
We have gotten so good at concentrating power basically and keeping those people in power.
Marco:
That that kind of overthrow or change just doesn't happen anymore.
Marco:
You know, like in ways like certain forms of warfare basically don't happen anymore because we as a society have found more effective things, you know, in to cover those those needs or wants.
Marco:
Certain types of media don't exist anymore.
Marco:
Certain types of legal issues are just not debated anymore.
Marco:
Certain types of freedoms are just assumed that we will either always have or that we will never have.
Marco:
It seems like we've moved forward, we've moved past many of these things, and we've advanced so much that I feel like the police states are so in control now of almost every first world country.
Marco:
And so the combination of the establishment of control here, along with these issues that
Marco:
Usually not bothering most everyday people in ways that they can notice or get mad about, plus the ability for the people who want to keep things this way to very effectively control the media narrative and to have media so centralized that's even possible.
Marco:
I feel like the conditions are such now that a significant revolution can't really happen anymore.
Marco:
Does that make sense?
Marco:
Am I just crazy?
John:
You're falling into the Illuminati trap where you imagine that it's possible for a conspiracy of people to actually keep their stuff together and actually be all-powerful and controlling.
John:
Bottom line, people are people.
John:
That's what undoes all these things.
John:
If any grand conspiracy theory requires people to be so much more competent than anyone else, so much more...
John:
intelligent and capable and organized and uh able to keep secrets and able to like that any conspiracy theory they realize in that is obviously false because that just has not happened there are no better set of people better able to control things and if and this is what i was saying before
John:
There may be individual people who are good at that, but they're at opposition to each other.
John:
And also, all of them are just plain old people with their own stupid foibles and desires and things that don't make any sense.
John:
And that general... The general chaos of people being people means that...
John:
in the end not saying it all works itself out but like i said as long as you're as long as you're not in a military dictatorship in which you have to like have a bloody revolution to change things as long as we still have some way to change things without uh taking up arms which at this point would be uh non-workable anyway because seriously the entire united states population versus the entire u.s army
John:
if you set up that battle assuming both sides were highly motivated against each other which makes no sense because the army is made up of the children of the citizenry or whatever but anyway if you can imagine that scenario we lose every time anyway doesn't matter um as long as voting still functions in some tiny way which is getting tinier all the time granted but as long as it still works in some way and as long as people are still stupid people with their own weird desires and motivations um that sort of like dystopian uh
John:
sci-fi narrative where the the few rule uh the illuminati rule and the morlocks are just like lulled into a sense of like in many ways idiocracy is a more uh a much more plausible scenario in which everybody is a bunch of dunces but the idea that well i feel like the reason idiocracy resonates so much and and and we use it as as such a such an often metaphor in these circles is
Marco:
is because the way that I'm picturing there being a big problem for any kind of meaningful progress on these fronts is not the Illuminati situation.
Marco:
It's not a big conspiracy theory.
Marco:
If anything, what we've seen over the last 10, 20 years or whatever, probably longer, what we've seen is that the government or those in power can do audacious things, possibly even things that are illegal, that
Marco:
And they can just do them right in the open.
Marco:
And if they message it correctly, which they found more and more effective ways to do over time, as long as it's messaged correctly publicly, they can get away with it almost every time.
John:
But there are people who are motivated to get them out of office.
John:
Other people want those jobs and they have the same tools and knowledge at their disposal to battle them.
John:
If someone does something like that, guaranteed when they come up for election and someone wants to run against them, they're going to bring up the thing and they're going to bring it up in the unfavorable angle using all the tricks of the trade and emotional appeals.
John:
I think elections, again, not the cure for this, but elections are the hedge against this because all the tools they have to get away with stuff, people who want them out of office have to run against them to do the exact same thing.
Marco:
Yeah, but that's also based on a number of big assumptions of a that the population cares what people say in election debates and everything.
Marco:
But you have to you have to learn how to make them care.
John:
That's how you get elected.
John:
You have to do all the tricks in the book to get people.
John:
I mean, look at Donald Trump.
John:
He's using all the tricks in the barrel to get to get, you know, to win the Republican nomination.
John:
He's an idiot.
John:
How is he doing that?
John:
Because he knows how to manipulate and play the game.
John:
Not that I'm saying he's the greatest person, but if Donald Trump can get this close to being president, it shows that anybody can.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
The tools are there for everybody.
John:
Everyone has access to Twitter.
John:
Everyone can be on a reality show where they say you're fired.
John:
Everybody can put their face on it.
John:
So, like...
John:
Again, in sci-fi stories, it's always like, well, or in military dictatorships or in places like North Korea where the people have no power and literally sometimes no food, right?
John:
It's much harder.
John:
But in a first world country with even a remotely functioning government where people get to vote...
John:
you there was always hope and even if it's a hope of like get the current terrible people out and get a different even more terrible but terrible in a different way person in that's still hope it's not as if like it's going to be you know a military dictatorship where where the the supreme ruler passes it on to his son and so on and so forth and the only way you get out of it is with a
John:
I'm not as pessimistic as you are about it because I think most of the scenarios where it's intractable and we're never going to escape from it just don't work out in reality because people are just people, like I said.
John:
I hope you're right.
John:
I am.
John:
Don't worry.
John:
It'll be fine.
Marco:
I mean, you usually are, so I have some confidence here.
Marco:
You're generally right.
John:
I mean, it's not to say that, like, it can't be disastrous, because I think one of the sci-fi stories and scenarios that is plausible is, like, the one where you get the crazy person, like Trump or something, in there.
John:
Or, like, what is it?
John:
Firestarter.
John:
Anyway, don't want to spoil that book for people.
John:
someone like trump comes in and then like nuke somebody and we all die like that's always a possibility but i feel like i lived through that as a child of the 80s and uh it's like it's old hat now the whole world could blow up at any second because of a cowboy in the white house that's still a possibility it's still out there so don't say that that's not gonna happen because it could but
John:
Again, that could have happened back in the olden days of the 80s, just as much as can happen with President Trump and terrorists nuking things or whatever.
John:
Terrorists nuking things, by the way, is exactly why they want to be able to monitor every single thing you do.
John:
Aren't you afraid of terrorists nuking you?
John:
Please let me have access to everything in your entire life and you have no rights and we can hold you without trial forever.
Wow.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Let's talk about something that's happy and awesome.
Casey:
And then I have a question for you guys.
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John:
Real-time follow-up.
John:
I'm going to blame this on the cold, which, by the way, I have.
John:
Hey, have you heard I have a cold?
John:
I have a cold.
John:
not fire starter obviously the dead zone sorry brain fart there and you know as donald trump would say he can shield himself from an assassin by holding a young child in front of him to still win the nomination all right enough politics oh my god now that i'm sad
Marco:
Yeah, seriously.
Marco:
Is there anything better we can talk about tonight?
Casey:
Well, I have a question that's related, but maybe less sad, hopefully less sad.
Casey:
Let's assume—well, it's going to start sad, actually.
Casey:
Let's assume that Apple is told, you have to do this.
Casey:
And, you know, the world is upset.
Casey:
We are upset.
Casey:
Actually, we haven't talked that much about how this relates to the rest of the world.
Casey:
But anyway—
Casey:
Everyone's upset.
Casey:
Apple's told they have to do this.
Casey:
And Apple says to its engineers, you have to do this now.
Casey:
What happens if all the engineers that work at Apple that have any sort of knowledge as to how to make this happen?
Casey:
Just say no.
John:
They get fired because it's insubordination.
Casey:
Do they?
Casey:
I mean, one would assume.
Casey:
I agree.
John:
It's civil disobedience.
John:
Civil disobedience is basically like if you refuse to do what the law says you have to do, you accept the consequences of it, which is you either get fired or go to jail.
John:
Basically, if Apple's CEOs refuse to comply with the thing, then they're in contempt of court or whatever thing.
John:
And if the people in charge of the company...
John:
cooperate and tell their subordinates to do it and their subordinates don't then the subordinates to get fired for insubordination it's not as if there's some scenario where that we can all sit on their hands and say well you told us to do it and i told these guys to do it but they won't oh well like court order is a court order and there is consequences
John:
for whoever it is that decides to defy it and you know they could civil disobedience is a way to protest unjust laws but part of civil disobedience is that you accept the punishment associated with disobeying the laws and that's part of civil disobedience so yes that could happen but i really doubt it would right i mean yeah eventually like you know if if tim cook was thrown in jail over not obeying a final court order then somebody else would replace him because the company would have to continue operating somehow
Marco:
and then that person would authorize it, or they'd go to jail, and the next person would.
Marco:
It's like eventually you'd find somebody who would do it.
Marco:
So that's not really a way out.
John:
And really, realistically speaking, they would just do it if they were ordered to, but then simultaneously what they would be doing is, like Marco said before, they're already obviously working on an operating system that they themselves can't hack into, and that just leads to the next legal fight, which is, should it be legal to make these things?
John:
Which is another incredibly stupid legal fight that, like,
John:
at a certain point law enforcement becomes just so misguided in what they want like in some respects i'd say they're already past that point i know but like when the system is working the way you expect it to like law enforcement is highly motivated to to get all the powers they possibly can to uh to enforce the law and solve crimes right uh it's checks and balances that there has to be some opposing force on the other side says yeah law enforcement you may want this but civil rights dictate x y and z like and when the checks and balances get out of balance then we you know that's why you get this this long-term trend and what didn't take much to unbalance it just
John:
giant terrorist attacks on american soil and then it gets all inbounds right um can also make the minor correction that law enforcement's incentive is not to solve crimes it's to close cases not necessarily solving them just to close the case solving them suggests they're doing it correctly in the grand scheme of things again people being people the idea is just to uh obtain power but whatever let's not get into into motivations and particular uh disincentives but anyway when things are working well like what i'm getting at is that it's not necessarily a bad thing to have
John:
Right.
John:
Right.
John:
Right.
John:
apple's ordered to do it they do it two years later they come up with a new version of ios that they can't even crack into eventually all the old ios devices would go out of use so no criminals are using them anymore and of course all the criminals upgraded to the one that apple can't break into a similar scenario comes up law enforcement has this thing they want to get into it apple can't do it they're pissed off about it it becomes a legal issue um you know
John:
The senators and congresspeople who think they can best get elected by scaring their citizenry into thinking this needs to be done, they say, it's outrageous that an American company can make phones that the American government can't break into.
John:
That should not be allowed.
John:
And so they propose legislation that makes cryptography illegal, right?
John:
And at that point, you would hope someone in law enforcement would realize...
John:
that it's it's asinine right america can make whatever it wants illegal you can't get rid of math like the rest of the world has the math people can write programs themselves that make cryptography that in theory can't be cracked by you know the world's biggest computers for some you know like that's you can't unring that bell like that exists and so if you make it illegal for all that's going to do is make law-abiding u.s companies not do that
John:
But everyone else can do it, right?
John:
And it doesn't help law enforcement, right?
John:
And practically speaking, criminals, including terrorists, are not as sophisticated as people think they are.
John:
But if they wanted to be... Even this guy's phone, if he had used an alphanumeric password, the FBI wouldn't be able to ask TAPL to crack into it anyway because it would take too long, right?
John:
Maybe he did on his personal phone.
John:
Yeah, well, he destroyed that.
John:
So anyway, the way the system should work is...
John:
uh american companies should be able to make technology they want with the best you know cryptography available to them and the government should be able to spend its hojillions of dollars in tax money to fund you know uh what are they called like uh not black box budget but like you know budget that you know there's somewhere for like secret budgets you're not even allowed to know how much money they spend like homeland security and the nsa
John:
by all means give this iphone to the nsa's experts and have them break into it using huge supercomputers that you built with taxpayer money like if you figure out how to break in good on you right then wait you know because that's just that is a proper balance where people get to you know make better and better cryptography unconstrained by the law and the government maybe it's a little bit unbalanced but the government with its huge funding gets to hire the smartest people in the world and build the world's biggest computers to try to crack that cryptography but
John:
yeah you can have that battle and that's the way it's worked for you know forever in this country is that the government does have smart people to try to crack things and people try to make uncrackable things on the outside and they go back and forth right but this is the new strategy of like we don't want to do that it seems hard apple can you just unlock it for us and so because it isn't about this phone it's about having having easier and faster access to any phone they want
John:
Right, basically to be able to... I'm the boss of you.
John:
I can make you do things.
John:
So anyway, if Apple loses this case, Apple will unlock the phone.
John:
Then Apple will use its lobbying power and its millions and try to rally the tech companies to try to get legislation to make this... It'll be the whole political process.
John:
But eventually, Apple will make a phone that they themselves can't crack into...
John:
Uh, and then that will be a political football where it has to be who can, can we try to make this illegal?
John:
Maybe that fight will be, you know, like it's the same in all these things.
John:
You would hope eventually the public will be persuaded that Apple and privacy and cryptography kind of has a point, even as esoteric as it is.
John:
I think eventually it will be understandable enough that because like the crypto one, you just have to explain to him, look, making this illegal for Apple doesn't do anything.
John:
Terrorists can do this right now.
John:
You know, it doesn't matter.
John:
All it does is mean that it's easier for other people to get into your phone.
John:
It doesn't make it any easier for people to get into terrorist phones because A, terrorists don't do important things on phones and B, if they wanted to encrypt things so that no one could get it except for them, they could do it now.
John:
They could have done it a decade ago.
John:
They have the technology.
John:
That's not what's stopping them.
Marco:
you have a lot more hope than i do for our people and our politicians and our law enforcement because everything you just said could apply also to drugs like why make drugs illegal then regular people will be penalized for not having drugs but then everyone else will have drugs
John:
yeah and they did it anyway and it's look what it's doing like it yeah i would make i would make the same big picture argument with the war on drugs where it's like regardless of what you may think about an individual issue what has happened over the past 10 20 30 40 50 years in terms of the war on drugs and what have the results been what are the intended goals and what are the actual results been and maybe pick a different strategy if what you're trying to do is the exact opposite of what you're causing to happen
John:
uh and that gets into all you know puritanical america that actually does have deep roots in america the whole idea of like finding who to blame or punish versus solving the actual problem and yeah yeah this is not a political podcast maybe we're going into too many issues but uh yeah some things some things do seem really intractable because of the particular nature of america we haven't even talked about guns by the way which i'm sure we'll get feedback about because all those arguments you you uh gave on cryptography exactly the same arguments you could give for anyway we're not going to talk about guns
John:
Anyway, people have opinions, but it's kind of a shame that this is weird and esoteric and techie, because in that way, it probably... Apple could lose this one.
John:
Apple is going to lose this one in the court of public opinion.
John:
Apple could win it in the legal court, but even if Apple, quote-unquote, wins in court, they're going to come out of this as a company that half of America thinks helps terrorists.
John:
There's just no avoiding that.
John:
which is a shame for apple it's a shame for people who don't understand the the larger implications who don't understand the uh the trends in american life over the past several decades or who agree with it because they're constantly terrified of everything because they watch uh you know fox news all the time i don't know or any news for that matter let's not just call it if i watch msc mbc all the time and all they know is the things they're going to kill them um
John:
Yeah, that's a shame.
John:
And that's a bummer for Apple.
John:
I mean, it's got to bum Tim Cook out because I think he's a savvy enough person to know that even if he wins, he loses a little bit in this one.
Marco:
And that's why it's so interesting and admirable here on the side of it that they are standing up for this because...
Marco:
The upside for them is not large here.
John:
There is almost no upside for them.
John:
I don't understand.
John:
You could say, oh, the upside is that they can sell more people phones.
John:
Like Marco said, people don't care enough about this.
John:
They're, I'm going to buy the Apple phone because it's less likely the government's going to.
John:
No one thinks about that.
John:
There is barely any upside for that.
John:
It is a net loss for Apple no matter how this turns out, I feel like.
Marco:
Absolutely.
Marco:
It's a huge loss.
Marco:
The silver lining I can see in this, the only silver lining I can really see in this, is that
Marco:
Apple is no stranger to bad press and to negativity about them and rumors or slight mistruths or even truths about them that just suck being spread in the media very quickly and basically sticking around forever.
Marco:
Any kind of iPhone flaw or the quitting your apps thing even or the idea that they changed the dock port to the lightning port to make you re-buy all your cables.
Marco:
Don't get me started.
Marco:
Negativity about Apple spreads so much in the general population now that...
Marco:
This is not new for Apple.
Marco:
This won't be the only negative thing about them that a lot of people truly or falsely believe.
Marco:
And the other thing that might help them here is part of what makes it so hard for things like the Snowden revelations to really stick around in the news cycle, that people will move on.
Marco:
You know, like...
Marco:
next week Kanye West will say something and that'll be like, and then all this won't matter anymore.
Marco:
It's like the, the attention span of, of the, of like the hot topic in American news is so short, especially for something like this, where, you know, like the Snowden stuff where it's kind of complicated and there's, there's no good solution or end game here that's going to happen.
Marco:
And, and just understanding the topic in general is complicated.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
I've had a number of non-geeks bring up this topic in the last week or so since it came out.
Marco:
And every time, their reaction is not, what is Apple doing to help terrorists?
Marco:
It's, what exactly is going on here?
Marco:
Because it's a hard topic to understand if you aren't very technical experts.
Marco:
And also haven't read a really good summary of it.
Marco:
It's all very sensationalized and very being boosted by the media here and there.
Marco:
But nobody really... In general, people don't really understand it or don't have a very accurate picture of it.
Marco:
So honestly, I don't think it's going to stick around for very long in the news cycle.
Marco:
I think...
John:
i'd be surprised if anybody was talking about it two weeks from now to give some support for your pessimism marco by the way like if you think about for for issues like this that are technical that people don't really care that much about that you need to kind of be into the intellectual or legal side of it to really have it hold your attention because it's too complicated to think about otherwise very often leads to terrible laws that take a long time if ever to go away
John:
It doesn't mean they'll never go away.
John:
It just means that we may all be dead.
John:
Some recent examples are like the DMCA, all of the weird stuff involving cable television and breaking encryption on...
John:
ink cartridges for printers and like all the laws most of those are done by corporate lobbying obviously but uh laws that are about technical issues like if the if i feel it really feel like if you took any individual american and put them into a room and explain the dmca and the actual consequences of it they would come down on the side that this is a stupid law um you know they would understand the motivations but this is not the way to do it because it can be abused in all these ways and look at how it works and blah blah blah
John:
But the bottom line is that pass is still the law of land.
John:
It's not going away anytime soon.
John:
Eternal copyright, another great example.
John:
You can explain some on that until you're blue in the face.
John:
You could probably convince pretty much everybody individually.
John:
But overall, people are like, eh, I don't know, whatever.
John:
They should own Mickey Mouse, I guess.
John:
Like, no one thinks about the long-term consequences of
John:
copyright without end or any like outlawing encryption is the entire patent system yeah the entire patent system like outlawing encryption would that cancel could they outlaw encryption despite how stupid it is like i'm hoping that law enforcement realized outlawing encryption is pointless and they wouldn't even pursue it but if they did pursue it they'd get it because law enforcement is is not a culture of trying to understand things
Marco:
It's not a culture.
John:
It's just like some things are, you know, like you need people sort of subject matter experts thinking about the consequences and then also pair them with people who are good at convincing other people to do what they say.
John:
And that's how you get good law.
John:
It's really easy to get bad laws.
John:
And we have lots of examples for bad laws.
John:
um you're just hoping that like and like what i'm getting at is that your pessimism is not that this not that this is like a you know a one-way slide into doom it's just that some of these things take a really really long time to turn around long enough that you know we won't live to see them like do you think we'll ever live to see the dmca uh taken away no probably not do you think we'll ever live to see a reasonable copyright or patent law certainly not right um but it doesn't mean those things are hopeless and they will never swing back in the other direction because
John:
All you need because people are so fickle and have short attention spans and can't be into the intellectual details of every single freaking thing that the government does.
John:
The system is always ripe for a small group of smart people to capitalize on a crisis in a way to make something good happen instead of something bad.
John:
And that is always a possibility in any sort of democracy.
John:
And so that's why I think long term.
John:
we'll never get to the really cool dystopias in the sci-fi movies because what i always think about when i watch those movies is like that's fine but long term long term like i mean even though you have the rise of hitler right eventually people realize we should fight this guy right and it's like you'll never have something like that that would be a fantasy well what about hitler he was pretty terrible he was you're right but
John:
it didn't lead to and it's hitler forever like you know people die people are killed people fight like again we could all nuke ourselves and that makes it that's the only stuff i believe where everybody's nukes like yeah that could happen and then you know the machines take over i guess i don't know
John:
um but the ones where it's just like a bunch of people who sort of like boil the frog and they slowly they slowly slowly like find themselves in increasingly dire situations and they can't get themselves out of it and then you just fast forward like thousands of years and it never gets any better that just doesn't seem plausible to me because in the end people are people they don't want to be uncomfortable they don't want to you know be sad or hurt they want to just hang out and uh the holodeck would kill everybody we all know that but aside from that uh we're fine
John:
I'm too depressed to even make an infinite timescale joke.
John:
You don't need an infinite timescale for holodeck.
John:
You need a holodeck and that's it.
John:
End of humanity.
John:
Sorry, everybody.
Marco:
Oh my goodness.
Marco:
On that happy note, I think we're out of time tonight.
Marco:
Do you want to give some other topic anyway just to not end on that?
Marco:
Even though we'll go over time, I don't care.
Casey:
We can do it in the post-show.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Squarespace, Fracture, and Harry's.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin.
John:
Because it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Casey:
So that's Casey Liss.
Casey:
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T.
Casey:
Marco Arment.
Casey:
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Casey:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean it.
Casey:
All right, so what do you want to talk about then?
Casey:
What's happy these days?
John:
Anything else besides this.
John:
I want to save my Blu-ray thing for a happier, a more tech-heavy week when we come out of this politics show and swear never to talk about it.
John:
You know what?
John:
It's Apple's fault, right?
John:
It's not like we choose.
John:
It's like the car thing.
John:
It's like Apple building a car.
John:
we don't you know we had a car podcast and now we have a tech podcast and then apple decides they're gonna make a car maybe allegedly possibly that's not on that's not on us it's not like you say you just wanted to talk about cars again i'm not making there be rumors about apple making a car and similarly we don't want to talk about politics on the show we avoid it as much as we can but then apple is the you know the main tech company we talk about on the show has to get into a big fight in the government on a political issue
John:
what can we do like that's i'm sorry you know it had to happen and it's very difficult to talk about political issues without getting political so if you're angry that we talk about in the politics on the show and you're thinking of sending us an email or tweet that tells us we should stick to technology we were blame apple blame the government this is a technology related issue 100 so was that the happy topic no that's just like the the preemptive preemptive whining
Casey:
At this point, I feel like we should just pull the ripcord and be done.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
I don't even want to talk about the Mac Pro.
John:
Is there news?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
I'm not going to bite.
Casey:
I'm not going to bite.
Casey:
I'm not going to bite.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
I wanted to know if there was news, but if there's no news, that's not.
Marco:
Of course.
Marco:
Always assume there's no news about the Mac Pro because almost all the time, with the exception of Phil Schiller's Act Innovation, every other time, there's no news about the Mac Pro.
John:
Oh, there was the repair thing where everyone's Mac Pros that were failing, they have a repair extension program to help them, right?
John:
God damn it.
John:
That wasn't this week, though.
John:
I know.
John:
It was semi-recent.
John:
I feel bad for Mike because he sold it because it was flaky, but if he had kept it a little bit longer, he could have got all new guts that presumably don't suffer from whatever weird problems he was having.
John:
Yeah, but the iMac was a better computer for him anyway.
John:
It's great for putting your iPad in front of.
John:
It's a nice backdrop.
John:
He puts the screensaver on it so he can look at it while he uses his iPad in front of it.
Marco:
Oh, iPad people.
Marco:
We can talk about them.
Marco:
That's not... No, they have good news.
Marco:
They have the pencil news, this thing.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
We didn't mention that.
Marco:
Yeah, with the 9.3 beta, all the betas up until now had removed the ability to use the Apple Pencil to do certain UI tasks like scrolling lists and panning things.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
Our friends noted that over the last few weeks and months as 9.3 has been in beta.
Marco:
And then we heard from a few people, I think including ATP Tipster, that this was actually not a bug.
Marco:
This was actually a choice Apple had made that the pencil shouldn't be used for these things.
Marco:
And then over the last few days, a whole bunch of people wrote articles about it.
Marco:
And last week or two weeks ago, Cortex complained about it very effectively.
Marco:
And so there was a whole bunch of complaining about it over the last couple of weeks.
Marco:
And then Apple announced yesterday, I believe, that...
Marco:
uh well they they gave a wonderfully spun pr statement to the effect of oh we always plan to do it this way and uh next beta it'll be it'll be back it was just temporarily removed you know and of course of course it wasn't and of course that was pr spin um but it's fine well see i i don't know like i don't know if it take that at face value because the thing again this is the more open apple which is nice that they're telling us like in the old apple wouldn't tell us at all like we would you know be under nda and developers would just well
John:
They told us something.
John:
Baby steps, right?
John:
But the real thing is what I've always been thinking of is like, what would be the motivation for removing this functionality?
John:
I think Stephen F. on Twitter had a couple of speculation about what it might be, but he was wrong.
John:
I'm like, why would they remove it?
John:
Assume it's intentional, right?
John:
And assume they're not telling you it's intentional because they don't want to.
John:
I'm just trying to think of a plausible reason for them to intentionally remove it.
John:
I can't come up with anything.
Marco:
The best reasons I heard were, one was the idea that you could be scrolling things with your finger, but you should only be using the pencil to tap or make marks on things and to clarify what the pencil is used for.
Marco:
People aren't idiots.
Marco:
They know what the pencil is for.
Marco:
I think that's not a great reason.
Marco:
The other reason I heard that was more likely and more credible was simply that
Marco:
Apple didn't want people to get into the habit of not using touch as the primary interface to iOS in general, to the overall UI and overall usage of these devices.
Marco:
They wanted the primary interface to remain touch, and they didn't want anybody making apps that had a bunch of tiny touch targets.
Marco:
They didn't want people to be using Pencil full-time.
Marco:
But the reality is, that is not also a good enough reason.
Marco:
First of all, if people make apps with a bunch of tiny touch targets, who cares?
Marco:
If that's truly not what most people are doing, those apps won't succeed.
Marco:
The market will solve that problem.
Marco:
That's such a bad reason that I like to think that it wasn't there.
John:
But here, say that was the reason.
John:
But that is a modern Apple reason.
John:
So say that was the reason.
John:
What I would like to see...
John:
is for Apple to say that.
John:
Like, why can't that debate ever happen in public?
John:
It's like a half debate where they passive-aggressively do something, don't tell you why.
John:
People complain and then they reverse it and never told you why they were going to do it in the first place.
John:
Instead of, like, the first beta comes out with it,
John:
news sites realize that it's that this is the thing they write stories about it and that there's a public dialogue where apple immediately says oh no no guys you don't understand here's why we did this we did it because we don't want people making an absolute touch targets well at least then you could have a real debate about like the merits of the issue as opposed to now where the debate happens entirely internally and it's just a one-sided thing where people complain outside and and maybe you're screaming into a void or maybe apple is listening did you convince them or maybe they're going to say it was an accident like this whole black box thing where you don't know
John:
Not that we need to be privy to everything that's going on there, but I just think it would behoove everyone in this dysfunctional relationship between customer and cooperation to speak openly with each other, to believe enough in each other for Apple to tell us the real reason they want to make a functional change in the OS.
John:
And then we can talk about the reasons why we think that's dumb or, you know, like instead of just saying, we can't tell if this is a mistake or not, but God, if this is intentional, please don't do it.
John:
Because maybe Apple can convince us.
John:
Maybe they have a really good reason that we haven't thought of, right?
John:
Or maybe, you know, the reason has to do with unreleased product that we don't know about and they can't tell us.
John:
I understand this is always going to be a limited situation here.
John:
I just feel like it would be a healthier...
John:
it would be a healthier feedback loop between customer and cooperation.
John:
Not that either one has entire rights to know what the other one is thinking all the time, but I think we need to get closer to a relationship where people like Marco don't assume that everything Apple says is a lie because they're not going to reveal their real reasoning.
Marco:
Well, I didn't say that.
Marco:
I just think the PR statement was pretty clearly BS, but it doesn't really matter.
John:
I don't know.
John:
You're just assuming it is, because the reason sounds so dumb to you, but then you don't know what to think.
John:
Do you think, like, are they being disingenuous?
John:
Why would they hide it?
John:
Especially since they've changed their mind.
John:
Wouldn't you come out and say, we were originally doing it for Reason X, but now we're convinced?
John:
Because that would be the truth, then.
John:
The truth would be...
John:
We had this reason.
John:
People complained.
John:
We were convinced by their complaints that our reasons don't trump their desires.
John:
Therefore, we changed our mind.
John:
Like, that's a healthy dialogue instead of, you know, again, if what you're saying is true, instead of pretending that that wasn't really the case and, oh, we were always meant to do this, right?
John:
Again, assuming they're pretending.
John:
It just seems like a dysfunctional relationship.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't know.
Marco:
At least it's fixed.
Marco:
Whenever people in our parts make big complaints about a change, Apple is floating in a beta.
Marco:
We always hear from people.
Marco:
I always see people responding, or they respond to me if I'm one of the critics, of like, why do you bother doing this?
Marco:
You're just complaining about Apple.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But the reason why they're doing it is because it works.
Marco:
Because then these things do tend to get fixed.
John:
Well, it's a random reward.
John:
It works sometimes.
John:
It works randomly.
John:
If it worked every time, it wouldn't be as motivating to do it.
John:
And if it worked never, we would never do it.
John:
But it works enough of the time.
Marco:
Well, I think these kind of decisions, these are probably debated inside Apple.
Marco:
Almost every decision that we get mad about, chances are people inside Apple were also mad about them and they argued about them.
Marco:
And so when outsiders pile onto the argument or draw attention to the argument, that helps that side inside Apple win the argument or it helps change people's minds.
Marco:
uh so it it is very effective uh and and it again you're not going to win every time because like if you're trying to argue for something like well you know what i'm tired of app review there shouldn't be app review like well you know you're not going to win that that's unlikely you can keep arguing that because someday that like that will be on the on an infinite time scale it'll be on the table again yes i got it well i you know and another example is you can complain about the file system for i don't know a decade all right we feel better now and uh and then you know maybe eventually they'll come around but uh
John:
But yeah, I mean, it's a function of the tech press.
John:
I mean, this is happening whether Apple admits it or not.
John:
Of course, it's always been happening because Apple's made up of people and they read tech press about themselves because, you know, that's the way it works.
John:
And as you pointed out, there's always dissension within the company.
John:
But in the end, certain people are in charge and certain people aren't.
John:
And Apple is not a democracy and neither is the press and neither is anything else.
John:
But what we're just trying to get is a...
John:
a healthier symbiosis where apple's potential customers are telling it what they would want and apple wants to give customers what they want but maybe not those customers maybe they see other customers who they're not currently talking to or they're you know like it's not it's not as if customers should be in charge of apple and it's not as if apple should be in charge of the customers it's just the and it's opening up like i feel like the dialogue is opening up more than it used to be and this is healthy we just we just have a ways to go yet
Casey:
Do you guys use the iPad Pro, Marco?
Marco:
Are you talking about me and John or me and Tiff?
Casey:
You and Tiff.
Marco:
Oh, she uses it.
Marco:
And she uses the pencil to navigate a bunch of stuff.
Marco:
And if I use the iPad Pro or any iPad on a regular basis, I would certainly consider doing the same thing because I like the pencil a lot.
Marco:
As an input device, it is really nice.
Marco:
And there's all sorts of arguments other people have made about it being either more efficient or better for advanced work or better for ergonomics or better for accessibility for certain people.
Marco:
Or it just feels better.
Marco:
The mic argument is sometimes it just feels better.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
If I were an iPad user or if I was the kind of person who liked writing things with pens and pencils, I would certainly be using it all the time.
Marco:
But neither of those things apply to me, unfortunately.
Marco:
So it's not really for me.
Marco:
But I do respect it a lot as a really nice input device.
John:
I do wonder a little bit, though, in these type of feedback cycles and relationships, that part of the reason the old Apple would not do something like this is because it was seen as a sign of weakness.
John:
Like, oh, we weren't right.
John:
We were wrong about something.
John:
We need to change it.
John:
But part of it is also that it is legitimately... Taking the angry feedback from your most enthusiastic users...
John:
as a way to design your products is a formula for death like apple doesn't do that for a good reason you never want to like just listen to your most enthusiastic users because you will evolve your product in a way that caters more and more to like the the the expert the super enthusiast and you will never you'll never get something like the iphone because the super apple enthusiasts were like drawing pictures of like os 10 on a phone or something you know what i mean like
John:
Apple doesn't do that to its credit.
John:
It knows the trap of, or Microsoft has done it so many ways.
John:
You keep adding features because your experts want features and you go to your experts or whatever.
John:
But for the iPad Pro, it's kind of a sign that Apple realizes that at this point in the iPad Pro's history, that fanatical group of users who really love the thing,
John:
That's all they've got at this point.
John:
And if they're going to betray those people for some larger market, they don't have faith that that will materialize.
John:
So they better listen to the most passionate iPad Pro users because there aren't many iPad Pro users, presumably, and it is kind of a high-end enthusiast product.
John:
There's a whole other line of iPads for the rest of the world and phones for the rest of the world.
John:
But for the iPad Pro, now, if you're going to listen to anybody about anything, that's where you would do it.
John:
On the other hand, if the iPad Pro was burning up the sales chart and everybody was buying one and it was like taking over for the Mac and Mac sales are going to be down 50% and iPad Pro sales were going to be like half the iPhone sales next year, they would feel confident to ignore those people and say it's more important to go with our gut instinct of whatever their internal reasoning is.
John:
Yeah.
John:
In some ways, it gives me a view of how Apple sees the current state of the iPad Pro market.
John:
They're not in a position right now to just do what they want, despite the howls of enthusiasts, whereas on many other markets, for example, the iPhone.
John:
people howling to be able to sideload apps apple confidently ignored them as the sales graph for iphones went you know up like a ski jump um and that's they were in a position of strength there but on the ipad pro not right now
Marco:
Yeah, and as much as it sucks for Apple to be losing things, as much as it sucks for them, I like what comes out of them when they have a fire load under them.
Marco:
I like when they're not in a dominant position, when they're fighting really hard.
Marco:
That tends to be when the best stuff comes out of them.
Marco:
Except for TV boxes.
John:
Sorry, low blow.
John:
So much competition in that market.
John:
That's a different topic.
John:
Honestly, have you used it?
Marco:
That's my Blu-ray top.
Marco:
I know, I know.
Marco:
I'm just saying.
Marco:
I also thought there was so much competition that was really good until I tried to use the competition.
Marco:
Well, there's a lot of competition.
Marco:
It's just not really good.
Marco:
Yeah, that's fair.
John:
Is that a fire lit under them or is it just like tepid water dripping on their toes?
John:
I don't know.
Marco:
It's called fire, but yeah, it doesn't really work that way.
Marco:
I'd like to set it on fire.
Amen.