Hardware Mind Virus
Marco:
xeon gold that's really the name of this thing it's xeon pro gold yeah extreme special edition i mean if they're releasing skylight ap i don't care what they call it but that's really a stupid name 18 cores xeon gold are they gonna make a gold mac pro
Marco:
That would be amazing.
Marco:
There could even be an addition that's solid gold.
Marco:
John, if the next Mac Pro is only available in rose gold, like actual rose gold, not like pink aluminum, but actual rose gold, that would probably raise the price by $15,000.
Marco:
Would you buy that Mac Pro?
Marco:
Nope.
Marco:
Can't swing it.
Marco:
What if it had a gaming video card in it?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
Still no?
Marco:
That's cold, Marco.
Marco:
No $15,000 computers.
Marco:
Sorry.
Marco:
Well, I mean, at the rate that you replace them, it actually isn't that ridiculous.
Marco:
Like, how many cars have you had during the time you've had this Mac Pro?
Marco:
Well, I get a lot more value out of the cars.
Casey:
All right, so we should start with follow-up, as we always do.
Casey:
Tyler Lok has some APFS boot experiments that he has performed.
Casey:
Would you like to tell us about that, Mr. File Systems?
John:
He was the person who last week tweeted about booting a Mac off of APFS.
John:
And we talked about it in follow up.
John:
And one of the points that I made during that segment was that he had posted a screenshot of the get info window in the finder of the volume that he booted from.
John:
And it said APFS case insensitive.
John:
And what I thought that meant was that the APFS on his volume that he booted off was case insensitive.
John:
And therefore, all the weird problems that we discussed about trying to run macOS and its applications on case sensitive file systems wouldn't apply.
John:
I should have looked a little bit farther down his tweet timeline because apparently he subsequently tweeted that Finder and other utilities are confused about whether the volume is case insensitive or not.
John:
Rest assured, it is case sensitive.
John:
so it's kind of weird that the get info window says case insensitive but he's telling me no no this apis volume is case sensitive so again he's doing weird stuff on an unreleased you know beta everything so still doesn't tell us what the final incarnation of this is going to be whether it's in a point release of sierra or whether it's in the next major version of magos but
John:
That's super weird that the finder thinks it's case insensitive, but knows that it's APFS, but that the actual volume is case sensitive.
John:
So, oh, well.
John:
Ooh, riveting.
John:
It is.
John:
This will be an important, even though this seems esoteric, as the follow-up we had last week or whatever, but your programs won't work if it's case sensitive.
John:
Or they won't work for some period of time until the developers update them.
John:
It will make you sad.
John:
So we better hope they sort this out.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
And then we have a little bit of talk about the various cesspools in Silicon Valley.
Casey:
Is that redundant?
Casey:
Anyway, Tesla apparently is having some problems with harassment.
Casey:
Surprise, surprise.
Casey:
There's an article in The Guardian, which I haven't had the chance to read, but I intend to read tomorrow.
Casey:
Female engineer sues Tesla describing a culture of, quote, pervasive harassment, quote.
Casey:
You don't say a technology and car company.
Casey:
That's surprising.
John:
Yeah, I put that in there just because not so much about the specific story, which this is actually interesting in that it's a current employee suing the company.
John:
So that's another twist in this.
John:
But just to reinforce the idea that we touched on last week about Uber, that although Uber is surely an extremely egregious example...
John:
that this problem is not isolated to a single company to a single person to a single bad apple i think it's not even isolated to a single industry although you know in the circles we travel and we tend to see tech things it is everywhere and when one of these stories comes up what it does is it makes the other stories come to the surface you know because it's it's you know a media trend or people feel more emboldened to come forward or people want to report on it more and they come in cycles but anyway it's everywhere if you want to see another example there you go
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
And then we have an entry in the show notes to Uber or not to Uber.
Casey:
And I presume that this is because a handful of listeners, very, very astute listeners, called out the fact that one of us, it very well may have been me, had talked about
Casey:
With regard to WWDC, flying into San Francisco rather than San Jose, and maybe we could just catch an Uber to get down to San Jose after flying into San Francisco.
Casey:
And a few people had said, hey, that seems kind of disingenuous after you spent a fair bit of time complaining and railing against Uber to then immediately say, oh, yeah, I'll totally take an Uber after that.
Casey:
It was actually me.
John:
I'm pretty sure it was me that said that.
John:
Yeah, it was Marco, and he used it as a verb.
John:
He said like Uber down to San Jose.
Marco:
Yeah, and the reason why is because when we recorded last week, we didn't have time for the Uber topic during the main show, so we did it in the after show.
Marco:
During the edit, I decided it was too important to have as an after show topic, so I moved it forward in the show.
Marco:
And and kind of promoted it like in the edit to a regular main core show topics.
Marco:
I thought it was important enough.
Marco:
Then, you know, I probably wouldn't have said that after having that discussion.
Marco:
And I just kind of said without even thinking about it, you know, like at the time, as soon as I said it, I regretted saying it.
Marco:
And because I that is exactly the kind of thing that I'm usually conscious of.
Marco:
And it's the kind of thing where like, yeah, I kind of don't want to take Uber anymore after how horrible they are.
Marco:
So anyway, I personally have since deleted Uber off my phone.
Marco:
There were plenty of previous reasons to do it, but this is the big one to do it like now.
Marco:
And I figure, you know, I don't actually use it that often because in my home city, I don't need it.
Marco:
But when I'm traveling, I would use it often.
Marco:
But I think I'm going to install Lyft now and try that instead because, yeah, it's it's not worth supporting that if we don't have to.
John:
Yep.
John:
It's kind of like some people who tweeted at us about this point out like the Kleenex situation where because Uber was first and is so famous and so prominent.
John:
that you know to uber it is is like even though you were saying the word uber which is the name of a company it's just a generic term for a thing that makes a car come and get you because you tap stuff on your phone right yeah and so you could uber from one place the other with lyft or whatever but anyway uh either way the larger question is given all this stuff
John:
uh, are we going to continue to use Uber?
John:
And, you know, I'm all, I think all of us in our places where we actually live, never have a need for a service like Uber at all.
John:
So it's not really relevant.
John:
It's only really relevant when we're traveling and there have been a lot of people deleting Uber off their phone and, uh, or otherwise vowing to never use it.
John:
One of the interesting things I read about, um, uh,
John:
the people who drive for Uber is that very often the drivers are working for multiple ones of these companies at the same time.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So if you call for a Lyft or you call for an Uber, it could be the same person answering.
John:
They just change what app is up on their phone, which is interesting.
John:
So it's not as if the person, the car, the person you get is actually dependent on the company.
John:
And Lyft, like every other company, I'm sure has its own fair share of problems and,
John:
And, you know, or as people bring in the chat room problems dealing with down to the application itself, you know, always putting location on.
John:
Oh, no, this is the opposite.
John:
They're complaining that Uber always has location on.
John:
Anyway, I recall reading lots of scary things about Lyft as well, and that very often they were presented as the better alternative to Uber merely because Uber is so incredibly terrible that the bar is low.
John:
In some respects, it's a little bit like airlines.
John:
We've talked about before where we all know angry travelers.
John:
Maybe we have been this angry traveler who has a bad experience with an airline and vows to never fly in them again.
John:
And if you travel at all frequently, you will eventually have that same experience with every airline and then you will literally be unable to fly.
John:
Because all airlines do something that is enough to anger people.
John:
That's it.
John:
I'm never flying Delta again.
John:
And they stick to it and they never fly Delta again.
John:
If you do that for five years of constant traveling, you will be out of airlines.
John:
And I wonder if ride-sharing services, especially ones subsidized by VC money that are basically trying to put taxi companies out of business so they can dance on their grave and then raise their prices...
John:
like i wonder if there are any good ride sharing companies and it's not as if taxi services are all that great either like every every one of these things seems to have some kind of problem so you know i'm certainly what i've heard i heard somebody say recently was that i'll still use uber but i'll hate myself every time i do it i don't know if that's the solution is the solution deleting uber what if you use lyft and you find all sorts of horrible things about lyft eventually you can you not use any ride share services um
John:
it's hard to know what to do in these types of situations.
John:
I think it is very similar to an airline type situation, but, uh, when there are alternatives, obviously if you have any kind of choice at all, uh, and you think you really do think Uber is the worst of the worst, like don't pick them, pick another company.
John:
Right.
John:
Um, and I guess you just keep doing that until you're out of ride sharing company or, you know, ride hiring companies.
John:
What are they called?
John:
It's not ride sharing.
John:
What do you call a thing like Uber?
Um,
Marco:
uh i don't know private taxis but it's not a car service i don't know whatever it is but like like you know usually this argument of like well they're all probably terrible when we might we just might not know how terrible the other ones are because they're like less in the public eye or we do know but it was like two news cycles ago
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And I've talked about this previously with how I buy things from Amazon, even though I know that in many ways, Amazon as a retail company is kind of horrible.
Marco:
But I've worked in other retail companies before just enough to know that they're all pretty horrible.
Marco:
And retail is just a horrible business.
Marco:
And so the smaller ones, like, what am I going to do?
Marco:
Like, oh, I'm not going to buy this thing at Amazon.
Marco:
I'm going to buy it at Walmart.
Marco:
No...
Marco:
And like, you know, where else am I going to like, maybe I'll go to some you go to Target.
Marco:
Well, they're probably horrible in some other way to like, because retail is a horrible business and all the incentives kind of force everyone in it to be pretty horrible or to go out of business.
Marco:
And so I decided like, it's worth it to me to shop at Amazon because it's just so much better than everything else.
Marco:
And and their offenses aren't bad enough.
Marco:
to offend me enough to overcome the difference between them and anybody else in morality versus the incredible convenience that they offer.
Marco:
With Uber, though, I think it's a little bit of a different situation because, first of all, Uber, in the grand scheme of things, is pretty young.
Marco:
And so it's hard for anybody to look at what Uber gives them in their life and say, I can't be without that.
Marco:
Because, like, well, you were without that, like, what, five years ago?
Marco:
Like, it wasn't that long ago.
Marco:
Like, chances are, five years ago, you weren't using anything like that.
Marco:
And you still lived.
Marco:
You still got around.
Marco:
You still found a way to make that work.
Marco:
How did you do that, right?
Marco:
Like, could you just go back to that?
Marco:
How bad would it really be?
Marco:
You know, even if there's no other ride-hailing companies like Lyft or, like, even if you can't get any of the other ones in your area, if it was the only one that serves your area...
Marco:
how bad would it be not to use them?
Marco:
And in some cases, it actually is really bad.
Marco:
In some cases, if your alternative is like, well, I can get an Uber in 10 minutes, or because of where I am, if you're in nowhere, Brooklyn, and no cab will pick you up out there, believe me, I've been there.
Marco:
This was before I used Uber.
Marco:
And you have to wait, literally, you have to wait an hour and a half
Marco:
from midnight to 1.30 a.m.
Marco:
on a pier in Brooklyn because there's no cabs around and you had to call a car service and that's the soonest they can come get you?
Marco:
In that kind of case, okay, if Uber is really the only thing that will serve you, I can't really fault you for using it.
Marco:
However, most of the time for most people, if Uber serves you at all, other options probably do too.
Marco:
Whether it's your regular taxi service or other car hailing services or mass transit or other private car services, stuff like that.
Marco:
Chances are, if you use Uber at all, you probably have other options.
Marco:
and they might be a little bit less convenient you might have to wait one or two extra minutes for a ride or you might have to pay a dollar more but you have to decide for yourself if that's worth you know the the the moral savings or not and for me i think it's worth it yeah there was that other one i heard about called fasten like fasten your seat belts i think that's another one that's uh at the very least in the the pacific northwest i heard a bunch of people talking about so
John:
It's not just Uber and Lyft.
John:
There are probably other options.
John:
Maybe not all of them are nationwide.
John:
So I guess check the app store and ask around to see what the other options are in your area.
John:
You, too, can live an Uber-free lifestyle.
Casey:
Hopefully, though.
Casey:
And, I mean, it's easy for the three of us to say because we're white dudes.
Casey:
But, you know, I've understood that in some ways it can be better if you're, you know, like a minority or if you're a woman that maybe it's better for some reason to call an Uber or a
John:
perhaps a Lyft.
John:
Well, maybe not an Uber.
John:
There's been a lot of horror stories about women getting picked up by Ubers.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Maybe women was a poor example, but maybe if you're a person of color or something like that, maybe a taxi cab would not take your fare where an Uber or perhaps a Lyft would.
Casey:
I guess what I'm driving at is it's all nuanced, right?
Casey:
It's just a balancing act and you do what works best for you.
Casey:
But I plan to, before I go to San Jose, which I'm
Casey:
think i'm going to be doing uh i plan to look into lyft and understand if there's any differences in procedure or like you know tipping paradigms or anything like that um i plan to try to understand what that is uh before i go so this way i can use lyft rather than uber and i should mention that um friend of the show uh gene mcdonald who uh
Casey:
in the past has run or been deeply involved with that.
Casey:
I guess she is still deeply involved with that camp for girls, which is an organization that's near and dear to all of our hearts.
Casey:
Anyway, she just for fun decided to drive, I thought, and I'm pretty sure I have this right for both Uber and Lyft, and then ended up not doing it for Uber anymore because she had some really bad experiences.
Casey:
And I don't have her tweets handy where she talked about this, unfortunately.
Casey:
But you can look at you can look at her timeline or just ask her about it.
Casey:
And she'll tell you that she drives for Lyft from time to time because she's just felt better about it.
Casey:
I wish I could remember what was better, but she seemed to think that Lyft was a better experience for drivers and probably for riders, too.
Marco:
The pink mustaches, right?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, I mean, here's the thing, too.
Marco:
Like, it's kind of hard to be worse than Uber.
Marco:
Like, literally everything they do is horrible, with the exception that they are kind of everywhere now.
Marco:
But like, the company is horrible.
Marco:
The people at the top leading the company are horrible.
Marco:
The app is horrible.
Marco:
The app itself is its own incredible case study of horrendous, abusive, fraudulent app design.
Marco:
It does so many creepy, immoral things that honestly should be or might even are, might be prohibited on iOS.
Marco:
It's just a terrible app in front of a terrible service run by some really horrible people.
Marco:
Again, in most cases, most of the time if you're deciding between big crappy companies like airlines or retail stores, I think the differences are usually smaller between them.
Marco:
But in this case, my God is uber horrible.
Marco:
It would be really impressive for any other company in this business to be as horrible as they are.
John:
well that's what the competition is for so here's one article from galopnik saying saying uber is quietly terrible for women and black people study says so there's an article on that so so much for uber being better for minorities or women um and then another article saying uh new business model same racist cab drivers that just talks about both uber and lyft making it harder for people with black sounding names to get rides so like yeah
John:
As with so many of these things that we're trying to emphasize, it's not a problem with a particular company or a particular domain.
John:
It's a cultural societal problem because all these companies are made up of people who come from this culture and this society.
John:
Granted, very often they are the worst people, but like the CEO of Rubu who was caught on video arguing with one of his drivers, which just boggles my mind.
John:
Maybe he was drunk.
John:
You don't have the self-awareness to understand that...
John:
I don't even know.
John:
If you are the CEO of a company and you can't manage to be respectful and magnanimous for five minutes to one of your employees who's angry, it boggles my mind that you could be this bad at everything having to do with you.
John:
Anyway.
John:
yeah so if you uh you know if you want peace fight for justice as they say uh if you want to solve the problem you really have to solve it at the root you're not going to solve it by uh scolding uh spoiled tech ceos but uh if you can at all if you can at all avoid uh giving money to what really seems to be the worst of the very worst of a business that is already in a slightly precarious situation in terms of
John:
You know, all the articles going around about the fact that Uber is not profitable and is basically being funded by venture capital to put tax companies out of business.
John:
And if they ever succeeded in that, they would just raise their prices.
John:
And by the way, they exploit their workers.
John:
And that's that's half of what these the argument with the CEO was about.
John:
It's saying I used to get paid X amount and now I get paid so much less.
John:
And the Uber CEO saying he's just waiting to replace all these drivers with self-driving cars anyway.
John:
And they're self-driving cars running through red lights and then Uber lying about it.
John:
Oh, it's a mess.
John:
So bottom line is stay in your house and never go anywhere.
John:
that is definitely the john siracusa answer to this problem yeah you wish that was the answer solves a lot of problems doesn't it it solves your problems yeah i don't think i've ever actually taken an uber on my on my account my wife has an account that we used it when i was in san francisco and i gotta tell you it was convenient
Casey:
I mean, my experience, my personal experience with Uber has really been very good, truth be told.
Casey:
I've never had a bad experience and it's always gone pretty well for me.
Casey:
But like I said earlier, you know, I'm not comfortable with the way the company as a whole and certainly the CEO seems to do business.
Casey:
And that doesn't mean that there's nothing but mean, terrible people at Uber, but certainly...
Casey:
the people that are running the show seem to be pretty consistently mean and terrible.
Casey:
And so because of that, I intend to, like I said, try out Lyft next time I'm out there.
John:
And that's the, that's the way it's like every time I've ever been in an Uber or even a taxi for that matter, like,
John:
The people who are actually driving like the leaf nodes of the org chart, I've had good experiences.
John:
Now, obviously, that's not universal.
John:
And again, all the articles we just listed about them refusing to pick up people with black sounding names and picking up women and driving them around longer than they should be driving them and hitting on them and doing all sorts of terrible things.
John:
Like, obviously, that happens.
John:
It's kind of like when you get mad at Delta and vow that you'll never fly with them again.
John:
Does that mean every employee of Delta is an evil person?
John:
Certainly not.
John:
And so it's a complicated thing where you're trying to punish the company by withholding your business.
John:
But what about the people who work for the company?
John:
Oh, they can just quit and work for a better airline.
John:
Can they?
John:
What if they work in Atlanta and it's Delta's hub?
John:
I don't know.
John:
It's the whole... The effectiveness and the sort of...
John:
ethics of boycotts have always been complicated when it's not like a black and white kind of, uh, you know, pervasive issue, like, uh, you know, segregation or, you know, the bus boycott and stuff like that.
John:
This is slightly more nuanced, but, uh,
John:
I think if there's something you can do that's straightforward, like Mark would have said, just call a cab, use a different company.
John:
It's so easy to do.
John:
You should just do it.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
We're pretty far into it now.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
I bet you're going to be so impressed after that that you're going to just finish it up in probably another 15, 20 minutes.
Marco:
It's really fast, I'm telling you.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Either way, you win because you aren't dealing with a website anymore.
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Casey:
So, Marco, you had a big day today.
Casey:
As we record on Wednesday, as per usual, Overcast ads are available for purchase from anyone that has an Overcast account, and that's exciting.
Casey:
And what surprised me, but really shouldn't have surprised me, you have a really neat little table here that's presumably all integrated with your ad backend that shows availability and prices and
Casey:
Some analytics, sort of, kind of, some estimated analytics.
Casey:
And it's all much more mature than I would have expected.
Casey:
The way you painted it when we've talked, both on the show and privately, I don't know, I just got this impression that this was a little bit, I don't know, grab-ass.
Casey:
But as it turns out, this is legit.
Casey:
This is the real deal.
Casey:
And you've clearly put a whole lot of work in it.
Marco:
This is grab-ass plus CSS.
Casey:
Touche, sir.
Casey:
But anyway, but this is super exciting and you've already had a few categories sell out.
Casey:
So how's things going?
Casey:
I mean, it certainly looks from the outside like it's going really well.
Marco:
I mean, so far it's going great.
Marco:
Like, and you know...
Marco:
This is not an indication of how it's going to be going long term because no one, including me and the people buying the ads, has any idea like what is a podcast ad worth?
Marco:
Because there are some of these ads are for websites or apps, but most of them by far, most of them are for podcasts.
Marco:
By the way, I love that ratio.
Marco:
I do want the ability to advertise for both types of things, but I also would prefer if most of the ads were podcast ads.
Marco:
I actually considered having it actually be two separate inventory types.
Marco:
It would actually sell separate slots, possibly at different prices.
Marco:
Maybe podcast ads would be cheaper than website ads.
Marco:
That was too much complexity, so I just didn't build that out.
Marco:
I might do it later, but probably not.
Marco:
Basically, it's kind of cool that in a podcast app, I can now have ads for other podcasts because it makes it kind of not feel like an ad anymore.
Marco:
This is one of the reasons why I added the option for paying subscribers who normally just automatically wouldn't see any ads.
Marco:
I added a setting in settings for them, a checkbox, for them to turn the ads on.
Marco:
For everyone else, it just is on and they can't turn it off.
Marco:
But for paying people, one of the benefits normally that you're paying for is not to see ads.
Marco:
But these ads are kind of nice.
Marco:
It turned out really well.
Marco:
And so far, there are podcasts and a good number of them and good quality ones buying the ads.
Marco:
I mean, I'm literally only about four hours or so into the ad sales.
Marco:
So it's very hard for me to really know what this is going to be like long term.
Marco:
But in the short term, it's really easy.
Marco:
It's really nice.
Marco:
It's just really nice.
Marco:
So I built the system.
Marco:
It's a pretty straightforward basic database thing with basic tracking in the app of views, taps, and subscriptions.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
The payment is all through Stripe because Stripe is amazing.
Marco:
I love Stripe so much.
Marco:
What did we do before Stripe?
Marco:
Actually, I'll tell you what we did before Stripe.
Marco:
PayPal.
Marco:
And it was a dark time.
Marco:
Oh, my.
John:
Was it a dark time?
John:
I'm going to tell you about dark times.
John:
Before PayPal, we had banks of modems that would dial the credit card companies and transfer information using archaic protocols from our Linux servers.
John:
Phone lines.
John:
Actual phone lines.
John:
That's how we did credit card processing.
Marco:
Was that actually worse than PayPal?
Marco:
I don't know.
John:
Yes.
Marco:
Have you ever tried to do subscriptions in PayPal?
John:
Phone lines and modems are among the least friendly things you ever want to be wrangling at a data center that is not in the same building as you.
Marco:
Have you ever used PayPal?
John:
I have.
John:
I mean, PayPal will eventually freeze your account and take all your money.
John:
But the phone line situation made it so hard to even get money in the first place.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, anyway, so this is all built using some, you know, nice, easy stuff with Stripe as the payment gateway.
Marco:
I even accept Apple Pay, which is kind of cool because they make it really easy.
Marco:
So I literally like, you know, you put in a few HTML dibs and you enable this thing on your site and then you have Apple Pay.
Marco:
So you can go to my site and buy an ad with your fingerprint in like three seconds.
Marco:
It's kind of awesome.
Marco:
It's incredibly satisfying.
Marco:
And so, yeah, that's what I've been working on the last week or so is just building this system out.
Marco:
And there's still a lot I have to do.
Marco:
Like basically tomorrow, I have to build a system to notify people when categories become available that are sold out.
Marco:
That's something I kind of added last minute tonight because a bunch of things sold out.
Marco:
And I immediately got a bunch of emails from people saying, hey, I got here too late.
Marco:
My category sold out.
Marco:
Can you put me up for the next one?
Marco:
And I don't really want to get in the business of having to maintain a thousand different relationships with people and emailing them.
Marco:
And then what if it sells beforehand?
Marco:
Then they're out of luck and I email them.
Marco:
So I was able to very simple notify me thing.
Marco:
I already built the system to record your intention to be notified.
Marco:
I just haven't actually made the notifications yet because now I have 30 days to do that because all these ads have 30 day intervals.
Casey:
That is the most Marco thing.
Casey:
The most Marco comment I've ever heard.
Casey:
Oh, I don't have to worry about that for a month.
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
And similarly, I want the ad to email the person who bought it when it expires to tell them, your ad has expired.
Marco:
Click here if you want to buy another one.
Marco:
And I haven't built that yet either because I have 30 days to build that too.
Marco:
But yeah, so for the most part, though, the system is pretty much like it's, you know, three quarters of the way done.
Marco:
Like all the core stuff is there, except in the payments, you know, my admin interface to approve or reject and refund them.
Marco:
All sorts of, you know, payment handling things that were actually surprisingly easy because Stripe is so good.
Marco:
I mean, geez, like Stripe kind of embarrasses everything else I do.
Marco:
Like in like every other part of this was more complicated and took more work and more fiddling than the entire payment processing.
Marco:
Which is kind of amazing.
Casey:
You would think that would have been the worst because that's arguably the most important since it involves money.
Casey:
But no, apparently not.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
So I have some questions.
Casey:
So you may have mentioned that this took you like a week.
Casey:
So last I had heard, you had demo ads in the app.
Casey:
Obviously, I'm on the beta.
Casey:
So I'm seeing these canned ads.
Casey:
Well, I guess they weren't entirely demo.
Casey:
They were kind of like first run ads.
Marco:
They were real ads.
Marco:
I had just inputted them manually into the database.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Because there was no interface for people to buy them.
Casey:
And so that was running for a little bit.
Casey:
And then how long did it take you to do this whole back end?
Casey:
You said about a week?
Marco:
Yeah, about a week.
Marco:
Well, because I already had the system between the app and the sync service.
Marco:
I already had the system to serve the ads to the app, have the app show them, record their stats, and then transmit the stats back on the next sync.
Marco:
And so I had basically the whole back end of serving and tracking the ads.
Marco:
Mm-hmm.
Marco:
So all I had to do was the creation, editing, and buying of the ads.
Marco:
And that's not a small amount of work, but in the grand scheme of things, it's only about half of it.
Casey:
So when one goes to buy an ad, you select a price, and the first thing you're presented with is choose an ad type, and you can either search for a podcast or you can provide a URL.
Casey:
What happens after that?
Casey:
Would I be providing art or a blurb?
Casey:
What is customizable here?
Casey:
Try it.
Casey:
You don't have to pay until the very end.
Marco:
So I'm not going to... I'm not going to, like, send you an invoice.
Marco:
Fair enough.
Marco:
You will know when you're paying.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
Works for me.
Casey:
I got a little scared.
Casey:
I don't want to mess with it.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So I have a title, description.
John:
You got to support arrow keys and return in your autocompletes.
John:
Come on.
Marco:
oh my big search my the podcast search box yeah that's a big custom thing yeah if i hit down arrow to select and hit return it's like nope oh i haven't looked at that code since 2014 it might support it easily i'm not sure i'm using this this pure framework which probably doesn't even exist anymore i don't know like it was the smallest like css type framework i could find in 2014 uh so i i put it in but anyway it doesn't really matter it does not
Casey:
Oh, this is very slick.
Casey:
Okay, so I've put in... This is the difference between John and I. John is advertising for a podcast, presumably one that has other people on it.
Casey:
Me, I put in my own URL.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
Marvin.org was a frequent test URL.
Marco:
Don't worry.
Casey:
So I have a title, a description, a URL, an optional image.
Casey:
And then what I really like is you have a little preview right then and there that shows you approximately what it'll look like.
Casey:
And then, like you said, when you're ready, either Apple Pay or Pay with Card...
Casey:
Super cool.
Casey:
I really like this.
Casey:
And so basically the idea is you're either advertising for a podcast or anything that can relate to the web, anything that has a URL.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So, you know, apps, websites, you know, any website.
Casey:
That's pretty cool.
Casey:
And so the initial take rate seems pretty good from what I can tell.
Casey:
I mean, you're sold out in a few different things.
Casey:
There's nothing that has no purchases.
Casey:
Nope.
Casey:
That slot's available.
Casey:
Oh, I'm sorry.
Casey:
I misread.
Marco:
So health has no purchases.
Marco:
But there are other categories that have... All the other categories have at least one.
Marco:
Fair enough.
John:
Well, so you obviously massively underpriced this stuff.
Marco:
I actually raised the prices about an hour ago because they sold too fast.
Marco:
I noticed that.
Marco:
I know, but it's too late.
Marco:
But anyway, live and learn.
Marco:
There'll be another 30 days.
Marco:
I did kind of want this to be a quick sale because one of the big challenges that I went into this with is all those categories that say not enough data yet.
Marco:
Because I just haven't had test ads in those categories.
Marco:
And so I really need to know what categories even get good traffic.
Marco:
And then the pricing is kind of a guess.
Marco:
Business sold out really quickly.
Marco:
And I had it in the low price category because I didn't think it was as high traffic as the other ones in Overcast.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
But now I'll find out if that's true or not.
Marco:
And if it is true, I'm going to move it up to the dark gray section between all and the others.
Marco:
That's like the mid-price tier.
John:
That's why you should have done an auction system because the market will decide what's valuable because it's not just the traffic.
John:
It's like how valuable are the people who listen to business podcasts?
John:
Maybe they all have lots of money and buy expensive stuff all the time.
John:
So they're more valuable to advertise to.
Marco:
Maybe.
Marco:
I mean, you know, I can adjust the prices, obviously, individually if I need to.
Marco:
But ultimately, I would rather have the inventory sell out more often than to extract every possible last dollar out of the highest bidder.
Marco:
Because I want there to be a lot of ads in the system.
Marco:
Because that way people see a nice variety in their apps and...
Marco:
It kind of gives more people a chance to advertise in the app.
Marco:
So I would prefer sold out inventory to necessarily the absolute highest price.
Marco:
Again, I have no idea how hard it's going to be to sell these ads in six months, a year.
Marco:
I have no idea.
Marco:
It could be really easy.
Marco:
This could require very little effort on my part.
Marco:
Or I might have to actually start keeping this email list and quote, reaching out to people and reaching all over them to get them to buy an ad.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
By then, you'll be on to the next business model anyway, so it'll be fine.
Marco:
That's true.
Marco:
It's going to be hard to beat this.
Marco:
If this keeps going anywhere near what it is now, first of all, I've made today enough for something like eight months of the Google ads.
Casey:
Wow, that's awesome.
Marco:
And I don't know if I'm going to make this every month, but it certainly shows this was probably the right move.
Marco:
And if I even get a quarter of this,
Marco:
I'm happy with that.
John:
I feel like it's going to go up.
John:
I feel like next month is going to be higher because you have to raise these prices.
John:
You just have to.
John:
And then even if it slowly tapers off over the course of a few years, the only thing that will make you stop it, which is a thing that may happen, but the only thing that will make you stop it is if you find it too annoying.
John:
That is the thing that's going to gate this, I feel like.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, that's certainly the main limiting factor is how much of my time will take.
Marco:
But the good thing is, this is a really easy thing to have someone else help with.
Casey:
Yeah, that's very true.
Marco:
But right now, I'm doing it myself right now because I don't want to immediately outsource something like this because I want to know, first of all, how it's doing.
Marco:
And the only way to do that is to really kind of run it myself.
Marco:
So I want to know how it works for everybody right up front.
Marco:
I want to know what all the needs are, what the pain points are so I can fix them.
Marco:
and then i need to know like is this even the kind of thing i need to outsource to someone else or is it so little work that i can just do it myself you know if it's sending 50 emails on one day a month that's that's a decent amount of work but i could probably do that myself you know so you know we'll see we'll see what it actually ends up being again it's way too early to tell but the very early indication suggests that it's pretty good
Casey:
This is super awesome.
Casey:
Now, so you're doing all the approving by hand using your little admin interface?
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Have you had to deny anyone as yet that wasn't clearly just spamming you for the sake of being a jerk?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
I mean, one of the things is you have to pay to even submit it.
Marco:
Oh, right.
Marco:
Yeah, sure.
Marco:
In CRUD web app terms, it literally doesn't even save the database record until it has a payment.
Yeah.
Marco:
The payment's all in the temporary session post variables until it's paid.
Marco:
So that basically makes it unspammable from a pure spam perspective.
Marco:
It puts up a pretty big barrier.
Marco:
And I am human reviewing them all to just make sure they're not obscene or hate content or anything else.
Marco:
And there was one person submitted one that had a word that...
Marco:
Some people might consider a bad word.
Marco:
It's not like one of the big ones, but it's like a kind of ancillary one.
Marco:
So I went back to that person.
Marco:
I'm like, hey, do you mind if I edit this?
Marco:
And we worked out a different copy.
Marco:
And then that was it.
Marco:
And I approved it.
Marco:
So that was the only one that even required any review at all.
Marco:
And you know what's amazing about this?
Marco:
When Google sells ads on my behalf, I get something like, I think, 60% of it.
Marco:
When Apple sells anything on my behalf, I get 70% of it, or maybe a year later for subscriptions, if I'm lucky, 85% of it.
Marco:
when google pays me money it's money that i earned like you know six weeks ago that i finally get paid for when apple pays me my money it's again similarly about money i earned about six weeks ago with these stripe ads i'm earning i think about 97 of what they sell for and it gets deposited in my bank account in two days that's amazing it's really kind of amazing to be out of the like walled garden ecosystem for once
Casey:
That's super cool.
Casey:
So initial reaction, things are going great.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
How do you think you're going to play with the pricing for now?
Casey:
Let's suppose you sell out in the next 48 hours.
Casey:
There's really no impetus to mess with pricing until the end of the month unless you want to cut down on the people that ask to be notified, right?
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, I guess.
Marco:
I mean, that's probably not a good business plan to cut down on the number of interested parties.
Casey:
I guess what I'm saying is there's no reason for you to raise your prices now once you sell out unless you want to prevent people from saying, notify me.
Casey:
Let's say the all goes from, as we record, it's less than $1,000, and let's say it becomes $3,000 tomorrow.
Casey:
All you're really accomplishing since it's sold out is you're preventing me from being interested because maybe I would have spent less than $1,000, but I'm not going to spend $3,000.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
So you don't really need to mess around with pricing for, like, 30 days, right?
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, for the most part, like, you know, unless things are not selling, and then I might lower the price on things that are not selling, like that health category.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
For the most part, I think I'm going to treat this the same way I've treated any other kind of thing where I set the price for an ad.
Marco:
So our podcast ads, my website ads, when I sold RSS sponsorships, things like that.
Marco:
And the way I've done this basically is...
Marco:
If they sell out way too fast when I go to sell them, I raise the price a little bit.
Marco:
Until things start selling still at a reasonable pace.
Marco:
I don't want it to be like pulling teeth to get things sold.
Marco:
But slowly enough that it's not like a stampede.
Marco:
And then I get 50 angry emails from people saying, Oh, I missed my chance to buy!
Marco:
That's no good either.
Marco:
That also is not great for business necessarily.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I think I'm just going to control the prices slowly.
Marco:
And maybe when next month rolls around, I will see how it sells at the new higher price from an hour ago instead of the initial prices, which are about 30% lower.
Marco:
I'll see how it sells at these new kind of higher prices.
Marco:
And if it sells out just as fast, then maybe for the month after that, then maybe I'll raise it a little bit more.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
If it's selling out at a reasonably healthy rate, then I'll just leave it the way it is, really.
Casey:
You really nailed it.
Casey:
This looks great.
Casey:
Thanks.
Casey:
So let's assume this is super successful for a year, just for the sake of discussion.
Casey:
Are you at all interested in expanding?
Casey:
I think we talked about this a little bit, but are you at all interested in expanding into being like IAD for other people, so to speak, you know, and...
Casey:
And either white labeling your ad platform or just extending your ad platform to anyone else's apps?
Marco:
Probably not.
Marco:
Because once you become an ad network for other people, that's a very different business.
Marco:
And it's a much higher needs business for just dealing with people, dealing with everyone else's money, dealing with staffing and dealing with people's issues.
Marco:
And it's a much bigger business.
Marco:
It's a much higher touch business.
Marco:
And this system I built,
Marco:
kind of in response to uh other types of advertising i've done where it's like you know for like blog ads and podcast ads where a lot of times you know you you have to like reach with sponsors you have to you know coordinate with them via four or five different emails you eventually like put the ad in your you book the ad in your system you do the ad and then you have to invoice them and then they might take six months to pay the invoice like we've we've seen we've seen the whole the whole spectrum some people pay the next day some people pay a year later or not at all um
Marco:
And it's a very just intensive process.
Marco:
And there are tools like FreshBooks that make it easier.
Marco:
But it's still a lot of just human work and just dealing with administration to just do the basics of selling and getting paid.
Marco:
And so with this, I really created this to be as simple as possible.
Marco:
And this is actually one of the things that's going to keep the prices kind of low.
Marco:
Because most big companies who would sponsor things like this, who would buy these ads, if it's below a certain price, oftentimes that's $1,000, it requires less of a process for them to approve the payment.
Marco:
So a lot of times big companies, if it's more than that, you'll have to go through an official...
Marco:
requisition process or some other garbage full of paperwork and overhead.
Marco:
But if it's lower, if it's like a sub $1,000 price for something, a lot of times you can just put that on a credit card and be done with it and not have to worry too much about it.
Marco:
So I want to keep these prices in that range.
Marco:
So that way I can have the system I have now, which is, look, if you want one of these, it's self-serve.
Marco:
You go to my site, you set it up, you pay right there.
Marco:
I don't even see it until you pay because I don't want to have to be chasing you down in a year because you didn't pay your invoice.
Marco:
I hate that so much.
Marco:
And so this system is very much like keeping it as simple as I possibly can keep it.
Marco:
And part of that requires that the prices be kind of low.
Marco:
That definitely requires that everything remains self-serve.
Marco:
And it requires that not a lot that I'm doing involves human interaction from me.
Marco:
Because if that's what it ends up needing to be, I'll have to hire someone else to help me because I don't have the time to be dealing with a lot of effort into the system.
Marco:
But in order to keep it that size and that scale, I basically have to keep it my app only.
Marco:
I can't become an ad network for any other apps because that will, by nature, make it a bigger, more complicated thing.
Marco:
The prices would probably go up.
Marco:
I'd have to start dealing with people's stupid invoice systems.
Marco:
And I just don't want to deal with that.
Marco:
That's not the business I want to be in.
Casey:
This makes a lot of sense.
Casey:
The thing that impresses me about you is that maybe I'm just a big wimp, but the audacity of doing something like this, like, oh, screw it, I'll sell my own ads, why not?
Casey:
There's no way in a million years, maybe I would have had the thought if I were in your shoes, but I'd look at this and be like, yeah, I'm not going to do that.
Casey:
There's no way that'll work.
Casey:
And good on you for not only having the, I don't know, fortitude to do it, but to make it happen.
Casey:
It so far seems successful.
Casey:
Like John has said, I think the ticking time bomb is about a year away until you do another business model change.
Casey:
So I'm expecting this will fail.
John:
I was just mostly doing that as a joke.
John:
Like Marco said, if it continues like this or better, there's no reason.
John:
Like I said, unless somehow it becomes too much of a burden for Marco to deal with it, I don't see how it would because everything he just outlined about how he doesn't have to do anything and doesn't have to chase people for money and doesn't have to get money on behalf of other people, like...
John:
And, you know, again, maybe he's leaving money on the table by saying, oh, I'm going to try to keep it in the in the petty cash range.
John:
But if that's enough money, then it's fine and it should be sustainable.
John:
Same could have probably been set up at all the past plans.
John:
So, again, we have to wait to see how it's going to be.
John:
But if it actually continues like this sustainably.
John:
I don't really see any reason for him to change models.
Marco:
Yeah, I completely agree.
Marco:
The sales would have to go down a lot for it to make sense for me to look at another model again.
Marco:
Because right now, I have pretty much everything I want.
Marco:
I have...
Marco:
a way to get sustainable income.
Marco:
I have my paying subscriber still, which is its own nice sustainable income that can almost support the whole business by itself.
Marco:
So this is kind of just bonus money and this is monetizing all the free users finally in a way that actually works because the ads really didn't do that well enough, the previous ads.
Marco:
So this is kind of a great system as long as it continues to sell the inventory at any reasonable rate.
Marco:
And day one, again, it's impossible to say.
Marco:
I mean, once you have the kind of audience that my app has, I could sell out day one pretty easily.
Marco:
But the question is, what happens on day 365 when people have had a year worth of buying these ads to see what they're actually worth?
Marco:
And what if they're worth a lot less than what I'm charging?
Marco:
Obviously, I have to lower my prices.
Marco:
But what are they worth?
Marco:
We don't know.
Marco:
I don't think there's ever been a system where you could advertise for a podcast in a podcast player.
Marco:
So this is really a complete unknown for both me and the advertisers.
Marco:
We have no idea what a subscriber is worth or how much these subscribers stick around.
Marco:
If you get a subscriber through an ad, how many of them are still subscribed in a year?
Marco:
We don't know.
Marco:
And so it's the great unknown right now.
Marco:
But day one suggests that there's basically a very wide buffer here for things to need to be scaled down if necessary.
Marco:
If it ends up the economics don't work very well, I can scale this way down and it's still worth doing.
Marco:
So that to me shows that this is probably a good idea.
Marco:
By the way, there's also other controls I have.
Marco:
Like I can increase the number of slots that sell.
Marco:
In certain categories, if they demand that the price be below a certain level to sell them very often, I can just put more slots there.
Marco:
This is a known thing to do.
Marco:
People have been dealing with ad-based businesses for quite a long time now.
Marco:
We know how to do it.
Marco:
And as long as the ads are valuable at all...
Marco:
you can usually make it work.
Marco:
And I think what we're seeing so far is that I think these are valuable.
Marco:
The only question is just how valuable.
Marco:
But that's really just minor tweaks over time.
Marco:
That's not like having to rethink the whole system.
Casey:
Yeah, that's super cool.
Casey:
I'm really impressed, really proud of you.
Casey:
That's good work.
Casey:
Thanks.
Casey:
A couple other very quick questions.
Casey:
Would you consider open sourcing this ad backend so that other people can copy all your hard work for free?
Marco:
Probably not, but it's not out of like a guarding my hard work kind of attitude.
Marco:
It's more just like a lot of it is pretty intertwined with Overcast.
Marco:
So it wouldn't make a lot of sense for this to be used for anybody else.
Marco:
This is really an ad network for podcasts on Overcast that happens to also work for websites.
Marco:
So it's pretty custom to Overcast.
Marco:
And most of the hard stuff is payment processing.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Which I don't even, you know, anybody can integrate Stripe and do that.
Marco:
So it's, yeah, there's not a lot of value to that.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
And finally, where's my swipe to delete?
Marco:
I was doing this.
Marco:
So I haven't done that yet.
Marco:
I'm going to tackle that probably next week.
John:
It's got 30 days to do swipe to delete.
John:
Is that how this works?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, I have 29 days to do it and then one day to make all these notifications.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
I take back all the nice things you said unless you give me my swipe to delete.
Casey:
One star.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
So today, I think it was today, there was a rumor that broke that came out of the Wall Street Journal, which is usually pretty well sourced.
Casey:
In fact, usually well sourced enough that we all kind of believe that Apple goes to the Wall Street Journal and says, hey, would you talk about this, please?
Casey:
And the Wall Street Journal has said that the iPhone 8, or whatever it may be called,
Casey:
will have USB-C.
Casey:
And at first I thought, oh, this means that it'll have lightning on the phone and USB-C on the other end of the cable instead of USB... What is it?
Casey:
B?
Casey:
A?
Casey:
I always get it confused.
Casey:
A. Thank you.
Casey:
Whatever today is.
Casey:
B is the Pentagon on printers.
Casey:
Ah, right.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So anyway, so...
Casey:
I assumed, oh, that just means that the cable will go from lightning to USB-C.
Casey:
That makes sense.
Casey:
Pretty much all the laptops are USB-C now.
Casey:
Fine.
Casey:
But upon further inspection, it sounds like, no, no, no.
Casey:
The phone itself will actually be USB-C.
Casey:
And I have really conflicting opinions about this because my gut reaction is, no.
Casey:
No, I do not want this.
Casey:
I have a crud load of lightning cables.
Casey:
Lightning is really small, and I don't want to mess with that.
Casey:
What good does this do me?
Casey:
And I think that that's in large part because off the top of my head, I don't think I own a single device that supports USB-C.
Casey:
So I guess you could make the argument I'm living in the past, and if you make the argument I'm living in the past, then I guess really this is the future?
Casey:
And maybe I should...
Casey:
be using usbc and i should embrace my future usbc overlords so john marco and i were talking a lot earlier what do you think about all this
John:
this is a weird uh rumor because like you said it is in the wall street journal which is usually like the the end the end stage of life for rumors if they graduate all the way up to potential leak and end up in the wall street journal but as so many people have pointed out it is so poorly written that we can't even tell it's like it was written by someone who doesn't understand
John:
any of the things involved they don't understand how phones work they don't understand what these different standards for connectors are they don't understand what a port is because they wrote it in such a way they were all reading it going what what are you even trying to say just like casey said are you just saying that the other end of the connector will be see are you saying the phone will have usbc port are you saying ipads will have usbc ports in addition to the lighting but like what do you what are you even saying this is the worst leak ever like you have to leak
John:
in a coherent way so we can at least understand the thing that you're telling us is supposed to be coming but so i've kind of discounted uh or not discounted but i've set aside how this rumor is being communicated i've chosen to believe that what these things are trying to tell us is exactly what casey said and that if you pick up an iphone in the future and look at the bottom of it instead of a lightning port
John:
you'll see a usbc port like every other you know android phone and all the other things that are out there right that's what i'm choosing to to think this is trying to tell me and then i'm thinking about that if it's trying to tell me something different like oh the you know the other end of the lightning cable is going to be usbc that is a super boring rumor and i guess we could kind of get upset about that because as has been pointed out in many places before
John:
that's cool for apple's ecosystem and it kind of makes sense and it kind of gets back to the whole iphone 7 thing we're like oh you buy an iphone 7 and a new macbook pro and you can't even plug them in because there's no place to put the usba connector that's true and all but usba is everywhere as a charging port it's on my luggage for crying out loud like it is everywhere um so there's an argument to be had there that apple doing that would be
John:
maybe an apply thing to do to be like oh you should just you know you should be in an apple ecosystem our our power bricks have usbc connectors that's the future of all blah anyway i'm ignoring that i'm just pretending they're telling me that there's going to be usbc port on iphones and
John:
I'm of two minds on this.
John:
I feel like there are strong arguments on both sides.
John:
Both strong arguments for why this would be good and bad and also surprisingly strong arguments for why Apple wouldn't do this.
John:
Usually it's the opposite.
John:
It's like...
John:
OK, well, there's arguments for and against on a tech wise.
John:
But then when you bring Apple into the picture and you say, would Apple do this?
John:
Like there's only one strong argument for like that tech stuff aside.
John:
We know Apple would definitely do a thing like this or would never do a thing like this.
John:
And with Apple in the state, it is.
John:
I think you can look to Apple and say very strongly they both would do something like this and wouldn't do something like this.
John:
And for the tech, you can say this is an awesome tech idea and this is a bad tech idea.
John:
So on the tech side, obviously, why is this a bad idea?
John:
Because lightning is smaller.
John:
and you know that every connector every millimeter on a connector is some number of months or years off its life as apple makes things ever thinner and thinner you're going to hit the limit of usbc before you hit the limit of lightning not much before it's like probably like fractions of a millimeter or something but a little bit before lightning is smaller than usbc so there's that on the other side of the tech thing and this is a little bit of an unknown here
John:
lightning we don't know how unreliable lightning is like we have anecdotal evidence of weird connector scorching and stuff apple knows for sure what their warranty repair thing is you know and also there's the apple cables themselves which really has nothing to do with connector and everything to do with apple's uh uncomfortable relationship with strain relief on cables where they apparently make things that don't hold up that well when they're under uh you know under rough usage and
John:
but there is a tech argument to be made for you know for the fact that lightning is smaller but also the fact that uh usb usbc and someone will correct me if i'm wrong inverts the relationship of springy pieces of metal and stationary pieces of metal where the connector is stationary and solid and has these contacts on it which is great and makes that connector sturdy and
John:
but the inside of the device has the little springy metal fingers that touch the contact points.
John:
So if those little springy metal fingers get fatigued or bent up or fail to make good contact, that's inside your phone and you've got a problem.
John:
Whereas a USB-C connector is...
John:
I believe the springy bits are in the cable and inside the connector is the stiff stationary thing.
John:
I'm using the tactical terms for all this, I'm sure.
John:
And so if the little springy bits that make contact with the stationary thing fatigue throughout the cable and get a new cable.
John:
So that that is a tech argument on the side of USB C.
John:
uh and then again i guess on the connectors themselves you've got the you know the business side of like well apple gets money for lightning connectors people can't make peripherals without it and that's a good and a bad thing because good apple makes money and can control it it's bad that apple has to approve every peripheral um yeah so that's like you can it's there are arguments on both sides for the tech thing and then let's move over to apple is this a thing apple would do or is this an apple thing apple wouldn't do and i think probably is
John:
soon as like a couple of years in the past we all would have said regardless of all that tech stuff we just talked about apple will never do this because apple loves things super thin and apple love things proprietary and apple is not so much in love with conforming to industry standards just for the hell of it right that would that would be the only side of this argument we'd all be like yep totally like that's the apple but today's apple today's apple is
John:
is doing things the old apple didn't do both good and bad and has sowed enough doubt in my mind that i i'm now envisioning these boardroom conversations where somebody high up says tell me again what the advantages are of uh the our proprietary lightning connector versus usbc and maybe this comes up because of uh large numbers of warranty repairs or you know who knows what the inciting incident is
John:
but someone says remind me again why we've been doing this lightning thing for five years like what advantage do we continue to have over uh over usbc especially now that we spread usbc to all of our uh you know all of our macs and our power brick connectors and you know all that stuff uh and presumably if they ever release new macs they will expand it to even more of them
John:
Um, why are we still using light again?
John:
I'm not saying there's not a reason, but just, you know, just go over it again for me.
John:
Like tell, tell me again, what the advantages of grading for someone would come up with like, here's our revenue from our made for iPhone program.
John:
And here's what we've been able to do with the connector, but changing the pins through software and we're not beholden to the USB consortium and here are this blah, blah, blah.
John:
And, um,
John:
maybe there's an argument within the company that says that's those are compelling arguments now here's what we would get with usbc everywhere would be the same one connector for power data uh peripherals video out at adapters for networking like across macs and all ios devices including the future much bigger ipads that we're surely making with multiple usb connectors on them right right apple making those yeah i'm sure they're supposed to make that
John:
Once you standardize on just literally one omnidirectional connector that's really small across all your products, that's an advantage.
John:
And you get to take advantage of the ecosystem of existing USB-C peripherals, which presumably will only grow as other things adopt it.
John:
So...
John:
and apple five years ago i can't imagine this discussion even taking place in serious ways apple today i can imagine this discussion being had prompted by whatever and i can imagine the usbc contingent inside apple winning the argument and saying we're going to go with the industry standard even though it is worse in a few ways tech wise because it's also better in a few ways tech wise and there's an ecosystem advantage not just for apple and non-apple companies
John:
but for apple's own products internally to standardize them one because it's never been there's never been a chance to do that before at no time in the past has there been any viable choice for a standard connector for like ipods and all macs except for i guess when it was firewire but that was hard it was hardly viable and firewire was definitely not the standard across all macs they had macs didn't even have it on it um
John:
So here we are, and I find myself incredibly believing a rumor that a future iPhone would have a USB-C connector on it because, you know, it's not a slam dunk, and I'm not even saying it's higher than 50-50, but I would say it is 50-50 in my mind, that tech-wise, coin flip.
John:
Would Apple do it?
John:
Coin flip.
John:
That's where I come down on this.
John:
Do you want them to?
John:
I kind of do because...
John:
If they're going to standardize on USB-C everywhere, I'm sold on the uniformity win.
John:
And I'm also kind of sort of sold on the durability win with the little bendy finger thingies.
John:
And I have no data on the reliability thing.
John:
And, of course, all my connectors still work, and I don't have these problems that people have.
Casey:
Of course they do.
Casey:
Of course they don't.
John:
Well, although my wife said she had one of hers that had the little scorch marker.
John:
I looked at it.
John:
It wasn't like it wasn't like Marco's was, but that you just just mechanically speaking, like I love the lightning connector, the fact that it was solid and didn't have any little fragile pins in and everything.
John:
But the fact that those little things, those little fragile fingers are inside the phones.
John:
i can see that being a problem but anyway i don't i don't have data on this um but i'm willing to believe and so if they did it i won't be angry i'll be kind of proud of them for being surprisingly pragmatic and courageous and for yeah kind of kind of not so much courageous in terms of like like we're willing to take the heat because i think they wouldn't actually that's the other aspect of this
John:
some people are going to be angry, like, uh, you just changed the connector.
John:
You're changing it again.
John:
Well, first of all, just is a relative term.
John:
Like the, the, the 30 pin connector was around for almost 10 years.
John:
And so, uh, you know, that I think that's a good run.
John:
This is slightly more than half of that.
John:
It's if they ended up swapping this out and slowly transitioning, it would be like five, six years by the time they were done transitioning everything, right.
John:
All the products they sold.
John:
That's a little bit, that's, you know, it's shorter than a 30 pin, but, uh,
John:
unlike the 30 pin to lightning they wouldn't be changing one proprietary connector for another they would actually be moving to where everybody else already is so i can't i think actually people wouldn't be all that mad about yes you'll be mad i'll have these lightning cables what the hell do i do with them right but there is a there is a pr and real win there to say but we move to the standard we move to the industry standard so now
John:
You know, if you're in a mixed household with Android and iOS devices, you don't have to have two separate charging cables.
John:
And the thing that you use to charge your Mac can also charge your phone.
John:
And just there's a, you know, there's a story to be had there to sell this so that it is less impact.
John:
So that it's basically, even though it hasn't been around for 10 years, we're not moving to another proprietary one.
John:
We're not screwing you over moving to the industry standard.
John:
So people will be less angry for a shorter period of time, I think.
Marco:
Marco?
Marco:
Yeah, I pretty much agree with John.
Marco:
If you would have asked me a year ago, I would have said, oh, why would they kill lightning?
Marco:
That's dumb.
Marco:
This might even come up a year ago.
Marco:
I might have said exactly that.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
But the way I feel about it now, now that I've had my USB-C MacBook Pro for a few months and I have a few USB-C cables and now I have the stupid thing where I have like half of my cables are that kind and half are another kind and it's really annoying.
Marco:
And, you know, on the phone, it's a little bit different than like a laptop because it's the other end of the cable.
Marco:
But it is kind of annoying when I'm packing for a trip and I'm packing my charging cables that most of what I use charges via lightning.
Marco:
But not all of what I use.
Marco:
I still have to have some mini USB cables, and now I have a USB-C cable for this new laptop, and probably anything I get in the future will be USB-C cables.
Marco:
The EU has mandated certain charge cable standards for a while, and the reason why is because...
Marco:
this actually generates tons of waste.
Marco:
All the different waste cables that people have to buy separately and then wear out separately, throw away separately, and have all these different connectors and everything.
Marco:
It actually does hurt progress in a number of big ways to have all these proprietary things.
Marco:
I think all you have to do
Marco:
to decide whether this is a good idea or not kind of like in theory is to think like if they were designing the iPhone 5 the first cable the first phone not to use the dot connector if they were designing that today would they still make lightning today in a world where USB-C exists or would they just use USB-C
Marco:
If you do the mental exercise, what would be the right thing to do if they had a clean start today, if there was no legacy to worry about, no established devices out there in the world?
Marco:
What would be the right choice?
Marco:
And I think it's very clear USB-C would be the right choice.
Marco:
Assuming it is probably more resilient because of having the pins on the cable instead of the plug, things like that.
Marco:
But also just because it is clearly...
Marco:
a really good, soon-to-be-very-widespread industry standard.
Marco:
And there's a lot of benefits to that.
Marco:
Apple does love a good proprietary port when they can make one.
Marco:
They do love that.
Marco:
They'll take advantage when they can.
Marco:
But not always.
Marco:
Sometimes they just use standard things, like USB, on the Macs.
Marco:
For a long time, they used a standard headphone jack because...
Marco:
It wasn't worth making their own custom headphone jack.
Marco:
The world had a standard for this thing, and they used it.
Marco:
And most of the time, they do that.
Marco:
Most of the time, that's the choice they make.
Marco:
And right now, I think it's very, very clear that... When they made the dock connector, that was a special purpose thing they made for iPods, and they later adapted it.
Marco:
When they made Lightning...
Marco:
There was nothing better for them to move to.
Marco:
The industry, you know, the USB consortium and their people were designing God knows what with all those crazy like like the USB 3B connector.
John:
Mini micro USB, the seven connectors I have to my digital cameras in the house.
John:
It all looks almost the same.
Marco:
yeah and that like pretty much everything the usb people have ever designed from a cable perspective or from a perspective rather has been horrendous before usbc it's no coincidence that apple allegedly had a very big role in usbc possibly even designing the whole thing themselves and just like handing it to the usb people and saying here that's another reason by the way that that this argument could be won inside apple because whatever sort of not invented here apple pride things may be preventing it like with lightning we made they'd be like
John:
We kind of made USB-C too.
John:
So we're all good in the pride area.
John:
Even if the world doesn't know it, we here at Apple know that we kind of made this too.
John:
So that's why I can imagine this argument being one inside Apple.
John:
Exactly.
Marco:
And so today, no question, the right move if you were starting fresh would be USB-C.
Marco:
And so the only question is, is it worth it for Apple to endure the transition costs to get to that point?
Marco:
And I think Apple... I made a joke about courage earlier, referring to their wonderful justification for moving the headphone jack.
Marco:
But I think ditching Lightning this year and going to USB-C and this new fancy phone, that would be real courage.
Marco:
Because they are going to hear better from the users if they do this.
Marco:
They are definitely going to hear from people.
Marco:
I mean, people are still mad today about Lightning.
Marco:
They're still mad today.
John:
almost five years later that they can't use their dot connector that they bought 10 years ago to charge their iphone i do hope though like maybe apple has numbers in this because android phones are so perverse but i think i saw like what their market share is among smartphones i think it's like 80 or something it's some really really high number i'm hoping that every house that has a or some high percentage of the houses that have angry people who are angry about like dropping lightning
John:
There'll be USB-C charging cables hanging around within a couple years to charge the Android phones in the house.
John:
Exactly.
Marco:
And so if you think about, like, what does an all-USB-C world look like?
Marco:
Well, we're already going to be halfway there because all Android phones are going to have it.
Marco:
If they don't already, they're going to have it probably within the next year, right?
Marco:
And so, like...
Marco:
You're going to start seeing now in places like hotel nightstands and charging cables in airports and terminals and stuff like that.
Marco:
You're going to start seeing where you used to see maybe you'd have a lightning port or a lightning cable and maybe you'd have one of those dual lightning and micro USB things.
Marco:
You're going to start seeing USB-C all over all those things now for all the Android phones.
Marco:
And wouldn't it be great if they could just do USB-C and have that cover all phones?
Marco:
That would just be the new standard for charging your phone.
Marco:
That would be amazing.
Marco:
I think Apple had big plans for Lightning, for it being this like amazing universal port that could do all these different data things and everything.
Marco:
And I think part of the justification for removing the headphone jack last year was, you know, it turns out we live in a wireless world.
Marco:
Like most of what we do is wireless.
Marco:
Still, I'll go look at audio stuff.
Marco:
I tried to buy a decent microphone or sound interface for iOS devices.
Marco:
And a lot of them didn't even make the jump from 30-pin to Lightning.
Marco:
I think Lightning largely hasn't panned out in being the universal accessory port Apple wanted it to be.
Marco:
And for a number of reasons.
Marco:
One is wireless things are so good.
Marco:
Another is that Android is more of a presence than I think Apple thought it would be or wanted it to be in that market.
Marco:
It's similar to one of the reasons everyone said why they wouldn't maybe do this is, well, they just had to make Lightning headphones this past year.
Marco:
Well, no.
Marco:
Lightning headphones have actually been around for a couple years, but there's been three pairs of them.
Marco:
There's been almost none, and almost nobody uses them.
Marco:
The only ones that have any reasonable use are the ones that Apple includes in the box for free with the iPhone 7.
Marco:
But if they changed USB-C, they would probably just include a USB-C version.
Marco:
And just like it was basically no big deal for all the people who got the ones in the box for free with the iPhone 7, it would be similarly no big deal for all the people who would get the new USB-C ones in the box with the iPhone 8 or whatever it's called.
Marco:
So like that, you can rule that argument right out.
Marco:
That doesn't matter.
Marco:
That doesn't matter enough, right?
Marco:
If you also look at the iPad in particular...
Marco:
the ipad really needs needs help you know it it needs to become more of a work device to boost its sales because it seems like you know they nailed the like passive consumption market pretty well if you want a the passive consumption by rich people market yeah well that yeah yeah the the high end of the passive consumption market they they they have that covered now
Marco:
Where I think they need to make a lot more headway is in the productivity market.
Marco:
And they are starting to see things like the surface hurting them.
Marco:
Not in a massive way yet, but in a way that they should really be noticing.
Marco:
And that they probably are.
Marco:
And for the iPad to grow, they are making it more PC-like.
Marco:
They added the smart keyboards.
Marco:
They added the smart connector.
Marco:
They added the pencil.
Marco:
They're going to hopefully keep pushing in this direction.
Marco:
Who knows what the software has coming next month or this month or whatever it is.
Marco:
We'll see, I guess, but...
Marco:
I think there is large potential if you would put a USB-C port on an iPad.
Marco:
Because right now, I mentioned earlier about sound devices and things, very few of them are available for lightning.
Marco:
Everything is available for computers.
Marco:
Every kind of peripheral you can think of is available with a USB interface on the end of it.
Marco:
And maybe not a USB-C port necessarily, but it could plug into a USB-C port through a very easy, cheap cable or a very easy adapter that you probably would already have three of in the bag.
Marco:
If Apple wants the iPad to become more of a computer replacement...
Marco:
adding a USB-C port or two or three is not ridiculous.
John:
You know, it's the kind of thing like... I remember when I suggested that.
John:
It was on this show, I suggested maybe a couple of years ago, adding a bunch of USB ports to the iPad, and I'm pretty sure both of you laughed at me very heartily.
John:
because every apple commentator would have laughed at the suggestion a year ago or more we all did every since the ipad one well i didn't laugh at it like i said like you have so much room on the side of the ipad and they want it to be uh more capable it's the place to put i was thinking of usba ports that's how long ago it was like i was envisioning usba ports on the side of like the ipad one because there was actually room for them back then
John:
but you know the apple though i like i want more than one port on a 12 inch ipad pro i don't want just one centered in the bottom replacing the lightning port you have the opportunity to put more than one there's plenty of room and if you want it to be the pro ipad like surface hardware it doesn't have just one port for power and all usb like the macbook one does
John:
So you got to compete.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
So I think the iPad, there's lots of new uses or uses that would be better if the iPad had USB-C ports, at least one.
Marco:
And if they're going to do that, why would they keep the lightning port also?
Marco:
It would make very little sense to keep the lightning port.
John:
That's for your headphones, right?
Yeah.
John:
you know speaking of that like i just realized the other day when reading these stories about lighting headphones and stuff i realized i actually don't know where my lightning headphones that came with my iphone 7 are right now in the house i don't think i lost them but i don't know where they are on the house because i've been using airpods and right if they if they get out ahead of this if they do the transition now
John:
with the anticipation to anticipating two things one thing margaret said that like usbc it's not it's not pervasive now but presumably in a few years it will be pervasive thanks to android phones and everything right so they'll be out ahead of that so they will be saving their customers from the experience of being like oh i'm on vacation and oh i can't use my iphone with this thingy or this charge cable because it's not usb so saving them from that and then two the thing that apple kind of knows and controls is what is the time horizon for wireless charging right
John:
Is that just around the corner?
John:
Is it one or two years?
John:
I feel like Apple, if they switch now, will be saying, we believe that by the time we get our devices so thin that we can't USB, can't use USB-C anymore, we'll have the wireless charging thing covered.
John:
So again, they're in a position to know, and those all seem like reasonable things that could happen.
Marco:
Well, the other thing is, I mean, this doesn't sound a lot more likely than Apple adding USB to an iPad, but what if the phone is getting thicker because they're getting rid of the bezels and they need somewhere to put things like the camera?
Marco:
The reason why those bezels are there is partly out of looks and grip and everything, but mostly because that's where you have to put a bunch of components that are too deep to fit behind the screen.
Marco:
And if they're moving to these larger screen, like more edge to edge phone designs that can be smaller in the hand, like have a smaller width and height in the hand, they might have to get thicker in order to just have space for things like a decent camera.
John:
Get ready for some bigger camera bumps.
John:
Well, probably.
John:
That seems like a more aptly, as judged by the iPhone 7, they'll just make a bigger bulge rather than make the whole thing wider, thicker.
John:
But we'll see.
Marco:
yeah maybe anyway so my point is basically that like in a perfect world if they started from scratch today had no legacy they'd probably go usbc that would probably be the best option if you look at the ipad the ipad could really use usbc and it wouldn't make a lot of sense it wouldn't be very apple style to still keep lightning on there they could just replace that we are already not using lightning for much else besides charging like it's not being used for a whole lot more by most people
Marco:
than just charging your phone um and they're already pushing things like bluetooth for a lot of peripherals for audio output and things like that so and and of course then also you look at the mac and the and the mac you know if you have usbc on both things everything shares the same peripherals everything shares the same cables you can charge them everywhere even with the android device cables
Marco:
You can use all of the devices for Android right now that are made by companies like Sony.
Marco:
If Sony has to pick between making something for Lightning or making something for USB-C for Android phones, they pick Android because they're more of an Android-focused company.
Marco:
There's lots of companies like that where you kind of have to... When you pick teams, you see some of the headphones.
Marco:
There are some USB-C headphones now for Android phones.
Marco:
And there are some Lightning headphones for iPhones.
Marco:
And usually the same headphone isn't available in both.
Marco:
You kind of have to pick.
Marco:
And it sucks having this format war, really, going on between these companies and these different ecosystems where you can't use the same headphones between two different devices.
Marco:
Wouldn't it be great if you could just have one standard?
Marco:
and USB-C is good enough, and it's going to be good enough for quite some time.
Marco:
We're not going to have to change cables again in like three years from now.
Marco:
It's going to be a while, and it would be amazing to have that.
Marco:
Now, there is one other part of this that is worth pointing out, and that is the other end of the cable, the end that plugs into the power brick or the computer, if the case may be.
Marco:
i think personally i think it's more likely that this rumor has been misunderstood and that the more likely outcome here is that apple's not changing the phone to usbc but they're just going to ship it in the box with a usbc cable that plugs into usbc brick but it's still going to have lightning on the phone end that is way more likely that's totally that's totally what i thought and i think that's so much more boring of a rumor so that's why i was like i don't want to talk about that because it's like all right fine if they do that like
John:
All you can do for that one is get angry about the fact that now you have no place to plug in your charging cable.
John:
But that would make such perfect sense along with everything we have.
John:
But why is that a story?
John:
That's not a Wall Street Journal caliber story.
John:
Like, because, you know, who cares?
John:
Whatever.
John:
I really hope that's not it.
Marco:
And the thing is, in many ways, having USB-C on the charger end is actually worse than having USB-A on the charger end.
Marco:
Because as I ran on Twitter earlier, basically the entire world right now has tons of infrastructure in place that has USB-A ports everywhere for people to plug their phones into to charge them with.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
This isn't just like the phone owner having to buy a new power brick or having to use a different one that comes in the box and throw away all their old ones.
Marco:
This is like... Again, it's like airplanes, cars, hotels, like all these different... Yeah, luggage.
John:
All these different places where you have USB-A ports.
John:
Those travel things that we all have with like 12 USB-A ports on them.
John:
You take the hotel so you can charge the whole family's devices with you.
John:
Now...
John:
There's nothing to say that all those devices won't also convert to USB-C at some point.
John:
It's just the question of if you're changing the non-phone end of the cable, which is what we're talking about now, even though it's boring.
John:
If you're changing the non-phone end of the cable, is now the right time to change away from A?
John:
Because you're not gaining much, except for the only thing you're gaining is uniform sanity within Apple's lines, where you no longer have the embarrassing situation where you buy a MacBook Pro and an iPhone and you can't charge them at each other.
John:
But that's it.
John:
That's all you get out of it.
Marco:
Yeah, and so it would be fine to have USB C2C as the main thing or C2Lightning as the main thing.
Marco:
That would be fine.
Marco:
But I think C2Lightning as the cable that comes with the phone and as the thing that most people have is actually less convenient now and for the foreseeable future than A2Lightning would be because...
Marco:
There are so many A ports everywhere in the world that people already have installed or bought or everything else.
Marco:
And it goes way beyond just buying a new power brick.
Marco:
And it goes into things like buying a new car or retrofitting airplanes.
Marco:
And those are things that just don't happen very often.
Marco:
So we're going to have USB A ports as the new power outlet for phones for a long time to come.
Marco:
And you can't adapt a USB-A port to have a USB-C cable plugged into it.
Marco:
You can go the other direction with all these little wonderful $9 adapters that Apple sells, but you can't go the other way.
Marco:
You can't plug a USB-C device into a USB-A port.
Marco:
It violates the USB spec because there's lots of weird things that can go wrong if you do it wrong, and lots of weird combinations they didn't want to allow with, like, what do you do with the massive amount of power on these pins and things like that.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
That direction can't be legally adapted by the USB spec, and for very good reasons that are probably unlikely to change.
Marco:
So if you're going to have a cable that you're going to want to plug into whatever you find as you travel or go throughout the world or in and out of your car or wherever else, you're probably going to want whatever the phone has, lightning or USB-C, to USB-A, and then maybe have a dongle with your laptop so you can plug it in there sometimes.
John:
You want to save yourself some email?
John:
Yeah.
John:
You have to tell them that you know that there's connectors that go from A to C. You have to say that.
Marco:
Yes, I know you can go on lots of places and buy one from some kind of no-name brand, but there's a reason why there aren't that many of them and why you don't see people like Apple selling them because they're bad.
Marco:
Bad things can happen.
Marco:
Please don't use them.
Casey:
So speaking of saving email, I forgot to mention that I do have a modern Apple TV in the house, and that is USB-C.
Casey:
Would either of you care to wager a guess how many times I've plugged a USB-C cable into that Apple TV?
John:
Isn't that just a diagnostic port?
John:
I don't think it's supposed to be a user...
Marco:
No, it's for diagnostics and it's for developers.
Marco:
Like when I install Providence, the emulator that I use, it's similar to how you plug in a phone to run apps that you write from Xcode onto the phone through USB.
Marco:
Same thing with the Apple TV.
Marco:
You plug it into the USB port and it becomes an output device for Xcode that you can run stuff on.
John:
Speaking of USB-C, the Nintendo Switch has USB-C, which is out soon.
John:
And someone tweeted earlier today that if you plug a Nintendo Switch into a MacBook Pro, the Switch charges the laptop, not the other way around.
Yeah.
John:
that's pretty great in the world of ubiquitous connectors it is kind of a weird situation because like we have the it's kind of based on size that's like you expect if you're using your laptop and you're like oh my phone's low i'm going to plug it into my laptop that's the thing like we've all done right you fully expect that when you plug your phone into your laptop the laptop will charge your phone the phone won't charge your laptop and why do you think that well because the batteries in the laptop is bigger i guess um but when you do it with the switch i guess they don't know how big they are it's like a little dog that thinks he's the big dog he's like i got you macbook
John:
here's some juice take this i don't know even who knows it could be just the mac thinks it's being charged and it actually isn't because i don't understand why the switch would output charge or anything but in in this world of ubiquitous usbc that our future world where everything has usbc ports it can be confusing as to what the actual relationship between devices with batteries in them will be when you plug them into each other
John:
I'm sure part of the standard is like for that, but they probably just didn't quite do it right or something.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Or like, again, why the hell is the switch charging anything?
John:
I don't think there are any peripherals that plug into the switch and derive power from it.
John:
So who knows?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
What do its various external control, like the pro controller?
Marco:
What are those?
Marco:
Are those all just wireless with their own chargers or what?
John:
i would guess so i mean the all existing game uh console controllers i have use one of the terrible micro usb things maybe the the switch pro controller has uh uh usbc i wouldn't know because i don't have a pre-order for it um but i'm working on that by the way so everybody knows i do have orders i do now have uh pre-orders for the switch and for the zelda game that i want thanks to some very helpful fans of the show uh so far still no pro controller
Marco:
Yeah, you're going to have to tell me at some point how I'm supposed to get a Pro Controller when I get my Switch.
Marco:
Also, can I buy the games?
Marco:
When I mentioned that I had these games in my Amazon cart ready to pre-order, I got a number of people saying, why don't I just buy a giant SD card and download them?
Marco:
Is that a thing I can do?
John:
Yeah, but the only reason I want the Zelda is because it's the special edition that comes with a bunch of little tchotchkes and stuff, and it comes with a soundtrack CD.
John:
I would throw all that away, or I'd mail it to you.
John:
Exactly.
John:
So if you don't care about that, I'm pretty sure every single game is downloadable, and the storage on the Switch itself is not that big, so everyone's telling you to buy an SD card, but I think if you just get the Switch and just want to play Zelda, you can just get it and then download Zelda and play it.
John:
Did you see the other story, speaking of Switch, about the...
John:
the zelda cards have you seen pictures of how big the little uh the uh the switch cartridges are no like they're really small like they're not as small as like the micro micro sd cards but they're smaller than you think they are um and that poses a problem because like what if kids find these little games and stick them in their mouth and swallow them or do something else bad with them right so nintendo's solution to this was to coat the cartridges they sell with a very very bad tasting substance
John:
So people are now licking Nintendo Switch cartridges.
Casey:
That's the backstory?
Casey:
I had seen people say, oh, yes, they really do taste like garbage.
Casey:
I didn't know what the backstory was, though.
John:
Yeah, that's what I've heard.
John:
It's a plausible theory, because it is like kind of a swallowing choking hazard.
John:
They're small enough, and they're going to be around kids, because it's not like they're...
John:
You're not worried about a kid swallowing the SIM card from your phone because kids aren't playing with the SIM card in your phone.
John:
But kids will be around these loose cartridges for the Switch where they bring a bunch of them in the back of the car with them and play them on a car trip and stuff.
John:
And their younger sibling gets a hold of them.
John:
And so apparently they taste terrible.
Marco:
Wait, so I have a question.
Marco:
All right, so I used to bite my nails, and one of the ways I stopped was I got one of those horrible-tasting nail polish things.
Marco:
Same theory.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
However, one of the shortcomings of that is that it would rub off on food I was preparing or anything that I touched would taste horrible.
Marco:
Mm-hmm.
Marco:
And so if you handle a Switch cartridge...
John:
and you can make a sandwich it like is it gonna rub off at all are you gonna taste that so i have to say that this is the internet and i've just read some tweets so for all i know this is totally false and people just got some weird foul tasting stuff on their switch cartridges but i will say that now assuming this story is true
John:
I would think that the coating they put on these cartridges would have some of the same problems as the nail-biting stuff.
John:
One, that it would eventually be able to wear off or be sucked off, as very determined nail-biters know well, that if you really want to go to town, you can A, build up a tolerance to, and B, eventually remove that substance.
John:
Not this stuff.
John:
I quit with one application.
John:
That's how bad it was.
John:
You are not as determined as some little children do.
John:
yeah i i can tell you from personal experience with people in my family who i will not name who are not me um that it is possible to if you are stubborn enough to get rid of that stuff and two like you said that like will it come off on your hands i think it has to necessarily come off your hands if your hands are wet because if it doesn't come off on your hands when they're wet it also won't come off on your tongue when you're wet and
John:
And so I think those are real things.
John:
But what I'm hoping is that cartridges don't get handled much under normal circumstances and that people's hands are not wet enough to pull off the stuff.
John:
Again, assuming this entire story is true.
John:
But all we know is that when any of us gets or encounters an Nintendo Switch cartridge, it is incumbent upon us as part of the homework for the show to lick it.
John:
You've just given me a really good reason to just download all my games and not ever buy one.
Marco:
Now you have to get one to lick.
Marco:
You have to.
Marco:
Tiff's going to want to lick it.
Marco:
I just have to lick my SD card and see if that has the same coding on it.
Marco:
That's right.
Marco:
You need to ABX test this.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
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Casey:
Anyway, I think the thing that bothers me about the iPhone USB-C thing is if the USB-C is on the device itself, is on the iPhone, what technical thing does that solve?
Casey:
Like, yes, I understand that there's a consistency with the rest of the laptop line, but what does that actually do for an iPhone that makes the iPhone itself better?
Yeah.
John:
Don't we get the advantage of dedicated analog audio pins so that we don't need the DAC in the things anymore and we could have cheap headphones to connect to USB-C?
John:
Or am I misremembering this?
Marco:
Both USB-C and Lightning have ways to do that.
Marco:
However, we also did find that in the little Apple dongle is a little tiny DAC because DACs cost nothing.
Marco:
And it's not a very good one, but it doesn't matter for most people for what they're using.
Marco:
It's fine.
John:
So anyway, that's a potential advantage that you could get if Apple decides to take advantage of it.
John:
I have no idea if there are any existing headphones that take analog audio signals and have instead of a regular headphone jack in the hand, they have a USB-C one.
John:
But in theory, that's one.
John:
There's also, you know, tech-wise, the thing with the bendy pins that we talked about.
John:
Like, who knows how big a problem that is, but it stands to reason that it is better to have the parts that eventually fatigue or bend or wear out on the cable that you can throw away and not inside the device.
John:
So that's another tech advantage.
Yeah.
Casey:
I guess I just, there's nothing that you guys have said or that I can think of that makes me think, oh, this is the technical problem that's being solved with USB-C.
Casey:
That juice is worth the squeeze of pissing off the entire world for another cable change or another port change.
John:
Don't you think, do you guys not agree?
John:
You both said that you thought people would be angry, but I totally think people will be less angry than 30-pin delighting.
John:
Even though 30 pin was 10 years old, I think there'll be less anger about this because it's a switch to the standard.
John:
Because yes, you're going to be grumbly.
Casey:
You're assuming though that people have USB-C devices.
Casey:
I am cheap and I don't buy expensive things terribly often, but I always keep up to date on iPhones and iPads and whatnot.
Casey:
And I don't have a, like I said, the only USB-C device I have is an Apple TV that I've never plugged USB-C into.
John:
They'd be a little bit ahead of the curve.
John:
Like, I agree.
John:
People don't have.
John:
But I think every story about this would be Apple concedes or like the most negative story you can have.
John:
Apple finally concedes and does what everyone else does.
John:
Apple finally gets in line.
John:
Ever finally does the industry standard thing.
John:
I think that would be the negative Apple spin on these stories.
John:
And, you know, again, with the European regulations requiring whatever it was, mini USB and probably going to require USB-C like Apple.
John:
I think that's the spin on the story.
John:
And yes, it's like, oh, I don't care what the hell the standard is.
John:
I got a house full of freaking lightning cables that are not worthless to me, right?
John:
Like people will be angry, but I think the story will be Apple gets in line with everybody else and that will soften the blow.
Casey:
again i think if you're going to do that though you wait another year or something like that because everyone is still sensitive to this because i still within the last month have heard people whining about lightning ports and and so if you're going to make this jump you make the jump where it's when it's it's it's preposterous that apple isn't on usbc right now you want to be a late comer though do you want that in this case yeah yeah
Casey:
Because again, the thing that I can't get past is it's not solving any technical problem that I'm aware of.
Casey:
Maybe on like an iPad, maybe if you wanted to plug in, say, an external display, which I guess you can do that with the HDMI cable on a phone or iPad anyway.
Casey:
So I'm failing to see what technical problem that makes the iPhone itself better.
Casey:
What technical problem are they solving by doing this?
Casey:
Because otherwise, why bother?
John:
We also don't know how pervasive the lightning connector problems are.
John:
How many people do we know who have had this problem?
John:
I know two people, Marco and Merlin, who have both had problems with the contacts, the bendy little bits coming out of the thing and then scorching the little connectors.
John:
Marco, did you get your phone replaced because of that?
John:
Yeah, I did.
John:
And then Merlin, I don't know if he got anything replaced, but he had like, we were calling it the hardware virus because once one of the little bendy pieces of metal doesn't contact with the shiny gold bits on the lightning connector and starts arcing, it can cause a little burny spot there and that makes the connection even worse and more arcing and so on and so forth.
John:
And now you have...
John:
a lightning connector that has a little Bernie spot on it.
John:
And then if you put that lightning connector into another device, now you have poor contact between the Bernie spot and the little bendy metal thing.
John:
And it causes that to arc.
John:
And so it's like a hardware virus.
John:
As you plug this plug into a bunch of other devices, eventually they all get this little Bernie spot on the same place.
John:
And that's bad.
John:
And is this just a problem that is really rare and esoteric and really much smaller in the grand scheme of things than Apple's bad strain relief?
John:
I don't know.
John:
But I do know two people, and it did cause a warranty replacement for sure on at least one of them.
John:
That, I think, would fall into the category of potentially a tech problem that USB-C is solving.
John:
But without numbers, it's hard to know without numbers, you know.
Casey:
I guess I just – but here again, that's like – that's solving a problem for Apple that your average consumer, even I, don't really care about.
John:
Well, but Marco didn't want to get his phone – well, maybe he did because of the microphone thing.
John:
But like people don't want to have to bring in their thing to get it swapped, right?
John:
I mean, does USB-C solve the lint problem?
John:
That's another sort of anecdotal thing we don't have numbers for.
John:
But like how many people have you heard about like –
John:
My thing wouldn't charge and I had to get out the dentist gear and start pulling out the little lint balls or cat hair from inside the thing.
John:
Or I brought it to an Apple store and they had to do it for me.
John:
My parents have had this problem where they had to have lint pulled out of their thing, pulled out of their lightning connector by like an Apple store person.
John:
Right.
John:
Does USB-C suffer from that as much as lighting?
John:
I have no idea.
John:
But that is another potential tech problem.
John:
Not just for Apple, for warranty.
John:
People don't want their crap to break and have to bring it to the store either.
John:
Especially it's so hard to get an appointment and it's annoying to be in there and everything.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I feel like if I were to wager a guess...
Casey:
I think it's what our initial interpretation was, which is the cable included in the box may be lightning to USB-C.
Casey:
That falls down, though, because of what Marco was describing about how the entirety of power charging in the world is all done via USB-A.
John:
I think Apple, this is one of the old school things where I would say, would Apple do this?
John:
100%.
John:
I totally believe Apple would go lightning to USB-C.
John:
Despite everything we just said, and we all agree on that USB-A is more common.
John:
Why would Apple do it?
John:
Because they'd be like, this is our connector for our stuff and our power bricks and our computers.
John:
And by the way, we sell the other one for a reasonable price.
John:
So buy more peripherals from us and buy more adapters and it's fine.
John:
I 100% believe Apple would do that.
John:
It's just hard to tell from this rumor.
John:
And speaking of hardware virus, I hope this rumor is a different kind of hardware virus and that even if Apple is either doing the boring thing or not doing anything and they just come with plain old USB-A to lightning connectors like every other thing, the fact that this story is out there and that every tech site and the Wall Street Journal and podcast and everybody are talking about it, and it seems to me collectively slowly convincing ourselves that this would be a good idea, it would be great if...
John:
somewhere at apple like no wall street journal that's not what you were supposed to be leaking at all it's just that we were going to change the other end of the cave and then come the time when when the new iphone is released we're all disappointed that it doesn't have usbc apple be like that would get away from us so it's like a hardware mind virus
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know.
Casey:
I don't know what to make of it.
Casey:
Like, it wouldn't entirely surprise me if the phone itself had a USB-C port on it.
Casey:
But I just, I keep coming back to it and I can't get past, what is it really doing for the device?
Casey:
Like, what problem is it solving for the device?
Casey:
I'm not saying there isn't one.
Marco:
It's making a lot of things more convenient.
Marco:
And in the very, very likely future that we're going to have, because, you know, Android is, you know, doing this.
Marco:
So we're going to have all these USB-C cables out there in the world.
Marco:
It's going to be very, very convenient if we not only can just have one cable, but then you can plug in your iPhone to any of these things anywhere.
Marco:
That's going to be incredibly convenient.
Marco:
It's also going to be convenient for just people who travel with an iPhone and a laptop.
Marco:
And then you can have one charger
Marco:
That you kind of switch between them as needed or you can swap cables between them if you forget one of the cables or one of them goes bad or you only have one long cable and one short cable and you need to flip where they are for a certain arrangement that you have when you're traveling.
Marco:
There's all sorts of everyday practical advantages that this could bring in a world where everything else is USB-C.
Marco:
And I think it's very clear we are heading towards that world.
Marco:
The world where everything else is USB-C, that's happening.
Marco:
Apple is leading the charge with the Macs.
Marco:
So that's obviously happening.
Marco:
It's here.
Marco:
If you've bought a new MacBook Pro in the last five months, you already are in this world, at least partially.
Marco:
And as they update the iMacs, hopefully in a few weeks and everything else, over the next couple of years, if you buy a new Mac, it is almost certainly going to be all USB-C.
Marco:
So again, this world is here.
Marco:
This is happening.
Marco:
This is already a thing.
Marco:
There's all sorts of great accessories for USB-C now.
Marco:
Think of all the standard... Just how iOS has had support for standard USB devices, like standard HID things, standard sound devices, things without any drivers or anything, for a long time now.
Marco:
But in order to plug them in, you had to get one of those light into USB camera connection kit adapters.
Marco:
And this would actually allow the phone to have...
Marco:
a standard port that is always there that can support a whole bunch of new devices that can make your phone more useful in certain specialized scenarios.
Marco:
So there's the everyday practicality of all these different charge cables that are going to be everywhere.
Marco:
There's carrying it with you in a bag full of a USB-C laptop with all the USB-C cables you're going to have for that, not having to have two separate sets of cables with different sets of connectors and everything.
Marco:
It's just tons of everyday practicality plus all this edge case power that you could have by having this device be a member of the USB-C ecosystem, a first class member, have it be a USB-C host device that can have other USB-C things put into it and have that just work in addition to being charged and everything.
Marco:
And eventually have Thunderbolt 3 or Thunderbolt 7 on your phones, right?
Marco:
Maybe.
Marco:
I mean, they probably wouldn't.
Marco:
probably even need that because usb 3 is already really fast for most things a phone would be transferring over an external bus you you would do it for a video out on on the the 27 inch ipad pro so you could have two of them next to each other that actually is pretty cool but yeah yeah and again and then also think of the ipad where like if they want to bring the ipad forward in a big way one of the ways to do that would be to give it a usb port of some of some kind and of course these days that would be a usb c port
Marco:
And if you have that, why would you keep lightning there?
Marco:
And if you're getting rid of lightning there, might as well also get rid of lightning on the phone and also be a lot more comfortable with the European Union in the process.
Marco:
So there's lots of reasons to do it.
Marco:
And Casey, as I think the one of us who's most cool on this idea, would you at least agree that if they were starting clean today with no legacy baggage, would USB-C be the right choice?
Yeah.
Casey:
Oh, without question.
Casey:
And sitting here thinking about it, I feel like the only way that this feels better to me is if inductive charging really is a thing.
Casey:
Because although I plug in phones constantly because I'm a developer...
Casey:
Like Erin, for example, the only time she ever plugs her phone into anything, it's just the wall to charge it.
Casey:
And yeah, it would be kind of a pain in the butt if she had to bring her like charging pad everywhere she goes in order to charge her phone.
Casey:
But that makes it sting a little bit less, I feel like.
Casey:
I don't know why.
Casey:
Now that I'm saying that out loud, it seems bananas to me because it's really no different.
Casey:
Because if it's USB-C, then we would have to bring that specific USB-C cable because it would be the only one in the house.
Casey:
But if it's an inductive charging pad, suddenly that's better because I don't know why.
Casey:
But it just feels better to me, even though I admit that that makes no sense.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Maybe that's the fix is inductive charging is a thing since it's wireless and Apple hates wires and USB-C for Apple TV style if you need it.
Casey:
I don't know.
Marco:
I think inductive charging is probably a separate thing.
Marco:
It's the kind of thing where...
Marco:
If it ever makes sense to do it in an iPhone, which so far it seems like the uses that have been out there in the world so far have not been very compelling for lots of different reasons.
Marco:
Some of which seem insurmountable, but we'll see if that ever changes.
Marco:
But things like the horrible efficiency of it and the incredible close proximity you need to have to the charging device.
Marco:
But anyway, or the pad or whatever it is.
Marco:
uh but i see this as separate things you know like you know it's it's very and even like apple has said this on multiple occasions i think phil has made a few comments to this degree you know you have a wire you can plug things into charge it's no big deal like wireless charging sounds great if you think about like oh i'd love i could just walk around everywhere my whole house my whole work my the whole world outside maybe and my phone just always charged from the air and
John:
but that probably isn't what it would be it would probably be like you just have these wireless charging pads like on your desk and stuff but like that isn't that much better than a cable oh that's a lot it's it's pretty better than a cable i think i think if you just have think of the area in everybody's house where they dump all their devices to charge in the rat's nest of wires uh that they have there if there was just a nice pad and they could just pile things on top of it and that's assuming they just go with like inductive charging with this type of thing if they go with uh the what was that company called the
John:
wasn't it steve perlman the on live guy i forget anyway uh the the beam forming wi-fi kind of tech that could be used to deliver power peace something that's the thing that you're talking about like i'm wandering around my house and my thing is charging and that is way way way slower but even if it's just like within the same room like imagine putting your phone on your nightstand to charge at night but not plugging it in and not having to put it on a pad
John:
and not having your brain slowly microwaved by the thing that's in your room.
John:
Yeah, that's a little concerning, to be honest.
Marco:
And then my phone just gets scratched up by my nightstand.
Marco:
Like, I have a little dock.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
See, I think the real reason why Apple... The dock industry.
Marco:
Yeah, no, I think the real reason why Apple is going to switch to USB-C on the phone is that I just got these awesome studio neat docks for everything, and they're really nice.
Marco:
So whenever I buy new docks, last time when they changed to Lightning was right after I bought the Elevation dock.
Marco:
And so now that I bought new docks, finally, I finally replaced my Elevation docks after five years or however long it's been.
Marco:
Now, Apple is going to change away from Lightning and make me buy all new docks.
John:
Well, the good news for the Kickstarter for iOS device docks made of like, you know, fancy burled walnut and all sorts of other things like that.
John:
The good news is that once wireless charging is here...
John:
you can still sell those same docks.
John:
It's even easier because they don't have to even charge.
John:
It's just basically like a little stand for your phone, like a little home for it.
John:
It just, it props it up and makes it look cute.
John:
Because in the end, I mean, I know you think they're like, oh, it's a charging dock.
John:
It's very important that it charges.
John:
In the end, it's a little stand for your phone.
John:
it's a nice stand for my phone i know i'm just saying like that industry will not be decimated by wireless charging in fact that industry will be freed from having to worry about the silly electronics and they can concentrate where they really care about which is fine materials and craftsmanship and so on and so forth and you can use all the money you're saving by not buying two sets of cables for everything and just dump it all into docks that's right you have one made from uh what is your little heavy cylinder made out of tungsten tungsten
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
Thanks to our three sponsors this week, Casper, Betterment, and Squarespace.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Casey:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
John didn't do any research.
Casey:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
They didn't mean to.
Marco:
Accidental.
Accidental.
Casey:
what is going on my mouse every great once in a while this happens my uh beloved magic mouse is like lagging to hell and it just wants to be harpooned yep it happens to me too you see me tweeting about that a few days ago oh yeah you're right i never i don't think i ever i think i told you it never happens to me in fact but i lied i'm a darn dirty liar that that just happened to me and it's not the first time it's happened
Marco:
It appears to happen to everybody who has any Apple Bluetooth pointing device.
Marco:
It happens to the trackpads and the mice.
Marco:
It happens to the old mice that use AA batteries and the new one that have the rechargeable harpoon thing.
Marco:
It happens whether you're at a high battery level or a low battery level.
Marco:
There seems to be very little correlation to any of these factors.
Marco:
It just seems to happen to all of Apple's Bluetooth devices.
Marco:
So it's probably an issue with either all Bluetooth devices or at least Apple's Bluetooth devices.
John:
Doesn't happen to my wired keyboard or my wired Logitech mouse from 1992.
John:
Oh, you're so old.
John:
Never.
John:
Doesn't stutter.
Marco:
Doesn't need to be recharged.
Marco:
Now, the Mac Pro that you have, I'm pretty sure Bluetooth was optional.
Marco:
Do you have Bluetooth on that?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Let's go find out.
John:
I think it was like a $60 option.
John:
Turn Bluetooth on.
John:
There is a button that says that.
John:
I think I can click it.
John:
It is currently off.
John:
So I'm going to assume I have it.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
That probably means you have it.
John:
I did not get the Wi-Fi option on this, by the way.
John:
Maybe that's what I'm thinking of.
John:
So my Mac does not have Wi-Fi.
Marco:
Maybe on the... I wonder if the 2006 Mac Pro, maybe Bluetooth was optional on that one.
John:
And maybe it was only Wi-Fi on yours.
John:
It might have been optional on mine.
John:
I might have checked the Bluetooth boxes and I'm like, maybe I'll get Bluetooth peripherals.
John:
Here I am eight years later.
John:
Still no Bluetooth peripherals.
Okay.
Casey:
What else is there to talk about?
Marco:
You can talk more about the Mac Pro if you want.
Casey:
Hard pass, and I gotta go.
Casey:
I mean, Tim Cook said nothing again.
John:
Yeah, that's why it's not even on the topic list.
John:
Because there's nothing to discuss, because there was nothing said.
John:
Well, I'll give my two cents that I already gave in Slack to put this one to bed.
John:
It's...
John:
He was asked in the shareholders meeting about like, you know, pro hardware and all the stuff we always whine about.
John:
And he gave the same kind of noncommittal like, oh, you know, we're we have things coming for pros and we do care about them despite all our actions to the contrary.
John:
But he didn't say I'm being sarcastic now.
John:
But anyway, he gave the same kind of answer he did last time that we talked about that led us to believe that an iMac pro is coming or something.
John:
And there was some discussion about like, all right, what's so bad about this?
John:
Like in the hierarchy of things that Tim Cook could have said or done in relation to that, where does this fall?
John:
And I feel like saying nothing would have still been worse.
John:
I feel like at this point, when there's a problem that a bunch of people see, like some people are cranky about Pro Mac hardware, right?
John:
Saying nothing is the worst choice because that's just like, it just makes people angry.
John:
It's like you're ignoring them or you're burying their head in the sand.
John:
People want some kind of answer.
John:
Saying something boring and noncommittal and vague that's basically like Apple saying, we think we have something for you, is better than nothing.
John:
Because at the very least, it says, all right, well, whether it's true or not, Apple thinks they have something that we're going to like in the future.
John:
And, you know, that's kind of vague, but...
John:
Like it strings us along.
John:
And then I feel like the best thing they could have done is give a strong definitive answer that acknowledges the acknowledges the issue and then comes to a conclusion.
John:
And so that could be we hear your concerns or we've decided we don't want to be in the hardware business anymore.
John:
perfectly valid it puts an end to all of our whining right because like well what's done is done you know we can yell them about it but at least we have a definitive answer or they could say we've heard your concerns we realize we dropped the ball but we are going to rededicate ourselves to pro hardware they didn't say that either so we get the we get the middle one the vague answer that tells us nothing that is still better than nothing but is still much worse than apple definitively coming down in one direction or another they don't have to announce new products they don't have to promise anything they could have just said
John:
you know they have to acknowledge the situation say we realize we've dropped the ball and either but we've decided to get out of this market or we are going to rededicate ourselves and they didn't do either one of those things so it's business as usual i think you and i just have different definitions of of what nothing means you think he didn't say nothing i think he did say nothing
John:
but well no because he i by not by not saying like we're sorry you feel like you remember the final cut pro 10 thing what they basically said with that was like we're sorry you feel this way but final cut pro 10 is the future get used to it right so instead of saying we're sorry you're sad about the pro hardware but we're not doing that anymore get used to it like but like what they what he was trying to say what he tries to say every time in this vague thing is like i know you're sad now
John:
And I will not acknowledge that your sadness is founded in anything.
John:
I know you're sad now, but we have some really great stuff coming in the future.
John:
And he always says that.
John:
It's a Tim Cook-ism to say, boy, we have a great roadmap.
John:
We have great things coming.
John:
And he says it frequently in earnings calls.
John:
For years and years, he's been saying in earnings calls.
John:
And if you look back on those earning calls and you try to say...
John:
Three years ago when he said that on the earnings call, what was he talking about?
John:
What product was he?
John:
He's always so jazzed.
John:
He's like, we have some great things coming.
John:
We have amazing product line.
John:
I think you're going to be super duper impressed when we get all excited.
John:
And then if you go forward three years, you're like, when he said that, what was he even talking about?
John:
Like, was he talking about the watch or was that was that like the new retina iPad mini?
John:
You can't even tell what he was talking about even after the fact.
John:
But he always says, like, hang in there, guys, just because you don't know that we're going to do a thing.
John:
Trust me, in the future, we're going to do a thing and you're going to like it.
John:
And I think that is materially different than literally saying nothing.
John:
like, you know, not answering the question.
John:
And it is also different than actually definitively saying they are or aren't going to rededicate themselves to the pro market.
Marco:
But see, it's because you can't associate what he says with anything even after the fact, it basically means nothing because you can apply his words to whatever you want them to be.
Marco:
And he knows that.
Marco:
Like, it's a noncommittal statement.
Marco:
So if he says we have great things down the pipe,
Marco:
and it isn't at all what you want, then when later comes, and the great things they release aren't what you want, it doesn't invalidate what he said.
Marco:
Then there's just a new excuse of, well, they made something new, it just wasn't for you.
John:
Yeah, right.
John:
But what if they never made another thing that they even pretended was for pro people?
John:
They never made an iMac Pro.
John:
Because then we could call him on it.
John:
But by him saying this, it's clear that Apple thinks they have something that pro people will like.
John:
They may be wrong.
John:
No, it's not.
John:
They've been wrong in the past.
John:
But at the very least, I think what this says is...
John:
It's them saying, we are going to release a new Mac that we think will appeal to pros.
John:
And all of us can say cynically, well, you're probably wrong.
John:
It probably won't appeal to pros because your track record here is crap.
John:
But at least you think you have something that will appeal to pros, which is more substantive than just saying, vague, we have something coming.
John:
I mean, it'll eventually build up to the point like it did right before the trash can, where at that point they were like...
John:
stay tuned for exciting new pro hardware which we all thought was going to be a new mac pro and totally was a new mac pro and so we'll see if that it builds to that but i feel like what tim cook is saying on on this hardware front here is like we're going to introduce a product that we think people who like the old mac pro will like and we probably won't because it'll be an iMac pro but whatever that's what i think is coming
Marco:
That isn't even what he said.
Marco:
What he said was things for pro markets and especially creative pros.
Marco:
You know what Apple pitches for creative pros?
Marco:
The iPad Pro.
Marco:
And the MacBook Pro.
Marco:
Everything Tim Cook said could be just in reference to the updated iMacs and iPad Pros they're going to launch in two weeks or whatever it is.
Marco:
That's the thing.
Marco:
It doesn't mean anything.
John:
I don't buy that, though.
John:
All right, so if in a year there has been no motion on anything that Apple is even pitching as a Mac made for pros, I think people will be angry and they'll come back at Tim Cook and say, you didn't deliver on those things.
John:
As opposed to as other, we have this great roadmaps.
John:
The problem is that we could say, well, they did release a lot of cool stuff and any of that stuff could have applied.
John:
We just can't tell what the hell he was talking about.
John:
But it's not as if they didn't deliver because every year Apple releases great new stuff somewhere.
John:
It's just never desktop Macs, right?
John:
i think that if if no if it really is just like the new ipads people will be like well that's not what we thought you were talking about at all and they'll be pissed about it and they'll come back even angrier with the same question whereas if apple releases an imac pro people like oh all right well i guess this is what he was talking about but surprise we're not happy because we wanted a better mac pro
Marco:
My concern with Cook's remarks in this area and the resulting products that come out of Apple is that – especially because he specifically called out – he said some of the lines of like, you know, pro users, especially creative pros.
Marco:
And they keep referring to, oh, creative pros, creative pros.
Marco:
It seems like Apple's image of what a creative pro is –
Marco:
is somebody drawing with a pencil on an iPad.
Marco:
And that's one type of creative pro, but that's a very, very small percentage of them.
Marco:
And creative pros aren't all pros.
Marco:
And Apple used to really own the market for so many kinds of pros.
Marco:
They've really owned those markets so well for such a long time.
Marco:
And it seems like all the market share that they've shaved off in recent years by just neglect or cutting off support or cutting off product lines or features or whatever else are almost all the pro users that had more complex or higher-end needs than somebody drawing on an iPad.
Marco:
And it doesn't seem like it seems like Tim Cook's Apple just either doesn't care about the other kinds of pro work and needs that are out there or they fundamentally don't understand it.
Marco:
Both of which are scary possibilities to me.
Marco:
But I think it's very clear that at least one of those is true.
John:
Did you see that MKBHD video where he was complaining about his Mac Pro?
John:
uh yeah i did he was basically saying like he's got he's got like the old 12 core trash can mac pro the old slash current current yes the one you can still buy for like eight thousand dollars and he uses final cut pro to edit his videos and what he was basically saying is like people like why are you even using that crappy old mac why don't you get like a fancy pc and he was like well i like final cut for video editing i'm sure it's what he's used to and he's like i have plugins for final cut that aren't available elsewhere and so on and so forth um i think that's a good canary the whole final cut pro thing so like aperture is gone right
John:
final cut pro is kind of the last bastion of pro-ness like the video market right and it is currently being woefully underserved by their the current trash can and anything else i feel like i mean maybe maybe i'm wrong maybe people are editing entire movies on their macbook ones and i'm just silly for thinking this but whatever mkbhd who does video for a living
John:
wants his mac pro maybe it's just because he's like a computer gearhead like we are um no no he actually needs it yeah but and he says that even despite that 12 core being old and creaky that he does still get better performance than he would with adobe premiere which is not an apples to apples comparison obviously that he does on adobe premiere on a fancy pc but you know bottom line is he just likes final cut right if they drop final cut if they stop making it in the same way they stop making aperture
John:
that will be an extremely strong signal because you're right marco like what's left is it just people making artisanal sketches on virtual napkins is that it is that the only creative pro because even like real creative pros need to use freaking adobe illustrator like let's get real here photoshop and illustrator is what they need to use to do their jobs and you know maybe like a page layout type of thing
John:
creative professionals like when they say that i would think of things like aperture oops that's not there anymore or lightroom because that's a mac application too right or things like final cut and premiere and so many markets like again we complain about so we get a lot of emails as a self-selecting people saying i work in this industry and i've watched my entire industry dump max as soon as they can and switch all to pcs because they realize apple doesn't care about them
John:
Apple makes Final Cut.
John:
It's their own program.
John:
Presumably there is a team working on it, right?
John:
And they put a lot of effort into the Final Cut Pro 10 being a big leap over the other one and endured all of the problems with that program.
John:
And, you know, like they, as a company, seem dedicated to resourcing and believing in that product in the same way they used it for Aperture, I suppose.
John:
If they drop that, then it will really be like, all right, Tim, stop talking about professionals of any kind, creative or otherwise, because what the hell?
Casey:
By the way, on this MKBHD video, you know what he says right before new Mac Pro?
John:
Oh, he's talking about USB-C, yeah.
Casey:
Yep.
John:
Well, it's in the news.
John:
It's in the news.
John:
He's reading the same stories we are.
Casey:
Yep, he wants USB-C everywhere.
Casey:
He's so much cooler than us.
Casey:
That's a pretty low bar.
John:
I don't know.
John:
He's pretty nerdy.
John:
You'd think he's cooler because he's young and handsome, but he's pretty nerdy.
John:
No, I'm pretty sure he's cooler than us.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm pretty sure he's considerably cooler.
John:
All right, all right.
John:
So it's a low bar.
John:
Is he cooler than Casey?
John:
Let's see.
John:
Well, I don't know.
Casey:
That's also a low bar.
Casey:
That's very flattering and complimentary of you.
John:
So I'm trying to put the coolest among us to try to see if we can reach up to that lever.
Marco:
I mean, the coolest among us is definitely Casey.
Marco:
And sorry, Casey, I think he's cooler than you.
John:
So I think, therefore, that solves the question right there, right?
John:
Yeah, I guess.
John:
I guess you're right.
John:
Maybe if we combine all three of our coolnesses.
John:
Then maybe we can... Maybe.
John:
Maybe all of us combined, like Voltron.
John:
It would still be... I think it would still be a fight.
John:
Anyway, coolness counts for nothing in this industry.
John:
Witness Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Andy Hertzfeld, Bill Atkinson.
John:
Not cool people.
John:
They're cool in their own way.
John:
Bill Gates is cool in no ways, but... He is the antimatter of cool.
John:
Curing malaria.
John:
No, it's not curing it, but you know what I mean.