The X Or The X
Casey:
And that's my fault again.
Casey:
Well, it's a combination of John's.
Casey:
Actually, no, that one's more.
John:
No, it's not.
John:
No, it's your fault again.
John:
No, because.
John:
Yes.
Marco:
Probably the most egregious error I made in the last episode was reporting that the GlobalSan iSCSI initiator was free.
Marco:
It used to be free, but apparently a couple of years ago it stopped being free.
Marco:
Now it's $90.
Marco:
And so when looking at iSCSI initiators, you have GlobalSan at $90 and Addo at $195, so $200 basically.
Marco:
I still continue to get positive recommendations for the Addo one and mixed to negative recommendations for the GlobalSan one.
Marco:
A few people sent in a few kernel panic stories about GlobalSan.
Marco:
So given that the price difference is now much smaller than it was before, if I was going iSCSI, I would go with the Addo one, but I still haven't.
Marco:
One also interesting iSCSI thing that a few people have pointed out to me, which I didn't realize, but it makes perfect sense,
Marco:
Because iSCSI is basically just running the direct drive access protocol over the wire, you can actually... Let's say Mac OS Mavericks or whatever comes after Mavericks comes out, and your favorite iSCSI initiator stops working and just won't work again.
Marco:
You can take the drive out of the NAS...
Marco:
And stick it either directly into the computer or into one of those drive dock things.
Marco:
And because iSCSI is just accessing the drive directly, if you plug it in directly to your computer, it works directly because it's formatted however you formatted it.
Marco:
Because it's just like a block level protocol.
Marco:
So, um, I think that's pretty cool.
Marco:
So that's, that's like an interesting, uh, kind of insurance policy again, because we, you know, we were discussing last episode how I was worried and John, you know, you were worried about, you know, first of all, even needing to run a third party kernel thing to, to have this protocol enabled.
Marco:
But also I was worried about, you know, what happens when a new version of the OS comes out and we know what, if your iSCSI initiator breaks, how long does it take them to fix it?
Marco:
Do they ever fix it?
Marco:
Does this cause problems?
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
So it's interesting.
Marco:
It's nice to have the option that, you know, we could always just like, because I have one of those drive dock things.
Marco:
I'm sure every nerd does by now.
Marco:
And if not, you can get one from Amazon for like 30 bucks or something.
Marco:
But it's nice to have that kind of fallback option.
Marco:
Also, one more little bit of follow-up on the NAS topic.
Marco:
One person recommended today, I wasn't familiar with this because I haven't been paying a lot of attention to PC hardware in probably about five years, but there's an HP microserver.
Marco:
And, of course, HP makes really, really awesome servers and networking products.
Marco:
And their website is completely abysmal and makes all of them impossible to find and impossible to find information about.
Marco:
But if you just search Amazon for HP microserver, you can see there's a few of these things.
Marco:
And it's basically – it looks like a four-bay NAS.
Marco:
And it's like a little cube, and it's like $300 with some kind of low-power CPU, a little bit of RAM, and four hard drive bays, and even an optical bay.
Marco:
So if you're looking into the build-your-own area of NAS's, the HP microserver might be worth looking at.
Marco:
That's all I really know about it, but it looked really interesting, and I would certainly want to play with that if I had a good reason to.
John:
And that's it.
John:
What do you guys have?
John:
On the iSCSI thing with pulling the drives out of your NAS and connecting them directly with an enclosure or in the old Mac Pro days, putting them inside your Mac Pro, you've got to make sure you don't use any RAID setup, obviously, on your NAS if you do that.
John:
So if you just have a bunch of drives in there and you want to
John:
be able to flexibly take out drives and stick in new ones of different sizes and have it, you know, resilver and everything.
John:
Like if you're doing that, you lose the advantage of being able to pull that drive out and attach it, you know, not through the NAS to your thing, even if you're using iSCSI.
John:
So that's one thing to be aware of.
Marco:
I still don't have enough of a reason to try iSCSI and spend that $200 and get the thing and try it.
Marco:
But it's nice to know that it's an option, like in case the time machine thing breaks with 10.9.
Marco:
Because one of the things is 10.9 apparently changes.
Marco:
It either removes AppleTalk file or AFP or it disables it by default.
John:
One of those people are saying... It doesn't remove it.
Marco:
Okay, well, anyway, it runs network access over SMB2, which I should know more about, so I'll do some research on that.
Marco:
And so people are speculating that might break or change the Time Machine thing, so we'll see.
John:
People keep asking me that as well, and I actually don't know the answer, so I can't break an NDA and tell you, but my guess is that Time Machine is still AFP only, because they did a bunch of...
John:
Yeah.
John:
And if you happen to have a third party NAS device that supported the old terrible way and that company didn't upgrade it to support the new way, then you were sad because even though your device technically supported Time Machine, it used the old terrible way.
John:
And I think both the old terrible way and the new way are both built on top of AFP.
John:
So my guess is Time Machine over the network to a time capsule continues to use AFP even in Mavericks.
John:
And I say that having not tested it at all.
John:
Good to know.
John:
And I don't even know if I'll be able to test that.
John:
I think actually ours is going to do another article about SMB2 and AFP.
John:
And that's going to be my excuse for not delving into it.
John:
Because I just don't have that stuff available.
John:
Like, I don't have a time capsule of any Stripe available.
John:
Or NAS for that matter.
John:
So there's not much I can do there.
Marco:
I also thought it was interesting.
Marco:
So last episode, we talked very briefly about the new Apple 802.11ac Airport Extreme and time capsules.
Marco:
And you mentioned, of course, that it has a fan, which was news to me.
Marco:
And I knew that there was an empty drive bay inside of it, but I didn't actually look at the teardown.
Marco:
It's just something that I believe, actually, John, you probably told me at WBC at some point while we were walking somewhere.
Marco:
So I looked at the iFixit teardown of the new Airport Extreme base station, and
Marco:
It is pretty comical because it is just like a giant three and a half inch hard drive bay in the middle of this thing that does not need one otherwise if it isn't a time capsule.
John:
Wait, it's 3.5 inch drive bay?
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
Are you sure?
Marco:
I can't be that.
Marco:
Positive.
Positive.
Marco:
is put the ifixit url in the chat i gotta find it things has to be gigantic is it gonna be like well so what they do is they they mount it diagonally so basically it's standing up on end but it's oriented diagonally in the case so it's as if you drew a rectangle a tall rectangle around like a diagonal around a 45 degree diagonal hard drive that is the shape of this thing
Marco:
It's really weird.
Marco:
And so I think it's interesting, first of all, that they're basically making the same unit, whether it's a time capsule or not, and then just not having a hard drive or even the little connector cable that goes into it.
Marco:
Here, Casey, you can see.
Marco:
And what's also interesting is how much it looks like the new Mac Pro construction inside.
Marco:
And then the third interesting thing, which kind of was a disappointment to me,
Marco:
I thought that the point of that tall shape was to make larger antennas inside, to have tall antennas that are spaced out a bit for better reception, better range, different frequencies, whatever the case may be.
Marco:
And from what I could tell from this teardown, it looks like all of the antennas are still in the top plate.
Marco:
So there appears to be no reason for it to be tall other than to fit the hard drive and have a smaller footprint and maybe have more room for the cooling and everything like that.
Marco:
But there appears to be no good radio or reception reason for it to be tall, with the exception that maybe that it gets it a little bit off of whatever surface you have the thing on.
Marco:
It gets the antennas a little bit higher than that surface to get a little bit less interference.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
That can't matter that much, but I don't know.
Marco:
So I was a little disappointed about that.
Marco:
Anyway, this might be the most boring follow-up we've ever done.
Casey:
I'm not saying something.
John:
I think this router is exciting because it's terrible.
John:
And it's exciting to have time.
John:
I don't want to buy this thing.
John:
I'm going to end up buying one of those Asus things with two dorky-looking antennas.
John:
I want all the features this thing provides.
John:
I want to be able to just plug in a printer and have the USB printer sharing thing because I still have my cheap printers.
John:
I like the management software that Apple brought.
John:
Well, the new version is kind of crappy, but it's not, you know, it's everything is fine except the fact that it's gigantic and has a fan and has a place for hard drive that I'm not going to use.
John:
And they even took away one network port versus the one I have now.
John:
So I don't think I could buy this thing.
John:
You have one with four?
John:
yeah now the one i have has like the one you know the wan port right and right and then i think it has four i could go run over and check now because as long as they've been the previous shape of this like the white mac mini shape rectangle um they've always had three as far as i know mine mine does i uh yeah all right let me let me go check because i need to give marco something to do in editing right back
John:
I counted the ports.
John:
Yeah, what do you got?
John:
That's the same as the new one.
John:
I was fooled by, I guess, the USB cable sticking out of the back or whatever.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, it's annoying because that's kind of a weird number to have.
Marco:
If you don't have any wireless devices or any wired devices, then you're probably not going to use any ports.
Marco:
And if you have wired devices, you probably need more than that.
John:
I have a bunch of switches connected to the thing, so it's quite a rat's nest as it extends out from the...
Casey:
I'm a little disappointed that you don't have all your cables like zip-tied, color-coded, et cetera, et cetera.
John:
I would if I could, but it's just not possible.
Casey:
My dad and I rewired my home theater, which I say that with enormous air quotes.
Casey:
We rewired the home theater in order to change from component or – component, not composite.
Casey:
I probably got that wrong.
Casey:
Whatever.
John:
You got it right.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
We changed from those to HDMI cables, and even I decided to color code the HDMI cables.
Casey:
So the ones going from the source into the wall, the colors match the ones coming out of the wall into the TV because I'm that nerdy.
Marco:
That is impressive.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
I thought you'd like that.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So what are we talking about tonight?
Marco:
Well, it might be worth talking about the developer portal being down for so long, because at the time we record this, it still is.
Marco:
But because this is coming out to most of the public in about a week, I don't know how useful that discussion would be.
Marco:
Assuming it's probably going to be up in a week, I hope.
Marco:
A lot of the iOS development world is probably grinding to a halt right now during a major work period of getting ready for iOS 7.
Marco:
So it's kind of a big deal.
John:
But they're still selling software.
John:
There are degrees of magnitude.
John:
For example, the iTunes store where nobody can buy anything that iTunes sells going down would be more of a fire drill than this, which is why I think Apple would be more willing to say, look, it's not like the iTunes store went down, guys.
John:
I know developers are going to be annoyed, but let's take the extra six hours or whatever to make sure that we have our stuff together.
John:
Because as terrible as it is for the developer portal to be down, it's not the type of thing where there's a big giant clock on the wall with a dollar sign in front of it and numbers ticking up for every second the thing is down.
John:
Two jobs ago, I was at a company like that.
John:
It's like, look, every minute our server is down, we lose this amount of money and it's a big number.
John:
So it makes a difference.
John:
Whereas, yeah, now it's a bummer that people can't put stuff up in the store and stuff like that, but customers can still buy apps.
John:
So the engine of revenue running into Apple is still running, and I think they can afford downtime here and just, like, apologize profusely and be nice and extend people's, you know, and do all that stuff.
John:
Versus, like, what we would see from Apple, what kind of motion and communication we would see from Apple if the iTunes store itself was down.
John:
That would be like New York Times headline calamitous.
Right.
Yeah.
Marco:
I think this might be a result... You kind of get the feeling from Apple that you see an event like WBDC and you think, wow, they really love developers and we're really a high priority for them.
Marco:
But then you see what they do for the rest of the year for developers and it's kind of a mixed bag.
Marco:
Sometimes it looks like they really care and are putting a lot of resources into it and sometimes it looks like...
Marco:
They couldn't possibly care less.
Marco:
And we get a lot of everything in between.
Marco:
The entire developer program, the VP who's responsible for that is Phil Schiller.
Marco:
And Phil Schiller does a lot.
Marco:
And it's kind of hard for people like us on the outside to really get that great of an idea of what exactly Phil Schiller does and how much he does.
Marco:
But from what we can tell, it seems like he does quite a bit.
Marco:
And so things like whether developers can do X, Y, or Z or are getting the kind of attention they want, he might not have time to care about that throughout the entire rest of the year that's not WWDC week.
John:
I don't think it's his skill set either.
John:
He's not a tech guy.
John:
Not that he has to be there and there fixing the servers, but you would expect that an organization responsible for some really important piece of server-side software that's important to the business...
John:
would have come from the technical side and wouldn't be the guy – wouldn't be a marketing guy, right?
Marco:
Well, but I mean what he does, you know, marketing I think is in giant quotes there because he does so many other things.
Marco:
Like he's – and he's involved with a lot of different things in the company it seems.
John:
Yeah, product design, marketing, like much more so than a regular marketing.
John:
But not – he's not a Craig Federighi or Bertrand Soleil or anything like – he didn't come up with that, you know, that area.
John:
Or even like – I mean Eddie Q is technically in charge of the iTunes store.
John:
So maybe I don't know.
John:
Did Eddie come from engineering background?
John:
But I feel like that team like knows that they're responsible for online services, whereas developer relations probably within Apple is seen as a wing of the company that relates to people versus we run web services.
John:
But developer relations does run web services and they're important web services.
John:
So it's kind of a schizophrenic thing where it's like, oh, we're relating to people.
John:
We need to make the people happy.
John:
It's like a customer relationship management type role, but this is other part of it that's web services and it's really important.
John:
So you have to have part of the team that's in that area versus people who run iTunes is like, look, we're running a gigantic web store and there may be some sort of relating to customers involved in that, but really we're an online services thing.
John:
So Eddie Q is like, I don't know if he's in charge of that whole thing.
John:
We should have the org chart up, but I think he's the iTunes head honcho in charge of all that, isn't he?
Casey:
That's what I thought.
Marco:
I think it's worth considering whether... I hate to use the phrasing, it's time for Apple to do a lot of work.
Marco:
That's like a crappy headline thing.
Marco:
But do you think Apple needs somebody at that SVP level representing the developers and the app store almost exclusively or primarily?
Marco:
That's what they do.
Marco:
Because Phil Schiller, I think, probably has too much on his plate to be that guy.
Marco:
Do you think...
Marco:
I mean, I guess you could argue they're doing pretty well.
Marco:
It's hard to argue that Apple should really change anything about what they do because they're doing pretty well with the way they have things set up now.
Marco:
But you look at things like the App Store.
Marco:
And the App Store has always looked like it has way fewer people working for it than it really does.
Marco:
And there are certain things about it that have lasted way longer than they should or have never changed.
Marco:
For instance, the category list, the app category list is really weird.
Marco:
and most of those categories were there when the App Store launched.
Marco:
Most of the App Store's mechanics, most of the layout, most of the things we think of we know as the App Store today, almost all of that was there on day one, what was it, five or six years ago?
Marco:
However many years ago 2008 was.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
It seems like, and obviously you look at pages, and look at what Google has done to the Play Store in the same amount of time, or less time, actually, I think.
Marco:
And you can see, I mean, obviously they have a whole bunch of issues themselves, and it's certainly not perfect over there by any means.
Marco:
But they've added a lot of features that are really nice to have.
Marco:
Some that aren't, but a lot that are really nice to have.
Marco:
And Apple has done very little of that sort of thing.
Marco:
And there's things like developers are always posting blog posts, myself included, or always posting blog posts about, you know, if you just change this one little thing or add this one feature, it would make such a big difference.
Marco:
And those kind of changes almost never happen in the App Store.
Casey:
I think we might want to talk about something that's awesome, but you talking about bloggers that are saying, if only this one thing happened...
Casey:
It would be so much better.
Casey:
It made me think of Underscore's article about upgrade pricing, which I think is worth talking about.
Marco:
Yes, definitely.
Marco:
So we will get to that in a minute.
Marco:
First, let me tell you about something we like.
Marco:
This is an app that you've probably heard of, but amazingly, as far as I know, the developer has not sold like 300 million copies of it.
Marco:
How many iOS devices are there?
Marco:
300 million?
Marco:
A lot.
Marco:
probably more than that now a lot as far as i know he hasn't sold 300 million copies yet so our job is not done yet this app is called drafts and it's by agile tortoise uh and drafts it's it's kind of hard to describe what it is in a way that makes you realize how good it is but i'll give it a shot okay so
Marco:
So Drafts is a quick capture app that launches, and it launches into a text field, and it's just ready for you to start typing.
Marco:
It launches really, really quickly, and the whole point of it is quick, quick capture.
Marco:
So whenever you are thinking about anything with text, you launch Drafts, and you are immediately presented with a text field on a keyboard, no matter what else you were doing.
Marco:
So it's where text starts on your iPhone or iPad.
Marco:
It can capture notes, ideas, status updates, and then it has all these sharing and communication options built in.
Marco:
So you capture the text first.
Marco:
You type it in as soon as you're ready to go.
Marco:
Then as soon as you're done typing in whatever you had in mind before you forget, then you have almost a limitless array of options.
Marco:
So let me see here.
Marco:
He gave me a list here.
Marco:
You can send it as an email or text message.
Marco:
You can create a calendar event.
Marco:
You can post to Twitter, Facebook, app.net.
Marco:
You can save it to Dropbox, Evernote.
Marco:
You can forward the text of your draft to a whole bunch of apps, including OmniFocus, Things, Fantastical, TweetBot.
Marco:
This is one of those apps that...
Marco:
Oh, and by the way, it syncs.
Marco:
It uses lightning-fast sync to go through between your iPhone and iPad or multiple iPhones, if you're one of those people.
Marco:
Day and night, maybe.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
There are some of those people.
Marco:
But they're misunderstood.
Marco:
So, drafts for iPhone is $3.
Marco:
Drafts for iPhone is $4.
Marco:
They're both in the App Store.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
This is one of those things where if you've ever talked about or thought about your workflow, this is the kind of app that you need.
Marco:
Because anybody who thinks about workflows, they love this app.
Marco:
Because it is like... One of the things developers suggest is try it for a week in your dock.
Marco:
You know, the little four icons at the bottom.
Marco:
Try it for a week there.
Marco:
You'll see because...
Marco:
If you start using this as your starting point of, I have some kind of text to enter and then do something with later, or right now even just for faster access, this is really what this app is good at.
Marco:
The last time Merlin did a sponsor read for drafts, I think it took him like 15 minutes.
Marco:
I'm going to try not to do that, but it's really hard to describe just how cool this app is and how much time it can really save you.
Marco:
If you have one of those ideas that you need to quickly capture...
Marco:
the best thing you can do is just get it out as soon as possible because then you might forget or if you launch some other app, maybe some other thing pops up and it's some kind of problem you have to deal with or some kind of distraction like, oh, look, a list of tweets that I want to read instead of tweeting this thing.
Marco:
There's so many...
Marco:
There's so many possible distractions and slowdowns when you go directly into the endgame of what you were typing for.
Marco:
With drafts, you just launch the app and you can start typing.
Marco:
It's that simple.
Marco:
So anyway, drafts for iPhone again, $3.
Marco:
Drafts for iPad, $4.
Marco:
They have lightning-fast sync between them.
Marco:
Go to Agile Tortoise.
Marco:
Is it Agile or Agile?
Casey:
Agile, as far as I'm concerned.
Marco:
You are the expert on this, Casey, because you are in the consulting business.
Marco:
So it is agiletortoise.com slash drafts.
Marco:
Go there to learn more and get the app or just search for drafts on the app store because it is actually so popular you will find it.
Marco:
It is so good.
Marco:
So agiletortoise.com slash drafts.
Marco:
And thanks a lot to Agile Tortoise.
Marco:
for sponsoring our show.
Marco:
And a little tidbit here, the creator of Agile Tortoise pretty much invented xCallbackURL.
Marco:
He emailed me for a while ago.
Marco:
He also makes an app called Terminology.
Marco:
It's an awesome dictionary and kind of word exploration app.
Marco:
And forever ago, we were trying to figure out a way that Instapaper could look up words and terminology and then have it bounce back to Instapaper after your lookup was done.
Marco:
And so he and I kind of coordinated on this standard.
Marco:
And then I'm like, look, I don't really have time to do anything more with this standard in public, but I would love it if...
Marco:
Somebody took this and ran with it.
Marco:
And so he took it and ran with it and made xCallbackURL really what it is today and made it, you know, made a site, made a directory, evangelized people using it.
Marco:
And then now it's this huge thing.
Marco:
You know, pretty much every app on Federico Vatici's iPhone uses xCallbackURL in some way.
Marco:
It's a great way for apps to work together.
Marco:
And since iOS still doesn't, even with 7, still doesn't give us a whole lot of good inter-app sharing options or data sharing options between apps or anything like that.
Marco:
It's a really great kind of stand-in here.
Marco:
until we get anything cool like that.
Marco:
And even afterwards, it's still going to be useful.
Marco:
So anyway, thanks a lot to Jurassic for sponsoring.
Marco:
And Greg, the developer, is a really cool guy.
Marco:
And if you like xCallbackURL and you haven't bought all of his apps, you should.
Marco:
And that's it.
Marco:
All right, so...
Casey:
Moving along.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So thanks to them for sponsoring.
Casey:
The thing I wanted to talk about in this cued in my mind after you said bloggers talking about what Apple should do is underscore David Smith's post from a couple days ago, and I'll put it in the chat, about Logic.
Casey:
Is it Logic X or Logic 10?
Casey:
I feel ignorant.
Casey:
Logic Pro something.
Casey:
Is John gone?
Casey:
Did we lose John?
Casey:
I'm here.
Casey:
I'm here.
Marco:
He's trying to figure out the X or the 10.
Casey:
For Logic Pro.
John:
Is there a question?
John:
Are you being serious?
Casey:
Yes, I'm assuming it's 10, but I don't know.
Casey:
I don't do this stuff.
Casey:
That's what Marco does.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
Because you do all the editing.
John:
Maybe.
John:
Now you're making me doubt myself.
John:
Of course it's 10.
John:
Why would it be?
John:
I think I'm still going to have two products.
John:
One of them's got an X at the end, but it's the Roman numeral 10, and the other one has an X at the end, and you say the X.
Casey:
Hey, who knows?
John:
That could be the case.
John:
Maybe I'm crazy.
John:
Now I feel like I have to go back and watch that like Final Cut Pro 10, whatever it was, you know, that the intro video where they demoed it.
Casey:
God, I wish so hard that I was trolling you, but I'm really not sure.
John:
Ignorance is its own special kind of trolling case.
Casey:
Oh, God, we're going to cut all this out, right?
Casey:
So anyway, so David Smith said, you know, we as a collective app developers, we're looking at Apple to have an instance to need upgrade pricing.
Casey:
to see what they would do with regard to upgrade pricing.
Casey:
Because everyone sort of seemed, well, let me quote him.
Casey:
It seems like most discussions of this ultimately ended up with a conclusion that Apple would only add upgrade pricing if they themselves needed slash wanted it for their own apps.
Casey:
This morning's launch of Logic Pro blank seems to settle the matter on that front.
Casey:
So Logic Pro whatever was a pretty major upgrade and they ended up saying, tough noogies, you're going to have to pay the whole $200 all over again.
Casey:
And that I think is a pretty, I think, uh, underscores, right.
Casey:
That's a pretty obvious cue that we're not going to get upgrade pricing.
Casey:
And I don't think that's terribly surprising, but I do think it's a little bit of a bummer.
Casey:
And that's coming from someone who doesn't have a profitable app in the app store.
Casey:
It just seems to me like it would be very useful in certain circumstances to offer either, I guess, just a discounted upgrade for paid users.
Casey:
So if you came out with another Instapaper, oh, you sold Instapaper.
Casey:
If you came out with another, no, you sold the magazine.
Casey:
If you came out with another bug shot that was a massive rewrite, then maybe you could charge, I guess you can't because it's 99 cents.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know what you would use this for.
Marco:
I was actually thinking about doubling the price to $2.
John:
You know, like, what is it that made Underscore decide that this was the turning point?
John:
Was it because the price didn't change from the previous version?
John:
Is that because, like, you know, Apple's done the same deal many times before.
John:
Like, they would come up with a new version of Apple.
John:
way back when they were like, Oh, the app store is out now and Apple selling its software through the Mac app store.
John:
What are they going to do?
John:
Well, surely when, as soon as Apple needs a new version of program X, then that's when we'll go upgrade pricing because then Apple will be stuck behind.
John:
And every time that has come up, they've released a new version of the program.
John:
It has not been upgrade priced.
John:
And, uh, you know, they just keep going down the road, but it used to be that the prices were lower than like, Oh, okay.
John:
Well they didn't offer upgrade pricing, but they lowered the price.
John:
So it's almost kind of like upgrade pricing and,
John:
They can afford to do that because they're Apple and have a whole jillion dollars of revenue.
John:
But now, I guess, Logic didn't decrease in price.
John:
And is that what cemented it?
John:
I don't know if there's another application that came out before.
Marco:
As far as I know, this is the first pro app from Apple that has had a major version released after the App Store.
John:
Final Cut, right?
Marco:
Was the original Final Cut ever in the App Store?
John:
The whole deal was like people who own the existing version of Final Cut, when the App Store version comes out, how are you going to give them upgrade pricing?
John:
And the answer is you're not.
John:
Apple didn't.
John:
There was no upgrade pricing.
Marco:
If you look at Aperture, for instance, Aperture, as far as I know, has not had a major version since the App Store.
Marco:
But when the App Store launched, Aperture was launched at $80, where before I believe it was $200.
Marco:
And so they launched the App Store and all the pro apps that went into the App Store all had...
Marco:
substantially reduced prices compared to what they were before.
Marco:
And I think with Logic Pro X slash 10, I think this might be the very first time that a major update has been, that Apple has had a major update to one of those Pro apps, besides just when they first added it to the store with that reduced price.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
So the theory is that, you know, if they were going to add upgrade pricing for themselves, they probably would have done it for this.
Marco:
Now, you know, David's post has a pretty big assumption that, like, you know, the assumption here is that maybe they just didn't do it in time for this, but they'll do it later, or they'll do it for some other app.
John:
I was going to say, speaking of the dev...
John:
I was just going to say that.
John:
The real underlying assumption is that the only thing stopping Apple from having upgrade pricing in the store is the willingness to do it.
John:
And what could actually be stopping them is the ability to do it.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
That's true.
John:
Not like it's, oh, it's impossible.
John:
The ability to do it in a timely manner, given the resources and priorities of the companies and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
John:
All of that.
John:
Perhaps the people, even all the way up the chain, the people who are on the teams with these pro apps are like, why won't you give us upgrade pricing?
John:
And they can't get the other part of the organization to give them the upgrade pricing.
John:
We don't know what's going on inside.
John:
All we know is that they haven't.
John:
But I think it's conceivable that...
John:
They, you know, can't in terms of like they can't they can't make the people who are responsible for these products wish they had upgrade pricing, but either can't convince the rest of the company that it's a good idea or can't get the resources into doing that with upgrade pricing.
John:
But as we're sitting here not knowing what's going on in that black hole that is Apple and coming up with these crazy theories, I've been thinking of reasons that.
John:
lack of upgrade pricing is actually good for consumers and Apple.
John:
And I've got one.
John:
Maybe you can think of a better one.
John:
The reason I thought of is that
John:
When you don't have upgrade pricing, you don't have the things that developers love, which is basically once someone gets on the train of my product, they are encouraged to stay on that train.
John:
Because like, well, I already paid all this money for the original version of Photoshop or whatever.
John:
I can get the next version of Photoshop for what looks to me compared to my original purchase price to be a bargain.
John:
Or I can buy an entirely different program that's presumably priced kind of like the original version of Photoshop was.
John:
And developers love that.
John:
That's how we get upgrade revenue because it's pricing psychology.
John:
People want to pay a little bit of money because they never want to start over again.
John:
They just want to stay on that train.
John:
But that's bad for consumers and Apple because it's like a lockout factor for new competitors.
John:
Apple and consumers would prefer it if...
John:
You weren't locked in.
John:
Like, say, the reason Photoshop is so entrenched is that no one could, you know, comp against and defeat it.
John:
Well, if everyone is kind of on a level playing field where you have to sell your new version or whatever you think it's worth, and you can't give the people who bought the old version an advantage, each time it's time for you to buy a new version of your graphics program or whatever your program is, you can look at the entire field because no one has any pricing advantage based on your past purchases.
John:
And I think Apple likes that, and I think consumers like that because it makes the developers, you know...
John:
It doesn't lock you in as much.
John:
And it's not like real locking.
John:
You're not being locked in by file formats or any sort of dongle type stuff or whatever.
John:
You're being locked in by pricing psychology, by your own brain and the way you perceive loss and how you just want to keep buying the same one you did.
John:
So that's all I've got for why the lack of upgrade pricing is good for consumers in Apple.
John:
I don't know if you guys can think of anything else.
Marco:
Well, it makes a lot of things a lot easier for both sides.
Marco:
First of all, it makes it very clear... Well, I guess it doesn't apply to the App Store.
Marco:
I was going to say one of the weird things with upgrades is that once you have upgraded, then you can't really do anything with the previous version.
Marco:
You can't really sell it to anybody else.
Marco:
There's other weird things, but I guess you can't do that now in the App Store anyway.
Marco:
But it certainly makes things easier on Apple's side for...
Marco:
accounting and price calculations and everything else to not have like these weird dependencies like well it's this price if you bought this and if you didn't buy that it's this other price like you know there's one less thing there there's probably a whole bunch of avenues for abuse that this rules out
Marco:
Because keep in mind, anything with the App Store, like anything you can do in the App Store, people are finding ways to like scam it and, you know, beat the rankings in some weird way or scam Apple or scam us.
Marco:
You know, there's like everything in the App Store is going to be scammed.
Marco:
And so, you know, Apple's probably reluctant to do anything to open up any more ways for that to happen.
Marco:
You know, I'm sure there's some weird thing you could do with like gift codes and then weird pricing scenarios and somehow make your app jump in the rankings.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I'm sure there's weird stuff you could do.
Marco:
but I think the biggest reason why and this is probably a bigger topic you know before it gets too late let me do the second sponsor and then we'll get back to this our second sponsor this week
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John:
Let me just respond to the guy in the chat room that I was reading there.
John:
They, they said my example of Photoshop was a lousy one because all Photoshop's competitors are like 80 bucks.
John:
They're already way cheaper than Photoshop.
John:
Uh, that's true.
John:
Uh, and it is a, only a weaker example, I think, but I think it's still an actual example of the phenomenon I was describing because if you took away upgrade pricing, pretend Photoshop is in the Mac app storm, uh,
John:
We should actually discuss Photoshop's real... I think that's on our topic list.
John:
Photoshop's actual pricing with the whole Creative Cloud thing.
John:
But anyway... I think they should give the App Store a finger with that.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Pretend Photoshop was in the App Store.
John:
And no upgrade pricing is available.
John:
When the next version of Photoshop came out, Adobe would be forced to...
John:
price it at whatever like the full price of photoshop is right and then you'd have a situation where all right well those competitors are still 80 bucks right you know can buy a pixel meter or whatever for such a cheap price but when the previous owner of photoshop said okay i need a new version of photoshop because i want the new features or it doesn't run on my old computer anymore whatever whatever problem they have uh
John:
They would have a decision that used to be pay, you know, upgrade pricing at the new version of Photoshop.
John:
And now the decision is I have to pay for the full version of Photoshop again.
John:
Oh, well, I'm going to look at some competitors.
John:
And, you know, and they wouldn't be as motivated to look at competitors if there was upgrade pricing.
John:
And even though the competitors were always way cheaper, why were they ever paying?
John:
You know, the upgrade fee for Photoshop is more expensive than the competitors.
John:
but being forced to like, like you're starting over a clean slate.
John:
There's no upgrade price and there is nothing keeping you on Photoshop except for your love of the program makes you more likely to look at the competitors and maybe you still reject them and keep going with Photoshop.
John:
But I think that that lack of lock-in, that lack of pricing psychology, keeping you buying the same program and over and over again, kind of unthinkingly or not being able to get yourself to seriously consider the competitors because of the sunk cost fallacy or whatever, uh,
John:
It's not good for consumers or for Apple because Apple wants that dynamic marketplace where no one locks you in in the old style kind of Microsoft Office that you just have to keep buying because everybody uses the file format or whatever.
John:
You know, 5-4 event is actually a digression in that, whatever.
John:
Anyway, I think there is something to the lack of upgrades.
John:
I do not necessarily think this is why Apple doesn't have upgrades.
John:
I'm just trying to think of any possible upside that could possibly explain some reason that they have for this.
John:
This is what I wish someone would write a tell-all book about, like, the insides of Apple and not about, like...
John:
Steve Jobs or like Forrestal being fired, but like about the boring stuff, like what happened at Dev Center downtime and what was the deal with upgrade pricing?
John:
Like, no, five people would read this book, but I think it'd be really interesting.
Casey:
So in the vein of upgrade pricing, I was thinking while you guys were talking, well, firstly, I should real-time follow up myself.
Casey:
It is absolutely Logic Pro X. I don't know what brain flatulence I was going through at that moment, so apologies.
Casey:
But with regard to upgrade pricing, I was thinking if we look at the three groups of people that are involved with this, to my mind, users, Apple, and developers, how is not having upgrade pricing good for all three?
Casey:
Well, for users, it teaches them there's no free launch and sets some price expectations.
Casey:
Now, they may not like them, but it teaches us.
John:
That's good for users?
John:
Remember to drink your Ovaltine?
John:
Good for users?
John:
We're telling you it's good for you.
Casey:
Let me finish my thought.
Casey:
I see what you're saying, but let me finish my thoughts.
Casey:
So, so Apple, it's good for them because there's a lot less complexity involved.
Casey:
And that also arguably may be good for users as well, because they don't need to worry about whether or not they've bought the app before and whether or not they're going to apply to pricing, discounted pricing.
Casey:
And obviously you can make that obvious within the iTunes store, the app store or whatever, but,
Casey:
It eliminates a lot of complexity.
Casey:
But most importantly, I think it is good for developers in the sense that it's more money for the people who write great apps.
Casey:
I mean, look at Tweety as a great example of that.
Casey:
Everyone at the time that was running Tweety immediately insta-bought Tweety 2 because why would you not?
Marco:
Except, was it Alyssa Milano?
Marco:
There was some celebrity that didn't and complained about the $2.
Marco:
It's $2.99, man.
John:
It was like, yeah, that was like her whole budget for the year for iOS apps.
John:
So she just couldn't do it.
Casey:
I don't even know where to go from there.
Casey:
But obviously it keeps the system working.
Casey:
And so I guess it's an application of keeping the system working.
Casey:
In other words, by users continually paying developers for their very hard work, it keeps the app store running and it keeps interesting and worthwhile apps in the app store.
Casey:
And that is absolutely good for users.
Casey:
So maybe it's a hop away from being directly beneficial to users.
Casey:
But I can make a case, and perhaps someone at Apple has...
Casey:
that it is good for users not to have discounted pricing.
Casey:
Now, flip that around, and if I put on my user hat, yeah, it makes me grumble a little bit, but if you're willing to take one for the greater good, I'd rather give Chalk and Berry a few bucks every time there's a new Twitterific or whatever the case may be in order to keep the icon factor, you know, keep everyone writing these great apps.
Casey:
And I will give Marco another dollar when Bugshot 2 comes out, even though it's never going to happen.
Casey:
But still, in principle, I would.
Casey:
And so I would argue it's actually possibly better for everyone if there is an upgrade pricing.
Casey:
But with that said, I don't run my life and my business by way of the App Store.
Casey:
So I could be totally missing the boat here.
Casey:
But I think it's probably for the best.
John:
It's such torture that Apple doesn't say anything because we're forced into these –
John:
scenarios of trying to speculate.
John:
Whenever that comes about, the tendency that I see is people want to assign to Apple some high-minded ideal or overarching philosophy.
John:
Sometimes that's the case, but I think that when there is some kind of idea or motivation behind it, Apple articulates it eventually, sometimes repeatedly, sometimes strongly, sometimes weekly, but eventually you get their philosophy behind it.
John:
Whereas I don't think the lack of upgrade pricing has ever been justified or defended, even like in a subtle or weak way by Apple, which makes me go right to the other possibilities that people don't like to think about, which is like incompetence, foolishness, that it's a mistake, that there's mitigating circumstances that don't make any sense outside of Apple's organization to explain why this doesn't happen.
John:
Maybe they just don't care enough.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
All the reasons that make Apple not look good.
John:
Everyone wants to go, well, it's a secret and Apple won't say anything.
John:
And because Apple makes awesome things and because I love Apple, therefore, the secret reason must be so incredible.
John:
And that makes us all do Apple's work for it and try to come up with a philosophy that makes sense.
John:
And like, don't you see?
John:
It's because of like... And we can come up with all those possibilities and they're all possible, but...
John:
It's not on us to articulate that.
John:
And, you know, it's Apple's responsibility to either explain itself or not.
John:
And with a lack of an explanation, I'm just as likely to assume incompetence is the reason or that they really are making a mistake or that there's some sort of internal political BS conflict over the issue.
John:
And I always go to those possibilities.
John:
But whenever I read on the Web, everyone starts from the premise that Apple is all knowing and wonderful.
John:
And that's kind of like one of the advantages of being secret is that
John:
If you're making good products and you don't say anything about them and you don't talk about how things work internally, people will assume that you are a lab full of super genius monks with high-minded ideals who have the whole world figured out.
John:
But in reality, it's like any other company and they're all fighting with each other and doing all sorts of stuff in there and being office politics and being incompetent and making mistakes and yelling at each other and having fires in the server room or whatever the hell is going on today.
Casey:
Well, and speaking of incompetence, earlier when you said, and it seemed to me to be jokingly, that maybe that's why the dev center was down, was in order to get the upgrade pricing squared away.
Casey:
I think it's pretty obvious that Logic Pro 10 wouldn't have been released already if they were going to do the upgrade thing.
John:
No, I was connecting it in terms of things with the assumption of Apple's competence and the counterexample being this very extended downtime to a service that should not be down this long.
Marco:
No, absolutely.
Marco:
Going back a sec to upgrade pricing, neither of you, I don't think, have really mentioned, I think, what the most obvious reason is because it keeps software prices down.
Marco:
And, you know, Apple, we've seen, you know, like David Barnard had recently, at least recently brought back that slide from Steve Jobs at, like,
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
You know, the whole, you know, ancient Joel on software strategy thing of commoditizing your compliments.
Marco:
And this is when like 12 people emailed me to say, Joel didn't invent that because for some reason Joel has received more criticism than anybody who writes as friendly as he does that I've ever seen.
Marco:
Anyway, so...
Marco:
Apple really benefits a lot from having all the software for their devices be cheap because then people have a really great reason to buy their devices because all the software is available for not that much more money.
Marco:
And Apple takes a ton of profit on those device sales.
Marco:
They don't make a whole lot from the app store, so they don't really need to worry about making that substantially bigger.
Marco:
It pales in comparison to what they can make on hardware.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
And then having people have a lot of apps on their devices is great for Apple because not only do you sell maybe bigger hardware, faster hardware, so people can run these apps better or hold more of them, but there's this massive lock-in effect then of once you have a bunch of apps, there's more likelihood, I think, that you're going to keep buying Apple's products as new competitors come out with fewer or different apps that you aren't used to or that don't solve your needs.
Casey:
Well, doubly so if you've just dropped...
Casey:
$400 on two different versions of Logic Pro.
Casey:
Because if I had just thrown a crud load of money at the same app two or three times, that's going to make me even less anxious to bail from iOS or OS X. Does that make sense?
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
Apple, I don't think they intentionally went out there and built the app stores in such a way to encourage cheap apps.
Marco:
I don't think that was intentional.
Marco:
I don't think it was planned in advance.
Marco:
I certainly don't think it was designed because I think the app store's success has been just as much of a surprise to Apple as it has been to everyone else and the scale and the scope of just how big it's become.
Marco:
But
Marco:
I do think that by having apps be really, really cheap and having upgrades not be – having upgrades be very simple, having everything about buying and installing apps be as simple as possible, including that now we see like 90% of them or something are free, then – actually, that's probably not true from Apple's point of view.
Marco:
But anyway, regardless.
Marco:
I think we're seeing that Apple is benefiting substantially from this.
Marco:
So even though they didn't design it from the outset to lower software prices, that has certainly been the effect.
Marco:
And that's benefiting Apple and it's benefiting customers.
Marco:
And developers just have to suck it up.
Marco:
And that's kind of the attitude that Apple has with a lot of stuff towards developers.
Marco:
It's, look, here's the new way of doing things.
Marco:
This is better for users, probably.
Marco:
And it's going to be better for some developers.
Marco:
And you can either join that train or wither and die.
Marco:
We don't really care, but here's how things are going and you can join us if you want to.
Marco:
And
Marco:
I get the feeling, and this is probably going to anger some people, but I get the feeling that you can look at developers, myself included, especially my past self, but even a little bit of my current self, you can look at us and you can say about us and our behavior a lot of what we said about the music industry in the late 90s and early 2000s.
Marco:
Obviously, things are going in a direction here.
Marco:
A lot of developers are taking advantage of that and making a killing or really substantially improving their businesses and their products.
Marco:
It's great for people and it's great for a couple of intermediaries like Apple, but
Marco:
The industry is moving in this direction.
Marco:
And developers who sit around and whine about not being able to charge $50 for an app anymore are increasingly starting to look like the record labels in 2002.
Marco:
And
Marco:
there's only so much you can do in that position.
Marco:
You can keep whining about it and you can keep wishing things will change, but they probably won't.
Marco:
All odds are against that.
Marco:
And you're not going to educate users into paying higher prices.
Marco:
That's not going to happen.
John:
The software and services side, though, are different than the music side in one really important way, I think.
John:
Because when the music side was like, they're all pissy they couldn't sell us CDs for like $20 or whatever anymore.
John:
Because people are, you know, getting for free.
John:
And then iTunes wanted to sell them for 99 cents a track or whatever.
John:
Like that's the phenomenon, the low pricing phenomenon.
John:
But on the app side, that's not, you know, it goes beyond that.
John:
It's not just, oh, here's a new way where people can get your thing less expensively.
John:
What's happening on the app and the services side is that that is mutating into a worse product for users so that the developers can get more money.
John:
The freemium model or the thing where, you know, it's a free service, but they sell your information.
John:
It's as if the record labels found out a way to start selling CDs again as a whole for $20 online, and they did it by inserting ads every 10 seconds into the song or something.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Right.
John:
That's the way that they're working around.
John:
And so part of the resistance at this point is like, you're not saying, oh, I need to sell, you know, my next application for 50 bucks.
John:
You're saying, I don't want to make it a freemium thing where when you press the red button, you got to pay 10 bucks in that purchase to get this feature and then five bucks to get that one.
John:
You got to get coins and there's an energy meter and you can't use the application more than five minutes a day unless you pay money.
John:
Like that's the model that everyone is going to.
John:
All these apps in the app store are making money hand over fist by, you know, game theory money out of people's wallets, not just kids, but also adults as well.
John:
And it's a worse experience for users, but that wasn't true with music because it was more or less, you know, I mean, you said the sound quality was worse and that wasn't that terrible, but it was not that the hellscape that is the, you know, the freemium free to play type of thing where it just like the application ends up costing you 50 bucks and the company to make tons of money, but it's free.
John:
Right.
John:
You know, so the sale price of the thing is free.
John:
That's, that's where it's gone too far.
John:
And I think.
John:
Most app developers have made their piece with adjustment in pricing.
John:
What they don't want to do is say, man, I really do not want to make a freemium product.
John:
I really do not want to put ads all over my thing or do anything like that because that just feels wrong.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, and certainly there's obviously a few different aspects of it.
Marco:
There's obviously the gaming world.
Marco:
It has way more severe problems with this, with the whole free-to-play BS.
John:
Well, think of Paper.
John:
Doesn't Paper do that?
John:
Or one of those graphics apps where you buy the brushes?
John:
It can be applied to anything.
Marco:
It does, yeah.
Marco:
But it's a little bit different in that I don't think they're consumable.
Marco:
But either way, obviously there's ways for abuse in both regular apps and games.
Yeah.
Marco:
The gaming market, I think, deserves a special discussion on its own.
Marco:
But overall, certainly you're right that to get this overall benefit to consumers of usually lower prices, we've had to add complexity.
Marco:
And a lot of that complexity is bad.
Marco:
The old way of buying music, in your theoretical example there, the old way of buying music was really simple.
Marco:
You paid money and you got the music on some kind of thing.
Marco:
And
Marco:
You could play it.
Marco:
You could do whatever you wanted to.
Marco:
You could sell it.
Marco:
You could throw it out the window.
Marco:
You could, you know, whatever.
Marco:
And it was just the music and that was it.
Marco:
And, you know, if they're, you know, once you start throwing in things like ads and privacy invading creepiness and stuff like that, like other ways to make money besides just charging people.
John:
Yeah, you're changing the product.
John:
You're not just changing the pricing at that point.
John:
And you're like, okay, I've done all I can with the pricing.
John:
I'm going to change the product now.
John:
So the experience of using the product is different.
John:
So everything is out of the window.
John:
Like if the song wasn't the song anymore, if the song was changed in some way, if it stopped midway through, if there was something else inserted into the song, and if somehow you could pull that off in a way that customers are like, oh, I guess like if you could like,
John:
get the tip of the wedge in and like you know because it's like with freemium it's like oh all right i do like getting the game for free this is kind of annoying like he slowly creeps up on you where you just you don't notice that eventually everything you get is free but it's just torture to use and you didn't notice it because it used to be you're just like it's like they slowly put oh it's just one second of audio into a song oh that's not that bad i'll listen to one second of audio to get my free song and they just kept increasing and increasing and eventually you're just like remember when you could buy something you just get the song you use it you know
John:
And I'm not saying free-to-play or freemium is a terrible thing, again, especially for gaming.
John:
But everyone is going that direction because it's like a way to get $20 for CDs again.
John:
They can get so much more money through a free-to-play or a freemium type of thing than they could ever get if they sold you that application.
John:
Like, I see it happen with my son with these stupid games.
John:
I talked about, you know, I told him that, like...
John:
There's no way he would have spent $15 of his own money to buy an iOS game.
John:
But within the first day of getting a free-to-play game, he spent $15 in the game.
John:
It's just the way it works.
John:
And granted, he's only nine, so he's more of a victim of this thing.
John:
But I see it with adults as well, like Candy Crush game you were just talking about your wife playing.
John:
It's a bad scene.
Marco:
Yeah, and to some degree, it is a lot like arcades.
Marco:
But now it's always in your pocket.
Marco:
Now you don't have to go to the arcade.
Marco:
You're always at the arcade, and you're paying by credit card.
Marco:
But it is hard to look at this and say it's overall worse.
Marco:
In some way, you can look at specific examples and say, well, that's worse.
Marco:
But overall, we now have devices that...
Marco:
You can look at smartphones, and iPads are a little bit more like game consoles in this way, but smartphones, you don't pay a whole lot up front for relative to the kind of thing it is, and it's subsidized, and it has all these capabilities, and you're kind of buying a phone anyway in modern society, so you don't have to spend $600 on a PS3 to play these games.
Marco:
That's the difference here.
Marco:
Anyway...
Marco:
The bigger thing is, now, if you want to play a new game on your iPhone, it's between, at least to start out, it's between $0 and maybe $4 most of the time.
Marco:
In the olden days, a game was $50, and more recently, $60.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
you're able to play a lot more games.
Marco:
And, you know, the production value that goes into them is obviously way lower than many $50 and $60 games.
Marco:
But not all.
Marco:
And there was, you know, there was a whole lot of like, I don't know, I think I'm still upset from buying Marble Madness for my Genesis for $40 on an impulse.
Marco:
And it was so, so bad.
Marco:
And I...
Marco:
I've never impulse bought a game that turned out to be good.
Marco:
Like a physical game in a store for like 30 to 40 bucks.
Marco:
I've never, I've impulse bought, I think three or four of them total.
Marco:
And they've always been horrible.
John:
This is the making of Marco people.
John:
These, these, these formative years of impulse purchases is why now he researches light bulbs.
John:
It's all about before he buys one, because he's, you know, in his formative years, he's like, never again.
John:
Well, I allow myself to buy this thing on an impulse.
John:
I'm going to research it.
John:
And I'm the same way.
John:
Like,
Marco:
Such a terrible game.
Marco:
No, but it's... I totally get that.
Marco:
And so that whole world now, the stakes are way lower.
Marco:
And that was like $40 or $50 or $60 in the 90s, which was more substantial than those same amounts are today.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
You know, everything is cheaper now.
Marco:
And you see the same problem or the same set of problems and benefits and kind of intertwined issues with, like, Walmart selling regular things to people.
Marco:
Like, you know, in some ways, it's better for people to spend less for things.
Marco:
And then there's all these terrible side effects to that.
Marco:
You know, I don't think this is as bad, but...
Marco:
But it's hard to argue that this overall is worse, that now that everything is either free or cheap to get into, and then even the things that aren't totally free, you might spend – yeah, what if the worst-case scenario is you put $15 into Candy Crush?
Marco:
Well, that's still, like, relative to how expensive games used to be, that's not that bad.
Marco:
That's still actually really cheap relative to how things used to be.
Marco:
And certainly you can go crazy, and you can kind of lose track of it and start spending, you know, $70.
Marco:
Well, yeah, games used to cost $70.
John:
I don't think it's the absolute amounts that's bad.
John:
It's making it less of a conscious decision.
John:
I would rather consciously spend $50 than not realize that I'd spent $15 in terms of the honesty of the interaction where you're basically tricking people into spending money they didn't really want to spend.
John:
I mean, it's –
John:
I do not want to get into free will.
John:
But anyway, personal responsibility was another code word, which I also don't want to get into.
John:
But, like, it feels like a more honest interaction to ask someone to make a decision based on an amount versus ask someone to speculatively predict their future behavior and decide whether they want to download this free or cheap game based on what they think they're going to spend on it in the future.
John:
Like...
John:
it just doesn't feel as nice.
John:
And I, I think you're right that, you know, it's, it's been a net win.
John:
Like we're, we're making progress.
John:
This is all good stuff, but it's kind of like with the good has come like this other bad force that we're constantly bombarded by.
John:
And we have to build up new defenses against this thing that didn't used to exist.
John:
Like,
John:
We get, you know, there are awesome, awesome software out there for a fair price, even, you know, some really good free to play things where you just buy new levels and they're reasonably priced.
John:
And it's only like five things you can buy in the game.
John:
And it's just a great way for a great developer to get more money.
John:
Like that's all good.
John:
And then there's like this giant bazaar of people yammering at us.
John:
And like the vast majority of the App Store and the vast majority of anything, was it Sturgeon's Law or whatever, is crap.
John:
and they're in our face and they're trying to scam us and they're trying to exploit us and they're trying to do terrible things to us and some of those companies are big and have you know millions of dollars zynga and that's you know we've created a monster and a mob outside of this other stuff that we got which is way better than it used to be so i guess you got to take the good with the bad but like we we really need to build up like defenses against the bad that has come along with us
Marco:
Well, and, like, you know, nobody's forcing people to buy or use these games.
Marco:
Like, I don't have Candy Crush installed on my phone because I heard it was really sleazy with all this stuff.
Marco:
And I thought, you know what?
Marco:
That's not worth it.
Marco:
And then I saw TIFF play it.
Marco:
And, you know, I'm like, that actually doesn't seem like it's a very good game.
Marco:
Instead, I went out and bought Mean Bean Machine for my PS3 instead.
Marco:
That's a different story.
Marco:
No one's forcing people to buy these games.
Marco:
The reason why these things are so prevalent, the reason why games can do all this stuff, is that people let them and people support it.
Marco:
They do it because it works.
Marco:
There's only so much that Apple can really do about this.
Marco:
The reality is that, let's say Apple gives us upgrade pricing.
Marco:
What's that going to do?
Marco:
Is it going to make prices go up in the App Store?
Marco:
Probably not, because people like cheap software.
Marco:
And the reason why so many games out there and so many apps out there have made their prices so low...
Marco:
is not usually because they have to.
Marco:
It's because they can make more that way.
Marco:
You know, people who are saying that, oh, they put an app in the App Store, and they wanted to charge $10, but nobody was buying it, so they were forced to lower the price.
Marco:
Well, we don't know if that app would have sold any better in any other environment.
Marco:
Maybe the app isn't worth $10.
Marco:
Maybe there's 15 other apps in the App Store that do the same thing for $1, and it just kind of sucks for you competition-wise.
Marco:
There's no evidence that...
Marco:
Apple's policies are really holding us back here.
Marco:
There is the top list, and that I think has harmful effects.
Marco:
I wrote about that before.
Marco:
I do think if Apple removed the top lists from the App Store, that it would be overall much better for everybody, for people, for developers, users.
Marco:
It would be way better for everybody, I think.
Marco:
But with the exception of that,
Marco:
I really think that there's not a lot Apple could really do here to change people's behavior.
Marco:
Because the fact is, people love cheap stuff.
Marco:
They respond way, way more to cheap stuff than to expensive stuff.
Marco:
And pricing is very psychological and not absolute for people.
Marco:
So to them, in a store where almost everything is $1 or $2, $5 does seem expensive.
Marco:
It's expensive in quotes there.
Marco:
So there's all these other factors here.
Marco:
And the reason why developers make their prices what they are is usually because it works better.
Marco:
And no one's stopping you.
Marco:
Apple has not set a maximum price by policy.
Marco:
Well, actually, I think that's like $1,000.
Marco:
But no one is stopping you from charging $50 for your app in the App Store.
Marco:
You can try, but if people don't want to buy it, that's not really Apple's fault.
John:
Well, I mean, there's a couple of little things, and we've all heard the little things they could do, and I think they would actually help us.
John:
Like, for example, making their search better would help a lot, because when you search for a well-known application and you get the million scam apps, like Apple's constantly fighting that.
John:
It's not like they're not doing anything about it, but they're not doing a great job.
John:
the time there's a new game that i've heard of and i search for it and you have to be careful not to accidentally go through the app that's trying to scam you because it looks like i mean even things like minecraft where they have those you know minecraft clone type things like they're like scam they're always trying to fight fraud but then it's like oh what's really fraud this game actually is a legitimate game and it legitimately uses that word it's not keyword spamming but like google does it better you know because they have a system you know page rank not in their store they don't
John:
If I search... No, I'm talking about Google on the web.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
With PageRank and the incoming links, right?
John:
If they can do that for the entire web, surely Apple can do a little bit better job of when someone types in Candy Crush.
John:
I don't even know what the search returns, but make sure the number one item is the actual candy or frame that everyone is talking about and buying.
John:
And it's not some other thing.
John:
And they're constantly fighting that battle.
John:
Really?
John:
They have some role to play.
John:
It used to be much worse than it is.
Marco:
It doesn't seem like they're doing that much in that regard, honestly.
John:
They have some role to play in...
John:
uh policing bad behavior and that's the problem with the system they set up is once you put yourself on the line for any kind of quality control where you don't just say look upload whatever the hell you want no limits right once you once you do that at all then you're always constantly battling like what's the line what do we stop okay well we'll stop outright fraud what's fraud how do we define fraud is this fraud is it's not fraud are we going to police copyright well no we can't really do that because our lawyers say we have to just wait for a takedown note so so we can't police copyright but then our store is filled with crap you know that's like super mario brothers with you know
John:
the O spelled with a zero or something, and that stays up until Nintendo notices it.
John:
And I'm sure Apple hates that, but it's the constant battle to figure out where you draw the line between intervention and allowing the stuff to sort itself out.
John:
And in some respects, the pricing thing, like the developers are all kind of in there
John:
making their own fate with their own decisions sometimes good sometimes bad but there is again like that that mob that horde of barbarians on the outside who are who are not well-intentioned who are in there to who are bad actors and there's a lot of them and they're all over the place and the good people are like hey can you get this mob out of here and apple had
John:
It's like, well, we can't tell the difference between the mob and the regular people until they do something bad.
John:
So we can't be police for the entire world and you guys just need to sort it out.
John:
And I don't know, you know, like there's been a lot of talk over the years about building kind of a wall around the good people, all the people who are, you know, good.
John:
good actors in the app store are like, look, can't we get some kind of thing where you're like, you agree that you trust us and we're not losers.
John:
And then our apps get approved more quickly.
John:
Or, you know, we've all heard things like that.
John:
Cause we all think like, Oh, we're the good guys and we know who the bad guys are, but we get treated exactly the same.
John:
And isn't there some kind of way I could pay more money.
John:
And then it becomes, well, no, then they're just the rich people would go in.
John:
A lot of the rich people are the bad people.
John:
And,
John:
It is a tiny microcosm, a tiny world government inside the App Store.
John:
And the way it's being run now, it's not the feudal system, but it hasn't advanced probably past the 1800s in terms of sophistication of the governing process.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
No, it's weird because you said, what could be done to make this better?
Casey:
And one of the things I'm thinking about is, okay, let me put myself in the shoes of a game developer, and I'm about to make this game.
Casey:
And maybe it's a game that's kind of hard to digest.
Casey:
And Mind Blitz from last week is a kind of interesting example of that in that...
Casey:
Yeah, on the surface, it's just a standard memory game, but really it's a lot more than that.
Casey:
And how do I get someone to see that it's a lot more than that if I don't have a free download and then in-app purchase?
Casey:
And it makes me wonder, well, would some sort of trial system work better?
Casey:
So it's a little bit less sleazy.
Casey:
It's an all-or-nothing thing.
Casey:
And you say, hey, you can try the, you know, Apple, I should say, allows developers to give users a trial.
Casey:
Maybe it's for a day, maybe it's just for an hour, whatever the number may be.
Casey:
Or maybe a developer could even set that number.
Casey:
One way or another, then I could, as the consumer of this game, I could download it and I could see if it was any good, see if I liked it.
Casey:
And then after an hour or whatever the number may be,
Casey:
I can't use it anymore unless I pay for it.
Casey:
But the premise is if I'm paying for it, I'm buying all of it and I'm not going to be nickel and dimed from there.
John:
The oligarchs, the oligarchs will not like that though, because the oligarchs are the people who are selling a gazillion $1 games and they would not sell a gazillion $1 games if someone could free trial it because they would sell like an eighth of that number.
John:
Cause most people would free trial, like get five minutes out of it and say, that's not worth the one, you know, whatever, like they make more money selling $1 game that you can't trial than they would.
John:
And
John:
And yeah, there are a few oligarchs.
John:
There's not a lot of the people who are making tons of money.
John:
There's the EAs of the world.
John:
But I think at this point, like now we've reached the point where EA has enough sway to say, you know what?
John:
We would prefer not to have free trials.
John:
I don't know what EA's official opinion is on that, but I feel like the games that sell tons and tons of copies at a really low price would actually make less money in absolute dollars if they were able to be free trialed.
John:
Even if they tried to crank the price up in response.
John:
Okay, well, it was $1, no free trial.
John:
Now it's $10, but free trial.
John:
I don't think they could make a balance that would give them as much money as the $1 free trial.
John:
Because as an impulse purchase, you've already paid.
John:
If you don't like it, you don't feel bad, and you just keep doing that.
Casey:
Yeah, and that's true.
Casey:
And this all runs contrary to my point earlier about removing complexity with upgrade pricing.
Casey:
But I still come back to, does Apple care?
Casey:
And yes, I know there are very influential people that will care and that will try to make Apple care.
Casey:
Not AppleCare, but AppleCare.
Casey:
Anyway, so the point is that if that makes the store a little less abrasive and a little less hostile to users, is that not worth it?
Casey:
I mean, I don't know.
Casey:
It's hard to say.
John:
But it seems like it might be.
John:
That lobbying effort, if it exists, and I assume that does between the big players in the App Store and Apple, happens totally behind closed doors.
John:
We have no visibility to have that.
John:
Like, something must be going on there because we know they're up on the stage during the keynotes.
John:
We know about the amounts of money involved.
John:
And we know about the technical discussions, like, what do you want out of our next GPU for your, you know, real racing game or whatever.
John:
But I don't know what the App Store...
John:
policy issues are there.
John:
I feel like even if it's subconscious, there has to be a role at this point.
Marco:
I mean, for whatever it's worth, I've talked to a lot of developers over the years, big and small, some of which have been involved in keynotes or unveilings and things like that.
Marco:
And the impression I get overall is that nothing like that actually happens.
Marco:
Like for the keynote, Apple goes to you.
Marco:
You don't go to Apple.
Marco:
And other than that, like, you know, your interaction with them is very restricted.
Marco:
They don't really negotiate with you that much.
Marco:
Like, it's pretty much like they tell you what to do.
John:
But why does Apple go to you?
John:
They go to you because you've, you know, because you're EA, because you're selling tons and tons of games, because you're a big game developer.
John:
Like, sometimes they go to small people, too.
John:
Like, there's two parts to that.
John:
One is just like the help us with our marketing effort.
John:
But the other one is, you know, who does have influence over App Store policies?
John:
individual developers don't have an influence, like, you know, mom-and-pop shops don't really have much influence, except in the aggregate, right?
John:
And I have to think that big companies... Even then, we don't.
John:
Yeah, but big companies have more of an influence, let's say.
John:
Like, I don't... And I don't even know if it's formal or just subconscious or whatever.
John:
Like, I wonder how much influence things like, why isn't Microsoft Office in the App Store?
John:
Like...
John:
not that that's a big deal for Apple and Apple's going to play all tough and like, we don't need Microsoft office anymore.
John:
We move beyond that.
John:
But in some ways, you know, at the very least Microsoft has someone they can call on the phone and talk to a human being and talk to them about their issues, you know, once or twice a year about, uh, what do you think about this, that, and the other thing?
John:
And maybe Apple rebuffs them or whatever, but this communication there that's happening on an individual corporate entity level that is not happening on an individual developer level in any capacity.
John:
And I think eventually that has to, uh,
John:
To weigh on them, again, even if it's just subconscious, even if they don't have formal meetings about deciding what to do about EA or Microsoft or Adobe or anyone else who could potentially be in the App Store but isn't or whatever, that it weighs on their minds in a way that the aggregated mass of angry people blogging about App Store policies does not.
Casey:
I think you're selling their influence a little too much based on no facts, just gut feeling.
John:
That's all we've got to go on.
Casey:
I really don't think that Apple cares what EA thinks about their App Store policies.
Casey:
And who knows?
Casey:
Just like you said, it's a set of very high walls with closed and locked doors.
Casey:
I'm never going to know what's going on behind there.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
The impression I've gotten is that
Casey:
Apple certainly will listen to what EA says, but I don't think it materially influences what Apple does.
John:
Well, look at the strong arming in the e-book thing, though.
John:
Stuff like that goes on in the relatively low-stakes world of the iBook store, which is nothing compared to the App Store.
John:
They're like, oh, we didn't let their app into the app store to try to twist their arm on this other negotiation we're having.
John:
That kind of petty crap going on on an individual corporate entity's basis, that's because the corporate entity they're dealing with is big and important.
John:
I don't think they would ever, like, Eddie Q's not going to call up the App Store guys and tell them to hold Marco's app because Marco said something mean, right?
John:
But if Marco is all of a sudden, like, a major publisher who is in the middle of the negotiation with Apple, then that comes into effect.
John:
Like, I don't put that petty crap beyond them, and we have now, you know, evidence in a legal trial that they totally do stuff like that.
Casey:
Right.
John:
Turns out some of it's illegal.
Casey:
But that's not a terribly fair comparison, is it?
Casey:
Because in the case of the publishers, they had all the cards, or I guess you could say all the pages.
Casey:
Whereas Marco just has an app and EA just has a couple of games.
Casey:
And maybe if Madden and a bunch of other really popular EA titles were all in the app store and making a just absolute killing, then OK, at that point, maybe they have some of the cards.
Casey:
But I don't feel like EA, as a silly example, I don't think they really have that much cloud in Apple's eyes.
John:
Oh, no.
John:
I think Apple and the people who run the App Store are still, perhaps unjustifiably, but still kind of a little bit defensive and paranoid about the success of other App Stores.
John:
And EA pulling out of the Apple App Store and going into the Google Play Store would make them upset.
John:
That's why Apple is constantly putting up the numbers about how awesome their App Store is in terms of number of applications and money given to developers and all that stuff.
John:
It's like a little bit death protest too much in all of their things.
John:
Even though they're just so incredibly dominant in the App Store at this point, they do not want that to change.
John:
And I think they're terrified of when Amazon started selling MP3s DRM-free and the music labels wouldn't give them DRM-free music because the music labels are basically...
John:
intentionally trying to take power away from Apple by empowering another competitor.
John:
Not that the Amazon MP3 store came and swamped the iTunes store, but it was scary there for a minute in terms of they're DRM-free, they're growing, we're not, the music labels are playing hardball with us.
John:
I think Apple does not want their store to be at a disadvantage.
John:
And the big players and their games, how many companies have the...
John:
The, you know, development bandwidth to produce the types of games that EA puts in there, like three or four or five person shop can make an amazing iOS game.
John:
But at a certain point, you can't compete with however many umpteen people are making these big, complicated games that nevertheless run on iOS.
Casey:
Well, and that's exactly what I was going to say is, you know, let's suppose EA pulls out and a handful of smaller indie shops step in to kind of replace them.
Casey:
You know, what if we had a situation where there was a new, I don't know, like a flight control or what was the Jetpack Joyride or whatever it was that was popular a year or two ago?
Casey:
Or even Words with Friends before it got even really, really slimy.
Casey:
Then Apple could spin it as, hey, when EA left, look at all you little guys that had a chance to make money.
John:
But no one's doing the next Call of Duty.
John:
At a certain point, that's going to happen as the computing power of iOS devices increases.
John:
At a certain point, this is something that the consoles went through many, many years ago.
John:
One guy used to be able to make an Atari 2600 game.
John:
One guy cannot make a PlayStation 4 game.
John:
It's just, you know...
John:
Almost impossible.
John:
Like a AAA title, $60, you're going to buy this and be happy that you spent $60 on it.
John:
The better your technology gets, the better the graphics are, the more compute power you have, the more money it costs to produce the game.
John:
It's why game developers were a little bit freaked out when they went HD because now all of a sudden the resolution of all your assets increases and then you need bigger machines to crunch them and the artists have to do more work and you can't fudge the details anymore and all this other stuff.
John:
So...
John:
If things continue apace, iOS is kind of creeping up that same trail where at a certain point, yeah, you can make flight control and stuff like that.
John:
And those kind of casual games are fine.
John:
But someone's going to make, you know, Madden or Call of Duty or, you know, Destiny from Bungie or something.
John:
And you can't make Destiny with a five person shop.
John:
And if the company that makes that pulls out and goes only on another platform, you would have to form a company the size of Bungie before you can field a game like Destiny.
John:
Maybe Apple isn't interested in those kind of games.
John:
Consumers are, though.
John:
Consumers are.
John:
Yeah, but how many?
Marco:
A lot of them.
John:
We'll see when Destiny comes out.
Marco:
We'll see how the PS4 and Xbox whatever sells.
Casey:
That's a good point.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I hope it's nothing like the Wii U. They sell them on the PC as well.
John:
That's why everyone goes multiplayer.
John:
I'm just saying iOS devices are not at that level yet.
John:
They can't play those games at all, period.
John:
So being...
John:
incapable of playing makes you all we don't have to decide whether people want to play once they become capable of playing them then we'll really find out is that something people want to do you know because at that point like the ios devices aren't going to become you know more expensive relative to people's incomes if only they're only going to get cheaper right uh so at that point if everybody who can afford you know an ipad mini also can now play uh you know current quality triple a type games
John:
Maybe they do want to.
John:
Maybe they're not just buying Candy Crush because that's the only kind of game they're interested in.
John:
Maybe it's because they don't want to spend $500 on a game console or $1,000 on a gaming PC to play that game.
John:
But if they could play it with a device they already have, like their web browsing and whatever, maybe suddenly they're more interested in it.
John:
We'll see how that turns out.
Casey:
We will.
Casey:
We should probably wrap up, though.
Marco:
Yeah, we're getting pretty long here.
Marco:
All right, so thanks a lot to our two sponsors, Drafts and Squarespace, and we'll see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Margo and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
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-E-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.
Casey:
Yes, I'm saying the wrong words.
John:
I'm teen.
John:
I'm trying to enunciate.
John:
What did you say?
John:
My nose is like a little bit stuffed up and I'm dying in this incredibly hot room.
John:
So I think I'm a little bit more fog horny than usual today.
Casey:
Look at it this way.
Casey:
At least you didn't stumble over Logic Pro whatever.
John:
That was funny though.
Casey:
If I could only have that back.
John:
I think Marco gave pricing for the iPhone version of Drafts and also the iPhone version of Drafts.
Casey:
He did.
Casey:
And then you got it right the second time.
John:
Sorry.
John:
Speaking is hard.
Marco:
Nothing happens in the summertime.
Casey:
Yeah, something like that.
John:
Except for OS X reviews.
John:
That's the only thing that happens.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
What's the quick update?
John:
Today was the first day that I had to consult the Darwin source.
John:
So that's always an important point in my review when I'm reduced to going through the source code.
John:
So today was the day.
John:
So that's pretty good.
John:
I'm probably about halfway done before I had to resort to that.
John:
But every review I write, I'm so glad that exists.
John:
Because I'm like, you know what?
John:
The easiest way to get the answer to this question is to look at the damn source.
John:
And it always is.
John:
Fun.
John:
And those servers were up.
John:
Opensource.apps.com.
John:
I was like, oh no, I need the source.
John:
Those were up.
Marco:
You're the only one browsing.
Marco:
Yeah, seriously.
John:
Yeah, they were up and they were fast.