Fashion Phase
I see you writing really heinously named C functions, and so I know you're in your happy place.
See, those names make perfect sense in the context of the other accelerate framework functions.
If you look at the names of the functions in the accelerate framework...
They are crazy.
They at first make no sense, but they are named with a convention, and I now understand that convention, so I'm now able to guess function names and even what the parameters are based solely on their...
signature which is not obvious because it's like you know const float a float b int c like it's very very like you know it's names it's single letter names like that usually you know a b c and you know n and i've used these so much now that not only can i guess the names of the functions most of the time and get it right but i can also guess the parameters most of the time and get them right too so i'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing i might be using accelerate too much
Can we just talk about how hideous this – I'm looking at your tweet, which if this makes the show, we'll put in the show notes.
Line 41 reads as follows.
And I'm going to read this whole frigging thing because it's awful.
Underscore, underscore, inline, underscore, underscore, space, underscore, underscore, attribute, underscore, underscore.
How do you not vomit all over yourself reading this?
And this is where all the Objective-C people are going to come and bite me on Twitter and be like, oh, well, Swift is so ugly.
How can you look at this and not vomit all over yourself?
It's hideous.
it follows conventions oh god if you want to make fun of me make fun of the actual content of these functions which also makes no sense why is the n capital in the the argument because in the dsp functions they always capitalize that i don't know why it's well actually they usually they capitalize almost all their function arguments because usually it's like a b c n like that kind of thing but here input db and output db aren't don't start with initial capital
That's true.
I'm trying to match the convention reasonably well.
Now, if I matched it completely, that would be const float capital A and float capital B. But I decided to make my variable names a little bit nicer since I don't write documentation.
That's not true.
I see two comments on this.
Those are not documented.
That is the documentation.
Also, truth be to, as much as I'm making fun of really the language in which this is written by making fun of you, as I've gotten older as a developer,
I have found that, I don't know if mimicking is the word I'm looking for, but kind of conforming to the code around you is almost always a wise choice.
Yeah.
Because even if the style is not your style, it's going to stick out as such a sore thumb and actually be more of a stumbling block when you try to figure out, okay, all of this code looks identical except this one other class over here.
These two other functions over here that look nothing like anything else.
What the hell is happening?
Yeah.
So as much as I'm poking fun at you, you've actually made the correct choice here, even though it is freaking hideous.
Right.
And you can you can see like, you know, in this screenshot, I call five vector functions, three of which are the VDSP syntax.
And you can see like, you know, V fill.
That's OK.
It's vector fill.
Right.
Vs div is vector scalar divide.
Vs mul is vector scalar multiply, which means that the first argument is a vector.
The second argument is a scalar.
their argument is where it goes right and and you know same thing like you know vv pow f is a different vector library the vv part and it's dealing with vectors pow f is a c function this is the vector version of the pow f function and pow is the power function and f is the floating point version as opposed to the double version like it's the names make sense when you are familiar with their conventions like i always had to look at it really until this week i had to look at the documentation every single time i called any of these functions and
It still proves hard to read sometimes, but they are ridiculously fast and powerful, so I really do enjoy them.
Is it possible for you to write these as kind of standalone audio units or something like that, such that they could be used in other apps?
I don't know how to write audio units like in the Mac sense where you can have like plugins for logic and stuff.
I looked into it a long time ago when I had a crazy idea to make a logic plugin to record who was talking at any given time in a podcast so I can embed that as metadata and then display in the app like somebody's pulsing Twitter head as they talked so you could tell who's talking.
Yeah.
Great feature idea, totally unimplementable in practice because it requires editor support, basically.
And I don't control an editor.
This is one of the reasons I want to write an editor.
So I did look into how to create an audio unit back then to see, like, maybe I could provide a logic plugin that could do this and output it along with the files.
And the answer really ended up being, no, I can't.
But what I discovered back then was that the documentation for audio unit plugins or any kind of plugin on Mac OS...
is pretty much non-existent and or very outdated.
And when I started playing with it, I very quickly realized this is not an area I should be playing in.
If you'll permit me a small tangent, we talked over the last couple of weeks about my adventures with HomeKit and HomeBridge and things like that.
And we had talked a little bit about how
I would like to, and if somewhat started writing a HomeBridge plug-in, I think in this case it would actually be called a platform in their parlance.
But anyway, a thing wherein I can control my thermostat from HomeKit because I don't think I would ever do it.
I just want to be able to.
It annoys me that I can't.
Well, I went looking through the HomeBridge documentation and, oh boy, that's
You think your documentation is bad.
At least this is only code that will ever be used by you, hypothetically, until you sell Overcast.
But that joke's probably a little old now.
Bad week to give that joke.
It's all come back around.
See, I'm smarter than I thought.
Anyway, your code is only for you.
You know how you work, etc.
But HomeBridge is, by design, like a plugin-based architecture, and about half their documentation is, ah, just look through the code, you'll figure it out.
And, oh my goodness, I have forgotten, and I guess I've just gotten spoiled, I have forgotten how disheartening and awful it is when you're trying to use an API and the documentation is, eh, just look through the code, you'll get it.
It's truly maddening.
And I don't understand how HomeBridge specifically has the unbelievable breadth of support that it has because I've looked at this a few times and it's made me want to jump off my roof because there's nothing there.
It's seriously one of the – there's a bunch of like – and I don't know what the equivalent is in JavaScript because I'm not –
really the best JavaScript programmer, but there's like structs and enums and things like that, that you have to in protocols that you have to like adhere to and implement and so on and so forth.
And their documentation for all these is, oh, here's a 3000 line JavaScript file, you'll figure it out.
It's just terrible.
Like, I don't understand how people think that's okay.
And again,
The 22-year-old developer in me would totally just pew, pew, pew, shoot from the hip, and who cares?
They'll figure it out if they really want to do it that badly.
But the old man developer in me is like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
If you're going to make some sort of API, you need some freaking documentation and some documentation that doesn't require you to go spelunking through the code in order to figure all this out.
It's just infuriating.
So yeah, I don't blame you for kind of punting on this audio unit thing.
yeah this is also why i work alone just gonna let casey get away with enum that's how i pronounce it in my head it's not enum yeah it's for enumeration it sure is enum oh come on no it's because it's enumeration i understand what it's short for but i'm saying that you say that word is enum if you can say enum i can say mov mov is just you enum casey has a posse but yeah it's a posse that's wrong
It's totally enum.
Nope.
It is absolutely enum.
And also, since we're airing grievances, who knew it was Festivus?
I would like to ask the ATP listeners to come to my defense and explain to Mr. Syracuse that PICTS is not a thing.
Yes, it may have been a thing in 1983 when I was a year old, but it's not a thing.
If you're talking about pictures on the computer, PICS, no T. No T is necessary.
Stop trying to make T happen.
Oh,
I was writing pics before you were even on the internet, son.
P-I-C-T-S is a perfectly valid alternate spelling of the thing we're both talking about.
No, I'm with Casey on this.
It's pics.
It's not pics or it didn't happen.
It's pics.
People abbreviated the word picture long before that meme existed.
There was a thing called Usenet, youngins.
I'm familiar with Usenet.
Yeah, me too.
It's a wonderful highway full of trucks.
Anyway, picked is perfectly fine.
It's a perfectly fine variant.
Here it is.
I think I'm old.
And then I talked to you, John, and I'm reminded I am but a wee whippersnapper.
A little bit older, but it's a little bit that counts.
Yeah.
Last we saw our heroes, which really isn't us, if I recall correctly, Facebook's enterprise cert was pulled, and Google had confessed that they had been doing similar shenanigans, but there had been no punishment at that time.
Since we recorded, Google got punished, and I think they're back up now.
Is that correct?
They had their enterprise cert revoked, and I think that they're restored.
Everybody got everything back.
Delightful.
Yeah, basically, they were punished for like, just long enough for us to record our podcast.
I think the kids call that a hot second, Marco.
They call it picts.
Yeah, they call them picks.
A hot second.
So anyway, so Facebook did get a pretty severe wrist slap, and then Google tried to avoid it by confessing, and then they got a pretty severe wrist slap.
However, these wrist slaps only lasted for a couple of working days.
It really wasn't that bad in the grand scheme of things.
On the one side, I kind of want to be like, man...
They should have been out for like a week or two just to really show them who the boss is.
But on the other side of the coin, like being immature like that is really not constructive.
And so this is probably the right way to do it, in my opinion.
But I don't know.
Marco, what do you think about that?
What Facebook did was pretty severe.
I was hoping for a more severe reaction from Apple in the sense that not pulling their apps from the App Store because that wouldn't be justified and that would hurt Apple.
I don't think Facebook should have enterprise distribution anymore, period.
The fact that they got it back after like a day is, you know, a little less of a punishment than I think they deserved.
That being said, you could make the argument like, yeah, Apple made their point.
I think Facebook got off pretty easy considering what they did.
Yeah, I think both parties are just highlighting what everybody already knows is that this is a special relationship, as we used to say, between the U.S.
and the U.K., between the big companies.
It's not the same.
The App Store is not the same for Facebook as it is for you independent developers.
Just not.
Everyone knows that.
Everyone agrees to it.
Apple, if pressed and actually forced to answer a question, would also admit it if you press them on like, hey, I heard Netflix has been paying 15% long before you extended that deal to everyone else.
Why is that?
And they would say...
They wouldn't say this, but the truth is it's because Netflix is Netflix and you're not Netflix.
Like it's the truth that's out there and we see it.
Like if you had some kind of rule violation as egregious as that, you wouldn't get your cert back in a day.
Like you wouldn't even get an email response in a day.
Like it would be if you got it back at all.
if they could bother to pay attention to you it would be a long time and you'd have to do a lot of groveling because you don't have any power in that relationship and like i said last week this is more or less how it should be because we're not all the same and i think a system that did treat everybody exactly the same would be bad for everybody because you know it would just as we stated last week start world war three like it doesn't matter if the if the big superpower crushes a tiny individual but if two big superpowers get angry at each other we all die in the in the
hail of missiles or whatever anyway that was last week's uh analogy we'll move on it's just the world is the way it is um we're just living in it uh apple has made some more comments on the facetime bug if you recall uh you were able to snoop on somebody's audio and or video if you did a series of steps quickly and in just the right order
And we, especially I, had gotten pretty fired up about the fact that Apple didn't seem to take the security report on this seriously and eventually told the mom of the individual who discovered it to create a developer account and file a radar, which I still think is the biggest screw you I've heard in a while.
But Apple has commented on this.
They say, quote, And then back to actual quoting.
Okay, so they're kind of admitting that something broke.
That's a step, right?
Well, the statement we read last time was just like, hey, there's a problem, blah, blah, blah.
This one has two important features that you just read.
One is acknowledgement of the family that found and reported the bug, which wasn't mentioned earlier.
It's like, why bring up the fact that you missed this for a week and that someone reported it?
They weren't even mentioned at all.
But since then, all the sort of, you know, media coverage of this or whatever has made it the correct PR move to acknowledge what everyone else is saying that, hey, not only is this a bug, we're not super, you know, we may or may not be super mad at you about the bug.
But the real problem is that you, you know, you ignore these people who are trying to do the right thing.
So the people get acknowledged and that they say not only hear the facts about the bug, but also we, you know.
We are committed to improving, is a way of saying we recognize that there was a problem with the process by which we receive and escalate these reports.
So, you know, good second PR statement on this issue from Apple.
And they also, apparently an executive went to meet the kid who found the bug.
I would love to know who that was.
Like, is Eddie Q. If Eddie Q. shows up on his way to work with his shirt untucked.
That'd be awesome.
Right after your house just screeches through a halt and say, hey, kid, heard you found a bug.
Good job.
Want to go ride in the Ferrari?
And then young Casey comes out and says, yes, please.
Why is it me?
Because you got to ride in your neighbor's Ferrari.
Oh, okay.
Fair enough.
You forgot that story that you've told twice in this podcast.
Did I ever tell you about the story?
It's so weird, though.
How is it that we all assumed it would be Eddie?
Shirt undone, shirt untucked.
Because that would be the funniest.
He doesn't have anything else to do.
He's not busy, right?
Oh, gosh.
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so i've got this macbook air i think i talked about it when i first got it and uh you know it's replacing the macbook air that my children destroyed one of my children more than the other not that you're angry yeah the old one was a 2011 and had magsafe and this is a laptop shared by two kids and they're constantly taking taking it and and you know from the charger and just yanking it off and putting it back on and now
We changed to a USB-C-only world, but now they have to deal with this USB-C connector, which for all its can't-put-it-in-the-wrong-way attributes still is much more problem-prone, let's say, for kids who don't care, than MagSafe because you have to kind of pull it straight out.
You can't yank it sideways, and it's just not the type of connector that I want to be plugged in and unplugged all the time.
So after I talked about the laptop and the various things on the show, I did get...
one of those like turn a usbc port into a magsafe like thing connectors we'll put a link in the show notes to the one i have uh it's a typical amazon product with a description that is a mile long usbc to usbc magnetic charging power cable charger adapter replacement for magsafe and brake safe compatible with macbook air 2018 new ipad pro google pixel 3xl samsung galaxy s9 plus and more is that all that is the that is the name of this product that's just the name that's not the description
it's from leonis tech or something but it's like you'll see lots of products that are like this now i've had this thing for i don't know whenever i got the 2018 macbook air whatever that show was a couple weeks ago a month ago so i haven't had it for a long time so i can't vouch for the quality of this thing i can't say that it's not going to burn down your house if you buy it and you know maybe it's going to flake out in a week uh i have no idea i do know that the little tiny nubbin you put in the usbc thing is
Seems like it's in there really good and I'm wondering how I'm ever going to get it out without like somehow prying it out, carry carefully with some kind of tool that's not going to scratch my laptop.
But whatever, nothing ever goes in those ports because we don't have anything that goes in those ports because nobody has anything that goes in those ports except for dongles.
So the only thing that ever, I think it's fine to just sort of dedicate that part to this.
And we've been using it.
And the other important attribute this connector has, it's a right angle connector because the place where the MacBook Air was, like the cable goes to the back of the desk, right?
So it goes to the side of the laptop from the back of the desk.
And I have a little thing that holds it so it doesn't fall down.
Anyway, it's been working fine.
Like it provides the attributes of MagSafe in exchange for this little nubbin on the side of my laptop.
uh computer i hope it continues to work fine uh but you know the cable is a little bit stiff that's probably the worst thing i can say about it but otherwise it's working and the kids are successfully able to plug and unplug it without really breaking anything so i have put yet another band-aid on my computer that already has a giant band-aid underneath the entire keyboard
Wonderful.
Yeah, I'm actually, I'm curious to hear how that works out long term because I also looked into if any of those, you know, fake MagSafe USB-C adapter things were good.
And when I looked, which was about a year ago, the conclusion I came to was that this is one of those product categories where everything is terrible.
You know, so like I just didn't get any of them.
But yeah, so if that works out, let us know.
Yeah, if something's going to be terrible about it, like a new out of the box, the only thing I can say is the cable was a little stiff.
Like it's like the kinks that are in the cable.
They don't straight.
It's a braided cable or whatever, but then didn't straighten out that well.
But the connection felt solid.
It never didn't.
It never failed to power the computer.
or anything like it just it just works exactly like you'd expect it to work now long term it could wear out or get crappy or start arcing or do something terrible so i have no idea because again with these sort of brands that i've never heard of with these really long descriptions always you know make me a little bit worried but it seems to be working fine so i'll definitely let you know if it catches fire please do all right marco speaking of usbc things tell us about your light up charging cable
Yeah, I think I mentioned this a while ago that I had just gotten it, and I just wanted to say that I've been really enjoying it.
So I have solved my main issue with the bad USB-C power brick transition, which was that we lost the little LED on the cable that told us whether our laptop was charging or charged by lighting up orange or green.
and uh company moshi m-o-s-h-i makes one uh for about 30 bucks that is a usb-c power cable just c to c and on one end of it it has an led that works exactly that way and it's not totally perfect for all devices because i i'm assuming that it distinguishes charging versus charge based on just like how much power is going through it a little bit or a lot
So some devices, it can maybe show the charged green state when it's actually still charging.
But for the most part, for computers, it works fine.
For iPads, for everything else, it works totally fine.
And definitely for every laptop I've tried it on.
And so it's wonderful.
So I now have...
light up charging cables back something that was standard on apple laptops until a few years ago and it's still it is exactly as useful as i remember it i'm very happy i went back to this so we'll put a link in the show notes to these moshi cables since you seem to be augmenting all of your naked robotic cores would you like to tell me about your screen protector on your ipad
Sure.
Yeah.
So when we last spoke, I was trying the paper-like screen protector.
And this was probably about a month ago now.
It's been a while.
And I said that I had one of the tempered glass fancy ones on the way.
And I have since tried them both.
I spent a lot of time with the paper-like screen protector.
I spent a little bit of time with the tempered glass one from some fancy company that is Japanese that everyone says makes the best ones.
I forget the name.
i gotta say i'm currently rocking a naked robotic core ipad pro and the funny thing is in the meantime our friend mike hurley on the connected podcast has started using the paper like kind of because i did and and he uses the apple pencil a lot more than i do and one of the benefits of it was that it provides a a much nicer texture when using the pencil
And he he sounds like he's similarly on the fence about it because it does make the screen look worse, but it makes it feel better.
I went back to just naked iPad after trying the tempered glass one I found actually even worse than the paper like that in pretty much every aspect.
It was harder to install correctly.
The resulting texture was not as nice.
It was much more harsh.
It felt more like sandpaper.
Um, it was, it was not a very nice texture in my opinion.
Uh, it was not nice with the pencil or touch in that way.
It just wasn't very good.
I, I only, I kept it on for like two days and I'm like, all right, I'm done with this.
Um, and I haven't yet put back the paper like because, you know, to make a matte finish, you basically have to make a whole bunch of tiny, tiny bumps that diffuse light.
And so what you, what it ends up looking like is a kind of slightly blurry film over the entire screen.
And so the screen itself ends up looking worse.
Um,
One big issue I had with it was when I would take it out of the house, when sun hit it, the glare was way higher on the matte screen than it was on the naked iPad screen.
And so it was actually harder to use in the sun also because of that glare.
I'd have to crank the brightness way up to even have a chance.
And then, of course, I'm using way more battery, and it still wasn't very legible in bright sun.
So I noticed how bad it looked more often than I appreciated how good it felt.
and the transition back to going you know naked again was rough because when you're used to your finger gliding smoothly over that wonderful feeling matte texture and then you go back to glass that starts out with no fingerprints on it so it has no greasy coating to help you move faster um it was actually unpleasant to use my ipad for like that first day like the transition coming down from a screen protector is really rough uh but
After a couple days, I stopped noticing and I went back to the old way of just using it the way everyone else does.
And while I'm not happy with how incredibly fingerprinty it is now, I'm not happy with the status quo of using it the normal way.
But I was more unhappy with the downsides of the screen protector than I am with the downsides of the regular screen.
So for now, even though I have an extra paper-like in the drawer that I can stick on at any time, I think I'm just not going to use it.
I think I'm going without it because even though the stock screen setup is totally flawed with how greasy and horrible it gets, and even though the paper-like does feel better and is better with the pencil...
Those were not strong enough advantages to make it worth its disadvantages for me.
That makes sense.
I'm somewhat surprised that both of you stuck with it even as long as you did, but it can't hurt to try, so I'm glad you did.
So what's the flaw in the screen?
How would you make the stock screen better?
Before the Apple Pencil, before the iPad Pro, the oleophobic coatings they would use on iPads and iPhones would not get as visibly fingerprinty as these do.
Ever since the Pro came out with the Pencil support, they have changed the oleophobic coating.
And I assume it's because the pencil wasn't good with the previous kind of coating.
Maybe it scratched the coating off or maybe the coating did weird things to the pencil.
Who knows?
But whatever the case, the old coating was not suitable to work with the Apple Pencil.
And so the new coating, it just doesn't seem as good at repelling oils.
And so it just gets really greasy looking really fast.
and it looks gross, and it makes content on screen kind of hard to see sometimes.
It's just a different way than a screen protector.
You've got to wipe it on your pants to just be able to see all this stuff on screen.
I can see the fingerprintiness when the screen is not on.
on mine but when the screen's on i don't really notice it that much i don't know i mean do you actually know for a fact that they changed the coding or are you just guessing because the screens look so different no i know for a fact it has changed for and it was it was pencil related i mostly see it when i'm scrolling content so like even if you're using it like especially if you if you're if you have a light background being split like a web page and you're scrolling you can see all the crap and grease that's staying still on the screen as you're scrolling the light content under it
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Angela Aarons is out at Apple, which took me by quite a bit of surprise, not to say that Apple is of the habit of running executive departures by me or anything, but I didn't hear any sort of, you know, rumblings and didn't see any smoke.
to indicate that this was coming.
Um, but Apple has said that Angela is leaving and that, uh, Deirdre O'Brien, who apparently was senior vice president of people, which I take to mean HR is now going to suck up retail as well, which seems like a bit of an odd pairing, but you know, whatever.
Um,
But Angela was there for about five years.
I have some different things that I'd like to talk about, but my initial reaction was that it was a bit of a bummer because to me it seems like she's a very, very, very smart woman who certainly has plenty of great experience and seemed to...
be making some really interesting changes to the Apple store.
And so my initial reaction was, well, oh, that stinks.
But then I thought, and we were in a couple of slacks where this was discussed.
I was thinking about how I do or do not really like going to the Apple store.
And we've talked about this before on this show, that for East Coasters going to the Apple store, it's kind of...
frustrating because there's no order to it and no lines and no places where you can go and find a cash register or anything like that.
So none of that necessarily was Angela's fault.
In fact, I think most of that predated her, if not all of it.
But I don't know.
It seems like it would be interesting to be able to tweak the setup a little bit.
And like I said, I have some other thoughts about this, but I wanted to give you guys a chance to have, I don't know, like an opening statement, if you will.
So, John, how do you feel about this?
Well, anytime there's any big executive news like this, there's always two obvious angles in the story.
One is to talk about the sort of palace drama or court intrigue or whatever phrase that I'm not pulling out of thin air that applies to this of like –
Why is this person leaving?
Were they fired?
Were they not performing well?
Why are they on their way out?
Whose power is ascendant?
What does it mean that the new person got the job?
Stuff like that.
Part of the reason we can have that discussion is kind of like the Netflix and Facebook and Google versus individual developer situation.
Yeah.
when you're a regular person and a regular employee and you get fired they just fire you but if you climb high enough on the org chart very very rarely are you actually fired even if they do want to fire you they let you leave in a way that makes it seem like you weren't fired so that's why we can have these discussions like is this person actually leaving to spend more time with their family or
Or is that just the phrase they use when they want someone to leave, but they're so important that they can't say, yeah, we didn't like the job this person was doing, so we fired them.
And it's easy to get caught up in that aspect of the thing, like the personal drama or whatever.
Palace intrigue?
Maybe that's... I'm getting closer.
But the fact is, we don't know any of that stuff.
We don't work for Apple.
We don't have any line on the executive.
Certainly, Apple's not going to talk about that type of stuff.
So we can speculate to some degree, especially about whether, you know, someone was...
sent on their way in some fashion or encouraged to leave because that does have some relevance to the future of the company and the direction of the company or whatever.
But the details, we can't really know.
Although I do find myself getting sidetracked in this thing and thinking much more so than the individual developer versus Facebook, Google, or Netflix situation, how incredibly unfair it is that the most important jobs with the most responsibility and the most influence on the lives of the most number of other people
get to have this graceful exit even if everybody hated them and they did a bad job they just that you know so we can't fire them well then what they would have trouble getting another job and what you know like like no matter what they do like you know i don't want to get say they're sexually harassing somebody but say but say they're just terrible at their job say they don't show up and they yell at people and they make bad decisions all the time and the company goes down the tubes it's like well but they're an executive
So give them multi-million dollar golden parachute and say, we thank this person for their service and they've done such a great job.
And that just rubs me the wrong way because it's like the exact opposite of the way it should be.
Like the person who has a manager who hates them for some reason that no one else can discern but gets to fire them with cause.
they get to everyone knows they were fired so when they get another job it's like oh yeah we'll totally tell them that we fired you from this job but the executive who has you know much more important job like they get the they get all the perks but they don't get the downsides like oh and also no matter how bad you do in this job you will leave rich and we won't even say that we fired you so I don't want to go I don't want to go down that tangent I don't think that's what happened here or whatever but anytime I see that it just strikes me as the opposite of the way things should be and it makes me very angry unlike
facebook google and netflix getting better treatment in the app store which seems like the way it probably should be and it's probably the best for everybody uh all things considered anyway that's i want to put that aside for now and just briefly say that the the other angle on this that is much more relevant to us who doesn't we don't have any connections to you know the higher ups in apple is let's look at you know so and i'm just leaving now how do you pronounce your last name errants
I thought it was Orantz, but I am not confident.
She's leaving, I assume, exactly for the stated reasons, although we have some other theories about that that we'll get to in a little bit.
But we can look back at her tenure and say, I don't know what her metrics were inside Apple.
Was she tasked with increase this number to this, increase that to that?
Or do like, we don't know if she did a good job according to executives, because what constitutes a good job?
Uh, you know, what, what's on her like a scorecard, another fun thing, another fun, uh, business term for market learning.
What's on her scorecard for the year?
I have, I have no idea.
Um, but I can say that as a person who goes to Apple stores, we can all have an opinion about have Apple stores gotten better, worse, or the same in her tenure.
What has she done that is externally visible and, you know, felt by customers to the thing that she was responsible.
She was responsible for retail, uh,
How is retail going?
And we can – I think we all know most of her big initiatives because she got a lot of keynote time.
Her initiatives got a lot of keynote time.
She did certain things to the Apple stores that Apple told us about a lot.
The town square kind of concept, the making the Apple store a meeting place, the real ramping up of the classes and everything that they give.
Today at Apple.
Yeah, today at Apple.
To some degree, slightly redesigning the Apple stores, right?
Yeah.
That's that's what she did during her tenure.
And I think we can evaluate that and say, do we like that?
Do we not like it or is it neutral?
And not worry about at all whether Apple was, you know, kicked her out or whatever.
Because I feel like there's no scenario in which Apple hated everything she did because they promoted it for like many years.
They weren't like, we hate all this stuff, but we're going to give you the number one slot in every keynote for like two years to talk about your initiatives.
They talked about it a lot.
I think the entire company was on board with all of her initiatives.
But were they good for the Apple store?
That's my question.
I don't know.
It's hard to say because it, to my eyes, a lot of these changes have also been coinciding or commensurate with whatever word I'm looking for.
It starts with the C with Apple becoming more and more and more and more and more popular with regular people.
And so it's hard for me to separate the fact that my local Apple store has gotten busier and busier and less and less fun to be in.
Is that because of Angela or just because Apple in general has many more users and to some degree many more products?
And it's very, very difficult for me to separate the two.
But something that I've heard a lot of people say, which seems odd to me that this is the time it's come up.
But a lot of people have been saying, and I agree with them, that it seems like a couple of years ago was the right time for Apple to add a whole bunch more stores in.
And they clearly haven't.
They've been redesigning a lot of stores.
Like my local store moved within the same mall a few spots to become bigger.
And I've heard a lot of people say their local stores have gotten bigger and prettier in many cases.
But it seems like there's definitely a pretty big appetite for more stores.
I've heard people in large metropolitan areas say this.
I've heard people in more rural areas say this.
As I've lamented on this show numerous times, Virginia is a
uh certainly a heck of a lot bigger than a hilariously small state like massachusetts and for two-thirds of virginia the closest apple store to these places which is four hours from the one near me is four hours away i totally gave away the punchline there that's okay uh somehow marco will edit that to make it sound good not really i don't think anyway yeah no you're stuck with that one that's right
The point is, though, a lot more stores would help a lot.
Now, was that Angela's decision not to open more stores?
Maybe.
Maybe not.
Are all these stores a lot prettier now?
Yeah, I'd say so.
Do they have other things going on there?
Yeah, certainly.
Today at Apple is new.
Is going to the Genius Bar very much fun?
No.
Was it ever really fun?
No.
But does it seem less fun now than it was in years past?
Probably.
I don't know.
And I have, again, more thoughts on this.
But before I go down the rabbit hole, Marco, what is your kind of hot take to start?
I mean, just looking at Angela Arons and what she did and why she might be leaving, it's hard to say because, again, we don't know what was her decision, what was not her decision.
These things could have been decided above or below her.
But I do think it is worth discussing the state of the Apple retail stores and the experience there.
The time that she has spent as the head of retail here,
has been easily characterized in a few ways of certain things changing.
So number one is the architecture has seen dramatic improvements.
Like the ones that have been remodeled, they look stunning.
They look incredible until you go into them.
And this can be a metaphor for so many things.
They look great, but they don't work very well.
There was a great post by our friend Dr. Drang yesterday about the Apple SVP changes and the retail, and he likened the latest retail era where things are looking great but not working very well in a similar way to when Johnny Ive took over software design in addition to hardware design.
Modern Apple software looks great, but...
But it doesn't work as well, UI-wise, as it used to.
And so I think we can summarize this with something you said earlier, Casey.
I don't enjoy going to the Apple Store.
And I would also question, do you know anyone who enjoys going to the Apple Store today?
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
even when it's packed full of people or maybe even especially when it's packed for people i'm thinking mostly of probably young people doing this i think there probably are people who still find that an exciting experience and you know the architecture itself is a drug you see people taking pictures of themselves by the the fancy location-based apple stores so i'm not to say that like the overall argument of like the store is getting better or worse not taking position on that quite yet but i do think there are people who enjoy the apple store way more than we do
Okay, so I mean, that's fair.
When I go to an Apple store, I'm going there for a purpose.
It's usually either to buy something, which I already know what I want and I just want to go buy it, or I need to get something serviced or something.
And when you go there with that purpose in mind,
It's really a pretty poor experience a lot of the time.
Not all the time, but a lot of the time.
It fundamentally comes down to overcrowding.
I think that seems to be the main issue, and Casey, I think you made a good point.
It does seem like they probably just need a lot more stores, and who knows why they haven't opened more.
I'm sure they have their reasons, but I think they have a significant overcrowding issue at many of their stores much of the time.
And you can see this for yourself if you try to make a Genius Bar appointment to get something serviced.
And you oftentimes can't get an appointment for like a week at least.
There's clearly scaling problems here.
And this goes from every level, from the Genius Bar or whatever the Genius Arbor is called now.
From that, whatever that is, that's a whole other thing, whether that was a big mistake or not.
Or from that to even just when you go into the store,
you are you're supposed to talk to the person up front which often isn't obvious because the person up front is often talking to somebody else already and you can just walk right past them and not even realize they were there because they have 900 doors when they're like the ones that were just the entire front of the store opens up right so you walk into any of the 900 doors you're supposed to go talk to the person in front but there's nothing saying that and it's often not obvious and the person often is busy doing other things what you're supposed to do is talk to that person and then they tell you oh go stand over at that table and wait for you know sarah
And you're like, okay, I don't know who Sarah is.
I hope this problem will be resolved some other way.
So you go over and you stand at whatever table you think they were waving you over to, but it was on the other side of the store and you could be off by one because it's a pretty far distance to just go off a hand wave.
So then you get waved over to the table.
You're waiting for Sarah.
And then you walk over and you're like, all right, looking around, there's like three people also hovering around who you think are also waiting.
You're not really sure what order you all got there in.
And eventually somebody with the store-colored shirt comes over who might be Sarah, and they're talking to somebody for a long time, and you're like, I don't know.
Do they know I'm here?
Am I next?
What the Apple Store really needs is an ancient innovation.
This is a solved problem.
Lines.
And the funny thing is, what they are doing with their freeform system here is basically creating a bunch of virtual queues around the store anyway.
They're just disorganized and confusing, and they're trying to pretend like they don't exist.
But what they're actually creating is a bunch of terrible lines that are really hard to figure out.
Well, these lines have a very important attribute, which is done in like Disney and other theme parks in a slightly different way, which is to intentionally not let you know exactly how long you're going to be waiting.
Right.
Having the line snake around so you can never see the full its full extent.
Right.
So if you think about the Apple store and we get back to the crowding thing in a second.
But if you think about the Apple store, if it was designed like a Target or a Walmart.
You'd have a whole bunch of registers and a whole bunch of lines.
I mean, you've seen Target where they double up the registers.
Like, not only do they do it parallel, but it goes deep so that each line feeds two or three registers, right?
To try to make the most efficient use of space.
And when the store is really slammed and all those things are running, the idea, as you're going around with your cart and you go past the checkout section and you see there's just massive humanity and you're like, oh, I better factor in an extra...
15 to 20 minutes to wait on all these lines right uh it you know it gives you the impression that it's going to be a long wait whereas when everybody's dispersed like this the store is so crowded anyway and you can't tell which people are there in a quote-unquote line and which people are just there playing with the iphones or whatever and so it's just like well the store is crowded but how many of these people a are even in line and b are in front of me in line uh it makes that it makes that question harder to answer like i think there are actually attributes of the system
That are positive as far as the experience that Apple's trying to provide.
We can certainly all see the negatives of it.
But to flip it around the other way, with the number of people that are there, they'd have to dedicate a huge amount of the store to lines.
And the store would look like...
instead of looking like a store that's really crowded like a party it would look like a place where if you go you know you're gonna have to wait a long time to get what you want whereas now when you see a crowded store you can guess that but it's not entirely clear what every person in the store is doing like i i can see reasons for them sticking with this despite the fact that every time we ever talk about the apple store all we say is please make a line because we're all from the east coast and we just want to know what order we're in right so i definitely think it is a problem but i've
I've thought about the other side of it to explain why they they do what they do.
And I know I didn't want to mention scorecards, but Casey did bring up the let's open more stores somewhere.
I don't know if it's on someone's scorecard, but somewhere inside Apple.
There is someone who is measuring a dollar per square foot because they always brag about it or other people brag about it like the Apple retail store makes the most money per square foot.
What they mean is given a store of this size, how much money leaves customers and goes into the store?
if you open more stores and they become less crowded your dollar per square foot probably goes down because you're not probably serving entirely new people what you are instead serving is people who have to drive less far to go to a store or you'll split the people from one big store and some will continue to go to the big store and some will go to the other store because it's closer to the game like it's not i feel like their dollar per square foot would go down it's
As far as I'm concerned, fine, make your dollar per square foot go down because the experience would be better because the store would be less crowded.
But maybe it's on somebody's yearly metrics to make sure the dollar per square foot goes up and opening new stores would make it go down.
So that's a nefarious or banal business reason for them perhaps not opening new stores.
And it might just be that
They're still trying to be strategic and cautious because the stores cost a lot of money and they don't want to open a big fancy one and have to close it.
I think they've closed, like, one or two Apple stores.
I think it was a big deal when they closed, like, the first Apple store that had ever opened up.
So I think not every place can support an Apple store, you know, and that's why they're all in these big cities and they'll end up being filled with people.
But getting back to what Angela Aarons did to the Apple store,
I in the end, I think her signature initiatives, the you know, the today at Apple, the classes and the idea of a town square and a meeting place are fundamentally flawed.
Like there is no situation in which an Apple retail store is going to become a town hall meeting place community thing for so many reasons.
First of all.
a community meeting place can't be owned by a private corporation like i know we all want to be touchy-feely and that's great but like that's not the definition of a public space a public space belongs to the public a public space is not owned by a giant corporation that allows the public to come into it right and there is a difference that the one that's owned by the private corporation can probably be nicer in some ways but everyone knows it's an apple store it's not your store right whereas central park does not belong to
God, please don't tell me Central Park is owned by a bank now, but I'm assuming Central Park is still not owned by a bank and everyone is in it knows it's their park.
Right.
And so it can function that role.
The second thing is if you want to make like a building, like all the Apple stores are some kind of building where they become like a community center and a meeting place and a gathering place.
You basically have to have food and drink like Starbucks can do it because Starbucks or bookstores that serve food and drink.
People can't come to your place and hang out and meet with each other.
I mean, they can, but they won't if there's no food.
Like Starbucks, I think, is the best example.
It seems like what they really wanted was to become another thing like Starbucks because Starbucks is a place where people go and meet.
And but that I think you're right.
I think it basically needs to be a coffee shop to do that.
Yeah, like Barnes & Noble is a great example where at a certain point, Barnes & Noble stopped being a bookstore that serves food and started being a food store that there's a bunch of books nearby.
Like they make all their money off of the food part because nobody really buys books, but you can get people to come and gather and buy a coffee every hour or so and sit there on their laptops and do their – right?
There's no way that Apple Store was ever going to get to the point, no matter how many classes you have, no matter how many like will show you how to do a cool thing switch.
And those classes are probably great.
And the people who go to them probably enjoy them greatly.
And I think they're an important part of Apple's thing.
But you're never going to turn that from a place where I go when I want to take a class.
to a let's all come meet at the apple store like that's it's it's a nice idea to have beautiful spaces that you build and keep clean and nice where people can come and use their cool products that you make to do creative things together but it's not going to happen like you're not you're not going to make this into
the dream of the town hall meeting place like and and all these things seem increasingly desperate trying to get people there's a reason for you to keep coming back to the apple store just just come to hang out we know you don't have to buy something every time you're here in fact we don't even have that many products you probably own all of them already anyway just come in and visit and maybe we'll talk about things we'll show you how to use stuff like there are so many people there that's you know the other thing if it's going to be that type of meeting place
You know, it's like Times Square could be considered a meeting place, but you're not going to go there on New Year's Eve because you're like, oh, forget it.
I know it's going to be a million people there.
Like, it's not a good time to go.
And the law of crowded places is like the idea of like, you know, the Yogi Berra.
No one goes there anymore.
It's too crowded.
But like,
If you take a survey of people and say, how many people are the buses too crowded in this city?
They'll all say, yes, the buses are massively overcrowded.
But if you actually measure how many people are on the bus, they'll be like, you know, 2% utilized.
It's the it's a it falls out of the natural thing.
Like when when it is crowded, more people are there to see it.
When it is not crowded, fewer people there to see it.
Therefore, most people will say it's crowded.
That's how crowding works, right?
So I bet there are plenty of times where it's dead at the Apple Store when everybody else except for Casey and Mark are at work.
You can go and get help right away.
Maybe there's seven people.
I think we wandered past an Apple Store.
I think when I got my iPhone 7, we wandered past an Apple Store where there was like...
10 people in apple retail shirts just twiddling their thumbs and we just walked in there and like hey got any iphone 7s and seven people scrambled like oh we'll get one just like there's nobody there they're just like instant service by you know two people went in the back to look for it one person talked to me like you know that's it's a very different experience when there are not a lot of people there but because people know that when i'm able to go there every time i go there i see that it's crowded and
It's not a place where I want to go.
I can't even get a coffee or a Danish.
So I think her signature initiatives, while high-minded and interesting, were never a good fit for the Apple store.
The only thing I can say is that maybe the classes were a good idea, but I don't think the physical infrastructure of the store...
is equipped to bear them even though the classes like take advantage of those dead times like it's a way to fill those dead times hey when nobody's there let's have classes with filled with retired people and marco and casey to learn about their products uh like it i see how it looks good on paper but it doesn't fundamentally change the experience of the apple store for most people for the better it makes a new class of people perhaps have an attachment to the apple store but i have to think that the vast majority of people who are who go to the apple store during those crowded times
are there to either look at the cool products buy a cool product or get something done to a product they've already bought and the classes are just sort of like a a nice to have filler to to populate otherwise idle things but the but the town hall thing or what is it town square thing and the community thing the community building is just never going to happen
I also wonder, like, you know, part of, I think, why they brought on Angela Aaron in the first place was because when Apple was warming up to the Apple Watch launch, they fancied themselves a fashion brand.
And they really wanted to become a significant fashion brand because they wanted the Apple Watch to be a fashion item.
And I think – and, you know, Angela Aarons comes from the fashion world.
And so, you know, one of the reasons that I think she might be leaving – if she's leaving voluntarily, it might be because she wants to get back to the fashion world because Apple's kind of like – I feel like whatever role Apple's going to have in the fashion world, they've had, and it's done.
And that, I think, also –
Whether it was her decision or not, that I think might play a big role in why she might be leaving now because Apple did fancy themselves as a fashion company with the Apple Watch.
They made the gold one at first and everything.
And I think what they have found with the Apple Watch is that it's way less of a fashion item and they are way less of a fashion company than they thought.
And it's much more like their other products.
It's a nice electronic gadget that people use in a wide variety of ways that is fashionable in the way that new gadgets can be fashionable, but is not a member of the world of high fashion.
You know, it's a different industry.
It's a different thing.
It works differently.
It needs to be marketed differently.
It needs to be sold differently.
And they pulled away fairly quickly from that with the watch.
I think their fashion phase or their phase of fashion aspiration is over.
And so Angela might not be as much of an ideal leader for their retail operations as she was when they hired her when they really had huge aspirations in the world of fashion.
Ben Thompson had some similar thoughts, but the only thing I think of is how much influence do you think she actually has?
I mean, like in the end, the product teams make the products.
I know she can control how they're displayed and how they're marketed and how you would best sell them to people.
But, you know, the timing definitely makes sense.
And when she when she was hired, everyone was talking about her and the Apple Watch and everything.
But in terms of retail.
I'm trying to think of anything that the store did that they wouldn't have done anyway and that wasn't basically dependent on the product itself being fashionable.
Oh, well, I don't know.
Maybe I'm missing your point.
But if you recall, when the watch was announced, but I don't think it was out yet, you could schedule a watch try-on and try on the different stuff.
Yeah, maybe.
be i remember that for the for the fancy watches and stuff like that i mean i'm not saying this theory doesn't make sense it totally does like that when she was hired no one was shocked because we're like oh we know apple's doing wearable stuff and this this makes perfect sense and you know and marco's right like they did figure out oh the but the watch is a fitness tracker like it's not so much a fashion thing but watches are still fashionable they still change all the straps all the time they still try to make them look pretty and i think
the body of the fashion aspirations of Apple are still carried by the products themselves and to much less degree by the retail.
And someone in the chat pointed out, if and when Apple ever comes out with AR glasses, we're going to be back into a new phase where Apple has to figure out what is, I mean, not that they're going to become a fashion brand, but the,
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
not only does it not have to not be ugly or embarrassing, but it's on people's faces.
So it better, it's like, it's much harder to do that.
You really have to hide the electronics and figure out a way to fit people's faces and you know, whatever.
And this is all about a product that doesn't exist, but if, and when that happens, um,
they could use some of the lessons from the watch but i don't think they need a retail person i don't think they ever needed a retail person with uh fashion expertise to to pull that off so i think you know it's not if she's getting pushed out of apple it's not because like their fashion time is over they're going to need that expertise again as much as they ever needed it uh but i don't i don't think they're uh dead in the water without it so i think i think it did learn a lot from the watch and all the come and have a special try on thing or just a general the general idea of like how you
how you treat customers who have to try something on how you how you sell a product to them how you make sure that they can be sure that they are getting the product that they want like that you can try all the different straps how you help them how you make sure things don't disappear from those tables you know how you make sure they don't feel rushed but guide them to the product that will make them happy yada yada yada like it's an extension of what they already do but it's slightly different i suppose
Yeah, I don't know what to make of it.
It is worth noting that there was a Vogue profile that came out about a week ago, which I thought was actually very interesting.
We'll put a link in the show notes.
And in that profile, it certainly didn't hint to me that she was one foot out the door, but who knows?
Maybe she already was.
She's not going to hint to that.
There was another aspect of the story that I saw elsewhere is that she has kids who are in college or just out of college or whatever, but they're in the U.K.,
and that's where she's going back to so she's been for for many years i think it was like for five years she's been separated from her kids because they went to uh college in the uk or university as they call it or whatever who knows what the hell they call it um but she she said she's going back over there uh so like there are you know going to spend more time with your family like and also as i think ben thompson also pointed out all of her stock options are like vesting now so like it's it's
There are many legit, boring reasons for her to decide, well, it's been a good run, I'm ridiculously wealthy, even more so now, and I want to go hang out with my kids.
That all actually... The going to spend time with your family actually makes sense in this scenario.
And maybe she's also missing her friends, and Apple has a high-pressure situation, and so on and so forth.
So I don't think there is... I don't have a read on it.
Again, we don't know what goes on inside there, but it doesn't seem to me that...
uh that she was pushed out for some terrible reason but it also doesn't seem to me that her signature initiatives were a slam dunk for apple um a couple of things that she's done i was going trying to go through all of the the articles i could to find what are people attributing to her her tenure as as apple retail
One of the things was trying to make it so there aren't lines outside the stores or the lines outside the stores aren't as big on launch days by having a pre-order system and everything.
That was another thing that made me think that Apple really doesn't like the idea of actual lines, like actual queues of people anywhere related to their stores, because that would happen outside the store before a launch.
Even though they make a big deal of it, it makes you not want to go towards the store when you see a line of people snaking out.
So reducing those by having pre-orders.
Someone in the chat said that she did or increased the in-store pickup of purchases online.
I think there's been a lot of positive initiatives that she's done.
But her signature ones, or at least the ones that she promoted that are the most sort of innovative and non-obvious...
I just think we're not a good fit for the Apple store.
So I'm not sad to see a different take on how Apple retail might be improved because none of her initiatives resonated with me personally, and I don't think they were a good fit with the store as it exists.
The only other thing I wanted to add was that an anonymous retail employee reached out to me and had some thoughts.
And one of the things that they said was that everyone they knew in their store and the surrounding stores, except for people pretty high up the chain, seemed to be happy that she was gone.
Now, this is just one individual.
Take this for what you will.
This is one individual who reached out.
I am not aggregating anything.
But the same individual said, you know, a silly example of what's been annoying is the dress code change over the last several years, which started as basically wear whatever the crap you want.
Just make sure there's an Apple shirt over it to apparently they have some sort of like quasi uniform.
Now, I can't say that I've noticed this personally, but I guess that, you know, a lot of the retail people are wondering how long until they basically look like Target employee clones, you know, with the khakis and the red shirts or what have you.
And then this individual had a lot of complaints that to me seemed to basically boil down to there was an increased focus on numbers within the store.
So silly examples like the retail employees used to always get some sort of Christmas gift.
And I guess they haven't for at least a year, if not a couple now.
this person said that there were considerably fewer in-store repairs and that the geniuses in the store basically just triage and then almost everything gets sent out to a repair depot to get fixed, which obviously dramatically increases turnaround time and it makes being a genius, I would imagine, a little bit less fun because all you're doing is, you know,
figuring out where you need to ship something.
And additionally, according to this individual, that geniuses were not quite as empowered as they once were to write off a deserving repair.
So let's say I've never had a problem with any of my devices, and I didn't put new RAM in my iMac, but it keeps shutting down spontaneously, and I come in within the first month of ownership.
In the past, they might be able to write something like that off and just be like, okay, here, here's a new iMac because you've been a loyal customer.
You've never had a problem before.
You're probably not trying to fleece us.
Here's a brand new iMac.
And I guess according to this person, that's not as easy anymore.
And then finally, they said that the raises have not been as good recently as they were in years past.
Again, who knows how much of that is Angela, but it seems like in summary, there's just a stronger focus on retail, which I guess in some ways is good.
But some of that focus is numbers related, which the retail employees, of course, didn't seem to care for.
And some of it is just kind of the touchy feely things like uniforms.
So take that for what you will.
Again, I'm not saying this is fact.
I'm just telling you one individual's perspective, but it's certainly I found it interesting.
Yeah, I've heard many of those same things from other retail people that basically the last few years have been characterized by a very much like optimization of the numbers thing with retail, which of course means a bunch of things that make the retail employees basically less well-paid, less happy, and more overworked.
I think this is a trend that has started from the day the Apple Store was created.
If you talk to anybody who's been at the Apple Store in the past five years, ten years, however long it's going all the way back to the beginning of the Apple Store, when the Apple Store first came out, it was super high-end.
The people who were working in the stores were paid a ton of money, were vastly overqualified for the jobs they were in.
It wasn't crowded.
Everything was the opposite of regular retail, right?
Yeah.
And over time, there's been a trend, probably a little bit bumpy, but generally a trend toward slowly, slowly, slowly getting more like regular retail, probably out of necessity.
Because like, why are we spending all this money?
Can we pay people less?
Can we get less experienced people?
Do you need to know that much stuff to be a genius?
Or can we just take anybody off the street and train them to know the five things they need to know or 500 or whatever it is like?
can we pay the employees less can we make them work harder can we make them more uniform like you know it's it's just a question of scale it's very difficult to especially since the people who are who are in charge of this are going to be measured on the same things it's very difficult to continue to be like this is totally different than every retail experience and you get a job at the apple store and it's much better than any other retail job and
We pay you tons of money, and it's relaxing, and you are empowered to do things, and you can wear what you want, and everything is nice, and no one's in a hurry.
That can't last forever because people are going to be somewhere.
Someone's going to be looking at a spreadsheet and saying, this is how much money our stores cost.
This is how much we bring in.
Is there a way to change that ratio, to squeeze out some more dollars?
Okay, we can squeeze out some more dollars.
Do we really have to be hiring these people so massively overqualified to be geniuses?
no no we could probably like institute a training program and hire people with less experience to be geniuses and then pay them less good we saved some money what could we do next like it just goes on year after year so like angela errant didn't make this happen she just came in at the tail end of a trend that continues and will almost certainly continue long after this right and so anytime there's a change you're hoping like this new person is going to change it now we're not going to get these ridiculous hours now we're going to
have more discretion at the genius bar now we're all going to get better raises and then when it doesn't happen you're like she just made it worse but she's just continuing a trend that has been going on and on it's very difficult to fight back against that unless you have massive support at the front end like tim cook probably thinks all the stores are beautiful and every time i go the employees are there are smiling and you know there's probably some some net promoter score for employees like what do you think how do you like working at the apple store and it's like well if they leave we can find more people because
In the end, Apple Retail probably is still better than most retail jobs.
I'm not saying Apple is now like Best Buy or Walmart or Target or whatever.
It is still probably better from the employee's perspective.
I bet the number of Apple Store employees who have to get food stamps is much lower than in, say, Walmart.
So they're still probably the best retail experience and probably the best retail employment.
but not quite as good as they were.
And I don't know how to balance this, because I understand if your job as a head of retail is to figure out where can we spend less money and get the same product, and where are we wasting money, and all that other stuff.
But that's generally what Apple has to fight against as a corporation, to fight all those instincts to...
in some ways hire the right people who will who will hold their ground who will remind everybody hey we're supposed to be better than walmart our products are supposed to be better than dell like all those things we talk about the reason we hold apple to a higher standard um i think angela probably did that in the areas that she cared about and maybe other areas continued on on the trend like maybe she maybe she got to do those things because she was good at optimizing the other things and
you know, repeat for all the other people who've been involved in retail.
One other thing I forgot to mention that accredited her was, we mentioned it before of like buying online and picking up the store, the merging of online and physical retail, which was an important optimization because it was so silly that they were separate.
And now it's nice that like when you buy something from Apple, all options are on the table, right?
You can buy it online and pick it up in a store, or you can get a repair.
You can do a repair online or over the phone, but then drop your thing off at the store to get it done.
I did notice when my wife got her watch fixed that they wanted to ship it out, and I'm like, I guess they don't want to do anything in the store anymore.
I think everything we've gotten repaired recently, except for the $30 battery replacements, has been a ship out type thing.
yeah it's increasing like how many things are ship out things watch i think watch stuff has always been ship out because you can't because you can't open it inside like i'm surprised they tried to repair it all and didn't replace it like and that makes sense from again from a numbers perspective like it probably is less expensive and the repairs are probably better because the people aren't rushed and and you know there's more room and like a nice clean factory type environment or whatever but the turnaround time is not as good for the customer so there's trade-off uh we didn't talk about the new person who got the job
uh not that we know much about her but it's worth mentioning and it's more and more of the tea tea leave reading uh the new person got the job as the head of hr who is not the former head of hr it's the head of hr who now also is the head of retail their title is like senior vice president of hr plus retail or something like that with an actual plus sign it's people john not hr
yeah i don't i've i had not been paying attention to deirdre o'brien much because i don't usually care about hr um i don't really know anything about her i guess we'll find out yeah i mean why would if you don't work for apple you probably don't know who their head of hr or sorry head of people is but she's been there for 30 years so she is a longtime person she was there when they their first retail ever it's gone i i don't doubt that she has the knowledge and experience to do this but the question a lot of people are asking is like
So she's got two really big, important, I mean, I guess, important jobs.
No, I guess they both involve people.
But, like, is this just somebody keeping the seat warm while they look elsewhere to hire some outside executive?
I feel like their track record of hiring outside executives is...
hit or miss for retail.
Even who's the original guy who is credited with all the wonderful things and they went off to try to save JCPenney but it didn't work?
Ron Johnson.
There you go.
I heard a really good podcast interview with Ron.
I think it was Without Fail on Gimlet, which we may talk about later.
I heard Ron Johnson talk about his tenure.
He seems like a nice guy and everything, but hearing him talk about his tenure, I realized how much
uh he was held aloft by steve jobs like in other words i'm saying anybody could anybody could have done that job but he was given a lot of rope and helped a lot by steve jobs decision making and taste that things could have gone disastrously worse if he wasn't in just the right environment right like i don't want to take credit away from him to say oh he didn't do anything because obviously you know he was important and did a good job but in his own retelling of his history at apple
Other people, especially Steve Jobs, featured very heavily, despite the fact that at a certain point Steve Jobs was like, look, I can't be involved with this anymore.
You just do something and figure it out.
Right.
So he deserves a lot of credit, but also maybe less glorification than I hear him receive is like the Apple retail wouldn't be what it was without Ron Johnson.
I think Jobs could have hired.
a large group of people and shepherded them towards the the same end results with a few exceptions where he really held his ground which is an example of what apple wants um so the broward person they hired i guess i didn't work out and that's a it was a quick departure and it's like okay well when something doesn't work it doesn't work fine and alert seems to be working fine as far as everyone concerned i still can't get away from the nag notion that despite
the entire corporation and Tim Cook buying into her vision that it, it still was a mismatch and wasn't resonating with people.
Like they, they wanted it to work out better than it did.
Like in the same way that the poor iPhone sales have the increasingly desperate calls to, uh, calls to action on the Apple homepage.
Every time they told me more about how, you know, today at Apple and the town square stores, which the chat room wants me to point out, we're not all the stores.
They were just doing that in certain locations and metropolitan centers.
But anyway, that vision of what the Apple store could and should be,
i don't i don't think it is what the apple stores are and will ever be and so that i feel like is a you know a fundamental failure so maybe apple is disillusioned with what she was doing or maybe they are still 100 on board and she just left to spend more time with her kids and do something different but either way this new person with two jobs i feel like that's that's too much responsibility for one person so that person is either keeping the seat warm or they need to be taken off of their hr job or something because you can't
Being in charge of all the employees at Apple and also being in charge of all retail at Apple, that seems like too much.
What is she, the new CEO?
Maybe he's promoted to CEO in Tim Cook and Rick Adair.
But I think they need a new head of retail because despite the fact that they all involve a lot of people and she probably has the skills to do both, I don't think there are enough hours in the day.
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So Steve Lowe writes, hey, what external drives do you use, recommend, and how long do you wait to swap them out?
For some time, I've used Seagate drives.
This is still Steve.
I recently started to use Western Digital drives again reluctantly after a major bad experience in college.
I try to rotate swap out drives every year or two.
I really want to go external SSD like a Samsung T5 or other, but I can't pull the trigger on shelling out the money to get a two terabyte one.
So what do you recommend?
I only use external drives for backups of backups of backups, so I don't really have any particular opinions about this.
Marco, do you have thoughts?
Not really.
It has been a very long time, over 10 years, since I've had a hard drive die.
um and and part of that is just because for a while there i would i would upgrade them to get a larger size after you know two to three years of usage and so it just wasn't it didn't keep them long enough for them to die yeah so it just wasn't long enough for them to die um i have however i like i've been running a nas with a whole bunch of four terabyte hard drives in it for a while now and like from for at least three years but
And I'm kind of surprised none of them have ever died.
I'm kind of like, I think I'm on borrowed time here.
But generally, like, you know, strategies you can use, you know, that obviously is a value strategy of just like, just buy a new one every like two to three years and you can be pretty sure that your odds are very good that it won't die.
Other strategies you can use things like don't buy two hard drives at the same time.
Like if you're, if you're placing order, if you need multiple drives, buy them from like three different stores or buy them.
If you're going to buy them all from the same store, buy them like three different weeks.
So that way you get different batches of the drive.
So you don't all have like, in case something was a little bit off about one production run or one batch of a drive, like the one day it was made, you minimize your chances that both of your drives are going to be part of that batch.
Is this like the advice about not buying a car that was built on Friday?
Yeah, right.
The problem with both of those theories is you don't know how the batching works.
You could buy things three months apart and they can come from the same batch.
Yeah, it's all about odds, really.
But the biggest thing, which one of you has put in the show notes, is to look at data that is larger than what you have anecdotally.
And my favorite source of this is the Backblaze occasional blog posts where they will talk about hard drive failure rates.
Backblaze buys and uses a lot of hard drives because they're an online backup company, of course.
Frequent sponsor of the show, by the way.
Anyway, so they buy a lot of hard drives and they publish about maybe once a year, I think, they publish failure rates by brand and model of the hard drives they use.
And granted, Backblaze's usage won't exactly be the same type and pattern of usage that any other user might be doing, but it is good to see these high-level trends from a very, very large install base.
And so basically, buy what Backblaze tells you is pretty reliable.
That is the best I can tell you.
The reputations that brands have over time, they are not stable.
They shift with different model lines are more or less reliable than others.
Sometimes one brand will have a really bad model line, like the IBM Death Star ones, that'll just ruin their reputation forever and make them sell their whole business to Hitachi.
But for the most part, brands go in and out of reliability.
Check big data sets like Backblaze if you want to actually know what to buy.
You're reminding me about the Death Stars.
The worst thing about those is their price performance was amazing.
That's why everybody bought them.
That was the last time I had a hard drive die.
It was an IBM Death Star because it was a great hard drive until it died.
Yeah, everyone got them.
They're like, this is the obvious winner.
This is the best hard drive.
Everyone should just get this one done and done.
And then they died like, oh, well, you know.
But for anybody who wants to know, it's called the DeskStar 75 GXP series.
And I had the 60 GXP, which came out like a half year later, and those were also very unreliable.
Yeah.
The reason the Backblaze thing is important to look at, one point you already brought up is that to remember that Backblaze runs these things in like a data center doing...
running their product which is almost certainly different than your access pattern exactly and you might think it's tough it's like it's harder than my access pattern because it's so much more access maybe maybe not depending right but it is a really good data set just to give you an idea of like they in the 2018 thing that we'll link in the show notes like for each model they say how many drives they got and some of them they only got a few of them because they're new whatever but like
A couple ones in the middle like this particular Seagate drive, they have 14,000 of them.
They have 24,000 of those drives.
They have a lot of hard – the sample size is large, right?
The other thing that I want to point out is – and I think Steve's question reflects this.
As consumer humans with low visibility into the world of hard drives –
and you know as people that hold grudges you tend to be like i always buy western digital drives or i never buy secret drives because i had a problem with the prayer if you look at back of blaze's stats the reason you want to look at these is because the there is the brand there isn't like no best brand you have to look at the exact model even sometimes you'll see like the reliability of like the 10 terabyte versus the 12 terabyte one can be different significantly it's
like this is the same drive from the same manufacturers different capacities how could they be that different you have to look at the exact model number which they give you in here to look at it so don't say like i always buy western digital drives because they're the best go start by brand and look at western digital and you'll see a wide variance wider variance within western digital than between you know the top drive so pick your exact model based on the reliability here don't say looks like seagate has the best drives i'm just going to buy a seagate and then go off and buy something that's a seagate on it
That is the important lesson of the Backblaze thing, by looking at these huge differences in specific models from the exact same manufacturer.
Oh, the IBM drives.
I remember those.
I used mine and enjoyed them and got rid of them just before they died.
I took all my data off them.
So I felt like I rode the Death Star wave and I was happy because they were great drives.
And I was just like, all right, I'm not pushing my luck here.
I got to get all my data off that.
And then I used it as a spare drive and then it died.
I'm like, success.
I'm almost positive I've told this story on the show before, but it's been a long time.
When I was in college, because I was super cool, I had a, I think it was a Toshiba Pocket PC PDA.
This was after Palms had mostly fallen out of favor amongst nerds.
And the particular Toshiba I had, it was like a 740 or something like that.
I don't know.
It was one of the first ones that had Wi-Fi internal to it.
And it had an SD card or no, not a, what was it?
Compact flash.
There you go.
Compact flash card slot.
And since dad worked for IBM, he was able to find himself and then give to me a micro drive.
Do you remember these?
These are what powered the iPods, if I'm not mistaken.
Yes.
And so it was a literal platter hard drive that was the size and interface of compact flash, which was kind of the SD card of the day.
And so I had a one gig micro drive in my little PDA that I loaded full of MP3s.
And oh, man, was I a total badass at the time, walking across campus with my with my quasi MP3 player.
This was wet back when the Rio was like the new hotness.
And so it was very weird to see somebody plugging into anything but a disc man because I'm old.
and I just remember those days, and I thought I was so cool.
In any case, moving on, Michael Heron writes, Hey, how does this reopen Windows when logging back in feature work?
Coming from Windows, this is incredible.
It restores my terminal buffers, open documents, browser tabs, etc.
Is there any interesting history to it?
And if you're not familiar, for some reason you're not a Mac user, basically what happens is when you shut down a Mac, you have the option of telling it to reload everything pretty much as you left it.
And
By and large, as Michael's saying, most everything will come back exactly as you left it, which is really, really surprising.
So I'm guessing if we're looking for Mac history, we need to turn to John.
John, tell us what's going on here.
So this feature, actually, this whole idea is near and dear to my heart.
I think the second blog post I ever made to my old Fat Bits blog at Ars Technica was on this exact topic of state preservation.
That was a long time ago before a lot of these APIs existed.
The way it works on the Mac these days is...
The OS itself has the feature you just talked about that asks you, you know, it looks like you're logging out.
Like, when you log back in, do you want me to reopen all the stuff that you had opened before?
And you can say yes or no, and there's a preference for that.
When you crash, it gives you the option because it doesn't want to keep reopening stuff that are causing crashes.
So it says, hey, it looks like you just crashed.
Do you want me to reopen stuff, yes or no, regardless of what the preference is that will prompt you for that.
But then there's the application side of this, where Apple has a whole bunch of APIs, Cocoa APIs and various other, maybe they were even dated back to Carbon.
specifically made to handle state preservation and restoration of course they have tons of this in ios is how ios has always worked because you don't even know when your app has been killed in the background the whole point of an ios app is when you relaunch you're supposed to bring it back to where it was where they left off to maintain that illusion but a lot of those apis also came to the mac and it really does depend on the specific mac application how they do that now the mac being older than the iphone by a lot uh
uh has a long history of mac applications implementing these features themselves before apple ever did any features any apis or any os integration at all good mac applications would have like a preference or a setting or whatever that says hey when i launched you want me to open up all the stuff i had open last time and then when apple added apis for this newer applications use the apis older applications may have kept using their custom stuff um some applications never did any of this stuff at all but it is a sign i think has always been a sign of a
that it at least has the option to restore its state to just how you left it.
Sometimes you don't want that, and it's nice to say, no, don't do that.
When you start, I want you to be fresh, right?
But if that's what you want, good applications have always done it, and it's easier now than ever to do it because of all the APIs and OS support that Apple provides.
And I'm, of course, a big proponent of that because if state is preserved and restored extensively, as extensively as possible,
It encourages you to manipulate that state, to put things where you want them, to open all the documents that are related to this project.
It's more efficient to have the insertion point and the selection and everything, every part of the application exactly where you left off.
To be able to just quit the whole application, log off, restart, do whatever you want.
not having that feeling like oh i'm just gonna lose my place in everything like i had everything all arranged i was doing all the stuff i got a web browser open and i'm editing this thing i'm building this over here i got a terminal window and like everything and i remember that highlight and i put a mark over here so i know how to get back to that spot and like and i just can't even bear the idea of having to log out and back in or restart for a system update or something like that because i'll lose everything i'll lose my place i'll lose all my state there's still the mental aspect of it that you may lose but i love the idea of that stuff being restored and as good as it is
it is not good enough as far as i'm concerned because there is lots of smoke and mirrors with smoke state restoration like when you log back in the os saves basically pictures of all your windows of what they look like and it shows you the pictures but those are not your windows those are pictures of your windows if you try to do anything with them you'll quickly see a little spinner appear over them that you'll see the spinner anyway that says yeah this is a picture of what your window looked like before i really hope the application that's behind this
we'll restore this window to exactly the state but you can't manipulate it yet because we're still launching that application so just cool your jets and hopefully everything will come back to the way it was uh so state restoration takes time it is not up to the standard even of ios i think ios applications do a much better job because it's been the ios convention rule and practice with apis from day one is that hey if we kill you and you come back come back to where you were because that's
we don't want people to know that you're killed.
Or in like the pre-multitasking days, every time someone hits the home button, you're gone.
And when they go back to you, you better be where you left off because otherwise it'll feel really weird, right?
So iOS has a leg up here, but like I said, great Mac apps have always done it.
So anyway, I hope that answers whatever questions and whatever interesting history you think is behind it.
But I just want to further endorse the idea of this because, you know, I'm not going to go off on a rant about the spatial finder, but I think this is
A key feature of an efficient working environment is the ability to do this when you want it.
And by the way, even Apple's apps sometimes have a preference to this.
So for example, Safari has a thing that says, what do you want me to do when I launch?
If you don't know that feature's there, go into Safari Preferences and pick the option that says like,
reopen the last windows they were open or whatever because even if you pick the os feature of like bring everything back to where it was if you quit safari and relaunch it the preference i think the default of the preference is like just open a new window or show favorites or some stupid crap change it to the state preserving one which chrome does by default uh if you've never tried it in safari try it and see if you like it i i obviously do
All righty.
And then finally, Alex Kadis writes, Hey, Marco, what do you think about Spotify's acquisition of Gimlet?
And what will that mean for the future of the podcasting industry?
Are you still involved with them?
Let's start by, if you don't mind, providing a little history and context for me.
And then if you wouldn't mind answering Alex's question, please.
Sure.
Yeah.
So anybody who listened to the early season of Startup probably heard an episode where I was on it saying that I was going to invest some of my money in Gimlet.
And I did.
So I'm an investor in Gimlet.
That being said...
I'm a pretty hands-off investor.
So I really have not been, you know, I've never even been to their office.
I've met with them, I think twice in the last five or four years since it's been.
Um, and I don't, I'm very hands-off cause I just, you know, I have my own stuff going on here and I don't have time to be very active with other people like that.
So, um, and I don't even know if they would want me to.
So anyway, so I, I,
I am an investor, but I don't have any inside information.
The only thing I know about this acquisition is what has been publicized.
I literally had no advanced knowledge of the deal.
I learned about it in the press like everyone else.
And the only thing I know are things that Spotify and Google might have said publicly.
So people have been asking me all day what I think about this.
And admittedly, I will make some money from this.
And so my opinion is probably colored by that to some degree.
But I don't think this is going to be a huge deal for the majority of the podcasting world.
People are freaking out a little bit.
And I get that because I often would do that too when there are signs of...
Big business taking over podcasting.
I don't like that, and that makes me nervous whenever it happens.
But I don't think this is going to end up having major effects like that.
And I'll explain why.
So first of all, Gimlet, they produce some really big shows.
And one of the things people suggested would be a problem here would be what if Spotify locks down their shows and makes them Spotify exclusives that you have to listen in Spotify.
You can't listen in other RSS based podcast players anymore.
Gimlet has come out right and has come right out and said they are not going to lock down their existing podcasts, but they will also be making exclusive content for Spotify.
That sounds a little good, a little scary, but Spotify already has exclusive shows.
This is not the first time they're going to have them.
Spotify has a pretty major presence in the podcast space now, and they have exclusive shows already.
Gimlet also has already been producing a lot of podcasts for other companies.
When you think about what's a Gimlet podcast, you probably think of the five or six big ones, but they also have been producing podcasts for other companies as a large arm of their business.
That being said, this is a little bit different in that...
Creating exclusive shows that are exclusive to Spotify is now a button they can press that will increase Spotify memberships on command.
And whenever companies create a button they can press to increase a key metric of their business, they can say, oh, we're not going to push that button too often, don't worry.
But no company can maintain that long-term.
Eventually, they're going to start pushing that button over and over again.
And no matter what their intents are now, that's just a thing that happens in business, regardless of everybody's good intentions.
So...
I do expect a lot more of this content to become exclusive to Spotify over time.
Maybe not the existing shows because they have said they don't plan to do that, but probably more of the new shows.
Again, I don't know what their plans are.
I'm speculating here.
The other thing is that there are other big services that combine public podcasts with exclusive audio shows.
We don't usually hear about them, but they are out there.
Audible does this.
Stitcher does this.
TuneIn has this.
SoundCloud is a big one.
You can host a podcast on SoundCloud that is public, but you can also not set up your channel on SoundCloud that way.
And a lot of people publish on SoundCloud.
They think they're publishing a podcast, but they're actually just publishing like a private SoundCloud channel that does not have an RSS feed and can't be subscribed to in a podcast client.
SiriusXM, you could even say, and talk radio stations do something like this in the sense that they have podcast-like content that is exclusive to their service, right?
So...
There are these other major services that exist.
These all have big name exclusive audio shows, exclusive to them, that have substantial followings.
These have all coexisted with the open world of podcasts.
Now, I don't call these podcasts because if you can't play an audio show in any podcast app out there, it's not a podcast.
They can call them whatever they want, but...
If it's a podcast, it plays in Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Cast, Castro, any podcast app somebody could make today that reads RSS feeds and can play in Clojure files, that's a podcast.
If it can't play in that kind of app, it's not.
But anyway, so all these big services have coexisted with our world, with exclusive content blending in with our podcasts.
And
And it's been okay so far.
We have our world.
They have theirs.
Nobody has posed any fatal threats to anybody else so far.
This is a little bit different, though, in that Spotify now has a lot of power in podcasting, and they've gotten it very quickly.
Spotify only launched podcasting, I think, less than a year ago.
It's been pretty recent.
They're accumulating share very quickly, and
That's probably going to keep going up because Spotify is huge.
But as they've accumulated the share, I think it has been mostly additive.
It is mostly adding new listeners to podcasts, not like a whole bunch of people switching from Apple podcast or overcast or pocket cast to Spotify as their podcast client of choice.
So I'm not so worried about it there, but they do have a lot of power.
And the fact that they have a lot of power and run their own proprietary lockdown ecosystem that is not podcasting, that does give me some pause.
But the world of standard open podcasting
has faced a lot of large, well-funded challenges over the years.
And it has proven every single time so far to be remarkably resilient and to outlast all of them.
This world of podcasting that we live in, that we publish an RSS feed, and any app can download it and can play the files, and there's no intermediary necessary, that world...
has existed for a long time is very strong very diverse and exists mostly independently of any particular giants nobody can stop us from making shows like this and nobody can stop standard podcast apps from playing them and nobody can stop you all the audience from listening that is the beauty of this ecosystem
so we will be fine as long as you the listeners as long as you stick around we'll be fine i think the concentration of power thing is the the key one here so lots of big players have come and gone but like it's as as they consolidate and as like the big players get bigger than they previously were there is kind of like a critical mass point that i find worrisome um so apple is already at the critical mass point but as we
pointed out in the past they have been nice to us they have benign neglect or just you know general niceness like whether they don't see a strategic or don't want to lock it down or just don't care or whatever they have the most important podcast index uh and they uh continue to basically not be evil uh and not try to uh you know
become the masters of podcasting and lock everything into an apple only ecosystem yada yada yada right spotify is big enough that that they're probably the biggest the biggest player in the audio space i feel like they're bigger they have more customers than audible they're bigger than any other big company that's tried to come into the podcasting space and they're acquiring popular original content they could reach that critical mass where suddenly being in the itunes podcast index is uh
you know only at best equally important to being the spotify one but maybe less so because they have the people like and the podcast will go where the people is and if they if they amass enough power and enough users it could be that like yeah you could do have an independent podcast but if you ever want anyone to listen to your podcast you have to be on spotify and once you're in spotify they have you right that's what we're all afraid of i think is letting any one player with ambitions to own and control the content of podcasts which apple thus far has not had they don't have that ambition
If that player gets so big that they become synonymous with podcasts and that if you want anyone to listen to your podcast ever, you have to be in that thing.
And the resiliency of it is kind of like the resiliency of the open web where the web is open.
Nobody owns it.
It's the platform nobody owns.
We can all make web pages.
It's great and everything.
But it's possible to subvert such an ecosystem if you get big enough.
Witness Facebook and Google where –
Even though it's open and even though Facebook and Google are probably more open about what they do on the web than Spotify is in relation to podcasting, nevertheless, the web becomes Facebook for a majority of people.
And you get to the point where it's like, well, if you want anyone to see anything you're doing, you have to be on Facebook.
I really hope we don't get to that place because I don't want to go there.
But that's why I don't really feel good about this move at all.
That is definitely a risk.
Ever since launching Overcast, I've talked about that risk of any one podcast app getting so much market share among listeners that you have to play ball with them, especially when that one podcast app is...
not based on the open standards when it is its own walled garden and it has its own like you have to add your podcast to it to participate in it because it is not playing things off your off your server it is copying things to its own infrastructure and playing things itself and and like you know doing everything in its little walled garden that is not actually podcasts that does worry me quite a bit and that is my concern with spotify big time um
I don't, though, I don't think that the Gimlet acquisition is going to be a major factor in whether that comes to pass or not.
You don't think the original content, having high quality original content that people want is a draw.
It will get more podcast listeners to go there.
Oh, sure.
But they already had that.
And they're producing even more of it.
And these other platforms that, you know, like Audible has their own stuff, Stitcher, Premium, like,
Yeah, but Gimlet has good stuff.
And even if they already have good stuff that is just as good, now they have more of it.
It's like Netflix buying up talent to make good shows and movies for them.
You reach a sort of a critical mass point.
We just never get there of where...
everyone's just assumed to have a Spotify account on a Spotify player and all of a sudden Overcast becomes, oh, I have to have a second app to listen to podcasts.
It's stupid because the Spotify one doesn't play open podcasts or something.
They don't even need to take control over it and re-host it.
They could be entirely open but just say, oh, terms of service, we get half your money if we even list you in your index.
And by the way, if you're not in our index, you're invisible because the iTunes index is gone because Apple got bored and so we're the only index that matters.
And by the way, you can't scrape our index to make your own.
There's lots of terrible scenarios for podcasting that I see coming out of this, and I really, really hope Spotify fails to be successful in podcasting after they give Marco all their money.
I definitely do share a lot of those concerns.
I really do.
But again, you look at Stitcher Premium.
Stitcher Premium has been around for a while.
It is a pay service that's an add-on to the Stitcher.
Stitcher is now, I think, mostly a standards-based podcast player, but they also have this premium service that has a whole bunch of big-name shows put in their archives or their early releases there or whatever.
stitcher premium is a pretty big deal in absolute terms but it has it has had basically no effect on the world of podcasting like it it has not affected us at all it is not it has not drawn people over to stitcher in mass like yeah they don't have critical mass
Right, but they could.
They have very strong exclusive content there, but it hasn't happened.
It hasn't caused problems.
They have people with very big followings who have stuff exclusively on Stitcher Premium, and it's been fine.
Again, I am worried about Spotify's control over podcasting from a market share perspective.
But I'm a lot less worried about any particular exclusive content causing the entire balance of things to shift.
Because we've had other big services with strong exclusive content, and that hasn't happened.
If the next serial comes out on Spotify only, I'm going to be worried.
You should find that link to the URL.
No, here's the thing.
If the next serial comes out on Spotify only, it won't become the next serial.
So Spotify has a lot of customers.
Yeah, but you know what?
There's also a lot of podcast listeners who aren't Spotify customers.
I don't know.
Anyway, there was a podcast you were on.
It was a podcast with Lex.
What was the name of that?
The Wolf's Den.
Yeah, we should find that episode for the show notes.
If you want to hear Marco talk more about this, in the context of Stitcher and not Gimlet, but I think it's relevant, it's worth listening to that because I think you did a good job of voicing...
the the concerns of podcast producers and listeners to some degree but like if you if you're just a podcast customer you're like well i'm already a spotify subscriber so i think this is great what do i care i don't care about the economics of podcasting like but there's there's a reason you know people who create podcasts don't want this to happen and probably as a listener you probably don't want it to happen either this kind of concentration of power is because
All these situations are a place where the player that gets critical mass inserts itself financially and in all other ways, like user experience-wise and everything.
They insert themselves between the listener and the creator.
That's where the big bucks are.
YouTube, for example, is between you, the viewer, and the creator.
And YouTube has critical mass.
And if you want people to see your video, it is very difficult to get that done if you are not on YouTube.
And anything that inserts themselves there has different motivations than the creator and mediates that relationship to the benefit of themselves, not to the benefit of the creator, and also not to the benefit of the viewer.
So there's money being siphoned away, and there is experience that's getting worse on both ends.
And the beauty of podcasting is thus far, like the open web,
Yeah.
Yeah.
nobody likes middlemen or middle people but probably middlemen like that's that's what we're fighting it it misaligns incentives it you know it sucks money out of an ecosystem to you know from the people creating them to the people who are facilitating but there's no facilitating that's required for podcasting podcasting does not need help getting audio to customers at all at this point like
it's fine it's a thing we can do if you have a phone you can choose from 20 different applications they can all get you podcasts i swear it works and those applications are probably easier to use than signing up for spotify or whatever so like maybe it's you know maybe this is inside baseball and it's like hearing a bunch of podcasters complain about podcasting but like
It will be worse, not just for us, but also for you, listener.
And so that's why I think you should listen to Marco argue with Lex about this very issue on that podcast.
Yeah, and if you care about such things, use the open podcast ecosystem.
Use an app.
I don't care if it's my app or someone else's.
Use an app that is part of that ecosystem, that doesn't try to lock things away for itself in some kind of proprietary thing.
So basically everything except Stitcher, TuneIn, Spotify, Google Podcasts, anything else, any other podcast app.
Apple Podcasts is actually a very good citizen of this ecosystem.
Pocket Cast, Castro, there's a whole bunch of podcast apps out there now in addition to Overcast that are part of this ecosystem.
So I don't care if you use my app or someone else's, I very much encourage you
If you want this open ecosystem to continue, and I think you do, use an app that is part of it instead of an app that is fighting against it.
Oh, no.
I mentioned before YouTube as an example, and you may be thinking, oh, you said it's going to be worse for me as a viewer or as a listener.
Like, how is YouTube bad for me?
I love YouTube.
I go there.
There's cool videos.
I have lots of fun.
YouTube is great for customers.
It's an awesome site.
I don't understand how there's anything bad about YouTube.
Maybe it's bad for the creators, but I don't care about that.
I just want my videos.
It seems like it's great for me.
There was a recent example I heard on – I think it was the most recent episode of Hello Internet –
uh if you want to hear people creators complain about youtube uh listen to hello internet uh although you might have to find the episodes where they actually talk about that but anyway a very recent example is uh youtube has a feature called annotations to let you put things over the video to like highlight regions and have you click on them and go off to some related content or whatever i think you could also put like text and i don't know i don't know how the annotations work i don't do that for my videos but um
Feature has been there for a really, really long time.
And YouTube sort of put it on ice and said, we're not going to really let you make any new annotations.
But don't worry, all your old annotations will continue to work.
And then more recently, they said, yeah, you know, your old annotations, those are going away, right?
Because as the intermediary, as the company that has inserted itself into the middle or has always been in the middle between, you know, the creators and the viewers, they don't want to support or have or use that feature.
It's counter to their corporate strategy or whatever.
Hundreds, probably thousands of people, certainly thousands of people, have annotated their videos and put them up on YouTube.
They did work and created content that's part of their creation with those annotations on them.
And because it wasn't convened anymore for the middleman, all that work is gone.
And people who are viewing those videos get a worse experience because if you come to a video and the person in the video is saying click here to see whatever and you can't click there or there's nothing to click or clicking there does nothing, which has been true since mobile came along because they didn't bring annotations to mobile either.
That's a worse experience for you as a viewer.
So, yeah, it's worse for the creators because the video is worse, but it's worse for you as the viewer.
There are thousands and thousands of very, very popular videos on YouTube that used to have annotations that don't anymore.
That is not a choice that those thousands of creators would ever have made on their own.
And it's not good for you, the viewer.
That is just one of many examples where when there's someone in the middle of this relationship, they will act in their best interest, which is not the interest of you, the viewer, and not the interest of the creator.
So it's pretty terrible.
And, you know, YouTube is a great counterexample of like, we never really had an open website ecosystem for video for a variety of reasons.
I think we've discussed in the show in the past, but we do have a podcast and God, just please let us preserve it.
Amen, brother.
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Eero, and Molecule.
And we will see you next week.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
Accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
It was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
And if you're into Twitter.
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-
Accidental Tech Podcast So Long
John, you punted last week.
You teased at least your hosts.
I don't know if this made it in the release show.
Probably not.
But you said your gas station has been updated.
What does that mean?
Did it get gas OS 5?
Yeah, it might as well have.
It kind of took away a fun little, I don't know, homey feeling.
So this is my local gas station.
It's the one closest to my house.
What's a gas station?
yeah oh god it's a place where i can put 300 miles of range of my car in like two and a half minutes um and it and for a while i knew that like one of the pumps like the the little i have the it's a mobile station i have a little mobile speed pass you guys remember that that's still a thing
Yeah.
Like it was, it used to be like, it's like a little dongle.
It looked like a little, like I think a crayon and break off about an inch of it.
And it would go on your key chain.
It was a little like, you know, about the thickness of a crayon and maybe an inch long.
And you would just like proximity.
You just like hold it up to the pump, like a little spot that had on the pump.
You hold it up by the logo and the logo glows.
Like it's activated.
It was like NFC before NFC basically.
Yeah.
And you didn't have to take your wallet out.
So you could gas up your car with just your keys.
If it's on your key chain, you turn off your engine, take your keys with you, smack the keys against the thing, and then you're fueling, right?
Which I loved.
This magical thing where you add 300 miles of range to your car in five minutes, you have to pay for it?
If I ever catch up to the cost of your car, I'll let you know.
um so anyway i i'm using the speed pass i would and it's a great whoever came up with that idea at mobile was really smart because i would seek out mobile stations just for the convenience i have a credit card i can dig it out of my wallet i can slide it in the thing and slide it out after i figure out how which way the magnetic strip goes and i can type in my zip code because i'm doing gas at a different place like i can get it done the other way but i love the convenience kind of like apple pay doesn't seem like a big deal but it's so convenient you really want to use it thus casey's quest forever to find
all of his favorite junk food stores to uh to support apple pay which is going well going well for him well i mean to be fair like i remember from my time so long ago at gas stations anything you could do to touch fewer things would be a bonus yeah although my gas station is very clean they kept it but anyway i knew one of the machines didn't the speed pass didn't work and it hasn't worked for years so i just didn't want to go to that pump or whatever and just felt like oh i this is my gas station i know the quirks right i know i know the best way to get in the pump and go anyway um
Um, so they replaced all their pumps and I, you know, I went out of the pump like, this is great.
Brand new pumps everywhere.
Now I can go to that other one that I never go to because everything's brand new.
So everything will work.
So I go to it, get out of the car and there's no place for me to put my speed pass.
I tried shoving it against the pump in a couple of places that look like they might be it.
Nope.
None of them were it.
Um, but I did see the thing that we're all now familiar with, uh, I guess probably like the industry standard, like symbol for NFC where it shows like the oval with the, uh, sort of wifi fan type thing in it.
right and it was clear that they had nfc type payments uh but i was still looking for the speed pass thing because yeah i have my phone and it's with me but it was in the back of the car i don't take my phone out of the car like i put it in a little place where you put your phone in the car place you know everyone's either they have a holder or there's a little rubbery area like that you know that's where my phone is or even if it is in my pocket i don't want to dig out my phone well so you just sit there pumping gas just staring into space like it's 1995 like what what is this
No, speaking of that, for a long time, Massachusetts did not have the little thing that locks the little flicky thing.
They didn't have that, I guess, but probably by law.
They've brought that back a few years ago.
I'm like, oh, thank God.
Anyway, this is just to activate the pump thing.
I have my keys.
I have to have them in my hand.
I just turned the car off.
I would like to use them, but I can't.
Now I have to use my phone.
So every time I go to the gas station, I got to take my, you know,
Turn off the car and then get out my phone and go bloop with, I mean, it's not that bad.
It's fine.
I'm sure I'll get used to it.
But I kind of miss SpeedPass.
An example where a purpose-built, custom, super low-tech, no batteries, by the way, the little NFC dongle thingy, it's completely inert and passive.
Never failed.
It's the only one I ever owned.
Never got broken.
Never wore away.
Never chipped off.
Worked every time.
Unless the pump was broken.
I really miss that.
And also, by the way, they have an app.
Who the hell is going to use that?
They have an app you can get.
The SpeedPass Plus app.
and they have a qr code on the pump so you can take out your phone launch an app show the camera scan the qr code no thanks so i mean who no unless you get like 50 cash back no one is ever going to use that so i just use the nfc thing with apple pay and it works fine and welcome to the brave new world but all i wanted to say is that i missed the original speed pass because it was a great idea well executed and i used it for years probably decades
Goodbye, key tag.
Hello, app.
The SpeedPass key tag will fully retire by June 30, 2019.
Get gas, earn rewards, and get going.
Switch to the SpeedPass Plus app.
Maybe I'll look at the rewards.
I don't think I could ever scan a QR code.
It's like, what are they even thinking?