Using It Is Wearing It Out
John:
your oled screen will last longer if you do not turn it on unlike batteries which will not okay i gotta come up with a better speaking of batteries you gotta come up with a better system for like when the power goes out i have to wander all around my house dealing with each ups it's just i wish i know like the usb connecting thing to your mac that it'll shut itself down but i never trust that i do it myself you know what i mean because i'm always just afraid it'll be like review these terminal windows and then it won't shut it down or whatever
John:
oh yeah yeah shut everything down the old-fashioned way you have too many ups's and then and then when when the power comes back on i have to remember that like even if i don't want to turn these things back on i have to activate that ups because there's a router attached to it right and if you don't have that router on nothing works in the house and sounds like a lot of work why don't you just get laptops everywhere yeah right yeah my laptops are plugged into ups too
Casey:
Do we want to talk about some gift memberships, John?
Casey:
Do you want me to do the pitch?
Casey:
Do you want to do the pitch?
Casey:
How do you want to handle this?
John:
I have a moment of pause because I could do it, but I kind of want to hear what you would do.
John:
This is a form of entertainment.
John:
All right.
Casey:
Here we go, kids.
Casey:
Buckle up.
Casey:
It's time to talk gift memberships.
Casey:
So our friend, my friend and yours, John Syracuse, my best, worst friend, worst, best friend.
Casey:
I always get it wrong.
Casey:
I'm sorry, Merlin.
John:
you got it wrong twice so there you go what's the right one then worst friend it's like best friend but the word best has been replaced with worst no for humor value no no no because that that's that's semi-aggressively negative and i thought that's what it is i didn't make it up i know but this is this is the casey version the casey version is recalling i'm trying to make a reference to another show but making it nicer
Casey:
Right, exactly.
Marco:
A little more friendly version.
John:
We'll chalk it up to niceness and not poor memory.
Casey:
Slash ineptitude.
Casey:
So yeah, my worst, best, best, worst friend, John Syracuse, a copyright 2023 case list.
Casey:
Anyways, he has put in a genuinely large amount of work and I put in a slightly more than zero amount of work in making gift memberships a thing on our website and our membership system.
Casey:
So if you have a nerd in your life
Casey:
that probably is listening to this.
Casey:
I don't know how this is going to work.
Casey:
But hey, if you have a nerd in your life that might be interested in our plucky little Apple-related show and maybe they're a little bit too frugal or, as I would call myself, cheap to pay for a membership, you can pay for a month or even a year of membership.
Casey:
You can go to atp.fm slash gift.
Casey:
you can gift this person a membership.
Casey:
Now, we never, ever, ever tell them that they've been gifted a membership.
Casey:
That is on you, in part because we're lazy and didn't have the time to do it, but mostly because we wanted you to be in control of how you message that whole thing.
Casey:
You can print something out.
Casey:
You can just send them an email.
Casey:
You can drop a random link in an iMessage conversation.
Casey:
I wouldn't recommend using Beeper, but you can give it a shot.
Casey:
But nevertheless, one way or another, you can go to atp.fm slash gift to gift someone a membership.
Casey:
Now, a couple of quick points of order.
Casey:
You need to create an account with us that is free for reasons in order to gift a membership.
Casey:
You can immediately delete that account afterwards if you so desire.
Casey:
Or you could sign up for yourself.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
that you can check out atp.fm slash gift.
Casey:
The time is running out.
Casey:
We are recording this.
Casey:
I believe it's the 18th.
Casey:
I don't even know.
Casey:
I'm all over the place.
Casey:
Yes, it's Monday the 18th as we record this.
Casey:
These gifts are ready instantly.
Casey:
So you could be, if you are the kind to celebrate Christmas, you could be doing this on Christmas morning if necessary and write a very unusual URL on a piece of paper, put it in an envelope and say, hey, Merry Christmas to you.
Casey:
So go check out atp.fm slash gift.
Casey:
John, anything to add?
John:
That was everything I dreamed it would be, Casey.
John:
I'm so happy for us.
John:
Classic Casey-less promotion.
John:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The only thing I would add is the way it works is if you're listening to this and you want a gift membership, just text somebody who you think is going to give it to you and say, hey, if you're looking for something to get me for the holidays, atp.fm slash gift.
John:
You have to deliver the URL to them and then they buy it for you.
John:
That's how the system works.
John:
They're not going to be listening to the show.
John:
How would they ever listen to the show?
John:
They don't know about the show.
John:
All they need to know is that this is a fun gift that you would like, you who's listening now, give somebody else the URL.
John:
They'll get the hint.
Marco:
This is the equivalent of like leaving the catalog open on the table with the thing you want circled and dog-eared.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
And this – I got to say like as somebody who – I listen to a lot of podcasts for which I am paying members or Patreon supporters or whatever.
Marco:
And so that is one of the – it is a great gift to give somebody because –
Marco:
Taking something that you're already doing in your life and making it a bit nicer is a fantastic gift, especially if it's the kind of thing that like the person probably would not have spent the money on it themselves for whatever reason.
Marco:
But you can make this thing nicer for them.
Marco:
That is always the best kind of gift.
Marco:
You buy somebody a really good tool for some hobby they're doing, or you upgrade something for them that they would really appreciate that they wouldn't necessarily spend the money on, or something like that.
Marco:
That's the category of great gifts, in my opinion, and this is exactly in that category.
Marco:
For someone who likes the show, if they're on a member and you buy the membership, like that just makes the show better for them.
Marco:
So that's it's a wonderful thing.
Marco:
Whenever there's a podcast I listen to that has a paid version, I almost always get it.
Marco:
And I'm always happier with it because I honestly I don't like having to skip ads if I don't have to.
Marco:
I'd rather just have them not be there.
Marco:
And any kind of bonus stuff that comes along with it is very helpful.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
ATP.fm slash gift.
Casey:
Give a gift to you, to your friend, to your loved one.
Casey:
And by doing it through us, you're giving a gift to us, too.
Casey:
So, hey, thanks.
Casey:
But anyways, yeah, check it out.
Casey:
And we appreciate it.
Casey:
Let's do some follow up.
Casey:
We have a handful of people that have written in with regard to and asked ATP last week about Apple devices and OLED burn in.
Casey:
We start with David Giancurcio.
Casey:
I hope I got that right.
Casey:
I actually did have burning issues on my iPhone XS.
Casey:
I had it plugged in and on a stand at work using it as an always-on display before that was a feature.
Casey:
And fuzzy versions of the battery, Wi-Fi strength, and clock became permanent fixtures on my screen.
Casey:
This is, I think, effectively nightmare fuel for John Syracuse.
John:
That's just how burning works.
John:
And by the way, the reason they were fuzzy, we didn't mention this last week, but in the long list of burning mitigation techniques that OLED screens use are something that I believe plasma screens also use, which is like they shift the image a little bit from side to side.
John:
So it's not always on the same place.
John:
I don't know if the XS did this, but I believe the current ones do it as well.
John:
So
John:
I always question the value of that feature.
John:
And by the way, modern TVs, in case you're worried that you're going to be losing parts of the picture, which you did back in the battle days of plasma, modern TVs overparison the pixels.
John:
So even when they pixel shift it, you aren't losing any pixels.
John:
They're just shifting the image around and not lighting up some pixels on one side.
John:
The good modern TVs do that.
Marco:
Oh, so the physical panel is actually larger than the picture by a little bit?
John:
By a little bit, yeah, because it used to be in the plasma days.
John:
They have these various calibration tests where it will show you, like, you should be able to see this rectangle, and it would put a thin rectangle around the whole screen, right?
John:
And you'd know if you had, like, the...
John:
the what do you call it the overscan thing on you'd be like oh i can't see the rectangle it's screwed up so you'd fix the overscan feature but the pixel shift or pixel orbiter thing it would cut off one of the borders but then when it shifted to like the left you wouldn't see the left border anymore because it would be like a one pixel line it would be shifted off the edge now i believe all the good all the good uh oled tvs have enough pixels to move it around i think they do that
John:
on most on like computer monitors i don't know if the iphone does it it's a very difficult thing to find out because they tend not to list it they will list the pixel shift feature under some branded name but they won't always say oh and also we over provision by seven pixels on all edges to handle this pixels are so small now on retina displays it's hard to tell but on tvs you can i think you can actually see this if you look up real close
Marco:
Yeah, and I think it's important to point out, too, like, you know, this instance of burning on a XS, as David said, who wrote it in, like, this was kind of creating an always-on situation.
Marco:
Plugged in and on a stand at work, using it as an always-on display before there was a feature.
Marco:
So what this means is, you know, because with the iPhone, you can tell it to never sleep the screen.
Marco:
Like, that's a setting that you have access to.
Marco:
Any phone can be left on all the time.
Marco:
I don't recommend this for lots of reasons, but this is, again, this is what happened here.
Marco:
And so this kind of shows, like,
Marco:
When Always On came out as a feature, some people were like, wait, why can't they have this added by a software to the older models?
Marco:
One of the technical reasons why they might not have wanted to do that or might not have been able to do that is because they knew when launching the 14 Pro,
Marco:
They knew this was going to be a feature of it, and they were able to make decisions with exactly what specs the OLED panel had, what kind of OLED it was, how it was going to be driven, within what range it was going to be driven.
Marco:
And they were able to launch this feature knowing what the hardware was going to be for it, slash pick the hardware knowing this feature was going to be important for them.
Marco:
so that they could have a panel that could get more use this way without having burn-in become a problem.
Marco:
Whereas on the older phones, that wasn't necessarily possible.
Marco:
As time goes on, components change, types of OLEDs change, and different ones have different tolerances for this.
Marco:
So the modern ones where they actually launched this feature in mind with these hardware panels can usually take it a lot better.
John:
Oh, and getting back to my point about the pixel orbiting and my doubt about the feature.
John:
Like, imagine you've got a rectangle that's your little battery.
John:
Pretend that it's always full.
John:
It's just a white rectangle.
John:
Orbiting it by a few pixels, like shifting it over and up and left and right by a few pixels, all it's going to do is...
John:
make a slightly less burned in halo around the burned in rectangle like like you're not actually stopping burning you're just trying to spread it around by a tiny little bit so i've never been a fan of that feature i'm like i don't think this helps me like having having a fuzzy burned in rectangle for my battery instead of a crisp one it's the rectangle is still there but you know that people do what they can
Casey:
Jameson Weiss writes, I am currently using an iPhone 14 Pro that shows no signs of burn-in, but my previous phone, an iPhone 11 Pro, did show noticeable burn-in around the menu bar icons.
Casey:
I could very faintly but noticeably see the ghost of the battery icon and the clock in the Wi-Fi symbol.
Casey:
Keith writes, my Apple Watch Series 5 and iPhone 13 Pro Max both have OLED burn-in.
Casey:
The watch has the complications burned in and the phone has the status bar burned in.
Casey:
So it's apparently on the watch as well.
Casey:
And then an anonymous person writes, Apple Store technicians have a diagnostic that will check and tell us if the device has developed a display profile.
Casey:
The display profile helps mitigate through software OLED burn-in.
Casey:
When we do repairs such as a rear system or mid-system replacement, we must run an additional diagnostic during repair.
Casey:
This test involves connecting the customer's original rear or mid-system and the repaired device to a Mac, which then allows us to transfer the display profile.
Casey:
We do these steps because the display itself does not have the components to store the display profile.
Casey:
It is instead stored on the main logic board.
Casey:
When this display profile test was first introduced, we originally had to replace the whole device when it was flagged because we did not have the tools to perform the display profile transfer.
Casey:
But now we perform this repair daily.
Casey:
I personally have seen a display show burn-in before performing this display profile transfer diagnostic.
Casey:
Anecdotally, always-on display has not led to an increase in these display profile transfers that I've noticed.
Casey:
Further instances of noticeable burn-in have also been very rare.
John:
This is what I was talking about last week with burning mitigation.
John:
Basically, if you don't drive every single pixel on the display to the maximum amount, you have a little bit of headroom.
John:
So if the displays get worn out and they're a little bit more dim, the display can compensate by sending essentially more electricity to that pixel to make it the same brightness as its neighbors.
John:
Televisions do this through a series of sort of... Again, they have branded names for everything in televisions, but like...
John:
They do these cycles when the display is turned off.
John:
I'm not quite sure how, but they do.
John:
But when your television is turned off, if you have a modern OLED television, at some regular interval, it does some tests to essentially recalibrate itself to make sure all the pixels are the same brightness.
John:
Every single individual subpixel, right?
John:
So if you've worn out the one particular red subpixel is not as bright as its neighbor,
John:
They can figure that out somehow, and they will give that Red Suffolk a little bit more electricity than its neighbor, basically trying to even it out.
John:
The rtings.com burn-in test that they've been running for years actually ran into this recently because the test that they were doing didn't allow certain brands to run their sort of display update cycle thing because they all cycle based on like, oh, you have to be idle for this amount of time or whatever, and they were just running the screens just, you know,
John:
24 hours a day or something close to it.
John:
So it never got to run the compensation cycle.
John:
So it looked like the burn-in was awful.
John:
But then once they figured that out, once they figured out how to detect when it's running the cycle, they let it run its cycle and it was a dramatic difference.
John:
And so what this Apple store technician is telling us is basically that, but for iPhones, that they
John:
The iPhone also can figure out, oh, you've worn out these pixels and now we need to drive them a little bit harder.
John:
And that display profile, I imagine it's like a big map of like, hey, for every single sub pixel on the display, does it need a little bit more juice than its neighbors and how much more?
John:
And the fact that they used to just chuck the whole phone or eventually recycle it or whatever, because they couldn't just transfer the profile, which is just it's just data, right?
John:
They couldn't transfer.
John:
It's like, well, you know, we have to give you an all new phone because there's no way I can transfer this stuff.
John:
It's good that they've introduced the ability to transfer it.
John:
But.
John:
Yeah, that's that's part of how you make OLEDs, quote unquote, not burn in.
John:
You're still wearing out the pixels as every time.
John:
It's like vinyl, Casey.
John:
Every time you use it, you're wearing it out a little bit.
John:
Using it is wearing it out.
John:
There is no way to use it without wearing it out.
John:
Every time your screen is on, you are degrading the organic compounds in those OLED pixels.
John:
But if you weren't driving them at the maximum amount, you've got a little bit of headroom and the display can figure it out and compensate for it.
Casey:
All right, let's talk stolen device protection in the 17.3 beta.
Casey:
Russell Quinn writes, trusted locations, let me get some context here, I'm sorry.
Casey:
So one of the things that they've said is you have an hour delay when you go to do certain operations, like changing your Apple ID password.
Casey:
Except if you're at a trusted location, which is allegedly like work and home.
Casey:
So Russell Quinn writes, trusted locations is kind of flawed because most people will have those very addresses, home and work, in their contacts app right there in the MyCard at the top.
Casey:
If your phone is swiped in a bar, etc., there's a reasonable chance that you're not that far from home.
Casey:
Russell is implying then that, you know, the thief could go drive or train or what have you to your house or your work as quickly as possible, and hopefully for them, change your Apple ID password before you have the chance to lock all of this using iCloud on another device.
John:
Yeah.
John:
We didn't have this in here, but there was some other feedback from, I guess, someone who's used the beta that these locations, these trusted location things, are configurable.
John:
It's not like it demands to be home and work and it just pulls them from your address book or something.
John:
And I think there either is...
John:
some kind of lock on those locations or maybe the person was saying there should be a lock meaning like if someone gets your phone that they can't see or change those locations or whatever but i'm not quite sure how that'd be possible once they have your phone and your passcode but we'll see how this works out for the people who are very paranoid i assume what you can do is just say there are no trusted locations i always have to wait an hour so then you eliminate this whole issue but
John:
it's asking people to make the security and convenience trade-off is always dangerous because they'll always pick convenience right you kind of if you if you don't sort of default them to having like at least their home be a safe location uh they're not gonna like add it themselves they're like why would i make my life more difficult or they wouldn't you know maybe someone would convince them to do it but the first time they had to to uh you know wait an hour uh they would get rid of it as soon as possible so you know
John:
Interested to see how this shakes out when they actually ship this feature and what the actual effect is based on the defaults they choose.
Casey:
Richard Harris also made an interesting point.
Casey:
You described a scenario where if my phone and its passcode have been stolen while I am out, but I have enabled stolen device protection, I can use someone else's web browser within an hour to log into iCloud.com and find or wipe my phone.
Casey:
However, with two-factor on in my iCloud account, I cannot log into iCloud.com from an untrusted browser without also entering the six digits that are sent to my trusted device, which in this case was just stolen.
Casey:
Since most people should have two-factor enabled on their iCloud account, and most people do not leave the house carrying their iPad or laptop, even if they have such devices, how does the new stolen device protection feature help in the most frequently cited scenarios?
Casey:
I don't have a good answer for this other than, you know, if you have, you know, like, say, 1Password or something like that, you could potentially log into your 1Password account on the web.
Casey:
However, that also requires a very, very large GUID-looking thing, which I certainly do not have memorized and would also be stored in, you know, a 1Password on a trusted device, which presumably has just been stolen.
Casey:
So I don't have a good answer for this.
John:
Yeah, well, that's why we were talking about whether one hour is the right amount of time, because there are solutions to this.
John:
OK, so obviously, if you're within an hour of your house and you can get back to your house and if you're like us and have more than one Apple device, like you don't need your phone.
John:
You can use a Mac that is a trusted device or, you know, other ways to get into it.
John:
Also, there are backup codes.
John:
I don't know if a backup code will be sufficient on its own because I haven't actually tried this.
John:
But there is a thing that exists where you can get backup codes to sort of recover if all else fails.
John:
And you should have those printed out and stored in a physically secure location that hopefully you can get to within an hour.
John:
And then the final thing is, you know, again, if you can actually get home, you can sign in from one of your Macs that is already able to sign into iCloud without going through the two-factor stuff because it's always signed in because, you know...
John:
Again, I'm interested to see how Apple pitches this.
John:
The idea is that if your phone is stolen and that hour timer starts, hopefully you can do something within that hour to get yourself in.
John:
Obviously, you can't do anything if you don't have a phone and you're alone.
John:
You have to find somebody else who's going to let you use their web browser or whatever.
John:
But if they do, depending on how nerdy you are, there are various scenarios you can imagine.
John:
You know, using some sort of web VPN interface to get into your house and remotely control a computer that's already signed into your iCloud account, yada, yada, yada.
John:
Backup code seems like the most regular person friendly, but even that's tough.
John:
Like what you do is you'd have those codes printed out.
John:
You'd have them in your wallet somewhere.
John:
You would not label them.
John:
That's a little security tip.
John:
Don't say these are my Apple ID backup codes.
John:
Just put them on a piece of paper.
John:
You know what they are.
John:
Bury them in some pocket of your wallet that you don't frequently use.
John:
Make sure it's waterproof and the ink is not going to smear or whatever.
John:
And then worst case scenario, you can, you know.
John:
find a browser and log in again i don't know if the backup code all by itself is sufficient it might also require a two-factor um so that's you know one hour is what i think the the time is in uh 17.3 beta having that time be configurable might be interesting for people who care but again when you ask people to choose between security convenience maybe things don't come out the way you want so we'll see how it goes again this is beta hasn't yet shipped
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Mathos Woolard writes, one thing to note in the EU's removable battery legislation is that they explicitly carve out exceptions for devices that have a high level of water resistance.
Casey:
So maybe batteries don't have to be so easily removable?
Casey:
Question mark?
John:
Yeah, I don't think any of this stuff is finalized.
John:
I do wonder if Apple isn't currently at that high level of resistance, if they wouldn't make sure they're at the high level of resistance just so they don't have to do the battery thing.
John:
Again, we'll see what actually comes out of this as a law or guideline or whatever when they're done.
Casey:
Skeen Harshly writes, that is a great name.
Casey:
My word.
Casey:
It is absolutely correct.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
John Syracuse is absolutely correct about Vexed.
Casey:
And the best part is someone ported it to iOS as Vexed Plus.
Casey:
This was John's beloved Palm OS game.
Casey:
And apparently you can get it on your iOS device.
Casey:
So that's cool.
John:
I immediately snagged that.
John:
Although one thing I noticed, this is the part of...
John:
Part of any kind of retro type gaming thing.
John:
I got it on my iPhone.
John:
I'm like, hey, it's the same levels I remember.
John:
And it looks a little different because it's on your iPhone or whatever.
John:
And then I realized, oh, it feels totally different when I'm swiping the blocks with my finger than using a stylus.
John:
And I know that sounds dumb, right?
John:
But it's just like, what is my memory of playing vexed?
John:
Apparently, a big part of my memory of playing vexed is pushing little blocks with the stylus.
John:
Sorry.
Marco:
I mean, I gotta say, having playing with my Palm Pilot, having played Hearths and stuff on it now and my Mealborn game... Not a Palm Pilot.
Marco:
Whatever.
Marco:
My Palm OS device... On my Nintendo.
Marco:
It was released after the Pilot 1000 and Pilot 5000 models, but not that much after.
Marco:
Anyway, so...
Marco:
A big part of the feel of what gives me the nostalgia and the feel of it is the feel of having that stylus and tapping those little things on the screen.
Marco:
It's something that we don't have anymore, really.
Marco:
You kind of have it with the Apple Pencil on the iPad, but not really.
Marco:
The screen doesn't squish.
Marco:
yeah it's a very different feeling um and what we have now is generally better for almost every way like it's it's generally much better now and i'm not saying we should go back to this and if you try an old resistive you know uh squish screen like this you will almost certainly think it's worse but it is different and so if you play these same games on a touch screen or with a mouse they are different and it doesn't feel the same so
Marco:
If what you're looking for is the nostalgia of how it used to feel to use a, excuse me, Palm OS device, not a Palm Pilot, John.
Marco:
If you're looking for that feel, you're not going to get it right with like any kind of emulation with a touchscreen or a mouse pointer.
John:
And it was kind of, you know, so the idea of direct manipulation, I've talked about this in many past shows, but like moving a block, in VEX basically you have these little blocks and they're actually very small on the screen.
John:
They're much smaller than they would be like to be good touch targets.
John:
Moving that block with the stylus on a POM device.
John:
feels like direct manipulation.
John:
You feel like, especially since the screen squishes, you feel like you're shoving the block off because there's gravity on the screen.
John:
So if you shove the block off of another block, it just falls down, right?
John:
You feel like you're directly manipulating the block with your little prod, right?
John:
When you play on the iOS version, which is a faithful port,
John:
First of all, your finger entirely covers the block and maybe a little bit of some of its neighbors because the blocks, again, they're not 44 points.
John:
They're much smaller than that, right?
John:
You can't really see what you're doing.
John:
And when you slide with your finger, yeah, it pushes the block over.
John:
But by the time you lift your finger up so you can see the screen, again, the block has already basically fallen.
John:
It doesn't feel like you're directly manipulating.
John:
It feels almost like you're swiping on the screen in the vague area of the block and then a block goes down.
John:
It is...
John:
Much less satisfying.
John:
But I would still say, I mean, no one's going to buy a Palm on eBay so they can play this game.
John:
So definitely check out the game.
John:
I think it's free.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I buy iOS apps without thinking about it.
John:
It's either free or extremely cheap.
John:
But check it out because it is a fun puzzle game.
John:
It is very much like every puzzle game you've ever seen.
John:
Like, oh, it's a little bit like Tetris, a little bit like Bejeweled, a little bit like this, but it's not exactly like any of them.
John:
And the levels are very clever and they do a good job of teaching you the mechanics.
John:
You should check it out and go through the first 10 levels or something.
John:
Have some fun.
Marco:
By the way, I tried installing it on my Palm 5X and it crashed.
Marco:
So I'll have to figure out maybe I had the wrong version.
Marco:
I think I might have had too new of a version.
Marco:
Because with the Palm devices, you went from these super simple 160x160 monochrome and then grayscale screens...
Marco:
Over the following years, you went to higher resolution screens, much faster processors, color screens, and various different OS and networking upgrades and stuff like that.
Marco:
And so a lot of the high-end Palm OS games were really made for those later systems, and they don't necessarily work on my Palm 5X running OS whatever it is.
Marco:
So I got to maybe find an old version.
Casey:
let's talk about apple's required reasons thing for certain apis this blew up i want to say two three months ago they decided that for certain apis a lot of which i think made sense but some of which particularly user defaults was quite surprising user defaults is the thing that most app developers use to store like preferences for their app or apps and things of that nature
Casey:
And they were saying, you know, it was very, very scary what Apple was not really threatening, but saying they were going to do that, you know, oh, you're going to have to provide reasons for using user defaults and it's going to be big and scary.
Casey:
And since every freaking app uses user defaults, it seemed a bit silly.
Casey:
So apparently Apple's updated its required reasons.
Casey:
thing for using certain APIs and user defaults has new reasons.
Casey:
It has three of them with very odd code names.
Casey:
The first one, declare this reason to, I guess this is why you would use it, declare this reason to access user defaults to read and write information that is only available accessible, excuse me, to the apps, app extensions and app clips that are members of the same app group as the app itself.
Casey:
So in other words, stuff that you write that only you and your apps can touch.
Casey:
The next one, declare this reason if your third-party SDK is providing a wrapper function around the user defaults APIs for the app to use, and you only access user defaults APIs when the app calls your wrapper function.
Casey:
This reason may only be declared by third-party SDKs.
Casey:
This reason may not be declared if your third-party SDK was created primarily to wrap the required reason APIs.
Casey:
So jump in, fellas, if I've got this wrong, but I guess if I were to vend a framework or a facade in front of user defaults, then I could claim this to explain why I'm using user defaults.
Casey:
Is that about what this sounds like to you?
Marco:
No, I believe it's saying you can't claim this.
Marco:
So the way I interpret this is if you make a library that happens to allow user defaults access as kind of some other kind of ancillary function, then yes.
John:
If the SDK had its own settings, for example,
Marco:
example yes that's some persistent state that's part of the sdk that it stores and it wants to store them in your apps user defaults because it's running within your app right but if you if you happen to make like you know swift defaults as your library name and it's really just a thin wrapper around you around user defaults without much other purpose and i think they're saying you can't use this code for that
John:
Well, I mean, I'm not sure about that.
John:
What they say is if your SDK was created primarily to wrap required reason APIs, not necessarily this API, user defaults, but like you can't use it as like a, you know, API laundering.
John:
Like essentially you make an SDK and it's like, call through this SDK and we'll get any other required reason APIs.
John:
It's interesting.
John:
I mean, the first one that Casey read was the one that I was complaining about back before I realized this doesn't apply to Mac apps yet.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Was that, hey, app groups, it's an Apple concept.
John:
Everyone uses it.
John:
Having a shared user defaults among app groups is a huge use case.
John:
So finally they addressed that.
John:
So that's great.
John:
The third party one I really didn't expect them to do, but I guess it's been so long and they've gotten so much feedback that they realize a lot of people are in this situation.
John:
They use a third party SDK.
John:
That SDK has some setting somewhere that it persists.
John:
And it's going to process them in your app's user defaults because that's – like where else would it put them?
John:
So they have to allow that.
John:
And I think this bottom part is, I guess, preventing it from being an API laundering thing.
John:
Maybe it's like –
John:
a third-party sdk for just wrapping user defaults i don't see why that would be banned but reading this language it makes it seem like it would be because it's like well it only it's only exists it's a library a convenience library around user defaults but what are you using it for to read and write your own apps user defaults like that's not laundering anything you could have done that yourself you're just using a library for it that's why i think the part where it says created permanently to wrap required reason apis
John:
Not specifically the user defaults API, but any of the other APIs that are on the list that you have to have reasons for.
John:
We're just listing the ones for user defaults because it was the most egregious one in the original list of APIs because everybody's app uses it.
John:
And it was so restrictive that you just couldn't do basic app things.
John:
So they're addressing that here.
Marco:
When this first was announced, I believe in the late summer or early fall, we did talk about it.
Marco:
I believe I said the same point then, so I'll be quick this time.
Marco:
We don't usually know the level of trickery and scamminess that apps try to pull off to try to track people and do creepy stuff.
Marco:
And so whenever we see stuff like this from Apple, like some kind of weird new privacy or security requirement that it seems like it shouldn't be necessary or it seems like unnecessarily persnickety, generally the reason is...
Marco:
This has been abused or is being abused for some kind of creepy thing, and we just don't necessarily know about it or can't quite figure out, like, how could this be abused?
Marco:
So in this case, like, I'm sure they added these things carefully with their inscrutable number.
Marco:
Why are these numbered the way they are?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
But whatever...
Marco:
Whatever the reason is behind this obtuse requirement they're creating here, it is probably because it was actively being exploited in the wild.
Marco:
So every single word of this, like every little clause, every condition, every exclusion, I guarantee you it was because somebody was being tricky with this stuff.
Casey:
And then finally, declare this reason to access user defaults and read the blah, blah, blah key to retrieve the managed app configuration set by MDM, mobile device management, or to set the yada, yada, yada key to store feedback information to be queried over MDM as described in the Apple mobile device management protocol reference documentation.
John:
yeah so these reasons i mean again we're just focusing on user defaults we'll put a link in the show notes to all the new reasons but there are a ton of them and it's been a while since we talked about this but this just shows how thorough apple has been in making sure that all the use cases that they got feedback about are addressed so just plain old user defaults there's the one thing that i thought of which is just obvious app groups right then there's a third-party sdk thing which we didn't even discuss last time and
John:
Then there's the MDM thing, which we definitely didn't discuss this time.
John:
But you can just see.
John:
You can say, oh, you look at that.
John:
Oh, I see how that could affect people.
John:
Oh, I see how that could.
John:
You know, how many people have their own apps that they distribute over MDM to their corporate devices that are owned by their company?
John:
And they're like, well, our thing doesn't work anymore because we access user defaults and we do it through the MDM thing.
John:
And no one who doesn't have an MDM distributed app is thinking of that.
John:
But so many apps out there do that.
John:
So this Apple took a long time to.
John:
come up with this list but it seems like they've addressed a lot of stuff now i'm sure there's still stuff that they missed but this is a much bigger expansion than i thought they would have again look at the full list this is just user defaults but like i expected maybe maybe they'd allow app groups but they added much more above and beyond that so i hope this is now at the level where let's say 98 of the apps fit within it
John:
It's still, I don't think they've changed anything about the strictness of it.
John:
I think there's some kind of timeline of like, well, it'll be advisory for a while, but then eventually they'll require it.
John:
But Apple's usually pretty good about not coming up with a new set of requirements and making it mandatory on day one and just destroying their entire Apple ecosystem.
John:
They'll, you know, do it slowly and hopefully get to the point where everybody's on board.
John:
And again, crossing my fingers, this still does not apply to Mac apps.
John:
I hope it never does.
John:
Please, Apple, leave the Mac alone.
Wow.
Casey:
Also, real-time follow-up from who?
Casey:
Someone in the chat.
Casey:
I've already lost where it was.
Casey:
MTZ Federico pointed out that if you don't have an iPhone or other Apple device to use Find My, you can use Find Devices on iCloud.com.
Casey:
When you sign in, you might be asked to enter a verification code sent to a trusted device.
Casey:
If you lost your only trusted device or otherwise can't get the code, select the Find Devices button instead of entering a code.
Casey:
I don't really know what that means, and I don't have the ability to research it right this second, but apparently they have a plan for you if you are in that situation.
Casey:
And this does not seem to indicate that you need a backup code.
Casey:
So I'm not really sure what the situation is here, but it's apparently been at least considered.
John:
These are all things we never want to find out.
John:
And unlike restoring from your backups, you can't, it's not easy to safely rehearse this.
John:
Like I wouldn't like, if you rehearse it and you find a problem with your system, guess what?
John:
You just intentionally lock yourself out of your own Apple ID forever.
John:
So don't maybe test this to the limit, but I guess, you know, it's up to Apple to try to communicate this to people and say, here's what you need to do to be safe right now.
John:
It's not entirely clear.
Marco:
we are supported this episode exclusively by atp members please consider becoming a member today you get all sorts of fun goodies as a member the number one thing you get is an ad free version of the show we give you a special rss feed that's exclusive to your account
Marco:
And you get in that feed ad-free versions of all of our episodes.
Marco:
So you still get everything else.
Marco:
You know, all the content's always there.
Marco:
You get ad-free versions as well.
Marco:
Now, you also have a bootleg version available.
Marco:
This is a special... It's basically a feed of our live stream, uncut, unedited, and published right after the live stream ends.
Marco:
So you get earlier than the regular episode released, usually by about 12 or 24 hours.
Marco:
You get...
Marco:
the release of the episode with no edits whatsoever so you get all of our like pre and post chatter our title selection talk a little bit of you know bonus stuff here and there beginning and end plus you get kind of you know the the delightful imperfections of a live show you get occasional flubs of jokes you get casey swearing you get you know occasionally us saying oh wait we're wrong about that go back and redo it so it's kind of fun and a lot of our a lot of our members really use that that they uh
Marco:
We did that by popular demand from membership, and people love it.
Marco:
It is extremely popular among our members.
Marco:
We also have member special exclusive content.
Marco:
About once a month, we'll do a special ranging from tech stuff to non-tech stuff.
Marco:
Sometimes we'll talk about movies or food or traditions or whatever.
Marco:
And, of course, there's tech topics there as well.
Marco:
Lots of great bonus content there as well.
Marco:
So go to ATP.fm slash join today.
Marco:
please check it out.
Marco:
Thank you so much.
Marco:
We are supported exclusively by our members of this episode, so it's really important that we keep that train going, I guess.
Marco:
So anyway, atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
Thank you so much for considering it, and let's get back to the show.
Marco:
Oh.
Casey:
A lot of stuff happened today.
Casey:
Generally speaking, this is a little inside baseball, but generally speaking, the morning that we record ATP, I like to go somewhere else to work.
Casey:
You know, oftentimes it's, you know, the grocery store that I like Wegmans or maybe it'll be a library or something.
Casey:
And I'll sit there and I'll read through all the links and make sure and watch all the videos and make sure I know what the heck it is I'm going to talk about that night.
Casey:
And I typically do that, you know, from like eight in the morning until roughly lunchtime.
Casey:
And then at that point, I consider myself having done the research and job well done.
Casey:
Pat on the back for me.
Casey:
Well, all sorts of stuff broke today.
Casey:
And so I'm shooting from the hip a little bit at this point.
Casey:
But here we go.
Casey:
And let's start with what happened at something like nine o'clock in the morning Eastern time.
Casey:
It was broken, I think, specifically to 9to5Mac, or at least in part to 9to5Mac.
Casey:
But 9to5Mac wrote that Apple is pausing sales of the Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 in the United States due to a patent dispute.
Casey:
And there have been rumblings about this in the past.
Casey:
I don't think we ever talked about it on the show.
Casey:
But in short, there is a company whose name I don't have in front of me, but I believe begins with an M that has patents on how to do blood oxygen detection.
Casey:
And they have claimed that Apple is infringing on those patents.
Casey:
And I guess it's going through the courts and that's not going as quick as this company wants.
Casey:
So they appealed to some other companies.
Casey:
jurisdiction or organization the international trade commission there you go that has said okay yeah we agree with you other companies so we're going to tell apple they have to pause sales of the devices that infringe on these patents which is basically the series 9 and ultra 2 for now as we sit here on monday the 18th
Casey:
They can still sell them through other retailers.
Casey:
So like Amazon and Best Buy, for example, they can still sell these devices.
Casey:
But it is possible that around Christmas time, they will also not be able to sell these devices.
Casey:
So it's a big mess.
Casey:
And I'm surprised it's gotten this far.
Casey:
So I don't even know what to make of this.
Marco:
I mean, this is why we really haven't covered it on the show yet as far as I am concerned.
Marco:
There's weird patent claims against companies all the time, and then they settle, and then it goes nowhere, and it's fine.
Marco:
Someone pays some money, and the lawyers make most of it, and like all use of patents, it's just a tax on everybody, and it doesn't really protect anybody from anything.
Marco:
And the lawyers make out with all the money, the end.
Marco:
Congratulations, that's the U.S.
Marco:
patent system.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
A lot of good there.
Marco:
Promoting innovation.
Marco:
Good job, everyone.
Marco:
So normally these cases, you know, they breeze through the news and they don't go anywhere because they get settled out and you never hear about them again.
Marco:
So when this stuff started with Massimo, the company, when it started, you know, them making claims against the Apple Watch, I think they've been making claims against the Apple Watch for years now.
Marco:
Again, we just thought, at least I just thought, well, it's going to fizzle out and get settled or something like that's that's what's going to happen.
Marco:
And that's it.
Marco:
And so to have us be at the point now where Apple has announced that like as possibly as early as next week, they might have to stop selling their two flagship models of Apple Watch, leaving only the Apple Watch SE in the current lineup.
Marco:
That's substantially different news than we usually hear like that.
Marco:
That's a big deal.
Marco:
I'm guessing it won't actually get that far.
Marco:
Or if it does get that far, it will be a fairly brief shutdown of sales.
Marco:
You got to figure like Apple is is pulling out all the stops to try to get this resolved in some way.
Marco:
But you also know that Apple is – I don't think Apple is super willing to give on threats of patent litigation like this.
Marco:
I don't think they're going to just say, all right, Massimo, here's a whole bunch of money.
Marco:
We're going to license your patents and give you whatever you want.
Marco:
I don't see it ending that way necessarily.
Marco:
What's probably going to happen –
Marco:
is they're going to try to get around it with some kind of technicality, and then there will be more lawsuits, and it'll prolong stuff, and it'll just kick the can down the road further.
Marco:
That kind of thing can be successful for years.
Marco:
So that's probably what's going to happen here.
Marco:
But in the meantime, if they actually go through with this, because all they said so far is basically that they think they'll have to go through with this.
Marco:
If they actually have to go through with this and actually have to stop selling most Apple Watches in the U.S.
Marco:
for a while, whatever that... Look, it could be a week.
Marco:
I'm guessing if it happens at all, it's going to be very brief.
Marco:
It would surprise me if it was more than a week.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
We'll see what happens.
Marco:
You know, stranger stuff has happened, I guess, in tech.
Marco:
But it will kind of be interesting as a, you know, as tech enthusiasts and as a tech podcast, it will be interesting to see if it does happen because this kind of thing pretty much never happens in our world.
Marco:
It doesn't make it up to the level of being visible to consumers like this.
Marco:
So this could be interesting.
John:
Yeah, so Apple released a statement about this, and you can see the glimmer of Apple's potential strategy because you would think Apple's statement about this would be all about how, you know, usually Apple's statements are, here's the thing we're doing.
John:
So first of all, this one's weird because it says...
John:
So here's a thing that we might have to do in the future if everything continues the way it's going, which is weird, right?
John:
You know, so they're like, but the very first sentence of the statement kind of hints at what they're going for.
John:
It says, this is from Apple's statement.
John:
First sentence, a presidential review period is in progress regarding an order from the International Trade Commission, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
John:
So it starts by saying, hey, there's a thing that's under review by the president, right?
John:
And if nothing changes and if their review period goes through and we have to list stuff, we're going to do these things, right?
John:
It's like, you know, what Apple says, Apple is preemptively taking steps to comply should the ruling stand.
John:
Right.
John:
So what does that even mean?
John:
I mean, I guess you could like, well, get ready to stop selling stuff.
John:
You know, I guess there may be there's something they need to do.
John:
But why issue a statement about just so you guys know, there is a presidential review period.
John:
And unless things go our way, unless someone says changes their mind, we're going to have stop selling Apple watches.
John:
Convenient for Apple, by the way, that they have to stop selling essentially on December 24th and 25th.
John:
So they get all their holiday sales, but they don't really get any post holiday sales.
John:
And of course, you know, Amazon and Best Buy and stuff can sell through the inventory or whatever.
John:
So the interpretation of the statement is basically Apple announcing to the world slash president saying, you wouldn't want us to stop selling Apple watches, would you?
John:
Because it's kind of a popular product and we're kind of a popular company.
John:
And if you don't do something, Mr. President...
John:
we're going to have to stop selling Apple watches.
John:
Doesn't that sound terrible for you?
John:
So just we're putting out this public statement.
John:
I mean, everybody involved knows this, right?
John:
But Apple puts out a public statement that says to the world, and we're talking about it on this podcast, something that everyone involved in this issue, the review board, the two companies, everyone already knows that.
John:
But Apple is kind of putting it out in the world to put pressure on the president to...
John:
you know overturn this or to you know whatever whatever they have the ability to this review period of saying because either you let it stand or you like counteracted in some way and i think apple's hoping that the president will say oh don't stop apple from selling apple watch they're a big important company and they make a lot of money um i'm not quite sure how the system works i don't pay too much attention to patent law i'm not a lawyer i hate patents with a passion um
John:
I'm not sure that gambit is going to work, especially because Apple put out the statement.
John:
If Apple wanted to do this, they should be working back channels, not running to the press, because that never helps.
Marco:
I mean, you can assume they probably have tried that already.
John:
Right, but this is like the last ditch thing of like saying,
John:
Hey, world, we're going to have to stop selling Apple Watches for dumb patent reasons.
John:
And this kind of is related to yesterday's last episode where we're saying that Apple is a U.S.
John:
company and they are subject to U.S.
John:
laws.
John:
And sometimes there are those laws that they don't like, like laws about handing things over to the government, or in this case, patent laws.
John:
Apple patents everything because...
John:
as a big company, they have to.
John:
The system we have is you have to participate in it.
John:
You don't get to be the size of Apple if you don't patent everything under the sun.
John:
A lot of the times you're patenting all this bogus stuff so you can use it as defense against other people using their bogus patents against you and this war of mutually assured destruction which is totally pointless and stifles innovation and the only people it makes happy are lawyers.
John:
It's terrible, but it is the system that we currently have and Apple sure as hell participates in that system.
John:
It's kind of, you know, a bummer for Apple.
John:
In this case, it seems like they don't have enough patents to retaliate against Massimo and Massimo is playing hardball and not being bought off at the price Apple thinks is reasonable.
John:
So it's a game of chicken now.
John:
It's like, do you do you people and the government of the US really want Apple to stop selling its two flagship Apple watches indefinitely because of some company you've never heard up with some super dumb patent?
John:
You don't want that to happen, do you?
John:
And Apple is not currently lobbying for reforming patent law.
John:
And I'm not sure if they even would, because, again, Apple participates so much in the system that it's hard to know whether they like it or not.
John:
But they have to participate in the system.
John:
It would be great if they lobbied for, you know, reform on software patents and reform on patents in general.
John:
But that is an uphill battle with lots of forces going in the other direction.
John:
It doesn't seem like Apple has much appetite for that.
John:
So here we are.
John:
They're just out there saying, I know we have a stupid system and we tried to settle our way out of this.
John:
Now we're doing making a last ditch sort of plea to the anyone who can overturn this to say, how about just let's not do it in this case?
John:
I don't know how that's going to work.
John:
One thing I think is for pretty sure, Apple will not stop selling its flagship Apple Watchers for very long.
John:
I mean, worst case scenario, Apple just buys the company.
John:
Like Apple can solve this problem with money.
John:
They just don't want to.
John:
Whatever Massimo wants, they don't want to pay it.
John:
But believe me, Apple can pay it.
John:
whatever the amount is apple can pay it and will eventually pay it if this goes on long enough so massimo is you know betting that they can just drag this out to get a little bit more money but in the end apple's not going to spend a year not selling its two flagship watches they're going to pay whatever it takes to make this go away eventually but they're going to try everything else first and this is one of those things
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, that's the racket of patents.
Marco:
It's just extortion.
Marco:
I mean, that's, again, promoting innovation with patents.
Marco:
What you're really doing is creating legal methods of extortion.
Marco:
And that's, again, it's one of the many reasons...
John:
And it makes it so that only the richest companies can even participate because it's impossible, as we've discussed in the past shows, it's impossible to make any technology product without infringing tons and tons of patents that you can't afford to license.
John:
Like that is not, you know, the purpose of the patents is supposed to be for whatever the quote is from the relevant law of like the encouragement of the whatever arts or whatever.
John:
And it does the exact opposite.
John:
It makes it so the only way that you as a small company can have a tech product is if you get lucky and hide.
John:
And the big companies violate so many patents, but they also acquire tons of patents to retaliate against anyone.
John:
And then you have patent trolls who are like, haha, we don't make anything, so you can't retaliate against us.
John:
And it's just, it is the worst system.
John:
And here we have, hopefully this will motivate some patent reform or maybe give Apple an appetite for it.
John:
Because again, Apple participates so heavily in the system that I can imagine within Apple, there are sections of the company that think,
John:
Oh, patents are great.
John:
We just, you know, our patents are super important.
John:
Remember when Steve Jobs was up there with the iPhone?
John:
Oh boy, have we patented it, right?
John:
They always sound great when you're on the side of like using your patents to beat down other people.
John:
It's not so great when it goes the other direction.
John:
And look at how well that worked for them.
John:
Like it didn't even work that well for them.
John:
No, it doesn't work.
John:
It'll never work.
John:
It's because everything is stupid and everyone, all the big companies acquire tons of these really dumb patents.
John:
And they make it like Apple licensed the one click patent.
John:
Do you remember that?
John:
Amazon had, for kids who don't know, Amazon.com, the place that used to sell books online and now sells everything, patented the ability to buy something with a single click.
John:
Yep.
John:
Which, if that sounds dumb to you, welcome to patents.
John:
And I believe Apple licensed it for like the iTunes store or whatever, right?
John:
Because that's the way it works.
John:
It's like,
John:
How many dumb patents do you have?
John:
That's why patent cross-licensing agreements happen.
John:
I think Apple did a big cross-licensing agreement with Microsoft.
John:
It's like, look, we have tons of dumb patents and so do you.
John:
How about we just agree that I can use all your patents and you can use all mine?
John:
So at least we can ignore each other and just worry about the other people who are constantly suing us for patents and stuff.
John:
um and we don't have time for an entire show about why patents are dumb i'm sure people disagree with us see many past episodes where this has been discussed including a couple on my old hypercritical podcast our position has not changed since then uh and especially i think the entire apple ecosystem got a taste of it with the what was the the round that came through and swiped a bunch of developers we know some stupid thing about audio playing or something
Marco:
Oh, that was a different one.
Marco:
That was something like Home Audio, something like that.
Marco:
The EFF struck that one down, I think.
Marco:
No, LodSys was, it was some kind of, I think it was an in-app purchase thing.
Marco:
I forget what the details were.
Marco:
Thank God it actually never hit me, but it hit a bunch of people close to me, like a whole bunch of people you all know.
John:
And the small developers like had to pay for it.
John:
And it really is like extortion because they come to you and they say, look, we can destroy your company with this.
John:
So pay us all the money you can afford to pass because they want to get money.
John:
They don't want to destroy the company because they destroy a company to get nothing.
John:
So they basically say, how much can you afford to pay us?
John:
Like how much money do you have in your wallet?
John:
Just give us all of that, right?
John:
And so for smaller developers who don't have a lot of their money, they'll say, okay, well, just tell us how much is in your bank account and we won't charge you any more than that.
John:
That's the shakedown of these things.
John:
Like for the big company, obviously they can't do it with Apple because Apple has billions of dollars.
John:
They're not going to get all of that, right?
John:
But for the small developers, it's not like there's a flat fee.
John:
Like everyone has to pay $2 million.
John:
No, because they know no small developers can pay that.
John:
But if you're a small individual developer, they still want your money.
John:
So like, can you pay us 30,000?
John:
You know, and...
Marco:
people would do it just to make you can't afford to fight it yeah because the alternative is like all right then you can try to hire a lawyer for a hundred thousand dollars like that's that's the that's again it's extortion it's just the mob but legal like it's it's exactly like you know hey it'd be a shame if that building burned down you pay us for protection money
Marco:
It's that.
Marco:
It's just that but legal.
Marco:
I'm never getting all mad.
Marco:
It is so dysfunctional and practical.
Marco:
It's one of those wonderful stories that we tell people.
Marco:
You can be an individual inventor in your garage and come up with a great million dollar idea and patent it.
Marco:
And the reality is so far from that.
Marco:
That is not how it works at all.
Marco:
The only people who have patents are fools and a**holes.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
Because to get a patent, if you are an individual, to get a patent that is actually like properly written, properly filed, and has any chance of at all maybe being enforceable, it costs tens of thousands of dollars just to file a patent like that.
Marco:
So how many individual inventors in their garage are going to have tens of thousands of dollars to pay a lawyer and file everything and get it all written up and get it done?
Marco:
And then once you actually, if you actually get that patent granted to you,
Marco:
That doesn't prevent everyone from using it.
Marco:
That just gives you a tool that you can use to sue people who use it.
Marco:
Guess what?
Marco:
That takes more money.
Marco:
So the only people who can actually get a patent and then afford to try to enforce it against somebody are people with tons of money already.
Marco:
And chances are it won't really stop a big company from stealing the idea and using it because big companies, guess what?
Marco:
They have more money and more lawyers and more time than you.
Marco:
and i know this is kind of making the case for massimo but but like but that's the reality so like if you are a small inventor and you think a patent is going to protect you it won't it just will cost you tons of money and then at the end of the day it still won't protect you so that's the fool side of it and then there's the asshole side of it it's people who who you know actually intend to you know deploy this thing against unsuspecting people because here's the thing like
Marco:
Patents are allegedly required to be novel and to be not some kind of solution that a layperson would have just kind of come up with on their own in the field.
Marco:
So this is the argument against many software patents is like –
Marco:
Many people end up allegedly violating patents accidentally because the thing that is patented just became kind of common sense to anybody who is in that field.
Marco:
So if you're writing an app and you have a certain problem you're trying to solve with some algorithm or some technique –
Marco:
you might just come up with that on your own.
Marco:
The reality is that's how most invention works, and simultaneous invention is a real thing, kind of destroys the whole myth the patent system is based on.
Marco:
But anyway, setting all that aside for the moment, most patent infringement in most of tech...
Marco:
is done accidentally and unknowingly because so much has been patented by people who are just opportunistic thieves and vultures who want to be parasites on the world and want to shake people down for money because they think, well, I'm going to stake out my claim and get these patents and these things and then everyone has to pay me when they do them.
Marco:
There are many ways to go through this life, and I try very, very hard to be the total opposite of that kind of asshole.
Marco:
And I hope most of you out there make the same choice.
Marco:
Anyway, so the patent system doesn't work the way anyone thinks it does.
Marco:
The only people who benefit are lawyers and giant companies.
Marco:
And here's a patent fight that is between two giant companies who are both trying to extract as much money out of the other as possible.
Marco:
And these views that I hold on patents and that John holds on patents are not super rare views in the tech business, especially most of the tech business doesn't like patents.
Marco:
And so there is no way that Apple is going to be amenable to any solution that requires them to pay Mossimo for every Apple watch they make, which is probably what Mossimo is asking them to do.
Marco:
And probably a lot.
Marco:
Because Apple doesn't want to be stuck with that forever.
Marco:
Patents last a very long time.
Marco:
I believe it's something like 20 or 30 years, depending on whatever it's in.
Marco:
Patents last a long time.
Marco:
So Apple does not want to be paying this company for every single Apple Watch they make some dollar amount for an idea that Apple thinks they don't deserve to have exclusivity on.
Marco:
Apple is very, very principled.
Marco:
We know that.
Marco:
We saw how hard they fought against Epic, which maybe we'll get to that a little bit.
Marco:
But we saw the principled stand they take about protecting what they believe is theirs in the App Store and the taxes they charge to developers in the App Store and the gatekeeper fees they charge.
Marco:
They feel so strongly that a lot of times to Apple, they're very...
Marco:
opinionated company, a very principled company, and usually that is a very good thing.
Marco:
You know with stuff like this, they're not going to just say, fine, we'll give you five bucks per Apple Watch or whatever.
Marco:
They're not going to say that because they are probably so mad that this company even thinks they deserve five bucks from each Apple Watch because Apple probably thinks...
Marco:
They invented this stuff or this stuff is common sense or it shouldn't have been patented or whatever because, again, that's how patents work.
Marco:
They're all BS.
Marco:
So I don't see Apple being necessarily willing to solve this problem with money if the solution with money involves, we'll give you $5 for every Apple Watch we sell for the next 15 years.
Marco:
no they would never do that they would just buy they would just buy the company at that point maybe but then but what what does the company want them to pay like because apple probably hates this company and they would they they would rather probably bury this company in in lawsuits for years than to actually buy them like because they're again they're a principled company i'm saying buy the company jokingly because they wouldn't actually sell and apple wouldn't offer to buy them but what i'm saying is that money can solve this problem in many ways oh it can no
John:
But they won't.
John:
There's no way they would sign up for that protection racket where they'd pay that.
John:
If they licensed the patent, they would do it the way they license all their patents, which is like, we just want to be done with you.
John:
We never want to see you again.
John:
Kind of like what they did with ARM.
John:
Not that it's adversarial, but like getting the architecture license.
John:
Whatever that license is, it seems like they now can do what they want with ARM without worrying about that anymore.
John:
Same thing with the cross-license patent agreements.
John:
Like, they just want this to be over and go away.
John:
And for whatever reason, Massimo's playing hardball and they haven't agreed on a price.
John:
But I feel like they have to because there's no way they're going to stop selling the Apple Watch, right?
John:
They're going to figure it out.
John:
I mean, not for a long time.
John:
I mean, maybe they'll do it for a week or a month or whatever to put political pressure on, but they're not going to forego an entire year worth of Apple Watch Ultra sales.
Casey:
So what do you think about patents, gentlemen?
Casey:
Not a fan.
Casey:
Not a big fan.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I think we have time to keep on keeping on.
Casey:
So let's talk about the next breaking piece of news from earlier today.
Casey:
Adobe is giving up on their $20 billion with a B-B-B-B-B-dollar acquisition of Figma.
Casey:
The two of them have decided that there is no chance this is going to get through regulators in the UK and the US.
Casey:
So the heck with it.
Casey:
We're going to part ways.
Casey:
Oh, and apparently Adobe owes Figma a billion dollars in termination fees.
Casey:
Whoopsie-dupsies.
Casey:
I can't say this is terribly surprising to me.
Casey:
And I honestly don't know a whole bunch about either company because I've never really used Adobe stuff and I've never had the occasion to use Figma.
John:
You've never used Adobe stuff?
Casey:
Not really.
Casey:
Not in any regularity.
Casey:
I never touched Photoshop.
John:
How about Acrobat back in your PC days?
Casey:
Oh, okay.
Casey:
Well, that's fair.
Casey:
I didn't think about that.
Casey:
Yeah, that's true.
Casey:
But anyways, yeah, so apparently they're breaking up and a billion dollars to Figma.
Casey:
You know, you may pass go and you may collect a billion dollars.
John:
It seems so weird that they had such a big breakup fee in what would always look like a risky thing.
John:
Because Adobe, despite Casey not using it, is a pretty well-known company with a couple of products you might have heard of, like Photoshop.
John:
They are the big dog in the markets that they participate in.
John:
Adobe has gobbled up a bunch of its competitors in the past, either gobbled up or defeated or both its competitors being the bigger and bigger dog.
John:
And Figma was the first company in a long time to start giving Adobe a run for its money.
John:
So Adobe trying to acquire them, you have to, you know, everyone involved has to know, boy, this might be tough to get past regulators because in general...
John:
If a company like Adobe started out as being an important company in their market and just grew and grew and ate their competitors and grew and ate and defeated their competitors and grew and ate and defeated their competitors and then wants to buy the one company that has challenged them in ages for $20 billion, you're going to look askance at that and say,
John:
This probably doesn't seem like it would make for a healthier market.
John:
And so they put a $1 billion breakup fee in there.
John:
And as Daniel Jock had pointed out earlier today, I think Figma has like 1,000 employees.
John:
So that $1 billion breakup fee, in theory, you could give a million dollars to every Figma employee, which of course is not what's going to happen.
John:
Right, because that's not how capitalism works.
Casey:
Can you imagine, though?
Casey:
That would be unreal.
Casey:
I know it will never happen.
Casey:
I'm not arguing it will never happen.
Casey:
But can you imagine if any one of these, what did you say, thousand people?
Casey:
Rank and file employees.
Casey:
Can you imagine if just, you know, they snap their fingers Thanos style, but then all of a sudden everyone's a billionaire, excuse me, a millionaire?
Casey:
That would be
Casey:
Unreal.
Casey:
What a cool story that would be.
Casey:
Unfortunately, it'll never happen.
John:
I mean, I think they all stood to make a lot more in their Adobe stock or whatever they were going to get as part of the deal.
John:
So this is, you know, obviously, yeah, all this money is going to go.
John:
A few people are going to make a lot of money with this breakup fee and most of the employees are going to make nothing, I would assume.
John:
Because that's the way capitalism works.
John:
But...
John:
Yeah, that's a big breakup fee for a deal that if you had to place odds on, it would be difficult to know which side to bet.
John:
I'm glad they went against not knowing the details, but my general inclination is competition is good and the market that Adobe's in needs more competition, not less.
John:
And I have used Adobe and I have used Figma.
John:
And I do see how they compete with each other.
John:
They also are slightly complementary because they come at things in a different way.
John:
And the places where Adobe is strong is not where Figma is strong.
John:
But the whole point is people were using Figma instead of the equivalent or non-equivalent, non-existing Adobe tools.
John:
And that's why the market was shifting a little bit.
John:
It was like, hey, Figma has something that Adobe doesn't.
John:
It's a competition.
John:
They weren't making a Photoshop replacement that was better than Photoshop.
John:
They were coming at it from a different angle, really focusing on collaboration and focusing on the use cases that for the modern world that were, you know, lots of Adobe products were created before the web existed.
John:
So that really colors their lineage and their feature set.
John:
And Figma is totally focused on a world where we're all connected and collaborating on things.
John:
So, yeah, my instinctual inclination when any of these huge mergers come is let's not do that.
John:
Let's just let them go on their own.
John:
And Figma is not, I think Figma can exist on its own.
John:
People are like, well, who's going to buy Figma now?
John:
I don't like the idea that the only reason a company exists is to get bought by a larger company.
John:
I know that's a big thing and there's some hemming and hawing about this.
John:
Like, oh, if they don't let this deal come through, how are startups going to get funded?
John:
Because the only way startups get funded is they assume they'll eventually get bought by the bigger company.
John:
It's like, that's not healthy.
John:
If the whole purpose of making a startup is to be eventually be acquired by the bigger company, all you do is feeding people and ideas into the bigger company that just keeps getting bigger and bigger.
John:
You can actually make a competing company that makes a profit and pays employees and makes a product and improves it.
John:
Like, lots of the companies that are around today started that way.
John:
If they weren't, like, every single company that we talk about on this show would all be owned by IBM or something, and there'd just be one company, and it's called IBM, and it owns the former Microsoft, and it owns the former Apple, and it owns the former Atari, and it owns the former everybody because they just buy everything.
John:
Like, hey, what's wrong with that?
John:
I feel like that's the current environment.
Marco:
I bet they would make really great products.
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, we're just like the like whatever the big companies are that exist now.
John:
It's like, well, no other companies can exist except for these ones.
John:
And from now on, the only thing you can do is make a startup that you hope will be acquired by one of them.
John:
I think the last big one that appeared, I assume we would say like Facebook and Google were the last two big ones to appear.
John:
And now it's like, this is it.
John:
This is the set.
John:
And your company is just going to get acquired by the stupid abbreviations they have for it.
John:
I forget what it is, like FAMP or whatever.
John:
It was like, you know.
John:
Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Adobe, there's just these big companies in each of their markets that are so dominant.
John:
Stop them from buying everybody.
John:
And if Figma can't make it on its own, it's like, oh, we invested so much money.
John:
The only reason we've been able to make this good product is because we're not viable as a standalone business.
John:
Our only purpose is to be acquired.
John:
Well, that's a bad business plan.
John:
Don't do that.
John:
Being acquired, fine.
John:
Maybe that can happen.
John:
That's a fine way to exit for certain companies.
John:
But if you grow to the size of Figma, where the biggest company wants to buy you for $20 billion, you probably have a viable business on your own.
John:
At least I hope you do.
John:
You've got 1,000 employees.
John:
Someone wants to buy you for $20 billion.
John:
You can't make money.
John:
You can't figure out how to be a profitable standalone company.
John:
You have to be acquired.
John:
Or is it because your investors are like, well, the only way we get our big payday is if you get acquired.
John:
Ugh, it's...
John:
more, more, uh, distasteful side effects of our economic system.
John:
So I don't, again, I'm not being gleeful saying it because they get these Figma employees, you know, they're working within the system we have.
John:
And part of the system we have is one of the big payoffs you might get from working at this company is you might get acquired and you might make out like abandoned.
John:
Right.
John:
Uh, and I just, I don't begrudge them that I don't, I think they, they deserve that as much as anyone deserves anything, but it's another example of working within a system that I think is bad.
John:
And we all have to work within it because it's a system that we have, but I really wish we would work to,
John:
change that system and part of the system like it or not are regulators that sometimes say that a big company can't buy some other company and in this case it was the uk and the eu instead of the us but you know that's that's also part of the system it's also part of the risk of being an employee and hoping you're going to get bought out by a bigger company uh that merger may be stopped by regulators and in this case i'm not sad that it was stopped
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then the last piece of breaking news from earlier today is that data from test flight servers from 2012 to 2015.
Casey:
So this is before Apple certainly took ownership.
Casey:
I think it was before Apple even said they were going to buy test flight or it was before all that happened, I believe.
Marco:
Yeah, TestFlight used to be a separate company, like a little startup.
Marco:
It was much more limited and much harder to use, but it was pretty useful at the time.
Casey:
Yeah, very well put.
Casey:
Anyways, there's a bunch of data that maybe has been leaked.
Casey:
I'm not sure that leak is really the right classification here.
Casey:
Uncovered?
Casey:
Uncovered might be a better word for it.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
But anyways, a bunch of data, like terabytes worth of data has been exposed or uncovered, like Marco had said, from test flight servers back in the 2012 to 2015 era.
Casey:
And so we're not entirely sure how this came to be.
Casey:
We're not even entirely sure if this was recent, but certainly it's become a bit of a brouhaha over the last 24 hours.
Casey:
Yeah, a lot of old builds, a lot of old data coming to light.
Casey:
It appears that this may
John:
relate to uh amazon s3 buckets that were not properly protected maybe that's the fourth hard problem in computer science uh is protect properly protecting s3 buckets right right um i think the deal with this again this story just broke this morning i think the deal with this is that this data dump has existed for like a decade and people are just rediscovering it because people have short memories um and it's like it's an archive.org right um
John:
regardless of when this leaked, how old the leak it is, how much we forgot about it and are rediscovering it 10 years later because we all have short memories.
John:
It's not great.
John:
It's out there, right?
John:
It's not the source code for these things.
John:
It's binary.
John:
So what you upload to TestFlight is a...
John:
uh you know a build of your app that you're testing on people's devices it's not the final one probably that you're going to send the app store or maybe you know it might be if you if they decide that build works but it's all the in-between builds that you send and so they're binaries or maybe in some cases bitcode if apple watch was around back then um
John:
for tons of stuff and people are sort of digging through this giant archive of binaries trying to see if there's anything useful uh the link we'll put in the show notes is from euro gamer it's because it's like look at these prototypes of games that never shipped because you know they they developed them they put them out on test flight they decided they're never going to ship them so if you want to find some weird unreleased game including some unreleased flappy bird variant because that's what people at euro gamer are excited about i guess uh you could dig through this but this is the difficulty of uh you know
John:
leaving stuff unprotected on the internet and when it makes its way into archive.org apparently it's hard to get rid of it even 10 years later if this really is a leak from or a people say it's not a leak it's it was they just crawled it either way test flight didn't intend for this to be in archive.org and yet it is in archive.org because archive.org crawled the test flight site and followed links and eventually found all this stuff and slurped it all up and now it's there it would be great if apple slash test flight could say hey archive.org
John:
can you remove all that because uh we don't own all that intellectual property and neither do you so it probably shouldn't be an archive.org because it's basically it's builds of did you use test flight in that year range did you upload an app your app is probably in this this data dump right uh and you probably don't want it there i mean maybe it's irrelevant maybe you don't care maybe it's a build of an app that's long dead or it's useless to everybody because it only runs on all the s's or whatever it's
John:
it's weird, but it's also a cautionary tale.
John:
Check your S3 bucket permissions.
John:
This sounds dumb, but Amazon doesn't make this that easy, and they've worked on it over the years to try to make it
John:
more obvious when you screw this up there are whole companies that part of their product is they will go over your stuff in aws and make sure you haven't done something boneheaded and yet it happens all the time someone has an s3 bucket which for people to know is just a place on the internet where you can store files there's lots of imitators um
John:
and they accidentally make it accessible to everybody and it's like how would they not notice this you don't notice it because you can't really get anything out of it unless you sort of know the file name so it's security through obscurity especially if they don't allow it like essentially directory listing to use web parlance like you can't you know you can set the permission so oh nobody can iterate over the contents you can't list what's here but if you know the file name you can make a request for it and you'll get it right and the file names are really big and obscure and it's like well
John:
You know, you wouldn't notice that it's publicly accessible because no one would be making those requests.
John:
But if you have a crawler, especially if that crawler is seeded with like it knows that you use like the app ID as the file name and it has a bunch of app IDs from elsewhere, then the crawler can just go through and try all those app IDs.
John:
The whole point is your S3 bucket shouldn't be publicly accessible.
John:
A random person on the internet should not be able to pull a file from it if it's not supposed to be publicly accessible.
John:
There should be some authentication where you have to be allowed to get that file because you're the developer of the file and that's how you can get it.
John:
But doing that can be a little bit annoying.
John:
And especially with the efficiencies of S3 where you really don't want them to go through your server or to bounce off your server.
John:
You want them to go directly to S3 because that's one of the wonderful things about S3 is that it's available everywhere and it's close by and blah, blah, blah.
John:
People take a shortcut and they say, well, no one's going to guess this URL anyway.
John:
We'll just make the bucket publicly accessible.
John:
Or they accidentally make it publicly accessible.
John:
But again, they never realize it's publicly accessible because it seems like you can't get anything from it without knowing how to get to it.
John:
But especially automated computer crawlers, they'll just follow links.
John:
They don't know which ones they're quote unquote supposed to or not supposed to follow.
John:
So if they find an in, they'll just go and crawl and scrape and pull everything out of there.
John:
And it ends up in archive.org.
Marco:
I mean, in all fairness, if you set up a new S3 bucket today, they make you jump through many hoops to make it publicly accessible.
Marco:
Amazon has learned, wow, people mess this up a lot.
Marco:
It is now so complicated and convoluted to make any part of an S3 bucket publicly accessible.
Marco:
So it's better now.
John:
People are motivated to do it because like my app's not working.
John:
I keep getting an error on S3 and they're like, they just bash AWS until the error stops.
John:
Like, oh, done.
John:
Now the errors don't.
John:
I'm not sure what I did, but now I'm not getting any more errors pulling from S3.
John:
So I guess everything's fine.
John:
And then, you know, fast forward 10 years and someone has scraped everything out of their bucket and it's an archive.org.
Marco:
As mentioned earlier, we are supported exclusively this episode by ATP members.
Marco:
Please consider becoming a member today at ATP.fm slash join.
Marco:
So to recap, here's what you get.
Marco:
You get the ad-free version of the show in a special RSS feed that you can add to any podcast app that you want to support to RSS feeds, which is most of them.
Marco:
You also get access to a bootleg feed.
Marco:
This is the unedited raw live stream that's broadcast for the show, including extra stuff before and after what's usually released, including things like our title selection process and occasional little bits that don't make it into the final edit of the show.
Marco:
Plus, you hear Casey swearing.
Marco:
You hear me miss some jokes.
Marco:
You hear like whatever flubs are kind of natural to the live show.
Marco:
And you get it about half a day before the episode is released.
Marco:
So you get it early.
Marco:
So that's a very, very popular option among our members, that bootleg feed.
Marco:
And of course, you get member specials, exclusive content released about once a month that can span from tech topics like our CMS development, John Learning, PHP, stuff like that, to more kind of squishy topics, things like movies we like or food we're trying.
Marco:
It's a lot of fun.
Marco:
That's the member special.
Marco:
So you also get a merchandise discount.
Marco:
So whenever we offer the ATP store, whenever we have those time-ranged sales that we bother you about in the main show,
Marco:
Usually members will get a special code that will apply to everything in that sale that will give them 15% off.
Marco:
So it's a net little extra bonus with membership there.
Marco:
So anyway, check it out.
Marco:
ATP.FM slash join.
Marco:
It's about eight bucks a month and it is the best way to support the show.
Marco:
You know, the ad market goes up and down.
Marco:
That's life.
Marco:
But members are there.
Marco:
They are consistent and they have really helped us out a lot this last year.
Marco:
you know, as the ad market has been not so great.
Marco:
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For some reason, if you're hearing this, if you're not, please consider becoming a member today.
Marco:
ATP.FM slash join.
Marco:
Thank you so much for your consideration and back to the show.
Casey:
All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
And Tom Bullock writes, what's the best way in 2023 to run an old version of OS X?
Casey:
For example, Tiger.
Casey:
I don't know, to be honest with you.
Casey:
I know that Apple has a bit of sample code.
Casey:
And I think Rambo might have put something together where you can like use whatever the hypervisor is.
John:
Virtualization framework.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
And you can very, very cheaply and reasonably easily create and run a virtual machine.
Casey:
I dabbled with this briefly like six months or a year ago, and it was pretty good.
Casey:
I would assume that the right answer is something like VMware Fusion or Parallels, but I honestly don't know.
Casey:
I think, John, you might be the best person to answer this question.
John:
Best is the trickiest part here.
John:
Yeah, best for what?
John:
What is the best way in 2023?
John:
Well, getting back to our discussion about Palm devices, the best way is to use an old Mac.
John:
Because that will give you the authentic experience of what it was really like.
John:
for that definition if that's your definition of best that's going to be the best you need like a crt you need a blue and white g3 you need that's good that's that's one definition of best but i'm assuming that's not what this person wants to know um people want to run it without getting an old computer or dealing with all that hassle here's the problem though all of the virtualization stuff that apple offers so far doesn't let you sign into an apple id
John:
which maybe back in tiger isn't that big of a deal but as the versions advance not being able to sign into an apple id puts really cramps your ability to do stuff with it like if you want if you're there because you i want to try all the old apps and see how they work and it's like oh i can't do this because i have to sign into an apple id or i can't use this sync thing or whatever if you don't care about that then yeah any virtualization thing will work there the reason people have made these
John:
uh virtualization apps is because apple has a framework for virtualization and if you can put a fairly thin app wrapper around that the framework does all the virtualization stuff you just have to deal with like making a nice ui letting people set things up and install or whatever right so that's why you see a lot of these hanging around vmware i think still uses its own virtualization framework from way back in the day that will probably be more straightforward and more supported um
John:
Even with VMware, there are limitations.
John:
I have VMware and I have old versions of Mac OS X here hanging around for some old software and some curiosity.
John:
And it's not, not everything works.
John:
Like if you expect it to be just like if you had pulled out that old Mac, it's not going to be it.
John:
I'm not sure if it has the same app ID and limitations, but definitely the graphics acceleration, especially on old versions, super jank.
John:
Either doesn't exist at all or it exists, but it doesn't work the way you expect it to, or it seems slow.
John:
And if, if you like, sometimes they're all, they all click there in safe mode where there's like no transparency and everything's really slow.
John:
You have to figure out how to enable the GPU acceleration.
John:
It's not straightforward.
John:
So I,
John:
The reason I mentioned the hardware thing is that really is the best.
John:
You'll get as much as you can possibly get.
John:
And even then, referencing what Marco was talking about last episode, there may be issues with TLS and SSL versions, which mean that you can't use the web browsers.
John:
You won't be able to really use it like it was back in the day because the world has moved on.
John:
But the closest you can get is with hardware.
John:
Everything else is going to be in compromise.
John:
So it really depends on what specifically you want to do.
John:
If you just want to run some specific app and it doesn't need your Apple ID and doesn't need to do any weird networking that's not going to work because of TLS upgrades, then, yeah, any VM solution will work.
John:
I liked VMware.
John:
I still use it.
John:
I think they're going into a subscription model soon.
John:
So if you want to get the last sort of licensed version that you can buy and use until it breaks, run and get a VMware Fusion now.
John:
uh or otherwise look at all the various virtualization projects but realize you're always going to be taking some kind of hit in functionality which is a shame until fast forward a decade or two kind of like we run uh classic mac os you'll be able to run tiger in like a web browser using some javascript thing right but we're not there yet
Marco:
Also, I mean, do the virtualization apps, to the best of my knowledge, none of them will provide architecture emulation, right?
Marco:
So, like, the idea is, like, you know, for an old enough version of macOS, if you are, say, you know, running on a Apple Silicon MacBook Pro or whatever...
Marco:
You're not going to be able to run something that could only run on Intel or PowerPC.
Marco:
So you're going to need something that can emulate those processors in addition to virtualization of the underlying OS.
Marco:
Yeah, I was trying to think of VMware would do that for you.
Marco:
Does anything do that on Apple Silicon?
Marco:
I don't think we have that yet.
Marco:
I could be wrong.
Marco:
But most of the big solutions, including anything that uses Apple's virtualization framework, they don't virtualize x86 emulation on Apple Silicon Macs.
Marco:
So you can't run an Intel OS using Apple's virtualization framework on Apple Silicon.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So VMware is, I mean, I'm, I guess I'm still stuck in the Intel world thinking old VMware rules run natively on your Intel thing, but if you don't have an Intel Mac, yeah.
John:
And the virtualization thing is not exists for Intel Macs.
John:
It's an arm only thing, but that doesn't stop you.
John:
There's tons of, before Apple came up with their virtualization framework, there, there are free ones.
John:
What is the virtual box is another free one.
John:
And there's one other free one I'm forgetting.
John:
VMware is just a fancy, Oh, there's parallels, which is another commercial one.
Yeah.
John:
Like I said, all those options have some... I've used all of them at one point or another on Intel Macs, and they all have weirdness about them.
John:
Every single one.
John:
There's no one of them that's going to be running it on hardware.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Licensing is weird, too.
Marco:
A lot of the old OSs, you legally aren't supposed to virtualize them or aren't allowed to virtualize them, or you have to find some pirate installer or whatever.
Marco:
That could be both a pain in the butt and not entirely legal if you need that for some kind of compliance reason.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Again, like old hardware, as John said, the only major downside of old hardware, besides having to have this physical thing that you're running, which can be physically cumbersome, I wouldn't say it's expensive.
Marco:
It's not.
Marco:
Because old PC hardware is very inexpensive because nobody wants it.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
It can be a pain in the butt to get stuff on and off of it.
Marco:
The advantage of virtualizing on your own computer is that usually the virtualization intermediate software will have some convenient ways to share files back and forth between your computer and the emulated computer or whatever.
Marco:
Um, when you're dealing with physical hardware, it becomes a lot more manual of a process.
Marco:
You have to do things like, uh, you know, maybe transfer stuff with USB drives and deal with, you know, the, the realities of the, of that situation and stuff like that.
Marco:
Networking can, as John said, networking can be tricky, especially if it involves any kind of modern security requirements like browsing the web at all can be very difficult on old computers.
Marco:
Um, so it is a bit of a pain in the butt to, um,
Marco:
to kind of integrate an old computer into your environment for whatever reason you need to be running it.
Marco:
But you kind of save a whole bunch of possible butt pains by not dealing with virtualization or emulation or anything like that.
Marco:
So you're kind of trading some butt pain for different butt pain.
John:
well i mean it's not like a classic mac os it's like anything that can run mac os 10 has usb right and so thumb drives that'll like the you can an hfs plus thumb drive will work in and even when you run mac os 10 it'll also run in any modern mac so it's way better than classic where you're like what the hell is this apple talk thing and how do i deal with that or like you have to install an extension to get tcp ip and you know you got to figure out how to connect to the internet yeah
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Or you have to figure out like floppy disk formats somehow.
John:
Good luck.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Get a USB floppy drive, plug it into your Mac, see how that works.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Renkari Anand writes, I was looking at the current set of EVs and they all seem very unappealing for one reason or another.
Casey:
So I decided to put together a list of my requirements.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I will read these.
Casey:
This is a lot.
Casey:
And I don't think you should be surprised that you can't find anything that fits all of these.
Casey:
But anyway, the requirements are as follows.
Casey:
No full glass roof, a sunroof that can open, physical button HVAC controls while you're out.
Casey:
At this point, you might as well give up.
Casey:
Uh, physical buttons for, or lever for the gear selector and no motorized controls for the gear selector.
Casey:
I'm not sure what that means, but I'll go with it.
Casey:
Uh, physical button seat adjustment controls, radar adaptive cruise control, car play, preferably have a speedometer in front of the driver, not in a center screen.
Casey:
And the center screen must not be safety critical.
Casey:
In other words, the car should be fully operational.
Casey:
Even if the center screen dies, how is this the future?
Casey:
How is this a future that we have built ourselves?
Marco:
I mean, first of all, this all sounds very reasonable in theory.
Marco:
But second of all, like, even if you just say not even just EVs, what new cars satisfy this?
Marco:
Not that many of them, I don't think.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
I mean, the new Golf R, for example, which I know is, I believe, no, it's the manual transmission that's dying.
Casey:
But anyways, the new Golf R doesn't meet all of these, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
Exactly.
John:
It's tough to find a car that would meet all these, even not an EV, but especially an EV.
John:
The reason I put this in here is because we'll get to his final question is, what requirements do you have for your next cars?
John:
You can have a list like this, but you've kind of got to sort it by priority and decide where you're going to accept because you're never going to get all of them.
John:
I'm pretty sure there are...
John:
if there's any car that satisfies all these, you don't want it.
John:
It's probably not a good car.
John:
It's probably a car that you, because you didn't list things like how many people fit in it.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I feel like that is a bigger requirement.
John:
Do you need to fit six people or do you need two?
John:
They're like, if you say, okay, we got a car that fits.
Marco:
Do you need a lot of space for luggage?
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, we got a car that fits this, but it has a driver's seat, a passenger seat, and no backseat of any kind.
John:
Does that work for you?
John:
It's like, no, I've got five people in my family, right?
John:
That should probably be a higher priority than no full glass roof.
John:
I'm just saying.
John:
So you've got to prioritize.
John:
But the reason I think this is a fascinating question, there was a story we had that's probably buried in the show notes, maybe we'll come up again at some point, about how customer satisfaction with their new cars has been declining, mostly blaming infotainment.
John:
And we've talked about this in the past, how everyone who's making an electric vehicle feels the need to do stupid things that are appealing in the showroom, but that people hate once they get the car home.
John:
And I was hoping that would be like...
John:
Something that would only happen in the beginning of the age of EVs.
John:
Like we've talked about, you know, how and why it was probably a good idea for Tesla to do these things in the beginning because you want the car to seem cool and futurey.
John:
But we're well past that now.
John:
EVs are not...
John:
They're entirely mainstream, but the only things keeping them out of the mainstream is their price, right?
John:
They are not exotic and weird.
John:
I see EVs all the time.
John:
Most of the ones I see are not Teslas.
John:
So there's no reason that every single company that makes an EV needs to do this.
John:
But they do do it, and I think the reason they do it is like, well, EVs aren't new, but this is our first EV.
John:
I don't care if it's your first EV.
John:
EVs have been out for, what, a decade?
John:
They're very common now.
John:
I know you're super proud of your first EV, but think twice before you, for example, decide to make the door handles crappy.
John:
Every single EV company is doing that.
John:
We've got an EV.
John:
The door handles better be annoying and harder to use and break more often.
John:
Why?
John:
Because EVs.
John:
And if you say anything about aerodynamics, I will hit you with my little cartoon hammer and say, no, no, that's not why you're doing this.
John:
Admit it.
John:
You can make flush door handles that are not stupid, but they don't.
John:
They make them all stupid.
John:
It's like, it's okay for Tesla to do that.
John:
Only Tesla.
John:
Tesla's the only company that gets to buy to do that.
John:
Because they were first, and they had to be cool and computery, and that's their brand.
John:
That shouldn't be your brand, Volkswagen.
John:
Just make door handles that work.
John:
People just want to pull the handle and open the door, and they want it to happen every time, and it would be nice if it still worked when it was like an ice storm or something.
John:
Stop making them electronic.
John:
Stop making them stupid.
John:
Same thing goes for everything else inside the car with the HVAC controls.
John:
Oh, you want to address your side view mirrors?
John:
Have fun navigating the touchscreen.
John:
No, stop it.
John:
removing stocks from the steering wheel stop all of that but people who are making evs are doing this and the let it's kind of like the apple silicon things like how many years does it take from conception to the shipping of things like seven years or whatever right the cars that we're seeing now what i hope is that every one of these car companies has learned a no more piano black plastic and b
John:
stop putting everything on screens but the problem is there's a countervailing force here because the countervailing force is part of the reason that Tesla continues to do this it's cheaper to put them on the screens and so despite how much people hate them it's basically like look if we all do this if we all make our cars worse what are they going to do they're not going to go to a competitor so let's all just do it let's all reap the savings let's just have one screen and no buttons
John:
And it sucks for everybody, but if all cars are like this, we'll be fine.
John:
And it's not that all cars are like this, but EVs, among EVs, there is a lot of sameness.
John:
Outside of EVs, there are still a few companies that now are bragging in their press things, saying, if you'll notice, we have physical controls for HVAC, right?
John:
And that's a selling point to them.
John:
They're using it as a selling point.
John:
Can you imagine in our childhood saying...
John:
So you're telling me you have buttons to change the fan speed.
John:
That's great.
John:
That's, is that a bullet point in your brochure?
John:
Cause every car has that.
John:
It's like, well, in the, in the dark future, not every car will have that and we'll make you use a touchscreen.
John:
Oh, and the other thing I'll throw in under the bus is it gets like, and Mercedes is doing stuff like that.
John:
I think we've explained about it before.
John:
Um,
John:
oh, don't worry, we don't have touch controls.
John:
That would be, that's not good.
John:
We need physical feedback.
John:
So what we have instead is like on the steering wheel, instead of having touch controls because you'll swipe those accidentally and you'll activate stuff.
John:
No, our things, our buttons, you press them and they physically move in.
John:
It's not even haptic.
John:
They physically move in and out.
John:
But what they do is they make a giant piano black plastic panel with six glyphs on it for six different functions.
John:
And when you press any one of those buttons, the entire panel moves in.
John:
with a creek and a plastic creek and some tilt and the entire panel moves out rather than making six individual buttons it's essentially one big button with capacitive sensors to know where on the big giant button your finger was when you pressed it and they think this is better than making six buttons but land river did that on my defender
John:
it's not better everyone is doing it because it's cheaper to make one giant button with capacitive controls than to make six individual buttons and it is so so bad so we all just have to hang in there and yell and scream as much about this as possible and try to find the one car company that you that like pick one of these things that's the most important to you like my thing is like i don't think i can buy a car with stupid door handles
John:
and I think physical HVAC.
John:
Those may be my top two priorities, but you can only do what you can do.
John:
In the end, there's no car that has those two things that I just have to buy what I have to buy, but we just have to make it through this terrible phase and come out the other side, or we just need some brave car company to say, no, we're going to design their interior of our cars to be useful.
John:
And not to be inexpensive and look, let's see, in the showroom, but we were in a dark, dark period for cars.
John:
And I thought we'd be out of it by now, right?
John:
I thought this was going to happen.
John:
The first few generations of EVs are going to be like this.
John:
People are going to snap out of it.
John:
They're not snapping out of it.
John:
Or if they have, we haven't seen the fruits of that labor yet.
John:
They're getting worse.
John:
Brand new cars, like Volvo's new line of cars.
John:
Here's our new EVs.
John:
We made EVs before.
John:
Like we have Polestar and everything.
John:
We're experienced.
John:
We've done this before.
John:
This isn't even our first radio.
John:
Our new EV, no rear windscreen.
John:
Right?
John:
Like no rear window at all.
John:
We'll just put a camera there.
John:
No Volvo.
John:
Stop.
John:
What are you doing?
John:
Maybe that's the Polestar.
John:
I forget which one it is.
John:
No screen in front of you.
John:
Just a center screen like the Model 3.
John:
It's like, have we learned nothing?
John:
Where are you going?
John:
It's so terrible.
John:
So I feel for this person.
John:
I understand the frustration, but...
John:
The pickings out there are so slim and there are so many bad ideas.
John:
And I would have more confidence they would go away if they weren't all less expensive.
John:
That's less expensive in your $80,000 car.
John:
We got to save the five cents.
John:
We can't have six individual buttons on your steering wheel.
Marco:
I think that's one of the most profound and impactful changes that technology has seen in my lifetime.
Marco:
It used to be not that long ago, maybe 15 years ago.
Marco:
But screens were very expensive, just in general.
Marco:
Any kind of screen technology.
Marco:
Growing up, screens were very expensive.
Marco:
That's why you'd have early computers that plugged into your TV.
Marco:
Because most people would have a TV, but you wouldn't necessarily have the money to buy a separate computer monitor.
Marco:
So you'd plug everything into your TV or whatever.
Marco:
And then later on, cars, for most of cars' existence...
Marco:
couldn't have like bitmap screens they had you know dials and lights and occasionally at the you know in like once you got into like you know the 80s and 90s and stuff you could have like little lcd segment displays and stuff but remember the buick that had a little i think it was a buick that had a crt in the dashboard i think we talked about it before yeah
John:
Someone did put a CRT in a car in case you were wondering if that ever happened.
John:
It was a monochrome CRT, I believe, but it was there.
John:
Terrible.
John:
Super terrible.
Marco:
Yeah, but it's like, you know, screens were expensive.
Marco:
And so there was always so much effort put into trying to do whatever you could without a screen, like without having a screen.
Marco:
Like even my first BMW that I got in like 2000...
Marco:
nine or ten or whatever that was the screen that would have given me the navigation system was like a five thousand dollar option so i didn't take it so it just had like you know the little like lcd segment display on the radio and that was it the reason it didn't have all these features was because screens were expensive only and only in like the last again like 15 years maybe that has flipped over so that now
Marco:
Screens cost nothing, relatively speaking.
Marco:
Screens are so cheap now that, yes, a screen is still more expensive than a button, but a screen might actually be less expensive than 25 buttons and all of their associated wiring and all of their service over the course of the vehicle's warranty period.
Marco:
If one of those buttons flakes out, then they've got to replace it.
Marco:
Once you factor in...
Marco:
the total cost of having all these buttons and stocks and everything that need to be, like, you know, manufactured, assembled, installed, maintained, wired, you know, tested, all that stuff, it actually is now cheaper in a lot of cases to just put everything in software on the touchscreen.
Marco:
And the idea of that, to tell someone 15 years ago that cars... It's cheaper for cars to have a giant screen, a giant color, high-resolution touchscreen.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
That's cheaper than having like 15 buttons?
Marco:
Yes, actually.
Marco:
In some cases, when you factor in certain things, yes, it actually is.
Marco:
But anyway, going back to the actual question, I would suggest...
Marco:
despite everything we just said you can get used to a lot of things that you that you might not think um so you know things that are important about a car are things like can it fit my family can it fit the stuff we have to do can it fit in my garage or whatever like you know physical like large physical characteristics of it are important is it physically capable of
Marco:
Fitting in my life and handling the tasks that I want it to handle.
Marco:
Is it an EV or not?
Marco:
Is it fuel efficient or not?
Marco:
The big questions like that, those all matter a lot.
Marco:
Stuff like whether you have to move your seat with physical controls or things on a touchscreen, that matters a lot less.
Marco:
So what I would suggest is...
Marco:
You know, shift your priority list.
Marco:
You know, these a lot of these are like nice to haves, but maybe not requirements, because what you what you will find is that if you're willing to bend on a few of these kind of more superficial or less less important things like, you know, how often do you move your seat if you move it every day?
Marco:
Well, then how often how often you move it or how how you move it matters a lot.
Marco:
If you are mostly the only driver of your car and you don't move your seat that often, it matters a lot less.
John:
And by the way, with all this technology, speaking of moving your seats and stuff, memory seats, the feature has been around since the late 70s, early 80s.
John:
Still, still car companies are stingy about doing that.
John:
And sometimes when they do it, they only have two positions because they can't store the extra three kilobytes of memory.
John:
Right.
John:
It's insane.
John:
And if, you know, you mentioned seat movement, if you move the seat, you're probably also moving the mirrors.
John:
If you get one of these EVs where to adjust the side view mirrors and the seat, you have to use the touchscreen and it doesn't have seat memory or it has enough seat memory for two people but not three and you have three people using the car, if every time you get in the car, you are swiping around on a touchscreen to adjust both your mirrors and the seat, you are going to be hating life, right?
John:
And so when I say prioritizing features...
John:
figure out like if you had if i had to prioritize them it would be like what things do you do most often and changing seats you know again like mark said it may be something you never do or something you do almost every time you get in the car because it's a shared car for example among two or three people so think more about turn signals and less about the hood release yeah so like stuff you use a lot
John:
Yeah, turn signals, changing gears.
John:
Those are things you use a lot.
John:
I would weight them way more heavily.
John:
And door handles.
John:
Every time you get in the car, use door handles.
John:
Or maybe you don't.
John:
Maybe you have your phone in your pocket and the door automatically pops open.
John:
But like, you know, because that's things you can get used to.
John:
But think about the thing you're going to be doing every time.
John:
Because as annoying as it is to use the touchscreen to open the glove box on a Tesla, you're going to open the glove box way less often than you're going to signal turns unless you're a BMW driver.
Yeah.
Marco:
But also, to play a little bit of devil's advocate here, some of these requirements are things that you could get used to if they weren't satisfied, and some of them you can't.
Marco:
So, for instance, if you really want a sunroof and the car doesn't have a sunroof, you're never going to get used to that.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Can confirm because that's where I am right now.
John:
Or if you don't want a sunroof in your head, it's the headliner.
John:
It's always going to hit the headliner.
John:
You're not going to shrink that fast.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Like if you want radar adaptive cruise control and if your car doesn't have that, you're never going to get used to it not having it.
Marco:
Like you'll just always not have it.
Marco:
Whereas like if you say you want physical HVAC control buttons.
Marco:
You could actually get used to the screen just fine.
Marco:
It might not be as ideal, so that's a little bit of a squishy requirement.
Marco:
What I would suggest is if there's an EV that you think you want or might like, but it fails one of those preferential things like physical buttons for HVAC controls or something like that, I would suggest go test drive it or even, if you can, rent one for a few days.
Marco:
Because a lot of that stuff...
Marco:
You'd be surprised how quickly you get used to it and it isn't a big deal.
Marco:
This is what Tesla people have been telling everyone else forever.
Marco:
Just try it like rent one for a weekend or something like try it and you'll see a lot of the stuff you think is a big deal is not a big deal.
Marco:
Whereas a lot of the stuff that you might not have thought of might be a bigger deal of new things.
Marco:
Like, I hate most Tesla door handles.
Marco:
Like, as John was saying, the door handles on Teslas are really annoying.
Marco:
All of them.
Marco:
Every model Tesla has differently annoying door handles.
Marco:
Even the new Cybertruck, which we haven't talked about and probably won't.
Marco:
They found another way to have annoying, stupid door handles.
Marco:
That is, if anything, Tesla's most innovative department might be the department that makes annoyingly bad door handles.
John:
It's really important for the Cybertruck to be aerodynamic, Marco.
John:
You understand?
Marco:
like they just keep finding new creative ways to make bad annoying door handles but anyway um you know that like to me the the door handles are worse on teslas than the lack of certain physical controls like because the lack of physical controls like a lot a lot of that you just get used to within the first day or two of driving the car and it just isn't as big of a deal as you think beforehand yeah
Casey:
Yes, but no.
Casey:
So let's take an example.
Casey:
Aaron's XC90, that has the HVAC controls on the center screen.
Casey:
I am used to it.
Casey:
So you are correct.
Casey:
But it is objectively crappier not to have physical controls.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
So it's not that you're wrong because you do get used to it.
Casey:
But just because you're used to it doesn't mean it's superior.
Casey:
Not having a gauge cluster in a Model 3 is crappy.
Casey:
Like, I'm sorry, Tesla people.
Casey:
It's crappy.
Casey:
It's not an improvement.
Casey:
Oh, but you can see the two inches above your hood.
Casey:
But I don't care.
Casey:
It's worse.
Marco:
You're totally right on that bit.
John:
Actually, although on that front, a recent trend with a couple of car makers has been to still have the instrument cluster in front of you, but to make it a very slim, low profile one.
John:
So you get the benefit of, oh, you have better visibility over the hood, but we've shrunken the thing down.
John:
Didn't the Prius do that a thousand years ago?
John:
The Prius also had the offset one, I believe.
John:
Tony used to say, oh, it's better for your eyes because they're focusing farther away.
John:
It's like, yeah, it's six inches farther away.
John:
Didn't the Civic do one of those too, like around 2004 or so?
John:
I don't think so.
John:
Civic has always had an instrument cluster, I believe.
Casey:
I can tell you for sure the Mustang Mach-E does that.
Casey:
It has a very small display that's your gauge cluster that has the bare minimum of useful and usable information, but that's all you really need.
Casey:
And it's a little slimline display right where you expect it to be, and it's
Casey:
I was going to say it's perfect.
Casey:
That may be a bit dramatic, but it's really good.
Casey:
And then they have the hilariously large center touchscreen thing where you would expect it to be.
Casey:
But at least you have some amount of gauges in the center.
Casey:
I know you can get used to it.
Casey:
And I heard you say, Marco, that you're on Team Casey for this gauge cluster thing.
Casey:
But to talk to the Tesla zealots,
Casey:
you can get used to the center screen.
Casey:
I'm not saying you can't get used to it, but it's objectively worse.
Casey:
It's just worse.
John:
The mirror adjustments is another example.
John:
I think of this every time I adjust it because we do have shared cars in my family.
John:
Every time I adjust the side mirrors, they're powered because we have the luxury of powered side mirrors because they used to not be.
John:
You used to have to reach over and do them and it was really annoying.
John:
Kids, ask your parents.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But I adjust them without looking anywhere with my eyes except for at the mirrors.
John:
You can't do that with a touchscreen.
John:
You have to look at the touchscreen to navigate.
John:
And then maybe if you're lucky, you have swipe controls in your steering wheel to do the adjustments once you navigate it.
John:
But literally, because they're physical controls and they're always in the same place and I can feel them in the dark.
John:
I don't have to look at them at all.
John:
I can and do routinely adjust the mirrors without looking anywhere except for at the mirrors.
John:
That is a better experience than using a touchscreen.
John:
And I don't want them to save the $5 that it would take to save on all the wiring or whatever.
John:
I'd rather have those controls there.
John:
So when I saw like the latest Volvo coming out with nothing on the door panel, including no window up, down switches, no mirror adjustment switches, like no, no Volvo.
John:
There should be something on that door.
John:
There's a reason people put controls on the door because it's a convenient place for your left hand to be when you're adjusting the mirrors.
John:
And if you, you know, just, I don't, I want to take those people and shake them.
John:
Like there's no excuse to be doing this for a 2024 model to have a door card with literally nothing on it except for an electronic door release to get out.
Casey:
bad yeah so i i think you guys are broadly correct though that you need to have some amount of prioritization here and i think that some things will be must-haves and some things are want-to-haves and you know you're never going to get used to as you had said marco or maybe it was john one of you said you're never going to get used to not having a sunroof i can confirm because that's where i am um but you can get used to having on-screen hvac controls they still suck but you can get used to it they're not
Casey:
And eventually, you're going to have to compromise.
Casey:
That being said, I haven't driven my parents' Chevy... Was it Bolt or Volt?
Casey:
I always get it wrong.
Casey:
Bolt in a couple of months now.
Casey:
But I think it may actually meet all of these requirements.
Casey:
Now, the problem, though, is that most people who buy an EV want to look fancy and cool and hip.
Casey:
And a Chevy Bolt does not look fancy nor cool nor hip because...
Casey:
But it is a stunningly good EV, given the price that it costs.
Casey:
Like, I'm grading on a curve here.
Casey:
I'll be the first to tell you.
Casey:
But it is stunningly good for what it is.
Casey:
And I think it might actually meet all of these requirements.
Casey:
For me...
Casey:
We haven't bought cars since 2018, and I have no current plan to replace either of our cars.
Casey:
But for me, I absolutely will not buy a car without CarPlay.
Casey:
And basically everything else is malleable.
Casey:
I vastly prefer cars with a sunroof.
Casey:
But I bought one without because all told, it was the best option I had.
Casey:
Like, I am a devout sunroof person.
Casey:
As much as John hates sunroofs or sunroofs, whatever, I love them.
Casey:
It kills me that my car does not have a sunroof.
Casey:
But eventually, you're going to have to compromise.
Casey:
That's the way this works.
Casey:
And so for me, the only thing I can think of that I literally will not compromise on is CarPlay, with a close second probably being I really dislike front-wheel drive a lot, a lot.
Casey:
A lot, a lot.
Casey:
And so it would take a lot for me to get into a front-wheel drive car.
Casey:
I would probably cave on that if I absolutely had to, but it would take a lot.
Casey:
If I were to buy a car today, I would probably buy the Kia EV6 GT preferably, which is very odd-looking.
Casey:
I've heard very crummy things about Hyundai and Kia dealers, so I might hate that car if I were to buy it today, but that's probably what I would get.
Casey:
Or they just came out with...
Casey:
What is it, the Ioniq 5?
Casey:
No, Ioniq 6.
Casey:
There's a Hyundai version of the Kia EV6.
Casey:
I forget what it is.
Casey:
There's something that was just announced.
Marco:
Is that the one with the square lights everywhere?
Marco:
It looks like pixels?
Casey:
Yes, but there was... Honestly, I think those look really cool.
Casey:
They just announced a new one that's like a direct competitor to the EV6.
Casey:
And for the life of me, I can't remember what exactly it's called.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
Nonetheless, I would probably buy one of those because it seems to fit all of my preferences.
Casey:
Note, I did not say requirements.
Casey:
It seems to fit all my preferences the best.
Casey:
The chat room is saying the Ioniq 6.
Casey:
That's probably... No, the Ioniq 6 is ugly as sin.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It's something else.
Casey:
They have like an N-line, I think they call it, which is like their hot rod version of their...
Casey:
Maybe it is the the Ioniq 5.
Casey:
I don't recall.
Casey:
It doesn't really matter.
Casey:
But anyways, I'd buy one of those.
Casey:
And again, you're just going to have to compromise.
Casey:
That's the way this works.
Casey:
You're going to have or or in some cases spend like a quarter billion dollars on, you know, a Porsche Taycan or Taycan or whatever.
John:
That's what I was saying.
John:
How about your seating situations?
John:
Because maybe the only one that fits your requirements is two hundred thousand dollar Porsche.
Marco:
I mean, honestly, I'm pretty sure TIFF's i3 fits this requirement list perfectly.
John:
Yeah, people don't know what their requirement lists are until they see the i3 and say, oh, I didn't have not but ugly on my list.
Casey:
There you go.
Casey:
No, I mean, but Marco, you make a good point that if you want an EV that actually works reasonably well for regular people—
Casey:
You're probably going to want to look at, I know BMW and budget probably don't belong in the same sentence, but you're probably going to want to look at a budget EV like the i3, which was not exactly budget, but kind of in that spirit or the Chevy Bolt or something along those lines, because they are not fancy or trendy or hip or cool or whatever, but they do cross off or they do check all the checkboxes.
Casey:
So what's more important to you, getting all of these things on your very long list or looking cool?
Casey:
And that's for you to decide.
Marco:
not even just necessarily looking cool, but when you think, I want to buy an EV, what you typically think of is the big names in EVs.
Marco:
So you think Tesla, you think the models that you've seen, either where the whole company is only an EV company like Tesla and Rivian, or Lucid or whatever, or you think of the car models that were launched as electric models conceptually from their makers, and all of those are electric.
Marco:
And
Marco:
When you, when you look at either the, you know, the all I trick kind of tech forward companies or those like, you know, EV like, you know, statement models from other companies, those tend to be the most aggressive in their like, you know, efforts to be futuristic, to get away from a lot of the stuff that we're saying we actually tend to want, um,
Marco:
Because a lot of the clean, minimal design that takes away all the buttons that we like, a lot of that is an effort to be futuristic and to be a statement.
Marco:
What will probably give you better luck is not only necessarily going with budget models, but going with
Marco:
Models of cars that were not always electric.
Marco:
So from companies that have made gas cars forever, like, you know, get like the electric, you know, BMW 3 Series or whatever, like, you know, like the electric versions of cars that car makers are now like reluctantly making, being drag, kicking, screaming into EVs.
Marco:
Those actually will probably give you more of your list if what you're looking for is basically an old-style car, which is what this basically is.
Marco:
That will give you more of that than the cool concept car from the tech company.
John:
Yeah, Mercedes really screwed that up by not going the BMW route, but instead deciding to make an entire parallel line of cars for their EVs.
John:
BMW said, we're going to make a 5 Series.
John:
You can get an electric and not electric, right?
John:
Mercedes says, you can get S-Class.
John:
We have this whole other line over here, the EQ.
John:
s not the same car you want an e class or do you want an eq e not confusing at all let me tell you the eq line the interiors of the cars is way dumber way dumber and the bad the bad thing about bmw is yes it's true that the interiors will be similar between the electronic and regular but the regular cars have gotten dumber too so yeah it's it's tough uh but at least the door handle should be semi-normal and by the way i was just looking at a picture of the ionic 6 which i do think is the one you were thinking of casey
John:
Stupid door handles.
John:
What a surprise.
Casey:
Yes, it does.
Casey:
The Ioniq 6 is ugly as sin.
Casey:
It's a sedan.
John:
That's what you're talking about.
John:
Four-door sedan, right?
Casey:
No, it's not.
Casey:
I'm talking about their hatch.
John:
I know the EV6 is not really a sedan.
John:
It's a short squat crossover with bad headroom.
John:
Great.
John:
Love it.
Marco:
Oh, and the one that I said looks cool is the Ioniq 5.
John:
Yeah, it's the Ioniq 5N.
John:
Yeah, the 5N.
John:
I think it's the one with the fake electric EV gear shifts.
John:
People are loving that.
John:
They basically make the EV engine go... For no friggin' reason.
Casey:
It's so stupid.
John:
They interrupt power when you do the fake shifts.
John:
This is great.
John:
This is a car with, I believe, one fixed gear ratio.
John:
And when you hit the little flabby paddle, they will intentionally interrupt power to the electric engine to make you feel like you're shifting.
John:
People love it, apparently.
John:
Talk about skeuomorphism.
Marco:
I'm guessing that lasts two model years and then it's discontinued.
John:
Well, it'll last until everybody who remembers what that's imitating is dead.
Marco:
No, it'll last until everyone tries it and realizes, oh, actually, it's just better to turn this off.
John:
No, people try it and they love it.
John:
They love it because they're people who know what that is.
John:
You can do a convincing job of pretending to be an internal combustion engine when you have all the torque all the time.
John:
You just interrupt it in ways that they make the sounds, they do all the things, and everybody who tries it, they're like, I thought this would be so dumb, but I'm having so much fun.
John:
But those people will eventually die.
John:
and then we'll be rid of this.
John:
But unfortunately, we are also those people, so we'll also be dead.
John:
I'm not.
John:
You are.
John:
You know what that's imitating.
John:
You know about gear shifts.
Marco:
Well, I know what it's imitating, but I ran away screaming from it once I found electric vehicles because they're better.
John:
Yeah, but if you tried it, you'd be like, I admit this is fun.
John:
It's basically a video game.
John:
It's a dumb video game.
Marco:
I will say one other thing, though, in the trade-off between old-style controls in a car that started out as a gas car and was later made electric versus a car that was electric from the start or a company that made electric cars from the start –
Marco:
What you are losing by sticking with the old classic car model from the old car company, even after it has become an EV, you don't usually get some of the really nice, interesting, techie features of the pure EV companies.
Marco:
Tesla and Rivian, for all of their shortcomings, especially in not supporting car play, but anyway, for all those shortcomings, I mentioned a few months back,
Marco:
I really missed dog mode when I had Teslas for a while and then I had to get the Land Rover for my sand permit.
Marco:
And I really missed dog mode, which is a thing where you could like leave your car and tap two buttons on the screen and it keeps the climate control running.
Marco:
So if you have to leave your dog in the car and go into a store, your dog doesn't freeze or overheat.
Marco:
And it shows on the screen, like, my dog is fine, here's the temperature, so nobody breaks into your car to free your dog either.
Marco:
This is a feature that I assumed would be on any EV, and it's just not.
Marco:
It's on almost none of them.
Marco:
There's a whole bunch of those features where, yeah, it seems like kind of goofy stuff that, you know, usually Tesla will be the first ones to come up with a lot of this stuff, and it seems goofy, and it seems like, why would anybody ever use that?
Marco:
And then you use it, and you're like, oh, that's actually really nice.
Marco:
all cars should have this feature and a lot of the like you know the the newer companies that are tech focused and very you know ev you know native like mostly tesla and rivian they tend to have way nicer features like that and way more of them and the old car companies that have you know more old style approaches you know less integration less software control over their own vehicles less ability to run over the air updates because they're tying together a million different things from a million different providers stuff like that like
Marco:
The older companies tend not to have many of those tech forward or clever new features.
Marco:
So it's a trade off you're making.
Marco:
If you want to stick with the old style controls and physicality and everything, that's great.
Marco:
But you will be missing out on a lot of that new fun tech stuff that EVs do offer from the overly minimalist companies.
Casey:
All right, moving on.
Casey:
Josiah Katz writes, how's Call Sheet going?
Casey:
Well, breaking news, as of today, doing really freaking great because our friends at Upgrade, spoiler alert, have awarded Call Sheet an Upgrade-y, which I was very, very excited to hear.
Casey:
Oh, congratulations.
Casey:
Well, thank you.
Casey:
For that timing.
Casey:
No, perfect, right?
Casey:
I didn't even put this in the show notes.
Casey:
I think this was John that put the topic in there.
Casey:
But yeah, Jason had sent me a message saying in so many words, you really need to listen to the beginning of Upgrade, which I did with the family, actually.
Casey:
We all listened to it together for the very first time.
Casey:
And the kids were extremely excited, which was very cool.
Casey:
So yeah, that was very kind of them.
Casey:
So check out Upgrade this week.
Casey:
But no, Call Shirt's doing well.
Casey:
I'm very honored.
Casey:
I'm genuinely quite honored to have received an upgrade.
Casey:
And as Mike had said on the show, there were other opportunities where if this was just, I'm going to give this to my friend, they could have done this before.
Casey:
But it seems like I genuinely earned this one, which I'm quite happy about.
Casey:
But it's been going well.
Casey:
Development has slowed a little bit because life has been getting quite busy, as it has for basically everyone in this time of year.
Casey:
But, you know, releases are still happening.
Casey:
In fact, just a couple hours ago, a release just finished a one week rollout earlier this evening.
Casey:
There's definitely a lot of stuff I want to do, which is in contrast to most of my other apps where there were things I wanted to do.
Casey:
But, you know, if I get to it, I get to it.
Casey:
If I don't, I don't.
Casey:
I have a laundry list of things that I desire to do, um, to call two and four call sheet.
Casey:
My first priority list as I call it is only one item, but let's see the, there are 44 other items that I have noted as things I would like to do.
Casey:
Now, a lot of these, you know, some of these are small, some of these are investigations, but, um,
Casey:
You know, a lot of these are features.
Casey:
And I feel like for the most part, I think I've gotten most of the low-hanging fruit.
Casey:
There's a couple of exceptions there.
Casey:
But I've gotten most of the low-hanging fruit, so I'm pretty happy with that.
Casey:
And I feel like the app is in a pretty good spot.
Casey:
There's definitely ways I want to enhance and expand, but it's in a pretty good state.
Casey:
And with regard to money, it's done pretty well.
Casey:
It's not...
Casey:
it is not done as I've tried.
Casey:
I just tried to start seven sentences all at the same time.
Casey:
So, um, if, if you look at how much time it took me to write call sheet, which was around about six months as a broad estimate, if this was the only income I had, I don't think I earned six months worth of income from it.
Casey:
If that makes sense.
Casey:
Like if, if I hadn't been doing call sheet and instead was like doing independent consulting at, you know, roughly independent consulting rates, uh,
Casey:
I would have lost money.
Casey:
But it's in the ballpark now, which is really freaking great.
Casey:
And what's incredibly great is that in theory, I'll be getting another payment of a lot of this money.
Casey:
Hopefully a large portion of this money will come again next year.
Casey:
And that, my friends, is incredibly empowering and incredibly cool.
Casey:
So my hope is...
Casey:
As I continue to add features and fix bugs and so on and so forth, hopefully that will encourage people not to abandon their subscriptions.
Casey:
It will hopefully encourage people to go ahead and tell their friends about it.
Casey:
And hopefully their friends and family and whatnot will subscribe.
Casey:
And hopefully over time, this becomes another item in the financial quiver, if you will.
Casey:
Which is really important to me because as much as I am so lucky for what I do and I'm so lucky that I'm able to put a roof over our heads and food on the table doing it, you know, it's still scary.
Casey:
You know, if Marco or John drop dead tomorrow, God help us and God help me, that would be a really big financial issue for me.
Casey:
I mean, leaving aside the fact that I'd be devastated that one of my dearest friends has had something happen.
Casey:
it would be a real financial problem.
Casey:
And so hopefully over time, you know, all three of us, and I think Marco's done a very good job of this, but he had a pretty big head start.
Casey:
But, you know, we all diversify and have other means of income.
Casey:
And so now this has moved the needle on the family income, which is exactly what I had hoped and what I had dreamed would happen.
Casey:
So, yeah, I mean, if there's anything you two want to ask, I'm happy to entertain questions.
Casey:
But in short, it's been going really well, and I'm riding a real big high right now on account of the Upgradee.
Casey:
So I'm in a good spot.
Marco:
Yeah, that's awesome.
Marco:
First of all, the Upgradee is a huge deal.
Marco:
That is awesome.
Marco:
I've been around long enough.
Marco:
I've had enough success in my app career that I've gotten a decent number of awards from blogs and podcasts and everything.
Marco:
It matters every single time.
Marco:
It never stops feeling cool.
Marco:
It never stops being a huge honor.
Marco:
I absolutely love it.
Marco:
I'm secretly hoping that when I release my big rewrite for next year sometime, I'm hoping to get awards for that as well.
Marco:
That matters a lot, and it's always a big deal.
John:
You're not going to end up upgrading, though.
John:
Well, I have a Lifetime Achievement Award, so you are ineligible.
Marco:
Yeah, I think I can get a Mac Stories Award for the rewrite, I think.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
There's going to be a lot of competition.
Marco:
What I would really want is an ADA, but we'll see.
Marco:
Yeah, I hear that.
Marco:
That's my white whale.
Marco:
I want an ADA so badly.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I feel like the idea – don't you feel like the ADA has been devalued through no fault of the people who have awarded?
John:
Congratulations to all of them.
John:
But I feel like sometimes – it's kind of like the Oscars.
John:
Sometimes you question the judgment of the academy.
John:
You know what I mean?
Marco:
I wouldn't say they've been devalued, but they have shifted over time with different priorities.
Marco:
And that's – first of all, I think that actually gives me a chance because in the original definition of the ADAs, I stood no chance because I'm not that great of a designer.
John:
Right.
John:
You just got to hope you're using whatever API Apple is promoting that year.
Marco:
Yeah, but I think I'm leaning so heavily into Apple's new stuff, like with SF Symbols and SwiftUI.
Marco:
I think I have a better chance than ever.
Marco:
That might not be enough of a chance, but it's certainly a better chance than ever, so we'll see.
John:
It's an honor just to be nominated.
Casey:
It actually, it genuinely is.
Casey:
It really honestly is.
John:
Yeah, it is.
John:
If you think, especially on iOS, how many iOS apps are released every year, it's worse than the Oscars.
John:
It's just like you get like a one in two million chance.
Marco:
Yeah, but also like the kind of app that used to win ADAs
Marco:
doesn't really exist anymore like nobody makes that kind of app anymore so if they were trying to give out ada's for just that style of app they wouldn't have enough candidates every year so that at least at least enough good ones um so you know it had to shift over time and the app market is constantly shifting but yeah honestly
Marco:
that is my white whale i i am going to keep trying until i win one and it might never happen but that like if i ever do just know that will mean a tremendous amount to me like that that will be like that will make my year that will make my decade i want one so badly and but we'll see i i never again i never think i have that great a chance but you just probably buy an old one on ebay
Marco:
It's not the same.
Marco:
I could totally, but it's not the same.
Marco:
You know.
John:
We were just talking about people were selling Eddie Awards.
John:
You guys don't remember this, but back in the day when the – was it Mac user?
John:
Yeah.
John:
The magazine would sell the little – or maybe it's Mac Word.
Marco:
No, it was Mac Word.
Marco:
I have one.
Yeah.
John:
uh the uh the big statues with the person holding up the mac se over their head which by the way that is the coolest award i've gotten i think i got one i got one for instapaper yeah but anyway like those those are available on ebay now for going for a lot of money apparently so you may be able to get an ada cube uh eventually when someone dies in their estate puts it up on ebay yeah
Marco:
I don't want someone else's ADA cube on my desk.
Marco:
I want, I want one that I was issued that I, that I take what you can get.
Marco:
We'll see if I get desperate enough, maybe, but no, the old ones had batteries in them, right?
John:
To light up or whatever.
John:
So I wonder if that battery will still be good in 20 years.
Casey:
I think that was actually user-replaceable, and now we've come full circle, baby.
Casey:
Yeah, wasn't there an iFixit, Terran?
Marco:
Somebody actually did a battery replacement guide on those.
Marco:
I think half is a joke, but it was actually real.
Marco:
Anyway, so all this is to say, Casey, winning an upgrade is a huge deal, and that's awesome.
Casey:
No, it really is.
Casey:
You know, for me...
Casey:
I don't know if you and I have ever met, Marco, but I have a wee bout of imposter syndrome.
Casey:
You?
Casey:
Yeah, I know, right?
Casey:
And so for me, all kidding aside, for me to have won an award for my work, and I absolutely had help on the app, but it's still my work.
Casey:
And that is a tremendous compliment.
Casey:
It's a tremendous honor.
Casey:
And it's a little bit of...
Casey:
It's a way for me to convince the nastier subconscious or the nastier subconscious part of my brain that, no, when you really do try hard, you actually can make this work.
Casey:
And even though I do believe that for the most part, as with everyone, but especially with me, a lot of times I feel like I'm faking it and I'm going to be found out tomorrow that I'm a big dummy and so on and so forth.
Casey:
And I mean, hell, listen to the first two years of this program and I think my confidence,
Casey:
To the degree that it existed at all was not what it is now.
Casey:
And so for me to have this tangible to a degree, you know, evidence that when I try hard and I do something difficult, I can succeed.
Casey:
Like that's a really incredible compliment and a really incredible feeling.
Casey:
And it really helps me.
Casey:
feel better about doing the thing, you know, the job that I do.
Casey:
And so I'm extremely thankful for it.
Casey:
And yeah, I didn't put this topic in the show notes, but it was extremely fortuitous timing.
Casey:
So thank you, John.
John:
I'm not out here doing it for the awards.
John:
I do it for the money and I get neither.
Marco:
Thank you so much to our members who were the exclusive supporters of this episode.
Marco:
You can join us at ATP.FM slash join and we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R
Casey:
What was your Eddie award for?
John:
Was it Overcast?
Marco:
Instapaper.
John:
Instapaper, yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, Instapaper was early enough in the App Store that I got a whole bunch of awards for things that don't exist anymore.
John:
Yeah, they're different categories.
John:
That's the other thing.
John:
Unlike the Oscars, the ADA categories have really changed from year to year, just depending on whatever Apple feels like doing.
Marco:
Of course, yeah, because, again, the app market is so different.
Marco:
Right now, how many indie developers are there that are crafting pixel-perfect UI today?
Marco:
There's not that many left.
John:
I mean, there are still ones out there.
John:
That's why it's so kind of fun when somebody wins and you're like, not only does that app show off the API Apple wants you to use and does all the things right, but it also is pixel-perfect and beautiful.
John:
They do exist.
John:
They're just more rare than they used to be.
Marco:
yeah exactly and like and but the thing is like there are so few of them left that i like apple probably doesn't have a lot to choose from for the ada's each year for that kind of thing that's why how many years went by with this i think they did like no mac apps got ada's for a bunch of years
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
Because how many awesome new Mac apps are being released every year?
John:
That aren't web views.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It's not a huge number, unfortunately.
Marco:
And so I wonder, too, how – it's always a question of what they're going to try to promote with the ADAs.
Marco:
And so this year, I'm sure anything good on Vision OS is going to be substantially looked at.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But it's always... They talk about other stuff.
Marco:
There's always diversity and inclusion metrics.
Marco:
There's fun metrics.
Marco:
There's games.
John:
All the game categories they have.
John:
Do you see all the game categories this past year or whatever?
John:
No, that was like the App Store.
Marco:
That was the best of the App Store, right?
John:
Which is different.
John:
But even those, it's...
John:
I look at those awards and it's so – I can't figure out how they pick – how Apple picks like game of the year because it's not the same way that, for example, a gaming website would pick its game of the year.
John:
I feel like gaming websites are picking like which they think is the best game and Apple is using something else.
John:
Not that the games that win aren't good games.
John:
They're all good games, right?
John:
There's a lot of good games out there but like –
John:
Why this game?
John:
I think it's like, I think Apple will pick, for example, I think one of those games, they'll pick like a game that is only made for iOS and is a good game over a game that is better, but it's not a great port for iOS.
Marco:
You know what I mean?
Marco:
Well, of course, because that's what they're picking.
Marco:
They're not picking the best game in the entire games industry.
Marco:
They're picking the best game on their platforms.
John:
I know, but they'll have a game on their platform that's a better game, and it was ported to iOS, but the port is only okay.
John:
But in the end, once you're into the game and playing the game, the game is better, but this game was made exclusively for iOS and uses all of Apple's APIs and isn't available on other platforms, and it gets the award.
John:
It's the platform tax in their awards.
John:
It's kind of hard to take them seriously when it comes to games.
Marco:
Well, but again, I think they're looking for different things too.
Marco:
Like what you look for in a game for – if you're like a gaming website that covers the major AAA games of the world, that's a very different audience with very different priorities and very different games than what succeeds on iPhones for people.
Marco:
It's so different.
Marco:
It's a radically different market.
Marco:
And Apple has different incentives, of course, as well because they are –
Marco:
like you know you don't usually get a whole bunch of like you know game of the year awards like from nintendo or from sony in this case apple is the platform so of course they're going to have not only different priorities but different incentives uh you know so yeah of course they're going to prefer games that are you know exclusive to them and show off their stuff really well and take advantage of any initiative they want to push you know the
Marco:
Games that are in Apple Arcade or games that are cross-platform that work on your Apple TV also or whatever.
Marco:
Of course they're going to push that stuff harder.
Marco:
That's the nature of them being the platform owner and also issuing awards.