Static Ad Removal
John:
Okay, let's do this thing.
John:
Nothing like fixing a critical bug 60 seconds before we go on the air.
Casey:
I saw that five seconds ago.
Casey:
I just saw that.
Casey:
That was great diagnostics from the both of you.
Casey:
I'm very impressed.
Marco:
Actually, I'm very annoyed right now because the headphones I'm using, the left driver started rattling today.
Marco:
It's only resonating with certain low frequencies.
Marco:
So like when Casey talks, I hear a little rattle in my left ear.
Marco:
But when I talk or when John talks, I usually don't.
Marco:
But when Casey gets nice and deep, really close up, then I'm like, oh, God.
Marco:
Hey, Marco.
Marco:
How's it going?
Marco:
So try to avoid your sexy radio voice this week.
Casey:
I'll just be sure to do it like this for the whole show.
Casey:
How's that sound?
Marco:
What could possibly go wrong?
Marco:
That'd be perfect.
Marco:
What could go wrong?
Marco:
I am incredibly pleasantly surprised with – maybe it's the quality of our audience.
Marco:
So last week we began the show with a pretty big segment about Black Lives Matter and racism and police and privilege and all the issues that are going on right now and have been going on for a while.
Marco:
I thought we were taking a risk.
Marco:
and we got hundreds of responses i mean we must have heard from 500 people and of that number i think three were even slightly argumentative like i wouldn't even necessarily classify them as negative like they were just like slightly argumentative and all the rest were universally positive and so i think this this both shows that our audience is awesome but also this gives me hope for just the public in general that i i think
Marco:
It shouldn't be risky to say Black Lives Matter and to say that we have a racism problem in this country and to say that we have a police brutality problem.
Marco:
That shouldn't be a risky thing to say, but it is, and it has been.
Marco:
But I think now it's not.
Marco:
Now I think it has reached a critical mass of public realization and public acceptance.
Marco:
That like, oh yeah, this is actually a really big problem.
Marco:
And it's not risky to talk about it.
Marco:
It's not risky to say, oh yeah, we really have this problem.
Marco:
Like, no, it's a real thing.
Marco:
And that, in a weird way, gives me hope that we're making some progress on these issues.
Marco:
And I know we have a long way to go.
Marco:
And it's not going to be fast progress.
Marco:
But it's not risky to talk about this anymore.
Marco:
And that's a really good first step.
Casey:
I couldn't agree more.
Casey:
I was braced for impact because whenever you put anything on the internet and you have more than 10 people that look at it, you're going to get obnoxious feedback.
Casey:
It's part of the contract, the social contract of the internet.
Marco:
I mean to give you some idea, like this might – like saying Black Lives Matter so emphatically around all that discussion of privilege and everything last week.
Marco:
Again, I thought this was going to generate some controversy among the audience.
Marco:
Things that have generated more controversy than this would be things like if we said the sky is blue or if we said Apple is doing pretty well these days.
Marco:
Anything we could possibly say generates way more argument and way more negativity than that did.
Marco:
Again, I think that's amazing and I'm really pleased with that ratio of positivity that we got.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm very excited about it.
Casey:
And I wanted to just one quick moment thank the both of you guys, especially for speaking so eloquently about it, and for our listeners for taking the time to listen to it as well.
Casey:
And actually, our first bit of follow up relates to that.
Casey:
John, can you tell me why we need to recount this other than that it's a good idea to revisit this periodically?
Yeah.
John:
I'm inlining for performance purposes.
John:
We had a whole bunch of links in the last episode about the resources that you could go to learn more and do more and stuff like that.
John:
And people were very nice and recommending things to add to the list.
John:
In particular, a lot of people were recommending books.
John:
What we had linked was a page that itself linked like 16 different books.
John:
So most of the recommendations for books that we got were actually books that were already on that page.
John:
So I just wanted to surface them.
John:
And so we're not going to have a million notes this week.
John:
I just wanted to pick out like the three or four handful of books that were most recommended.
John:
They will be in line in the show notes this week and not buried one link away under a page.
John:
So check it out if reading is your thing and you want to learn more about these issues.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
I plan on reading at least one, maybe two of these.
Casey:
There's another book I'm going to read this summer, but I have a couple of these on my reading list now.
Casey:
If I have time, I hopefully will be able to add many, many more, and I'm really looking forward to that.
Casey:
John, you were making fun of me last week about doing some edits inside of a web form, and Martin Bree has some thoughts about that.
Casey:
Martin writes, regarding John's last remark about never editing in a text field on a web page,
Casey:
I've also been in the same camp and trying to spread the message.
Casey:
I did that no later than yesterday with my brother, who's currently taking his exams, which are occurring online due to the COVID-19 measures.
Casey:
In this particular case, that was disastrously bad advice.
Casey:
He quickly learned about the school's anti-cheat features.
Casey:
For some of the questions, they simply blocked pasting text.
Casey:
And on others, they apparently check the speed at which text is entered.
Casey:
And if that's too fast, it gets cleared.
Casey:
And I assume you also might get flagged as a potential cheater.
Casey:
I should have anticipated this, but I didn't.
Casey:
And it made my brother lose a bunch of time.
Casey:
See, I was right all along.
Marco:
See, I think this is one of the ways like schools when when I went through school and again, disclaimer, I'm a terrible student, etc.
Marco:
But, you know, when I went through school, when I stumbled through school, we didn't have much technology in the school.
Marco:
Like, you know, I went I graduated from high school in 2000 from college in 2004.
Marco:
And that was like I never even saw anybody use a laptop in a classroom.
Marco:
wait not in college no really that happened like right after i graduated like it was when that whole wave came in when i got to college most people came with a desktop computer a cheap pc desktop computer only a few usually the rich kids had laptops and you'd occasionally see them with it like in the library but they you would never see anybody in the classroom using a laptop
Marco:
And that seemed to start literally, like, right after I graduated.
Marco:
Like, I graduated in 2004, and it seemed like around 2005 is when everybody had laptops in classrooms.
Marco:
But I never saw one.
Marco:
And, you know, I never took a test on a computer.
Marco:
I never, like, I wanted to.
Marco:
I would have loved that at the time.
Marco:
I was dying to use computers for anything.
Marco:
But we only had them for the computer science class, and that's about it.
Marco:
And so I missed this entire wave of classroom technology that is now ubiquitous.
Marco:
I've never seen a smart board.
Marco:
I don't have a great idea of even what it is.
Casey:
Oh, they're so nice.
Casey:
You've missed out on so much.
Casey:
And we're the same – in fact, actually, that reminds me.
Casey:
Happy birthday to you because your birthday is tomorrow.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
We are effectively the same age, you and I, and I didn't get to use a smart board until my second real job, but they were amazing at the time.
Casey:
Smart boards were... Imagine one of those mobile whiteboards that you would perhaps see in school or whatever, but instead of being a traditional whiteboard, if I remember right, it was a...
Casey:
Or maybe it was a whiteboard.
Casey:
I don't remember.
Casey:
It's been so darn long.
Casey:
But anyways, it was something like a screen projected on the whiteboard, or the whiteboard itself was a screen or something like that.
Casey:
So the point is, it was digitizing everything you were doing.
Casey:
So you could draw using this fake marker, and then you could select what you've drawn and move it around.
Casey:
And as someone who loves doing...
Casey:
like whiteboard diagrams and things of that nature.
Casey:
It was really convenient because not only could you move the stuff around when you realized, oh, I got to shimmy something in between these two boxes, but also you could just easily make a PDF and send it to your coworkers or whatever.
Casey:
Smartboards are super cool.
Casey:
I never had the opportunity in college, but they were great in the real world.
Casey:
Sorry, I totally interrupted, but happy birthday.
Marco:
no i mean i mean i interrupted you that's my job on the show i guess i i've never even like i think in all of college and like i think i had one professor who gave presentations as powerpoints like i've i never had that either like i like it seemed like the old school way of doing school ended right as i left
Marco:
And now everyone's on PowerPoints using smart boards or things like that, using digital test taking on computers.
Marco:
That's all new to me.
Marco:
And so, you know, if you look at the quality of software on average, you know, up like kind of near the top, you have like most consumer level stuff made by good companies like Apple who are pretty decent at it.
Marco:
That's like, you know, nice, usable, thoughtful software.
Marco:
And geez, I mean, even Apple has their problems in that area a lot recently.
Marco:
But believe me, it's way better than a lot of things.
Marco:
Then, you know, about a little step down from that, you have, like, the general world of PC hardware.
Marco:
Like, well, you know, it's – sometimes it's okay.
Marco:
Sometimes it's all right.
Marco:
You know, it's not to the best standards, but it's still, like, generally kind of usable.
Marco:
Then kind of, like, down a bit, you have, like, specialty software for, like, certain industries, like my dentist software –
Marco:
And that's, it's getting a little bit hard to use, a little bit crappy, a little bit, you know, hostile.
Marco:
And then you take a huge step down and you have enterprise software.
Marco:
And that is a disaster.
Marco:
It's impossible to use.
Marco:
It's terrible.
Marco:
It's user hostile.
Marco:
It's terribly designed.
Marco:
And then even another giant step below that, you have what is usually education software.
Marco:
The incentives and the factors and the costs and benefits and everything are not set up at all for enterprise software and especially for education software, which is like enterprise software but with even less money.
Marco:
it's not set up at all for that to be usable or friendly or well-designed or even remotely well-maintained because schools have very special needs and usually no money.
Marco:
And it's a similar enterprise software where you're making a deal with a whole district or a whole government where you're dealing with huge committees and budgets and the public and politics and all sorts of other stuff.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I can't even imagine how hostile a lot of the software must be in education these days.
Marco:
I mean we only see – we like scratch the surface with just like whatever we have to use because my kid's in school as like the parent portals of various things which are always terrible.
Marco:
And that's like the bare minimum.
Marco:
I can't even imagine what it's like to be a student in this stuff these days.
Casey:
I've told pieces of this story on the show before, so forgive me, but when I was in college, I went to school with a home-built tower monstrosity, which at the time was not unusual.
Marco:
A full tower, too, not even a mid-tower.
Casey:
yep yep yep because the full tower had more drive bays yep and i i believe i had two cd like i had a cd rom drive that was super fast for reads then i had a cdrw drive that was not that fast for reads but then what you could do is you could duplicate cds without having to like cache it on the hard drive for a little while you could do a straight rip from one to the other
Marco:
Well, you could, but that was a risk.
Marco:
The buff for underrun protection on the Riders was never that great.
Marco:
No, that's true.
Marco:
You've got to whip out your Nero burning ROM game and rip it to an ISO first and then use Nero to burn with all the protection, try to copy all the games with all their stupid protection disks and everything.
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
God, this is a walk right down memory lane.
Casey:
But anyways, but I think I had what it wasn't as zipped.
Casey:
Was it a jazz drive?
Casey:
That was like a zip drive, but higher capacity.
Casey:
Is that what I'm thinking of?
Marco:
Yeah, it was one gig instead of 100 megs.
Casey:
Yeah, I had one of those, which I loved at the time, even though I barely ever used it.
Casey:
But after a couple of years, I think it was my junior or maybe senior years, I got myself a ThinkPad, which was in no small part because Dad worked for IBM at the time.
Casey:
And I remember I thought I was hot stuff, and this is the part I've told on the show before, because this ThinkPad was one of the first –
Casey:
That you could add a daughter card internal to the ThinkPad.
Casey:
It had like a little door that you could unscrew and open.
Casey:
And you could put a Cisco 80211B wireless card within the computer.
Casey:
And so I had a wireless connection in the like 10 buildings on campus that were set up for wireless.
Casey:
But I had a wireless connection...
Casey:
without one of those PCMCIA dongles hanging out the outside you remember that where you know you had that like antenna hanging out the outside of the machine this is around the same era as if you were really cool you would have one of those what not like slot loaded but like one of those spring ejected uh ethernet or modem jacks you know what I'm talking about those things I'm I'm shocked those didn't immediately break on every use agreed completely agreed I believe it's called an x jack if I remember correctly
Casey:
You might be right.
Casey:
I don't even remember.
Casey:
But anyways, I bring all this up because one of my – oh, you are right.
Casey:
Look at that.
Casey:
Very deep, good pull there, Marco.
Casey:
I'm impressed.
Marco:
I read a lot of computer magazines and a lot of ads for these things.
Marco:
I never actually owned one.
Casey:
One of my favorite memories of school, which is probably indicative of how poorly I did in school, was when we were in a class.
Casey:
It was myself and a couple of friends, and we all had laptops, and we were using waste.
Casey:
And nobody remembers this, but this is Justin Frankel, who did Winamp.
Casey:
when he was at aol he put together a peer-to-peer like chat app that was all like super encrypted at the time maybe it was easy to break who knows but at the time it was like super encrypted and you make like a chat room and then have like person-to-person chats and this is when aol instant messenger was very much a thing but we were like no way man the school might find out that we're chatting during class if we use aol so we got to use like this super encrypted waste thing and it was so stupid but now i was a stupid kid so what are you gonna do
Casey:
But I remember doing that with a couple of friends during class, and it was extremely enjoyable having a back channel as we were supposed to be listening, even though we really weren't.
Marco:
I love Justin Frankel.
Marco:
He was like, I haven't made Winamp.
Marco:
AOL bought Winamp in the late 90s or early 2000s because they wanted relevance, and they didn't know what to do, and they were old people.
Marco:
They had more money than cents and had no idea what they were doing, and
Marco:
mp3s seemed like a new thing that they could take hold of and maybe do something with so they bought winamp and meanwhile justin frankel the developer or at least one of the developers was like one of the most like you know radical like activist anti-establishment developers of the era and he just kept making and releasing things that just totally undermined aol i don't know what his deal was like like what how he didn't just get fired like i don't know whatever the contract he had with them was was amazing i
Marco:
because he was able to just release stuff that just constantly like poked them so hard and somehow get away with it and and he just he seemed to not care at all which i just i love so much yeah i completely agree do whatever happened to him like recently what is he even up to i don't know i hope you're not some horrible person oh who knows
Casey:
Doesn't ATP's livestream eventually boil down to Shoutcast, or is that not correct at all?
Marco:
Oh, yes, sort of.
Marco:
Yeah, so we host this livestream on an open-source app called Icecast, which is basically the successor to Shoutcast.
Marco:
Shoutcast was the streaming server protocol for MP3s, basically, that I'm pretty sure Justin Frankel, or at least the Winamp team, initially developed, I think.
Marco:
and then IceCast kind of evolved out of that, and I think it has replaced it, and it's better in a few ways, but the basic idea is the same.
Marco:
It's one of the many things that I love about MP3 is that the broadcast protocol is amazingly low-tech.
Marco:
I run an app on my computer, Audio Hijack, that streams the MP3 bytes that we're recording here
Marco:
to the server and the server just repeats it back to anybody who listens and the protocol is super simple it's like it's basic you know text to connect and then it shoves binary at you that's just the mp3 and mp3 decoders are super simple they just look ahead until the c11 ones in a row and start decoding there like and it's just and it just works it's amazing like it's really like it's so this is one of the reasons i love working with mp3 so much like it's in many ways it's so low tech that it makes it makes it very easy and powerful to work with
Casey:
Oh, that's right.
Casey:
Somebody in the chat put a link to Kakos.
Casey:
I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right, but it's his current company.
Casey:
And I'd forgotten that my favorite software to make animated GIFs of screen recordings.
Casey:
What is it called now?
Casey:
I can't remember.
Casey:
Shoot.
Casey:
Gosh, it's going to drive me nuts.
Marco:
Kleket?
Marco:
That's what I use.
Casey:
Lyscap.
Casey:
There you go.
Casey:
It's like the simplest, ugliest, clearly cross-platform, but does-the-job-well screen recording software.
Casey:
Well, anyways, that was done by Justin Frankel and Cocos.
Casey:
I don't know how you pronounce it.
Casey:
But anyways, it was done sometime after he left AOL.
Marco:
This is what I was forgetting.
Marco:
I knew he made something that really put AOL on the side.
Marco:
He made the Nutella file-sharing network.
Marco:
That's what he...
Marco:
as he was working for aol i'm pretty sure which was a major media conglomerate that owned a lot of like you know music and stuff oh man yeah so i oh man he's the best anyway what were we talking about i don't even oh writing into web forms the moral of the story is yeah don't write on web forms kids unless you're in school in which case your software probably sucks
John:
Don't try to paste into web forms because they'll think you're cheating.
John:
My son had to take an AP test online and it had similar measures.
John:
That was the same test where there was that story where people were... At some point in the test, apparently students are instructed to do something on a piece of paper and then take a picture of it with their phone or something or upload a picture of it.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Anyway, that's what they were doing.
John:
And a bunch of kids took pictures with their iPhone and then tried to upload it.
John:
But the iPhone was taking Heek pictures instead of JPEGs.
John:
So they tried to upload the Heek to the website.
John:
It crashed because it couldn't process them.
John:
And then
John:
Everyone was flipping out and it's under a time limit or whatever.
John:
My son avoided that, uh, by dumb luck because the way I had him doing the pictures, cause he doesn't know how to use computers.
John:
So as I said, look, just take the picture on your phone and then just keep photos open in the background and just wait a couple seconds.
John:
And you should see the photo you just took on your phone appear in your photos app.
John:
Cause he's got the photo stream thing going and then drag it out of photos app onto the desktop, which is the only place that he knows exists.
John:
Like most people, uh,
John:
And when you drag it out of photos onto the desktop, it turns it into a JPEG.
John:
And so he was uploading JPEGs and not Heeks, even though his phone was taking Heek pictures.
John:
Anyway, hopefully with all of the COVID stuff, everybody's online test stuff will get better.
John:
And the thing trying to prevent you from pasting into the form, like some password fields do that too, which is horrendous because it defeats password managers many times.
John:
But I know what they're trying to do.
John:
But it's punishing people for essentially bad, for good habits, because if you are under time pressure to write something substantial into a text field as part of a test, it does make sense to do it someplace else where you know it's secure and then only put it into the web page when you're ready.
John:
But, of course, the software interprets that as, oh, you must be cheating because you're copying and pasting it.
John:
And I suppose if you just edit the node in the DOM and stick the text in, it probably won't know, but...
John:
Again, they might they might accuse you of cheating and it's all just very fraught.
John:
So I feel like this is a cultural issue more than a technological one that eventually once kids become accustomed to taking these kinds of tests online, they'll learn all the things that you're supposed to do and not supposed to do.
John:
And I guess the backup mechanism is every once in a while copy and paste it out of the web text field into a text file so that if the web page does crash, you'll still have the text.
John:
Anyway, online test stink.
Casey:
Boom.
Casey:
So when I got angry last week about my Samba SMB woes –
Casey:
I was expecting to be the only one.
Casey:
And if you recall, this is when I haven't used my computer in a little while.
Casey:
I go to reach like my Synology, for example, and I see a message in Finder.
Casey:
The operation can't be completed because the original item for whatever can't be found.
Casey:
And the only way I knew how to fix it was to do a kill all Finder and then try the same thing again.
Casey:
And it would always work pretty much immediately.
Casey:
And I got a lot of varied feedback about this, including from John, actually, after the show.
Casey:
And one of the two most important things I think I can share confidently right now is that, first of all, you can go to the Go menu in Finder and then connect to Server, which is also done by Command-K.
Casey:
Should I mess with John and say K command, just to really tick John off?
Casey:
Anyway, you can use command K to go to this menu, and then you can reconnect that way.
Casey:
And supposedly, I haven't actually had to try this, and I'll explain why in a moment, but supposedly that'll let you reconnect without having to kill Finder, which is excellent.
Casey:
And then John, amongst others, had suggested, well, how are you getting to the Synology?
Casey:
And
Casey:
To answer that question, what I was doing is I was looking at locations in the sidebar of Finder, and I see disk station, which is the thing that Synology calls itself.
Casey:
I see that in the sidebar, and I would just click that and drill into the particular folder I wanted, and that was that.
Casey:
But, John, you had recommended one of several different ways to get there.
Casey:
The Synology has its own dynamic DNS system where you can get yourself an internet-visible host name, even if you're NAT-ed and so on and so forth, and I could choose that.
Casey:
But it also occurred to me that since I'm running the PyHole, I have set up... It's still funny.
Casey:
It's the best, isn't it?
Casey:
Since I have set up PyHole version 5...
Casey:
then one of the things it allows you to do is very easily, using the web interface, set up DNS responses for your local network.
Casey:
Really, just basically custom DNS responses.
Casey:
So, for example, iMac Pro, I have effectively hardwired, if you will, to refer to my 192.168 address for my iMac Pro, which is statically assigned via the Eero.
Casey:
And so what I've done is, instead of connecting using the sidebar in the Finder, I've connected to SYN, S-Y-N, which is what I have as like a shortcut to the Synology's static IP address within my network.
Casey:
And so far, after nearly a week, I have not had a problem with doing that.
Casey:
So it appears that something, I guess, with Bonjour...
Casey:
or something about using the locations thing in the sidebar is what's hosing this all up.
Casey:
And so if you have any other mechanism by getting to your device, you know, do it by IP address, do it by a fully qualified domain name, whatever the case may be, you might find that that will fix your problem like it did for me.
Casey:
Also, there's a very interesting Hacker News post
Casey:
which is not something I say often about all this, which I'll link in the show notes, even though that didn't actually get me to my solution.
Casey:
It was more what John said to me, amongst others.
Casey:
But you might want to check it out because apparently this is a longstanding bug and not actually a Catalina thing after all.
John:
Yeah, the suggestion that a couple of people had was to do something related to IPv6.
John:
Now I forget what it was.
John:
Are they telling you to disable IPv6?
Casey:
I don't remember.
Casey:
I didn't have to fiddle with it, though.
John:
Yeah, the Hacker News thing talks about DNS lookup and the MDNS stuff.
John:
It's not like regular DNS in that it gets broadcast periodically, and there's a TTL on the value.
John:
But if the TTL expires, say, because your computer was asleep, apparently you can't go request it again.
John:
You just have to wait for the next broadcast.
John:
And during that time, your computer has no idea how to connect to it at all.
John:
Makes some amount of sense.
John:
But yeah, my suggestion was just to do what I did and cut all of that zero-conf bonjour rendezvous stuff out of the loop and just use IP addresses or names that you statically map to IP addresses.
John:
So there you go.
John:
Problem solved.
Casey:
I think so, actually.
Casey:
I was really surprised because I didn't think I was going to get any useful feedback.
Casey:
Not because our listeners aren't awesome, just because I thought it was some really weird, esoteric thing.
Casey:
Turns out, not so much.
Casey:
Speaking of feedback from me to me, or to me from me, I don't know, anyway.
Casey:
Last week I had also kind of off-the-cuff lamented about my TV turning itself off, and I wasn't 100% accurate on what I had said the problem was.
Casey:
And Hugo Jobling had pointed out to me via Twitter, and I'm glad that you did,
Casey:
that the issue isn't... I think I had said it was automations, and that wasn't strictly true.
Casey:
The issue is that, I think, the TV was added to my goodnight scene.
Casey:
I believe I had called it an automation last week.
Casey:
But Hugo had pointed out that when he was adding his OLED TV to his home...
Casey:
One of the screens that I guess I just plowed right through and didn't look at, and if so, that's on me.
Casey:
One of the screens he has is suggested scenes, and it says select scenes to include this accessory, and you can customize these scenes later in the home app.
Casey:
And sure enough, there's good night where it says turn off.
Casey:
And I don't recall having seen this, but I bet you anything that I just plowed right through it and, you know, next, next, next, next, next, next, whatever, whatever, whatever, and wasn't paying close attention.
Casey:
So it's all my fault.
Casey:
We'll put a link that Hugo, a link to a picture that Hugo had provided to give you a better view of what I'm talking about.
Casey:
But I thought that was useful feedback to clarify what I was talking about earlier.
Casey:
And actually somebody, a couple of people reached out via Twitter and said, oh, yeah, that happened to me.
Casey:
And I never understood why.
Casey:
Now I do.
Casey:
So I'm glad I brought it up.
Casey:
Let's see.
Casey:
Daniel Jalkut is telling us about Powerbox.
Casey:
John, what's going on there?
John:
Minor corrections from last week.
John:
Powerbox is the thing that, for security reasons, presents the open and save panel rather than your application doing it.
John:
A couple notes from Daniel.
John:
One is that Powerbox is now always used for open and save panels.
John:
Gus Mueller says it used to be that it was only used for sandbox apps, but in Catalina or maybe Mojave, it was changed to be used for all apps.
John:
So that could actually explain some of the
John:
Slowness, because before maybe an app wasn't using Powerbox, but now it was.
John:
And the second is Daniel says that he thinks that the app actually owns the window, but not the content.
John:
So your app may actually control that window, but you only get a small region where you're allowed to draw into it.
John:
And through XPC, the Powerbox draws into the main content of it.
John:
um and apps are allowed to add their own sort of accessory views so it's like you own the window and your app gets to draw on some small portion but powerbox drawers in the other portion and powerbox is the thing that actually gives you access to the file and tells you what the result of the thing was so it's very complicated and it's not surprising that something like that could potentially go go wrong or have some performance difficulties again related to security checks and other things that may be slow especially the first time you try them so
John:
Security is complicated.
John:
It's a lot easier.
John:
Back in the day when everything was all in one giant memory space and you just put up an open save dialog box and you could literally not do anything else on the computer until you dismissed it.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then finally, for follow up, David Darcy writes and shows us some videos about something absolutely fascinating that I had no idea was a thing.
Casey:
If I understand this right, on an Android phone, there's a accessibility mode called live caption.
Casey:
And so David sent us a video of,
Casey:
the Android phone playing our show and doing speech-to-text captioning live as he's playing it in his podcast app.
Casey:
At least that's how I understood it.
Casey:
And this looks really freaking cool.
John:
Yeah, I thought it was cool.
John:
I mean, it's another type of Android thing.
John:
You see much more of this in Android.
John:
There's no reason that iOS can't do it, but in general, Apple has shied away from...
John:
allowing parts of the system that are not the app you're currently in from overlaying the app that you're in.
John:
Obviously, notifications can come down from the top, and there's other things that can appear, and the status bar can change color.
John:
There are obviously ways that the operating system can intrude into the space of an app, but not really to this degree.
John:
This was presumably the operating system, Android.
John:
putting a very large overlay on top of the podcast player, showing the captions, right?
John:
And you might be mistaken for thinking like, oh, that's a feature of the podcast app.
John:
But my understanding of watching this video is that it's not.
John:
It is a feature of the operating system.
John:
And any time audio is playing, you can have this translucent overlay with the things being transcribed in it, which is pretty cool if you've got a very fast on-device speech-to-text engine.
John:
That's a great use of it.
John:
Was this person, did they also give the...
John:
Video showing the voice control of Android, or was that somebody else?
John:
I wish I could remember that tweet.
John:
It was like showing how to speak to your Android phone to make it do stuff.
John:
Not like you speak to Siri, like, you know, hey, dingus, you know, open thing and whatever, or remind me to do this with that or whatever.
John:
But like using it as kind of a...
John:
a verbal pointer right so you could tell it to go to the home screen to open an application uh and when it opened that app like all the controls on the screen would have tiny little numbers and circles next to them so you do you would tell it to you know hit button number one number five confirm okay like
John:
It was kind of like speaking, very much like the interface that the Mac has, right?
John:
Do you remember that demo where they showed the screen was cut into regions and controls had numbers on them and you could essentially navigate the screen with speech, only this was on a phone.
John:
I'm not sure what Apple's interface to that looks like these days because this interface does require you to see the screen, so it's not for people who can't see.
John:
the screen well you mean these numbers are very small so you have to have good vision but just not the ability to or the the motor control to use the touch interface so anyway i think all this stuff is uh especially interesting um including in the context of rsi i don't know if anyone is getting rsi from their phones but uh i can assure you that that is actually a thing somewhere out there is somebody who's been swiping too much with their thumb and it feels a little stiff and they're trying not to think about it and they should
Casey:
We did want to take a moment to call out three different organizations that we think are probably worth your investment, interest, time, etc.
Casey:
And just if you happen to have any money that you can throw their way, I think the three of us all believe that these are worthwhile causes and they're worth checking out.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
uh secondly the black lives matter organization is a global organization the u.s uk and canada whose mission is to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on black communities by the state and vigilantes by combating and counteracting acts of violence creating space for black imagination and innovation and centering black joy we are winning well not we but they are winning immediate improvements in our lives but it'll be we if you donate which is excellent
Casey:
And then finally, Black Lives Code is one of the organizations that the, I believe, now defunct App Camp for Girls has decided to sponsor or at least elevate.
Casey:
And I know the App Camp people, and they're all really great.
Casey:
So Black Girls Code is devoted to showing the world that black girls can code and do so much more.
Casey:
By reaching out to the community through workshops and after-school programs, Black Girls Code introduces computer coding lessons to young girls from underrepresented communities in programming languages such as Scratch or Ruby on Rails.
Casey:
If you happen to have a few extra bucks to throw any of the three organizations that we've just called out, I think that would be really excellent.
Casey:
And certainly the three of us would appreciate it.
Casey:
But we just wanted to call that out.
Casey:
And I don't know what our agenda is for talking about these sort of social issues and stuff in the future.
Casey:
But expect that as with last week, we'll talk about it here and there.
Casey:
And then we won't.
Casey:
And then we will.
Casey:
And then we won't.
Casey:
And we'll just do what we think is best.
Marco:
Yeah, we had some sponsorship openings this week and we figured what better thing to do with them than to try to promote some of these great causes.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
Marco, it's your birthday tomorrow.
Casey:
Are there any birthday presents you would like by chance?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
My wife's making me some delicious fruit tarts and I'm going to have some beer that I like and I think that'll be a good day.
Casey:
That sounds like a good day.
Marco:
Additionally, if you want to get me an extra birthday present after you've already given to the good causes that are way better than this because they need it way more than we do.
Marco:
We are going to launch a membership program as of right now.
Marco:
So if you go to atp.fm slash join, you can join as a member right now.
Marco:
We've been doing this show for seven years so far, something like that, a little over seven years.
Marco:
And we are not going to stop anytime soon.
Marco:
We all love doing this show.
Marco:
And as long as all of you out there keep listening, we want to keep making this show.
Marco:
And the format and style of this show were established really fast.
Marco:
Within the first few episodes, we pretty much established the format that we've really used almost unchanged for seven years.
Marco:
We have the cold open pre-show, we have the dial-up sound, follow-up, main topics, Ask ATP if we have it that week, ending theme, and the after show.
Marco:
It's a very simple formula.
Marco:
We've been doing it for a very long time.
Marco:
And yet you two still can't follow it, can you?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
part of the formula is not following the formula okay great and we also very early on established the business model of the show and it hasn't changed really in the entire seven years the show is free it's available everywhere it's not exclusive to anybody and it's funded as so many podcasts are by sponsorships
Marco:
We read an ad read three times per episode roughly.
Marco:
Each read is about two minutes long, so you get about six minutes of ads in our show that is usually almost two hours long.
Marco:
And I think that's one of the best content-to-ads ratios of anything I listen to that has ads.
Marco:
And this all has worked very well
Marco:
and continues to work very well for seven years, and will continue well into the future, we hope.
Marco:
And unless the sponsorship changes a lot, and if people stop buying podcast ads, other than something dramatic like that, we have no intention of changing any of these basics for the foreseeable future.
Marco:
And if you all will forgive me for a moment of a total lack of modesty,
Marco:
I think we make a great show.
Marco:
We might make the best tech podcast in the world.
Marco:
You will never hear me say this any other time because it's really hard for me to say this without like freaking out about the lack of modesty here.
Marco:
But we take a lot of pride in what we do here.
Marco:
We put a lot of work into it and I think we're good at it and I'm damn proud of it.
Marco:
So let's get back to the money part for a minute.
Marco:
We already make good money from this show.
Marco:
None of us are hurting financially.
Marco:
The vast majority of that money, though, only comes from one source.
Marco:
It comes from those ads.
Marco:
Now, we did just finish a merchandise sale, which we do a couple times a year.
Marco:
Merchandise is kind of a fun side project.
Marco:
It doesn't make that much money to us because it's so expensive to produce physical items and ship them around the world and everything.
Marco:
We make a few bucks off of each thing, but it's more for kind of fun stuff to give our fans something cool to wear if they want to and make some side income from the show.
Marco:
But the vast majority of the money comes from those six minutes of ads that you hear in each episode.
Marco:
So our ads usually sell well because we have a really good audience for selling ads.
Marco:
You all out there, we have a pretty good idea that you're probably mostly a bunch of nerds like us, and we can sell you things like hosting companies and domain registration and things like that, and it's not that hard to sell ads to our audience, right?
Marco:
That's why you hear so many of the same companies advertising over and over again because our ads work well for them.
Marco:
It's great for us.
Marco:
We like them too because they're good companies selling good stuff.
Marco:
We can get paid good money but also sleep at night knowing that we're not annoying people or ripping you off or making a bad show.
Marco:
but podcast ads are a bit tricky as a business model they are mostly good but over time they do take an increasingly higher amount of work to sell and to get paid for as a lot of that ad buying has shifted it used to be that the companies who bought the ads would come directly to us and deal with us and we would send them an invoice and they would pay it and whatever and
Marco:
And increasingly, many of the podcast advertisers that you hear on most shows are buying through ad agencies.
Marco:
And the ad agencies are also consolidating and getting bigger and getting acquired and everything.
Marco:
And so when you're dealing with ad agencies, it just adds more work to the process.
Marco:
It adds more cost all around.
Marco:
We can't always sell every slot.
Marco:
We can't always sell the ads at the prices that we want.
Marco:
We often don't get paid for months.
Marco:
And sometimes we don't get paid for a sponsor at all.
Marco:
Like if they go out of business or they go bankrupt or they just don't want to pay anybody any forever again.
Marco:
We do get stiffed on an occasional basis.
Marco:
And the ad market is also volatile.
Marco:
It's kind of like the real estate market.
Marco:
Real estate are like, oh, it's always going to go up.
Marco:
People always assume the ad market will do well because it usually does.
Marco:
Until it doesn't.
Marco:
And whenever there's a big economic disturbance like there was with the quarantine, everybody cuts back on their ad spending immediately.
Marco:
And it's really hard to sell additional ads.
Marco:
It's also really hard every January or February or August or the fifth week in a five-week month.
Marco:
Podcast ads have ups and downs and you're very much tied to the economy or these random calendar things about budgeting.
Marco:
So in this quarantine period, we've had – this was terrible for podcast ad sales.
Marco:
Some shows were hit worse than others.
Marco:
We were hit pretty bad.
Marco:
That's why you've heard so many episodes recently that have had only like one or two sponsors, including this one, instead of the usual three sponsors that we have.
Marco:
Now –
Marco:
I don't want to paint a picture that we're like dying here.
Marco:
The rest of the summer is looking a lot better for the ad sales.
Marco:
And again, we make good money and we'll be fine no matter what you do.
Marco:
But this was a wake up call to us that we wanted some diversification.
Marco:
You know, we don't want the, this entire show that we love so much to be dependent on the whims of the ad market.
Marco:
When we have this perfectly good audience, you all sitting out there right now, many of whom have told us that you'd be happy to support us directly if such an option became available.
Marco:
So we are now launching a membership program.
Marco:
We don't expect us to replace the ads anytime soon or probably ever.
Marco:
I honestly, I think we'd be shocked if we got more than a few percent of the audience to sign up for it.
Marco:
And we also don't want to take anything away from what the show has always been for everyone.
Marco:
So we don't want to take any existing part of the show and put it behind a paywall or anything like that.
Marco:
You know, and maybe in the future, if ad sales totally tank and we have to make a bigger push for membership, maybe we'll have to do stuff like that.
Marco:
But that probably won't happen.
Marco:
If you want to support us by becoming a member, we have one plan, which we'll talk to in a minute.
Marco:
It's eight bucks a month.
Marco:
For that, you get your own private RSS feed, and you get a sponsor-free version of the show.
Marco:
And you can put that feed in whatever podcast app you want.
Marco:
We made a nice, slick integration, heavily inspired by Stratechery and Dithering.
Marco:
Thanks, guys.
Marco:
We made a nice, slick thing that you can just do it with a couple of clicks on most apps.
Marco:
i went back the last four episodes uh have sponsor free versions in those feeds and then you know all future episodes ongoing will have sponsor free versions um and for now that's it uh you have the ad free version of the show eight bucks a month and you know i gotta say i subscribe to a few patreons for ad free podcasts and i love it it's it's a completely unnecessary luxury you know as i said we have six minutes of ads a week uh but
Marco:
It's a luxury.
Marco:
Like most luxuries, it's kind of nice if you can afford it and if you care about that kind of thing.
Marco:
We hope to add more stuff later.
Marco:
Maybe some occasional member-exclusive bonus content that wouldn't fit or make sense to be a part of this regular show.
Marco:
And we'd also love to hear your ideas on what else you would like to see as member benefits.
Marco:
But for the most part, what we're selling is...
Marco:
supporting us and you get a sponsor free feed of the show same show just without sponsors so if you want to spend eight bucks a month for that that's great uh if you don't want to spend eight bucks a month for that that's totally fine too simply by listening to our show and hearing the ads in the regular version that supports us perfectly well so we thank you for that that's enough
Marco:
If you want to support us differently by becoming a member for $8 a month, we'd be very thankful for that.
Marco:
So there it is.
Marco:
Thank you for that.
Marco:
We have a lot more we can talk about, actually, but the implementation of this, some of the decision-making and why, the stack and everything.
John:
I think we should dig into that.
John:
We can start by saying that...
John:
we're already seeing suggestions go by in the chat.
John:
As you might imagine, when we discussed this amongst the three of us, we had all sorts of ideas.
John:
We entertained almost everything.
John:
I'm not sure which ones we want to discuss that we entertained.
John:
There's a couple of them you might be amused by, but
John:
uh we're starting intentionally very simple right and we don't know how this is going to go right you know there's one price there's one offering it's an ad free show like it's straightforward it's easy to understand we're not taking anything away from anybody nothing is moving behind a paywall like if you don't pay you get exactly the same show you've always gotten but we've entertained all possibilities and so i think it's important to recognize that we are intentionally starting simple and we're just going to learn from how it goes if nobody signs up then maybe we've made the wrong offering right and so we'll
John:
We'll figure it out from here.
John:
But hopefully what we're providing is easy to understand, straightforward, and something that at least a few people will be interested in doing.
Casey:
Yeah, I think we should also talk about a little bit of the machinations with regard to cost, because I think that even though I am very comfortable and proud even of where we've landed, a little sliver of me is disappointed that we didn't decide to go with what we were originally thinking.
Casey:
It was really funny.
Casey:
It was really funny, but I think it would have come across obnoxious, which is why we shelved it.
Casey:
But I think it's one of those things where it's a bad joke, but I can't help but telling it anyway.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
You're totally that dad who tells the bad joke anyway.
John:
I am.
John:
I don't think it's a bad joke.
John:
I was heavily in favor of this plan.
John:
Go ahead, Casey.
John:
It was your idea.
Casey:
No, I thought it was Marco's idea.
Marco:
It might have actually been Tiff's idea.
Marco:
Tiff and I derived it one night.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
That's right.
John:
It was Tiff.
John:
Marco came and told us that Tiff suggested it.
John:
That's right.
Casey:
Yes, yes, yes.
Casey:
But anyways, though, Markwood Tiff had come up with the idea of doing RAM plans.
Casey:
So you could do $8 a month, $16 a month, $32 a month, or $64 a month.
Casey:
Now, of course, what would you be getting for all of those higher tiered plans?
Casey:
The same exact crap you're getting.
Casey:
Nothing.
Casey:
You get nothing.
John:
And, you know, we like it because it's, you know, it's a computery, like the pricing, you know, at Powers of Two and stuff like that.
John:
But practically speaking, a lot of things that are like Patreons work like that, where there are tiers and you get, you know, if you pay more, you get some separate thing or whatever.
John:
Yeah.
John:
like especially for an initial offering even though the joke about the ram things was good it just seemed like maybe too confusing and just let's just start off simple and see how it goes if if there are people out there who are super angry that they're not able to give us more money per month let us know and we'll consider high tiers right i don't expect a lot of email on that yeah exactly right and my thing is like you should have an other field where people can just type in the amount they want to pay
John:
because who knows i'm always waiting for that that one reclusive billionaire who listens to the show is like all right all right 10 grand a month here you go anyway um i love k ham in the chat says come on this is an apple podcast we know it's 8 32 64 yeah that's probably that's probably true they're gonna skip over the size that everyone else wanted to yeah and we have all sorts of ideas of other things that we could give but in the beginning we don't you know
John:
we don't want to over overwhelm all right so marco mentioned member specific content i always said like eventually someday years down the line we should eventually get me to play destiny with those two but i don't know if they're actually going to want to do that and i and that's not a podcast either so i don't even know how that would work but that's like stretch goal five years in the future potentially if this is still a thing that we're doing but
John:
But in the short term, most of the obvious ideas you can think of, we've also been entertaining and may actually arrive.
John:
But we don't know what those are going to be now.
John:
So this is what we've got to start with.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And ultimately, like, you know, we know if you go, you know, apples to apples comparison of like, well, for eight bucks a month, I could get Disney Plus or something like, yeah, we know.
Marco:
But it's closer to like, if you look at, you know, like Patreons basically are the real good comparison here of like,
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
we didn't really want to have some kind of like doodads that we give you or kind of vague promises or like DVD extras.
Marco:
You know, it's like a lot, a lot of Patreons and Kickstarters and everything.
Marco:
They think they have to offer stuff to people to get them to pay for the higher tiers.
Marco:
But as a supporter, you just want to support them.
Marco:
You don't want their stuff.
Marco:
You're not ever going to get their free email greeting or whatever the thing is.
Marco:
And then meanwhile, for the creators, those things are massively time-consuming and burdensome and often costly to make.
Marco:
And so I, as a frequent supporter of this kind of stuff, I don't want any of that stuff.
Marco:
let me pay you the five or ten bucks a month for your show and get the ad free feed if you have one and that's that's great that's all i want like because the whole point is you're paying to support something not to buy a low-priced product all right and so we wanted to avoid anything like that because not only is it generally not worth it for creators and it wouldn't be worth it for us but that's not why we want your money like we don't want you to
Marco:
buy something expecting massive bonus stuff or special access to us, stuff like that that's kind of hard for creators to actually really give.
Marco:
If you want to pay us for an ad-free feed and for extra support if you want to, that's great.
Marco:
If you don't want to, that's totally cool.
Marco:
Again, we understand.
Marco:
If you just listen to our show and hear the ads, you are already supporting us.
Marco:
You can even skip them sometimes.
Marco:
Just don't tell anybody.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
Everyone does it.
Marco:
I do it.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
You are already supporting us by doing that.
Marco:
So if you want to support us more, come be a member.
Marco:
ATP.FM slash join.
John:
There's some interesting tech details of this.
John:
My favorite one, before we start talking about the website and everything, hopefully everyone in the chat has already signed up so you already know what the website's like.
John:
We already have 71 members.
John:
Hooray!
John:
The most interesting tech bit here is to streamline the production of the ad-free feed
John:
uh marco lover of dynamic ad insertion has made the reverse of that which is static ad removal he's the the forecast tool that he uses to chapterize the shows now has a feature where it can export the ad free version i don't know exactly how this works marco you want to explain it
Marco:
Yeah, sure.
Marco:
So basically, this is one of the areas... Sorry, this is going to be a Marco-heavy episode.
Marco:
If the haters out there, I'm sorry.
Marco:
You might as well stop now.
Marco:
This is one of the areas where owning the entire stack of production tools... This is strategically very good for me.
Marco:
Back when I made Forecast...
Marco:
I believe I said on the show that one of the reasons why I wanted to just get it out there for free and not try to charge $30 or $50 for it and make nobody buy it is because it had value to me as somebody in the podcasting space, as both a podcaster and the owner of Overcast, it had value to me to have some kind of control over a podcast production tool.
Marco:
Because then if I wanted to add features to podcast at the production side, I had a place to do that.
Marco:
And then I can do things like add corresponding features to overcast and give MP3s a certain ability.
Marco:
Like the idea of I have my floating chapters where the chapter spec has a provision where you can have a chapter that does not get listed in the list of chapters, but just appears at a certain time range.
Marco:
Nothing actually reads or writes those.
Marco:
But the provision was there in the spec.
Marco:
So I said, hey, I'll implement that.
Marco:
So I implemented it in forecast and in overcast.
Marco:
So now if you have a chapter podcast and you want to display a chapter that merely shows up at a certain time range but is not listed in the table of contents, you can do that.
Marco:
And it works.
Marco:
So there is value to kind of owning the whole stack here.
Marco:
In this case, first, we built a CMS.
Marco:
This is one of the big reasons why we built the CMS when we did it.
Casey:
Stop.
Casey:
Stop right there.
Casey:
We did not build a CMS.
Casey:
I would love to take credit for this, but two of us complained and moaned about a handful of design decisions, and one of us actually did all the work.
Casey:
Complained?
John:
That's important user feedback.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
I would say two of you were design consultants.
Marco:
Fair enough, fair enough.
Marco:
Anyway, so first, I built a CMS.
Marco:
We were wanting to do it for a while.
Marco:
As we said, things like controlling the RSS feed and how everything works and everything.
Marco:
We wanted to build it exactly for our needs, in part to support a membership program.
Marco:
The way I build things is for the long term and with as much under my control as possible.
Marco:
So this is things like minimizing external services is a big part of this.
Marco:
When a service is necessary, I like to choose conservative, stable, long-term services, companies that have been there a long time.
Marco:
And I like to choose low-level building blocks instead of high-level, all-in-one solutions.
Marco:
What I want to do is own as much of the customer interaction and the customer billing relationship as possible.
Marco:
For example, rather than going to Patreon or Memberful, we built a site on Linode, and we host our files on Libsyn, and I built the whole membership payment program on Stripe.
Marco:
Building a hosting platform, or a podcast CDN and stats service, or a payment processor, which is what those three companies are respectively,
Marco:
That's no small feat.
Marco:
It's not worth doing for almost anybody ever.
Marco:
So that made sense to outsource.
Marco:
Those are major problems that are really hard to do.
Marco:
I'm not going to become my own credit card processor.
Marco:
But I also don't want to go to somebody like Patreon where they have this whole big platform and I would simply be like...
Marco:
We'd be like one tiny member of it, and we would be at the whims of whatever they decide to do.
Marco:
Every company seems good for a while if they're good, but then you don't know what's going to happen in the future down the road.
Marco:
Why have a dependency if you don't need it, right?
Marco:
So we built the CMS as these low-level building blocks that you, the customer, either will never see or might only notice.
Marco:
You'll see a Stripe logo in the footer of the payment page or something.
Marco:
But that's it.
Marco:
These aren't hitting you over the head.
Marco:
You're not going to Patreon to sign up for us.
Marco:
You're going to our site, and you're signing up directly on our site.
Marco:
And we control all that.
Marco:
We don't have to worry.
Marco:
If we're going to go to some new podcast subscription membership management service...
Marco:
what if they go out of business next year?
Marco:
We don't have to worry about that kind of stuff.
Marco:
Stripe is not going anywhere.
Marco:
Libsyn has been around for 15, 20 years.
Marco:
They're not going anywhere either.
Marco:
Linode is not going anywhere.
Marco:
These are solid, long-term, low-level building blocks, and that's the way I like to build things.
Marco:
So that's the CMS part.
Marco:
And there's lots of interesting stuff about the CMS, but we'll get to that some other time maybe.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
So as John mentioned...
Marco:
Here, I'm setting myself up for every week producing two copies of the show.
Marco:
One with the ads and one without.
Marco:
What the entire rest of the podcast industry does now is called dynamic ad insertion.
Marco:
We've talked about it here and there before.
Marco:
This is one of the reasons why you can occasionally, if you're listening to one of the major shows...
Marco:
From a major producer, you will often hear a recent ad in an old show, or you will hear a local ad for some local car dealership or some event that's happening in your town, which sounds kind of creepy the first time you hear it.
Marco:
And the reason why they're doing dynamic ad insertion, where they have their MP3 files of the show, and they mark certain timestamps to insert ads at.
Marco:
and on download, they look at your IP address, they either do a direct geolocation lookup and figure out roughly where you are, or they do something even creepier where they look it up with one of those data broker services and find out exactly who you are, and then they inject ads that are relevant to you directly into the show at your download.
Marco:
As I mentioned earlier, the MP3 file format is really hackable.
Marco:
You can basically splice MP3s freely, and as long as you do it...
Marco:
remotely competently you can you can be really sloppy you can make a lot of mistakes as long as you do it remotely competently it'll work it'll play and so that's what a lot of big publishers do now like you know they they they dynamically insert ads and anyway
Marco:
I actually do kind of the opposite now.
Marco:
As John said, I am statically deleting ads automatically, where Forecast, the tool that I use to encode the chapter markers and the MP3, which I write, already had the concept of sponsor chapters, like recognizing sponsor chapters by the prefix.
Marco:
And you can edit what the prefix is.
Marco:
By default, it's what we use on this show, sponsor colon.
Marco:
And so it recognizes those and it highlights them in the table view so you can easily see them.
Marco:
And that way, I always check to make sure, like, are they actually, you know, do they have the right durations roughly?
Marco:
And then I can make sure they all have links and everything.
Marco:
And so it already had this mechanism of recognizing sponsors.
Marco:
It also had a feature called export air checks, where people who buy ads, a lot of times they will want to hear a copy of whatever ad you read before.
Marco:
Before they pay you, they give us an air check, which is just a fancy industry term for the copy of the ad as you read it from the show.
Marco:
And so I have a feature in Forecast.
Marco:
I never wanted to do this.
Marco:
So I have a feature in Forecast that says export sponsor air checks.
Marco:
And any chapter that has the sponsor prefix that you've set, it will just export those as separate files that include only that plus or minus, or plus a couple seconds on either side, et cetera.
Marco:
So I already had MP3 splicing, sponsor recognition, chapter markers, and I'm already making the show with chapters.
Marco:
So I built in a feature into Forecast to automate the creation of the sponsor-free versions by simply having a menu item that will export a copy of the same file without the sponsor chapters in it.
Marco:
And as you hear the show, the way the sponsor-free version sounds, it's exactly the same show.
Marco:
The way it sounds is when you hear... And then you hear the sponsor here, and then you hear the sponsor closed music.
Marco:
Basically, the way the ad-free version works is you only hear the ad closed music, and then it goes to the next topic.
Marco:
So you don't hear the ad open or the ad.
Marco:
You hear just, you know, previous topic...
Marco:
And then the next topic.
Marco:
To do this in forecast, I had to first figure out macOS app notarization because the last forecast update predates Catalina.
Marco:
I also then had to add support for dark mode because the last update also predated Mojave.
Marco:
It was in 2018.
John:
Wow.
Marco:
but the main reason i had to update the forecast app besides adding this feature was i had to improve the precision of the chapter markers because it turned out the way i was forecast what forecast does to achieve its amazing speed and make your fan spin so fast is it splits up the file into however many cores you have so on my iMac i have 10 cores it's 20 virtual hyperthreading cores so it splits the files to 20 parts and
Marco:
encodes each of those parts separately in parallel, and then glues them all together at the end.
Marco:
It turned out the way I was gluing things together was actually adding one silent frame of audio, which is something like 11 milliseconds.
Marco:
It was adding a little bit of audio at every joint that was silent.
Marco:
And it split them on silences, so you wouldn't ever notice.
Marco:
It wouldn't split in the middle of a word, so it wouldn't be inserting silence anywhere you would notice.
Marco:
But it was enough that the chapter markers would be very slightly off as they were later in an episode if you were encoding with a high-core count machine.
Marco:
Because you would have all these segments that were joined, and so a chapter marker might be off by a half a second.
Marco:
And the problem is, when I'm placing these so precisely to make sure that the audio flows correctly when it performs the sponsor removal splice and it doesn't have a weirdly long gap or it doesn't cut off half a word somewhere...
Marco:
a half a second of imprecision is too much.
Marco:
So first, and this, this is all to save me a small amount of work every week.
Marco:
First, I had to improve the MP3 joining algorithm in forecast.
Marco:
You know, when I, when I made, when I first wrote it like four or five years ago, I had less knowledge of the MP3 file format than I have now.
Marco:
So I was able to do that just by knowing like, Oh, that's right.
Marco:
It's this, it's this padding frame that the lame lib is adding, you know, whatever.
Marco:
So,
Marco:
I knew enough to do it correctly this time.
Marco:
So first I had to figure out the notarization, add dark mode, update lame, then improve the precision of chapter markers by rewriting the way I join things.
Casey:
My goodness.
Marco:
But all that, I was able to do it because I control my production tool.
Marco:
It's a very powerful thing to have that.
Marco:
It's like a slow build.
Marco:
This is how I like to do things in my entire career, if possible.
Marco:
You put in a lot of work up front to do ridiculous things that save time over time.
Marco:
This is one of the great things about being a programmer.
Marco:
If you have some annoying task that you have to do every day or every week or even once a year,
Marco:
You can write a script and you can spend three hours writing a script that's going to save you one minute a day.
Marco:
But that's satisfying.
Marco:
And eventually that might be worth it.
Marco:
But now I have ad free versions.
Marco:
As I said, I only did the last four episodes ad free.
Marco:
I didn't go back like any further than that.
Marco:
And then there's also issues with Overcast that were kind of led to this.
Marco:
I developed a ping API to kind of make the private feed update speed be as fast as the public feed.
Marco:
Because what you wouldn't want is if you have a premium feed where everybody has their own little feeds, like a premium offering, you don't want the public show to go out
Marco:
And then have that be picked up by all the apps really fast because it's a popular feed.
Marco:
And then have to wait like two or three hours for all the member feeds to pick up the same episode.
Marco:
That would be not good.
Marco:
You don't want your members to have a worse experience than your non-members.
Marco:
You want it to be equal or better.
Marco:
So I developed an API in Overcast where every time we publish a new episode, and this is a public API, it's on the Podcaster Info page, the ping API, Overcast now has an API where you can say, all right, the feeds that begin with this prefix just got updated, so go crawl them now.
Marco:
instead of waiting possibly up to an hour or whatever that you might otherwise crawl them.
Marco:
So again, we produce a show here.
Marco:
I control the production tool.
Marco:
I control our biggest client.
Marco:
It's a good place to be.
Marco:
I know not everybody can do this, but when you do this, when you have this kind of stuff, it's amazingly strategically valuable.
Marco:
And you can push things forward.
Marco:
You can make new features or make things better for everybody just based on your own needs because you know what your needs are because you're also a podcaster.
John:
It's important to remember when Marco's talking about all these things about how he has his production tools and the app and the CMS and blah, blah, blah.
John:
This is still using all just open standards.
John:
MP3 is an open standard that Marco did not invent.
John:
Chapters are part of the standard that Marco did not invent.
John:
Anybody can make tools that understand these.
John:
Our private and public feeds are just plain old RSS feeds that any podcast client can play.
John:
We're all within this open ecosystem.
John:
It's just that because it's open, anybody can make apps that deal with them, which means that Marco can make apps that deal with them, and so he has.
John:
And same thing with our website.
John:
It's using PHP.
John:
It's on the web.
John:
It's a plain old website using open standards.
John:
It's just nice to be able to control as much of that as possible and as feasible.
John:
Related to that,
John:
since we control it we wanted to make it a good simple experience hopefully the people in the chat room who are super fans have figured out the website and have not stumbled over anything but we spent a surprising amount of time trying to figure out how to make it make the experience obvious and simple enough there's just like one or two screens like it's not complicated it's you know you just go there
John:
Enter some stuff, click some buttons, and you're done.
John:
It's very simple.
John:
That's what we wanted it to be.
John:
But one of the simplifications that I had my heart set on the beginning that turns out we couldn't do was sign in with Apple.
John:
The thing that we talked about on the show, I'm a big fan of this service.
John:
It's like, oh, if you already trust Apple and if you're listening to this podcast, maybe you do already.
John:
So you can instead of signing in with an email address or something, you can do sign in with Apple and we wouldn't even know what your email address was if you didn't want us to.
John:
You'd just be completely anonymous as far as we're concerned.
John:
You wouldn't have to maintain any kind of separate login credentials.
John:
It would just be like your Apple ID that you already have.
John:
And that would be an option for people who wanted to use sign in with Apple.
John:
Unfortunately, signing with Apple strongly suggests that you have an application associated with an iOS application or whatever.
John:
And you can kind of make a dummy application just to satisfy its desires, but we don't have an app.
John:
We have a website.
John:
There is no ATP app, right?
John:
We didn't want to make one.
John:
So unfortunately, the reason we don't have signing with Apple is right now it's not really designed to be
John:
Just a way for people to log into a website that has no associated app whatsoever.
John:
We do support Apple Pay through Stripe.
John:
So the payment process is really easy if you have Apple Pay and you want to use that and you don't want to have to enter credit card number.
John:
You can be done in like less than 30 seconds.
John:
But for now, no signing with Apple.
Marco:
As John said, if we could just get away with not having your email address at all, that would be wonderful.
Marco:
You know I would jump at that.
Marco:
Believe me, I thought of various ways I could try to get away with not having an email address for anybody.
Marco:
But the problem is when you're taking people's money directly,
Marco:
you need to have some way of accounting for them so that you can... So if they have a problem, they can email you and say, hey, I have a problem.
Marco:
Here's my email address.
Marco:
Can you look up my account?
Marco:
Otherwise, it just makes stuff a lot harder if you don't have that.
Marco:
And our payment processor, Stripe, collects the email address anyway.
Marco:
So we already are in possession of it anyway indirectly.
Marco:
We have access to it.
Marco:
It's in our data from Stripe.
Marco:
So at that point, it's like, well...
Marco:
we're already exposed to it.
Marco:
If you think about personal information as almost like a virus, it's like, well, if it passes near your hands, it's on you.
Marco:
So you have to take the precautions to protect it and you have to have a privacy policy about it and everything.
Marco:
Once you have to do all that stuff anyway, you might as well also provide a decent login experience and be able to fix people's issues when they email you.
Marco:
One of the problems that we had when we were thinking about should we add sign-in with Apple before we realized that you really are encouraged, that it really needs an app, and when Apple strongly encourages something, it basically is a rule, not a suggestion.
Marco:
And if it isn't a rule now, it will become one later, so you might as well treat it like a rule now.
Marco:
But one of the problems with sign-in with Apple is if you have sign-in with Apple,
Marco:
Many people will use it the first time they sign up or they will not use it the first time they sign up.
Marco:
And then when they come back to your site a few months later and want to log in, they will try the other thing.
Marco:
If they used it the first time, they will try not using it the second time because they'll forget whether they used it the first time or not.
Marco:
And then they will either...
Marco:
not have not see their account and email you saying my account's missing or they will miss they will inadvertently create a new blank account and then they'll write to you saying all my stuff's gone in my account so you create all sorts of like customer friction and customer support problems whenever you have multiple ways to log into your service or app so ideally if you could make it just one way you totally eliminate the
Marco:
how did I sign up for this?
Marco:
You know, and, and you still have issues of people with multiple email addresses deciding which one they want to use, but at least you reduce the, you know, you reduce the number of problems and problem sources you have by one big one by just saying like, okay, you don't have to worry about whether you log into our site with Twitter or Facebook or Apple ID or anything.
Marco:
You just log, you log into, you log into our site with the email address, period.
Marco:
So there it is.
Marco:
I don't even have a password.
Marco:
I use one of my passwordless login systems.
Marco:
And, um,
Marco:
We put a lot of work into the subscribe flow.
Marco:
Again, special thanks to the Stratechery and Dithering podcast, Ben Thompson and John Gruber.
Marco:
The system that Ben Thompson has devised over there for quick subscribing with the cool QR code and everything, we ripped it off completely 100%, with permission, but totally ripped it off, totally shamelessly.
Marco:
So thanks to them for innovating so that the rest of us can reap the benefits.
John:
One final nicety that Marco added, and you can correct me if I'm wrong about understanding this, but if you sign up as a member and you get your special member feed and you add it to your podcast player of choice using our cool little page that lets you do that, and then you unsubscribe, you stop being a member, you don't have to change your feed.
John:
Is that correct, Marco?
John:
That feed will continue to work for you, and then it will just become the non-member feed.
John:
So suddenly you won't have to delete the feed from your podcast player, then resubscribe to the public feed, and then delete the public feed.
John:
You can just keep that feed there forever, and the content of it will change based on whether you are currently an active member or not.
Marco:
Yeah, and it'll tell you.
Marco:
It'll prefix the title with subscription expired.
Marco:
So it'll be very clear that it is an expired member subscription, but the content will still be coming in, and there'll be a link in each post for you to renew if you want to.
Marco:
Your member feed, as long as you don't delete your account, your member feed will continue to work just fine as a copy of the public feed.
Marco:
And then as soon as you want to resubscribe in the future, member stuff all shows up again.
John:
Yeah, and you can, of course, delete the feed and resubscribe to the public one, too.
John:
We're just saying this is a nicety, so you don't end up with this weird dead feed that doesn't work anymore.
John:
One thing that may not be clear, or at least wasn't clear to me, about your membership that you're paying for, it's not calendar month.
John:
So if you become a member now, you're not missing out on the first couple of shows in June.
John:
It's based on your sign-up date, right?
Marco:
Yeah, it's simply time range from now.
Marco:
You're buying a month from now, and it renews next month.
Marco:
And you can see it's like, man, Stripe is so good these days.
Marco:
I mean, so I've built, I've used Stripe a couple times over the years.
Marco:
It's always been great.
Marco:
It's always been like great company, super amazing API, extremely easy to use, like breath of fresh air compared to the old days of PayPal.
Marco:
But now it's even better.
Marco:
Like if you can believe, like if you are building anything with payments,
Marco:
I strongly encourage you to use Stripe because it's so good.
Marco:
Stripe, not a sponsor of this episode.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
You'd be amazed how much functionality we got from them for almost no effort at all.
Marco:
The Stripe integration took me two days for the entire payment system.
Marco:
That is subscribing, including Apple Pay, including support for the cards that use 3D Secure that send you a text message to verify the charge before it actually goes through.
Marco:
All that stuff is supported.
Marco:
And a whole billing portal where you can go in and change your credit card number if it's about to expire.
Marco:
It'll email you a week ahead of time of expiration and stuff like that.
Marco:
You can see your billing history.
Marco:
All that.
Marco:
And it took me two days to build the entire integration.
Marco:
Again, Stripe has always been good, but it's even better now.
Marco:
So if you're building something that requires credit cards, if you're thinking about it, you'd be shocked how easy it is.
Marco:
So yeah, thank you to Stripe for being awesome.
Casey:
There were a lot of design decisions and things that went into this, and I don't think we need to belabor it anymore right now.
Casey:
But we might visit it in the future, or as we make other choices, we might revisit those in the future.
Casey:
But I do want to thank Marco one more time for putting in the overwhelming amount of work on doing this.
Casey:
And if you want to get Marco a birthday present, you can donate to the three organizations we've already talked about, and or you can join the ATP membership program.
Casey:
And would be better.
Marco:
Let's do and.
Marco:
If you're going to only give $8 a month to somebody, don't give it to me.
Marco:
Give it to one of them.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by notion, the all-in-one tool for taking notes, managing projects, sharing documents, and collaborating with your team seamlessly.
Marco:
When your work is scattered across different tools, different browser tabs, your brain feels scattered too.
Marco:
You need to simplify notion can do all those jobs, letting you consolidate your tools, all the work tools you use every day with notion in one place.
Marco:
And Notion is quick to set up and fun to use.
Marco:
They make it easy to work on your own or with your teammates in real time or around the clock no matter where you are in the world.
Marco:
Notion keeps information centralized so you can find documents fast and you can stay on the same page with everyone.
Marco:
Everybody knows exactly what's going on, what progress has been made, and what comes next.
Marco:
And you can capture your ideas and manage your tasks the way you want because Notion is flexible and customizable.
Marco:
You can set it up for exactly how you and your team work best.
Marco:
And Notion can replace dozens of single-purpose programs like Google Docs, Asana, Trello, Evernote, Confluence, so much more.
Marco:
So stay on task and find what you need and collaborate efficiently all in one place with Notion.
Marco:
For 10% off a team plan, head over to notion.com slash ATP.
Marco:
That's notion.com slash ATP to get 10% off a team plan.
Marco:
Once again, notion.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Notion, the all-in-one tool for taking notes, managing projects, sharing docs, and collaborating with your team seamlessly for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We have one big topic we need to talk about, which is going to make me frigging miserable.
Casey:
Bloomberg says that the arm transition is happening in, what, a week and a half, two weeks, something like that?
Casey:
It's happening at WWDC, or at least it will be announced anyway at WWDC.
Casey:
And this would only be depressing if you had a brand new laptop arriving tomorrow, which I definitely don't.
Casey:
Definitely not.
John:
I'm kind of amazed at how much mileage that Bloomberg has gotten, slash German, have gotten out of essentially the same story.
John:
Like, I think we've had basically this same story as a topic on this podcast.
John:
Not just our max, but I'm saying this specific story with these facts in this publication on this show like three times, right?
John:
So kudos for, you know, getting the page views.
John:
I don't think there's much new information except they're becoming more and more insistent that no really –
John:
wwdc which is in a couple of weeks as we record this this is going to be the coming out party for arm on the mac um they don't you know and with a typical hedging they always say as early as yeah well it could happen as early as any point in the future that's kind of you know anyway um so they're hedging and they're like oh there's not going to be hardware available but you of course you have to announce the transition before you have the hardware for most cases because if you just released arm max nothing would run on them and
John:
You know, all this leads us to discuss all the same questions.
John:
Now, the fact that they why are we talking about it for a third time then?
John:
If it's like there's not really any new facts and it's just, you know, being more insistent on the dates that they've said many months ago.
John:
I think as they become more insistent and as the date comes closer, I start to believe more because it's like, well, they're still insisting and it's getting closer to the day.
John:
We all know kind of like, you know, the leaks get more more solid the closer you get to the date of when they're supposed to happen.
John:
and practically speaking if the the long-term rumors of like our max in 2021 are true you kind of have to tell people about it before you try to sell them a bunch of hardware that doesn't run any apps right so wwc is the time you would tell them and you probably don't want to wait until wwc 2021 if you're planning on having any selling consumers max in 2021 that's too late so
John:
Unless, like so many other things in this world that have been, you know, delayed by coronavirus, if coronavirus hasn't thrown a giant monkey wrench into their plans, I'm starting to believe that this upcoming WWDC is going to be the...
John:
You know, the move away from x86, move away from Intel.
John:
I don't even know how to phrase it.
John:
We keep saying our max, but as we've discussed in many past shows, oh, it could be anything.
John:
It could be any kind of Apple processor.
John:
It could be RISC-V.
John:
It could be AMD.
John:
It could be, anyway, our max.
John:
We're pretty sure that's what's coming.
John:
That's what Bloomberg says.
John:
And WWDC could be the date.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm very much looking forward to this.
Marco:
I mean, we've been talking about it for years now as the thing that we assumed was probably going to happen someday.
Marco:
And it has kind of felt over the last year or so, like, it seems like it's getting close.
Marco:
If it finally is happening, I'm so excited.
Marco:
And even though, you know, again, we've talked about it so many times.
Marco:
there will be losses along the way, but I think we've already hit most of them.
Marco:
You know, there's, it's not a coincidence that Mac OS in the last couple of years has dropped support outright or deprecated major functionality that is considered like older legacy that you think might be hard to support in an arm transition.
Marco:
So things like 32 bit support, um, open GL, um,
Marco:
You know, like the major things that have cost us a lot of apps, especially, you know, 32-bit has caused a lot of apps to be killed, basically.
Marco:
You know, a lot of the old APIs that were 32-bit only, you know, those aren't coming over.
Marco:
Why do you think Apple's been doing all this house cleaning on macOS?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
it's not just for fun.
Marco:
It's clearly in preparation for this transition.
Marco:
So it does seem, it seemed for a while it's imminent.
Marco:
That seems more likely than ever now.
Marco:
And especially when backed up with this pretty firm report, I'm very excited to see this.
Marco:
I cannot wait.
Marco:
I do think we are probably going to lose this,
Marco:
Boot Camp, any kind of x86 emulation, I think, is out the window.
Marco:
And a lot of PC hardware compatibility is probably going to be lost as well.
Marco:
But I think that will be worth it in the end.
John:
I'm trying to remember what was the presentation where... Was it the most recent WWDC?
John:
There was some recent Apple presentation.
John:
I remember talking on the show...
John:
about how the whole presentation was like a giant subtweet.
John:
I remember saying that the presentation was basically screaming, we are making our Macs.
John:
The presentation was like... That's exactly what I said in the past episode of ATP.
John:
I can't remember the episode number, but the presentation was...
John:
Here at Apple, we have a bunch of new products, and this one has an A-whatever processor in it.
John:
And let me tell you how great those A-whatever processors are.
John:
And it's got this, and it's got that, and they just went into how great they are making these system-mounted chips.
John:
It was obviously an iOS device or whatever.
John:
They were so into it, and they were just telling you about all this cool stuff.
John:
And either just before or just after that, they had talked about a Mac product, and it said almost nothing about the CPUs, because A, we knew that they were not remarkable, and B, everything they were saying about the A-series, you knew if you knew the tech stuff is like...
John:
Not true of the Intel CPU and the other thing.
John:
It's not super power efficient.
John:
It's not made on a new process size.
John:
It doesn't have a neural engine.
John:
Its GPU isn't way better.
John:
It doesn't have more cores.
John:
It has none of that stuff.
John:
And, of course, Apple's not going to say this in the presentation.
John:
It costs Apple hundreds of dollars to Intel, whereas this one costs them, you know, less than $100 or whatever.
John:
Like...
John:
The whole presentation, the subtext was, Apple makes great CPUs.
John:
Our CPUs are great in ways that Intel CPUs are not, but they didn't say that.
John:
That wasn't the time for that presentation.
John:
When I saw that presentation, I'm like, oh, it's on now.
John:
It's clear that there's no turning back now.
John:
This is the tech strategy.
John:
Everybody knows it, and their presentations have been leading up to it.
John:
So when they do come on stage and present this,
John:
This is the thing I'm thinking about as we come closer to WWC.
John:
How do they position this?
John:
We talked about this when we were talking about it years ago.
John:
It's like, oh, do they just use ARM for the low-end laptops?
John:
Do they keep the big ones x86?
John:
Do they try to make a 64-core processor for a new ARM-based Mac Pro?
John:
This is back when we didn't even know they were going to make a Mac Pro.
John:
Yeah.
John:
How do they deal with the software situation?
John:
How do they present this?
John:
And now that we get closer to the date, the sort of default strategy that everyone believes becomes much more... There's much more support for it.
John:
That presentation they gave was not a presentation preparing the way for
John:
Apple to say, we're pursuing a dual CPU strategy where we're going to have, you know, forever Intel CPUs and our Macs at the same time.
John:
No, that presentation was all about how Apple makes amazing CPUs.
John:
Nobody makes better ones.
John:
Isn't Apple awesome?
John:
Don't you wish these were in all of your devices?
John:
So I think right now, a couple weeks out from WWC, if they do this, the positioning is the same as it was for Intel and the same as it was for PowerC, which is basically...
John:
these new a whatever you know these new apple made cpus are better in all the ways that we care about than the cpus we currently use they're faster they use less power they have more features they're not going to say this but they're cheaper like and the pitches and eventually all macs will be use this because it's better just like they said with power pc and just like they said with intel in fact with intel if people were around for that transition
John:
The specific pitch they made, which may sound weird in today's world of smartphones and iPads, but the specific pitch they made was that PowerPC was just too power-hungry, haha.
John:
Like, they couldn't put a G5 into a laptop.
John:
They weren't power-efficient.
John:
And Intel's roadmap had CPUs that had much better performance per watt.
John:
It wasn't just like, oh, Intel CPUs are faster.
John:
They were at that point.
John:
They definitely were faster.
John:
But the pitch was...
John:
these are faster and use less power so we can put them in our laptops and you know like apple's thing is like there are ideas for computers that we have that we can't make with available power pc cpus within the roadmap doesn't have anything to help us like say a laptop if you can't if your laptops are still g4 but your big desktops are g5 and the g5 is faster and better than the g4 and there's no prospect of getting a g5 into a laptop that's a pretty dire situation obviously it's not that dire now but all this is to say is the pitch was
John:
this is the future of the Mac.
John:
And yes, there'll be a transition and it will take a while.
John:
And here's how we're going to handle the transition and don't feel bad about the Macs that you already have.
John:
Like all the stuff that people are worried about, like, oh, you're going to announce an Intel transition, but then you're going to be selling people PowerPC Macs.
John:
What if someone bought a PowerPC Mac the day before that presentation?
John:
That happened.
John:
That's a thing that happened.
John:
We all survived it.
John:
It's a bumpy transition.
John:
Your Intel Mac will be fine for probably the lifetime of that computer because these transitions take time.
John:
But in the end, I feel like this has to be positioned as the future of the Mac is whatever this thing is that Apple wants to move to, whatever they call these things.
John:
If they're A-series, M-series, whatever they are, that's going to be for every Mac.
John:
It may take them longer.
John:
Maybe it's two or three years until they get an Apple-made CPU that is appropriate to replace the one in the Mac Pro or something.
John:
But I think that has to be the pitch is we make great CPUs.
John:
We're bringing them to the Mac.
John:
Even if they say, you know, our first line of Macs will just be the laptops.
John:
I will be shocked if they make any commitment to, like, in perpetuity continue to make Intel-based Macs because that's just not the way Apple does things.
John:
And honestly, it doesn't really make any sense because I think, you know, this is one thing we've discussed in the program over and over again.
John:
i think apple has proven the capability to make an appropriate cpu for every mac that they sell including the mac pro they haven't actually done that yet as far as we know maybe there's something in a secret lab or something but i think they've proven they're able to because the only difference in terms of you know the chips like in an ipad and in the mac pro is basically the number of cores the individual cores are now competitive and
John:
everything else is just a matter of money and time, you know, busts, bust widths, memory support, IO, you know, PCI express lanes.
John:
These are all solvable problems.
John:
Even the, the minor barriers that existed before that I used to insist could be solved by money.
John:
Those have come down without the application of huge amounts of money.
John:
Thunderbolt is now an open standard and you can be certified as Thunderbolt compatible, even if you're not made by Intel, like all, you know, and Marco, Marco mentioned the 32, 64 bit stuff has resolved itself.
John:
Like,
John:
Everything is all set up.
John:
Everything is all lined up for Apple to do this.
John:
It's easier now than it has ever been in the past.
John:
I feel like the positioning simply has to be, this is the future of the Mac.
Casey:
I'm so excited and disappointed about WWDC this year because it was a unique pleasure being around you when Swift was announced.
Casey:
Wasn't the Mac Pro announced when we were in the keynote audience?
Casey:
Sure was.
John:
You weren't next to me for Swift, but Mac Pro you were.
John:
Both times.
John:
Both Mac Pros.
Yeah.
Casey:
Well, there you go.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
Anyways, the point is being in the room for that.
Casey:
Like, obviously, the reality distortion field is different and has been since, what, 2011.
Casey:
But it's still amazing to be in the room when this is happening.
Casey:
And if this really is going to be announced in a couple of weeks, I'm going to be real sad not to be there.
Casey:
Obviously, I may not have been there anyway because I might not have gotten a ticket.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
It would have been really cool to have been able to see it in person.
Casey:
And I'm really curious how they're going to handle the cheering and the hooping and the hollering over something that arguably really should be cheered and we should be hooping and hollering over.
Casey:
I'm curious to see how they handle that if they're just doing recorded videos.
John:
uh i'm also curious to see what i think about this computer that's arriving tomorrow which i actually am super stoked for i was thinking of you when i said what if i just bought a mac with the previous cpu like it'll be fine like i saw you fretting about that what about yourself i mean before i ordered my mac pro i had made you know insisted many times i understand that apple may have to be switched to arm and i'm going to buy like the last great intel thing and honestly it's not even that great in terms of single core performance the ipads are
John:
probably faster right i'm i'm resigned to it slash fine with it i am people are asking how do you feel about that i'm excited for our macs i'm not depressed about my mac pro i love my mac pro it's great right and i'll be fine with it maybe it won't last me 10 years right maybe i'll replace it with another you know i had i bought multiple cheese graters before i can buy multiple mega graters again maybe someday
John:
uh but anyway i will you know i'll survive it'll be perfectly fine i'm excited for our max even if it's just laptops which i don't even like in the beginning because having lived through two cpu transitions before every one of them has been exciting power pc was super exciting for i mean power pc itself was exciting for lots of reasons there was lots of political reasons and other things that we can get into an old man mode in a different show maybe but like
John:
The main thing was that it was faster.
John:
It was so much faster than the, you know, ridiculously faster, demonstrably faster.
John:
And who's not excited by that, right?
John:
And even this is even, you know, back in the 90s or whatever, when computers were getting faster all the time anyway.
John:
Even in that environment, the switch to PowerPC showed a lot of speed.
John:
Even in an operating system that was still largely emulated because huge swaths of macOS were still 68K code for the longest time.
John:
And then the Intel transition...
John:
Again, Apple was in a bad place.
John:
They couldn't put a G5 in a laptop.
John:
The Intel Macs were right out of the gate.
John:
You used them.
John:
You're like, oh.
John:
I remember, like, you know, of course, compiling Pearl on an Intel Mac.
John:
I'm like, holy cow.
John:
You would.
John:
This compiles so much faster than it does on my, like, dual G5 Power Mac, right?
John:
It was, you know, it's like, it was the next day.
John:
It's like, oh, you have a dual G5 Power Mac?
John:
Try this one.
John:
middle-of-the-road, wimpy Intel Mac.
John:
I'm like, well, you know, this giant cheese grater surely will combine.
John:
No, the Intel one was so much faster.
John:
I hope we have that same excitement.
John:
Maybe it's not raw speed.
John:
Maybe it's just like, oh, the battery on the laptop's last iPad length, they're like 10 hours long, and before I was only getting four hours.
John:
I don't know, but I'm hoping...
John:
that these macs will be compelling and for anyone who has never gone through one of these architecture transitions they're scary and they could be bumpy but my main memory of the previous two transitions is excitement as a as a as a tech nerd is an exciting time to be involved in the mac you would think it would be a scary time to be like oh i'm just going to leave the mac and come back when things settle down but to me it's always been exciting
Marco:
I think they're probably going to start out with the MacBook Air.
Marco:
It's the best-selling Mac by all accounts, and it is very mainstream and very good, but the one problem it has is it's kind of slow.
Marco:
I've also heard that the thermal system is not super awesome.
Marco:
It's not a very graceful or high-capacity thermal system.
Marco:
If you can take that computer, keep what everyone loves about it, and give it significantly better performance and probably better battery life, that's a great update.
Marco:
That's all it needs to be.
Marco:
And many of the buyers of the MacBook Air don't need a lot of the higher-end pro use cases where the transition might be a little bit bumpier.
Marco:
And this is why I think that... I've seen the idea floated that possibly...
Marco:
the high end products would stay Intel for maybe a little while longer or a significantly longer time.
Marco:
And that maybe arm is potentially only in the laptops for a while, or maybe like laptops and the Mac mini or, you know, something like that.
Marco:
Like maybe arm doesn't come to the MacBook pro or the iMac pro or the Mac pro anymore.
Marco:
quite yet maybe it waits another couple years before that in the meantime you have arm where it really has like where it matters most which would be you know the smaller battery powered things like you know the macbook air um and that would be fine and that would also give people who rely on high-end apps high-end hardware um you know kind of more specialized stuff like virtualization that not everybody really needs to do but some people really need to do it um
Marco:
It would give all that time to transition and for those people to either find a different platform or for toolmakers to fill that in, like to make x86 virtualization or rather emulation, I guess it would be, on our Macs, stuff like that.
Marco:
There's so many paths they could take here.
Marco:
And what's really interesting, what I can't wait to see is what some of these decisions end up being, like what they decide about things like boot camp or emulation, things like that.
Marco:
And then I want to see the first ARM Mac.
Marco:
I'm so curious.
Marco:
If it is something like the MacBook Air or even a return of a 12-inch MacBook, but ultimately I think it would probably just be the MacBook Air.
Marco:
that would be an amazing computer.
Marco:
I would probably buy one.
Marco:
It would be so good.
Marco:
I can't wait.
Marco:
I really can't wait.
Casey:
The thing that scares me a little bit about the potential for the laptops getting these processors first, which I think makes the most sense from what we know today,
Casey:
I'm worried, and this is actually applicable as well to something we haven't mentioned, which is a potential iMac refresh.
Casey:
I'm worried that maybe the processors will be new.
Casey:
Well, obviously they will be.
Casey:
And maybe some other things around that will be new.
Casey:
Let's just say a version 2 of the Magic Keyboard or whatever it is they're calling the keyboards these days.
Casey:
like all that is fine and dandy, but I'm really worried that there's going to be some new hotness looking like, like aesthetic quality to it.
Casey:
And I don't know what that would be to be honest, except on the IMAX where obviously like smaller bezels and so on, but, but I'm scared that I'm going to get this laptop tomorrow, which I am genuinely very excited about.
Casey:
I, I'm really, really stoked to have something that'll perform a lot better than my adorable, even though I love it, it's not fast and I'm really excited for it.
Casey:
And I think John, you're right.
Casey:
When you said earlier that,
Casey:
It's going to last.
Casey:
The entire lifetime of that laptop, I don't think, has been cut short by a potential ARM release.
Casey:
What scares me, and it doesn't even scare me if this potential ARM laptop has twice the battery life of my forthcoming 13-inch MacBook Pro.
Casey:
I don't operate away from a charger that often, so I'm not worried about that either.
Casey:
But if it looks cool...
Casey:
which is so stupid i'll be the first to tell you it's so dumb but if it looks super cool like can you imagine if they brought back like maybe not the polycarbonate but like the black macbook do you remember how friggin cool those things looked oh something along those lines i mean they look they look cool they look great in 2006 when they came out i don't think they looked out like i think that was that was a time period sure sure they're not going to bring back plastic i don't think i don't see that happening i don't think you have to worry about it looking that cool though honestly
John:
I mean, not to slam Apple's current laptop design, but for two reasons.
John:
One, most of Apple's devices have had their skins pulled in to such a degree that there's nothing left to trim.
John:
And all you've got is surface finishes of color.
John:
So I suppose they could make a black one, but they probably won't.
John:
And the second reason is during both of the previous transitions...
John:
Apple's MO, whether intentionally or just because of momentum, has been to sell you computers that look just like their predecessors, but their insides have a different CPU.
John:
And it makes sense from a design point.
John:
It's like, well, what if your CPU transition doesn't exactly coincide with a complete redesign of all your computers?
John:
You can't really do that.
John:
So let's just take this case that previously came with the PowerPC and put an Intel chip in it.
John:
And the second part of that that could be intentional is like we want people to understand this is just a Mac.
John:
They're not weird.
John:
They're not different.
John:
This computer you bought last week and this computer you bought this week, they look exactly the same.
John:
One has an Intel CPU.
John:
One has a PowerPC CPU, right?
John:
That could also be an intentional strategy.
John:
But I think the other one is more compelling.
John:
Practically speaking, Apple is not capable of...
John:
physically redesigning its entire line of computers, or even a specific one.
John:
They've just refreshed most of their computers, which I think leads into this other rumor.
John:
This is related to WWDC, the rumor about the iMac being replaced with a new design.
John:
And what they mean by new design here is, like you were saying, Casey, the case, essentially.
John:
The current iMac design has been around for many years.
John:
Everyone thinks that you could get one with a smaller chin, smaller bezels.
John:
Maybe it could look like the Pro Display XDR.
John:
People have all sorts of ideas.
John:
But the bottom line is,
John:
The iMac is probably due for a physical redesign.
John:
And this rumor is not that this would be like the ARM iMac, because ARM Macs are, you know, there's no rumor that says ARM Macs are coming this year.
John:
All the rumors say ARM Macs would be coming next year at the earliest.
John:
But you have to tell developers about it ahead of time.
John:
And this is a developer conference, so people expect them to be announced.
John:
to give developers time to rebuild their apps, yada, yada, right?
John:
But the iMac rumor is, oh, and they'll introduce a new iMac.
John:
So what this would mean, and this may also blow people's mind who haven't been through the previous two transitions, is they would announce an ARM transition and in the same presentation say, look at this amazing new Intel-based iMac?
John:
Yeah, because they're not going to stop selling Macs once they announce the transition.
John:
When they announced the Intel transition, it's not like, no more Macs will be sold until the first Intel-based Mac is released.
John:
And same thing with PowerPC.
John:
That's just not the way the world works.
John:
So it is not inconceivable that they could introduce a new iMac, probably do that at the first part of the presentation, and say, here's a great new iMac.
John:
Here are its specs.
John:
Here's its price.
John:
Doesn't it look cool?
John:
Ooh and ah.
John:
And then later say, and now an important transition for the Mac.
John:
We've done this twice before and put in the slot.
John:
You know how this is going to go, right?
John:
And I don't think people will be like, well, wait a second.
John:
You just introduced an Intel Mac.
John:
Yeah, and we're going to be selling them in our stores for the next year.
John:
And people are going to buy them and they're going to use them and they're going to work because of their Macs.
John:
It's all fine, right?
John:
But that being the case, it's not like they're saying, okay, well, the first ARM-based Mac, whatever it may be,
John:
It has to look radically different to give Casey FOMO.
John:
Like, I don't think that's going to happen, right?
John:
I think they're just going to look... Whatever Mac it is, especially if it's like the MacBook Air that was just physically redesigned, it's going to look like that.
John:
Like, that's it.
John:
I mean, the best they could do is maybe give it a new color is available or something like that, but their colors haven't been that daring lately either, so...
John:
I do not expect the ARM transition to coincide with amazing style change.
John:
That said, I welcome an amazing, daring style change to any of Apple's Macintosh lines, the laptops, desktops, anything.
John:
Not that I don't like the current style.
John:
I do.
John:
I really like how my Mac Pro looks.
John:
I think they're all attractive computers and they're fine.
John:
But I'm always willing to have things mixed up.
John:
I'm frequently jealous of, you know, the...
John:
The surface finishes that the phones get from year to year, different colors, you know, shiny matte, the glass covering, the pastel things, the product red ones, the whatever that jet black one.
John:
Like there's an adventurous spirit in the phone line that is not present in the Mac line.
John:
And I certainly welcome that, but I'm just not expecting it.
Casey:
By the way, semi-real-time follow-up.
Casey:
I am pretty sure, and I think it was my name is T in the chat that pointed this out.
Casey:
It was the Brooklyn Academy of Music event that Marco and I were actually present for physically, that they were going on and on about how amazing the processor is and the then brand new iPad Pro.
Casey:
And then they started talking about the then brand new MacBook Air.
Casey:
And yeah, it's great because of all these things and there's a processor in it.
John:
It also has a processor in it.
Exactly.
Casey:
And so I'm pretty sure Marco and I were there for that.
John:
It was brutal.
John:
One final bit on the RMAX.
John:
A lot of people have been speculating about the
John:
hardware the developers would use to work on their apps so i kept saying like you have to tell developers so they can rebuild their apps but you're not going to sell max based on the new processor until the next year so what the heck are developers going to test on well when they did the intel transition they had this thing called the what the developer transition kit or something where they would sell you
John:
a mac that was basically an existing cheese grater mac you know power mac but inside i believe it was a pentium 4 correct it was like a pc motherboard with a pentium 4 and they weren't selling it to you you were essentially renting it but you had to give it back to apple at the end and anyway developers could get this they gave apple whatever it was a thousand dollars or something and you got a cheese grater with a pentium 4 in it
John:
And you would use that to port your app.
John:
It was an Intel-based Mac.
John:
It ran Mac OS X. And you would open up Xcode and bring your source code into it and try to get it to build and test it and everything like that.
John:
And then after the period was up, you sent that back to Apple.
John:
And then what did they do?
John:
They gave you the actual production Intel iMac.
John:
as an option or something you could choose to either get your money back or they would send you an intel iMac i forget but the point is apple has various ways to get hardware to developers so they can do their development but that hardware they give to the developers isn't like a secretly ready ahead of time mac on the new architecture it's like this weird mongrel beast it's like dev kits for consoles right they don't they're not production systems these are not consumer systems like apple never shipped a mac with a pentium 4 in it except for these developer transition kits they were all like the core
John:
You know, the core architecture or whatever.
John:
But the Pentium 4 ones were good enough for people to do their porting work because it's the same instruction set or whatever.
John:
So everyone's thinking, what are they going to do this time?
John:
What kind of thing are they going to give developers so they can actually build their Mac app on ARM or whatever these, you know, what are these CPUs are going to be?
John:
And since the rumor is that these are going to be our max, everyone says, well, they don't have to worry about that because developers probably already have tons of arm based devices in their house.
John:
Like they've got an iPad or something.
John:
So why not let them run Mac OS on their iPad or something?
John:
because it's already ARM hardware, and it's probably similar enough to the ARM Mac hardware that's going to come out, because the rumors are that the ARM Mac hardware is based on the A14 chip that's going to be in the next-gen iPhone and all that other stuff, right?
John:
So it's not like Apple's making an entirely... The rumor is that Apple's not making an entirely different architecture.
John:
It's all derived from the same iPhone chip that they're making a million of.
John:
Anyway, let everybody run macOS on their iPads, or maybe even on their iPhones, or run on your iPhone and have a projector and external display, and all sorts of theories like this.
John:
They are technically plausible, but they don't strike me as likely simply because the straightforward solution of just giving people a Mac with an ARM chip in it, even if it's some weird slapped-together thing that you have to ask for back at the end, Apple's done it before, and it worked perfectly fine.
John:
If they have a better solution, if they've already done the work to make iPads do this because that's how they've been developing it internally, sure, maybe they could do it, but I feel like Apple's going to do...
John:
the thing that is the most straightforward for them and without knowing for a fact that apple has been developing mac os and running it on the ipad internally i have to think that they're going to give people give developers access to something that looks and behaves like a mac but it's got an arm chip inside it and they'll probably want it back
Marco:
You're probably right about most of that.
Marco:
One major difference, though, that we have to consider is that the number of Apple developers is so much bigger now than it was back then.
Marco:
And even if you rule out all the iOS-only developers, which is probably most of them...
Marco:
even just the number of mac developers is way bigger now than it was in 2005 2006 so it wouldn't surprise me if the idea of like give people something that they have to then give back at the end is just too large of a scale to do this time um like to make that it would just be so first of all it would probably be like incredibly wasteful like all the electronics that you'd be manufacturing and then having to recycle at the end of that they can let them keep it too like it
John:
There's no reason, you know, it would be useless for you because it would probably be unsupported by the next actual release version of Macros, but you could have them keep it too.
John:
But I see what you're saying about the scale.
John:
Although, speaking of scale, didn't they do something similar with Apple TV development?
John:
Obviously, again, a smaller user base, right?
Marco:
Yeah, I got one, but you paid a dollar because they had to charge you something for some kind of accounting reason.
Marco:
So you signed up, you filed a request to get one of these, and if they granted it, and it was through the developer account system, and if they granted your request, you were allowed to buy an Apple TV for $1.
Marco:
And I think...
Marco:
I forget whether that was actually before they were available.
Marco:
I don't think it was.
Marco:
I think anyone else could buy them as well, but you just got yours maybe like a week ahead of time or something.
Marco:
It was obviously certainly cheaper, and that was the main issue there.
Marco:
But with something like this, it's very possible that they can't really release a whole Mac to the public.
Marco:
And with, with very little software available for it.
Marco:
Although the funny thing is like, if you look at how much software people run on their Macs that is not made by Apple, like, I mean, yeah, most of us run stuff that is not made by Apple, but I bet Apple could sell a MacBook air tomorrow that only ran their software for the first few months that it was out and it wouldn't sell zero copies.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Microsoft ran that experiment.
John:
Microsoft did Windows on ARM that had very little support from third-party applications, and it didn't sell that well, but it was a product that they sold.
John:
Yeah, they released it.
Marco:
So I think what's possibly a more likely outcome here is maybe Apple sells a laptop, but only... They actually sell.
Marco:
This is the first...
Marco:
arm mac here it is it's a macbook air or something or maybe a 13 inch macbook pro it's something like that with you know it's exactly what you said it's like whatever the current you know case and design it'll look exactly like what we sell now because we're not going to put any additional work into this like you know kind of beta product and it'll just have arm guts inside of it and it'll be compatible with almost nothing but you can use it for development and maybe they sell it only through the developer portal like maybe you have to log into your developer account to buy it
Marco:
And then you sell it to developers and maybe you even call it a beta product.
Marco:
And that way you try to keep it out of the hands of the general public as much as possible or at least discourage people in some way from using it.
Marco:
Maybe it can only run software that you sign with your developer ID and nothing else.
Marco:
Somehow you make it so that...
Marco:
Most regular people are not going to want to get their hands on one.
Marco:
But then, you know, otherwise, it's a regular product that developers can buy.
Marco:
I don't know, something like that, maybe.
John:
Well, the way they would make it discourage is they would say, like, look, this is not going to be supported by the next version of macOS.
John:
Like, we're not, this is not a supported machine.
John:
It's just for you porting your software from that point out.
John:
Like, pretend no one gave back those Pentium 4s.
John:
Those would have not been supported by a later version of the operating system unless Apple explicitly did it.
John:
Like someone in the chat room was saying that it used BIOS instead of EFI.
John:
I forget if that was the case, but that was a weird machine, right?
John:
And so as long as you're upfront about what you're getting into here and tell people, like, this is not – don't buy this expecting to use this as your Mac.
John:
That's not going to happen.
John:
This is for your – you know, it's a developer transition kit.
John:
It's a dev platform.
John:
And like I said, with game consoles, it's ample precedent.
John:
Every console game that's available at launch was developed –
John:
on a dev kit on provisional, weird, mongrel hardware that everybody, you know, like the whole world of console development, this is how it works.
John:
You get a dev kit.
John:
The dev kit often is very, very different from the console that's released to people, you know, in hardware and software, especially if you're going to be there on launch.
John:
And, you know, those dev kits, historically, they've actually been very expensive, but they ship them to developers all over the world.
John:
And, you know, I don't know if there are more Mac developers than there are console developers.
John:
I have to imagine there's more console developers when you add, you know, Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo all together.
John:
There's got to be more of them, and it's a proven system.
John:
And again, in the console world, they charge you thousands of dollars for these dev kits, which are useless to you, essentially, especially if you have one of the early ones before the console actually launches because they may have major differences to the actual production hardware.
John:
Um, but that's how, that's how the sausage is made.
John:
So, and again, you can't buy, you can't just go into, you know, target and buy a PS five dev kit.
John:
Certainly now you can, you can't buy a PS four dev kit.
John:
You have to go through Sony and you have to be a developer and, you know, so I feel like there are established systems for this.
John:
The developer transition kit was weird because it was a rental and they wanted you to return it.
John:
But then in some ways, that's kind of an Apple-y move where they don't want these things out there in the world.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
And that's the firmest way to explain to people, this will not be your Mac for the next five years.
John:
Like, we're not going to support it.
John:
Just pretend it didn't exist.
John:
It is a developer transition kit.
John:
It's a kit.
John:
It's not a Mac.
John:
It's just a kit.
John:
um the reason i think people can go back to the ipad thing is like i said i think the only reason they will do that is if they've already been doing that internally if the way they've developed this is internally rather than making a dev kit they're like well we've already got ipad hardware so why don't we just use that as a dev kit inside apple
John:
If they've already done all of that work, then yeah, they'll just do that for external people as well.
John:
But I question why they would do that work internally because internally is exactly where they make these weird transition kit things.
John:
So I'll be very surprised if the iPad is the transition kit.
John:
But if it is...
John:
that's gotta be something that they've been doing internally for, you know, for, for a long time.
John:
And they're just saying we're, we're going to leverage that work.
John:
Why would we repeat that work with something that looks more like a Mac?
John:
Certainly the iPads are fast enough and we've already got this cool keyboard thing and, you know, we're all set to go.
John:
It's already a weird, uh, not so floppy laptop.
John:
So let's just go with that.
John:
But we'll see.
John:
Gruber had a big post about how on Apple, like it seems and how it would be weird to have a touchscreen with an OS that isn't touch based.
John:
And, you know,
John:
When I read that Gruber post, often on Daring Fireball, there's a post that I will read and nod my head, and I'm like, I agree with every single part of this.
John:
But when I get to the end of it, I start to have flashbacks of the earlier Daring Fireball post from years ago where I agree with every single part of it, but it turned out, like, all of it is sound, logical reasoning, but it turned out to be wrong for, like, because, like, Apple gonna Apple.
John:
Sometimes they just do something different.
John:
It's like, boy, I agreed with that post.
John:
Everything made perfect sense.
John:
And it does, but it's like...
John:
Yeah, we just decided to do something different.
John:
It's like, oh, well.
John:
That's the difficulty of predicting Apple.
John:
It's just an organization full of people.
John:
And sometimes decisions happen one way or another based on the things you don't know about or just sometimes whim.
John:
It's like when you try to make a decision, do the big pros and cons column.
John:
It can be misleading and you're like, look, I've got all these pros and very few cons, but like the second con down is may cause death.
John:
And you look at the list and it's like, if you did a blog post that just showed the pros, you'd be like, wow, this is a slam dunk.
John:
Look at all these pros.
John:
They all make sense.
John:
They're all logical.
John:
But if you don't dwell on this one con that's like may cause death.
John:
yeah you know so anyway i'm not saying the ipad uh developer transition kit may cause death but you know it really depends on how much you feel how you feel about that keyboard and uh you know touching the screen for you on your mac
Casey:
I received a text message from someone inside your house, John.
Casey:
And it said something along the lines of, I have never been more tempted to touch John's screen than I am right now.
Casey:
And it made me so happy.
Casey:
And I believe I told this individual that they should not.
Casey:
And even though you were bad cop that week, I still didn't think that they should.
Casey:
That's how you know I love you, John.
John:
No, no one should touch my screen.
John:
Why would anyone do that?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I have no, I can't, I can't think of a thousand different reasons, John.
John:
Was that on, I forget, was that on this show or on Rectives where I talked about it on my screen?
John:
It must have been the last episode on this show, right?
John:
It was this show.
John:
You mentioned that it's never been touched.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Why, why break the streak?
Casey:
I can fix that.
John:
No, you can't.
John:
You're way over there.
John:
Social distancing is saving my screen.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsor this week, Notion.
Marco:
And please give to the charities we link to in the show notes.
Marco:
And finally, thank you to our new members.
Marco:
That's really great if you signed up, and we really appreciate it.
Marco:
So thank you very much, and we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin, cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, cause it was accidental, 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.
Marco:
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T.
Marco:
Marco Arment.
Marco:
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
They did it.
John:
now we're in the after show and i can tell the uh the most obnoxious slash funny slash still obnoxious idea i had for the pricing tiers you know so tiff came up with the 8 16 32 thing and we were like oh and we don't want to do that let's just start simple blah blah i'm like wait a second
John:
What if we have a thing where the more members we get, the higher pricing tiers you unlock, right?
Marco:
So to be clear, it's not like when Pinboard launched, it's like every member that subscribed added like a cent or a tenth of a cent or something to the price for the next member.
Marco:
So it's not that.
Marco:
You're saying you could still sign up, but you would have the ability to pay more money as everything went up.
John:
Oh, it's not even that.
John:
It's like so the people would sign up and like the original just have the one pricing tier and they'd all sign up at that one pricing tier.
John:
But then like after you get 100 members, you unlock the second pricing tier.
John:
Now, those people who already signed up, they got their pricing tier and it's still there.
John:
But they've unlocked the ability for future people to pay more if they want.
John:
It's totally nonsensical.
John:
Right, right.
John:
And the more members you get, the higher pricing tiers get unlocked.
John:
It doesn't mean anyone ever has to pay them.
John:
They just get unlocked.
John:
I see a lot of stuff like this in video games where you're like, unlock harder difficulties.
John:
Like, why am I unlocking a harder difficulty?
John:
I had just enough trouble getting through this.
John:
Congratulations.
John:
You've unlocked nightmare mode.
John:
I don't want to unlock nightmare mode.
John:
It took me a week to get through the hard mode.
John:
I mean, again, Tiff enjoys that.
John:
But I thought it was funny, the idea that the more people sign up, the more you unlock.
John:
Mostly because it would be a curiosity to see, will anyone?
John:
If you unlock the $128 a month mode, it's like, will anyone sign up for that?
John:
And then each week we could say, so far, no takers on the $128 a month one.
John:
But if we get more members, we'll unlock 256.
Marco:
Yeah, and one of the biggest reasons why we decided not to have multiple pricing tiers is like,
Marco:
you know eight bucks a month we recognize that's like slightly premium for what we're offering for you know what other podcasts and youtube channels charge for their patreons we're at we're like right at or slightly above like the basic level i feel like five and ten dollars a month are very common price points for these kinds of things so eight is right there in the middle
Marco:
I think I would have a hard time sleeping at night if somebody was paying us $64 a month for this.
John:
I wouldn't have any trouble at all.
John:
I was the proponent of the open text field.
John:
If you want, just type a number.
John:
Type a number you want to pay us per month, and we will accept that.
John:
But no one's going to actually do that, so this is not just funny things to think about.
John:
But then again, we thought that idea of putting wheels on a shirt for $4 actually was funny, too.
John:
And that was the most popular shirt, because people are weird.
John:
That's true.
John:
So...
John:
Anyway, we're starting simple, but we have a lot of ideas.
Casey:
Real-time follow-up with regard to shirts, by the way.
Casey:
I think it took – if I recall correctly, Alex Cox sent me a text message at exactly 8.01 Eastern time saying, is the shirt still available?
Casey:
Which I thought was extremely well played, and I was –
Casey:
I was very grumbly, but I thought it was very well done.
Casey:
But I definitely did get a surprising amount of tweets that did not strike me as trolling.
Casey:
People saying, oh, gosh, I did forget.
Casey:
I knew I was going to forget, and I forgot.
Casey:
So all you people who are responsible and actually buy when we ask you to, I appreciate that because you will be surprised how many people say, oh, oh, no.
Casey:
Oh, it was me this month or this season, I guess I should say.
Casey:
It was me.
Casey:
It was me this time.
John:
it was almost me this time now i always go down to the wire it has been me like i've said in the past i've forgotten to buy our own shirts yeah you know my kids my kids wear them and you know we bought and sometimes you just you're like oh i'll get around to it i i miss what did i miss i think i missed the when we did the multi-color shirts where it's like all different colors i forgot to order those yeah yeah i ordered all my stuff for this like within eight hours of it ending yeah
Casey:
I think I was the first of us because we all use the same account, you know, so we can get it at cost.
Casey:
And I think I was the first one of the three of us to do it.
Casey:
And I was, I thought, like eight hours out.
Casey:
So maybe I was more than eight hours, but I certainly didn't think I was, you know, I didn't have a lot of extra time.
Casey:
I definitely procrastinated.
Marco:
normally i order one of everything like at the beginning of any sale because what you don't want is for somebody to get to the site and see that there's been zero sales like that just looks bad right so like i always want to have like put in any of our orders first before we announce it to the public so that way they get there and it's like oh look people are buying this it's happening right so like because you don't want you don't want there to be a big zero there that's why we all signed up for atp member accounts yeah before you came to the site
Marco:
yep i i sent him for the first one before i told anybody hey here's the link i signed up for the second one and i deleted it yep hey you gotta test if account deletion works yeah well you should you could just like uh now that we've deleted those numbers you can just assign uh two to the audio increment column that probably has like seven in it for my thing now there is no auto increment column in this this is a random id oh
John:
He's such a weirdo.
Marco:
What?
Marco:
There's the UUID people and there's the auto-increment people, and I am an auto-increment person.
Marco:
Sorry.
Marco:
To be fair, this is not a UUID.
Marco:
It's a random integer.
Marco:
There's a difference.
John:
Why are you doing that?
John:
You're making me even more upset.
Marco:
Why?
John:
Everyone, it's your job to have so many members sign up that it shows Marco why it's a bad idea to use a random integer as a unique key in the table.
John:
why it's a really big integer yeah that's what everybody says there's a reason there's a reason uuids exist it's a really big integer it'll be fine everybody we now we need to have what like uh two and a half billion signups and then we will show marco the error of his ways it's not 32 bit uh 64 bit sure okay well anyway there's a reason uuids doesn't my school have native support for uuid columns probably
John:
what are you just making it yeah okay all right mysql has all sorts of support for like native storage of you know slightly complex value types that you're but you're generally better off not using that support because it's like it's weird when they say native though it's probably all strings under the covers anyway knowing mysql yeah right it's like not actually native like packed binary support for uuids like real databases have it's always just like oh well there's some code that will generate a thing but we store it as a string in a var charcoal
John:
I just went to our member admin page.
John:
We don't have anything on there yet, huh?
Casey:
Nothing.
Casey:
Yeah, I want to see a count, man.
Casey:
You got to give me a count.
John:
I can tell you.
John:
We have 117 members so far.
Casey:
Hey, that's excellent.
Casey:
I'm really pleased by that.
John:
How many people are on the stream?
John:
Like 400?
Casey:
Oh, that's brutal.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I feel like the people who listen live are our absolute biggest fans because some of them are up in the middle of the night or early morning in weird times because of time zones.
John:
So if you're listening to a live stream and listen to all this BS and everything...
Marco:
uh you are very likely to be a super fan who at least consider becoming a member so this is like the best case scenario for signups i mean in all fairness we have a like 25 conversion rate among this group like all right that's what i'm saying like this is that's the best case yeah obviously they will not 25 of the listeners will not sign that would be amazing like i i don't think i've ever seen any kind of optional payment for anything that was above that was above like 10 percent
John:
You won't break double digits for sure.
John:
I'm not sure we're going to break 1%.
John:
This is another thing we've discussed endlessly.
John:
Optimism versus pessimism.
John:
How many people are going to want to sign up for the membership?
John:
So we'll see.
Marco:
Casey basically thinks no one's going to sign up.
Marco:
I think everyone's going to sign up and John's kind of in the middle.
Casey:
That's an exaggeration.
John:
I was the most pessimistic for a long time until we started talking to other people who had membership programs and learned what their conversions are.
John:
And I'm like, all right, well, I feel like we could probably do about as well as them.
John:
So I was super pessimistic in the beginning, but I've been coming around.
John:
So you're right.
John:
I am kind of in the middle now.
Marco:
yeah like i would i would love to get five percent that's kind of my target of like i think we can probably do it i don't think it's going to be super easy to get five percent but i don't think it's out of reach like i think i think that's that's kind of like my marco ever the optimist but but that would be a pretty good goal but if you look at like you know hello internet you know like other kind of like nearby shows and their proportion of but it's different because like everyone offers different stuff like some people offer nothing and just like pay to support us
John:
Can we tell the live streamers the thing that I didn't mention in the show that I desperately wanted to, but you didn't want to?
Marco:
I forget.
Marco:
Oh, the Ask ATP priority thing?
Marco:
That was a terrible idea.
Marco:
No, the CB thing.
Casey:
The CB thing?
Casey:
Oh, yeah, yeah.
John:
Yes, I can mention it?
John:
Yeah, yeah, go for it.
John:
I think that's fair.
John:
So, someone mentioned in the chat before, discounts on merch...
John:
I think that we're absolutely going to do that.
John:
We don't have a merch sale now, so it's irrelevant, which is part of why we didn't want to talk about it.
John:
But if you're listening to the live stream right now and you're wondering, hey, are they going to have merch discount codes for members?
John:
Yeah, we are planning to do that.
Marco:
Yeah, we already worked out with the Cotton Bureau and everything.
Marco:
But the problem was that we didn't want to...
Marco:
launch a membership immediately after our merch sale ended and say, next time we sell merch, you can get a little discount.
John:
I mean, I wanted to do that because I think people understand the arrow of time and can say, yeah, I understand.
John:
You didn't launch the membership until after the sale was over.
John:
Like we didn't, this is not ideal timing.
John:
Okay.
John:
We're not, we didn't like coronavirus kind of forced our hand a little bit on this.
John:
Like we'd been talking about it for a while.
John:
So things could kind of rush.
John:
But anyway, if you're wondering if I sign up for a membership, is there a possibility of discounts on merch in the future?
John:
The answer is yes.
Marco:
yeah and yeah and then and we we know the timing on this is weird like we yeah you know right now is not a great time to be you know launching a whole new thing i was like hey everyone give us extra money like something not the greatest time but we're in it for the long haul here like it's not like you know so just there's no time like the present so we just we understand that it's weird everything's a bit weird now but
Marco:
yeah and we also and we didn't want to take any time out of our wbdc show to do it then yeah definitely not so yeah you know it's like we wanted to have it in place by then because we know it's we're going to be very busy with all the wbdc content for probably weeks afterwards so like yeah it's it's a whole thing there was there were there were a lot of considerations that went into this timing even though it it seems like it sucks basically it sucks less than other timing would have sucked that would be nearby yeah
Casey:
I would like to state for the record that I am not above.
Casey:
I'll call them stretch goals for lack of a better terminology.
Casey:
But if John really does want to play destiny with Marco and me and do it in some way that, you know, we can have people watch it on Twitch or something like that.
Casey:
If I don't know what the number is, but if enough people become members, okay, fine.
Casey:
Sure.
Casey:
You want to make me suffer?
John:
Fine.
John:
I'm volunteering both of you for this.
John:
The only reason we're not doing it right now is because I don't know how.
Marco:
that's the only reason we're not doing it right now like and tiff probably knows how we'll do that as soon as we can make cooking with john i've wanted to make i've wanted to make a cooking show with john just not me cooking just like filming john cooking and you know that's harder than what i was but i'm just explaining you just need to show screen like screen sharing like now this is like a thing with cameras in a kitchen i know complicated but still like imagine how good cooking with john would be
Casey:
No, I disagree.
Casey:
If you're going to do it, then it needs to be John tries to teach Casey how to cook.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
Well, that's the whole destiny angles.
John:
I'm trying to teach you to how to play destiny.
John:
That's the funny part.
John:
John teaches Casey to cook over Zoom.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Do you remember when we were all at John's house and I shredded or grated cheese unsatisfactorily?
Casey:
Oh, yes.
Casey:
He gave me like 10 minutes of crap about it.
John:
Like someone who had never been in a kitchen before.
Casey:
That's about accurate.
Casey:
And so can you imagine?
Casey:
I will commit that.
Casey:
I don't know what the number is, but I am ready, willing.
Casey:
Well, maybe not able, but I'm ready and willing to figure out how to make this all possible so that if we get enough members...
Marco:
The best thing would be to do what Queer Eye does, where John teaches Casey something about cooking, and then Casey has to do it, and John has to watch, but he can't say anything.
That's brutal.
John:
Anyway, you're distracting from my Destiny idea, which I think is much more feasible, and Tiff knows how to do all this game screaming stuff, and maybe when the PS5 is out, we'll set something up and we can figure it out.
John:
But that's like...
John:
in the distant future when we get our act together we have all sorts of wacky ideas for things that don't make sense to do except for if there's this group of people who are like paying to be members and that would be like you know member again like for the chat room people if you have ideas even though we've discussed like probably all of them send them in because it's like you're essentially voting by like not that this is democracy but like
John:
if a million people say that they want this or don't want that, that will influence what we may or may not do in the future.
John:
So if you have ideas about member specific stuff that you want, feel free.
John:
The only thing that's really off the table is removing things from the show for the free people, because as we said, we don't want to do that.
John:
So like,
John:
Oh, I think you should make the after show.
John:
Put it behind a paywall.
John:
No, we're not doing that.
John:
We thought of that, but we said let's do it.
John:
Again, if 90% of our listeners become members, we'll put the whole show behind a paywall, but that's not going to happen.
Marco:
Don't worry about it.
Marco:
Some of you are asking for the unedited live stream, similar to what The Incomparable does with their bootleg feeds.
Marco:
That is something we've talked about.
Casey:
We've actually talked about that more than arguably anything else.
Marco:
I really don't want to do it because I think it sucks.
John:
But if I don't know, you can imagine listeners in the live stream.
John:
You know why Marco doesn't want to do it because it's going to sound crappy and it's not going to be edited.
John:
And like, you know, everyone who listens to the live stream knows what the live stream is like.
John:
I was in favor of it because it's a thing we're doing for free anyway.
John:
And we would still do it for free, by the way.
John:
We would still stream it for free.
John:
Like everyone who's listening now, you'd still be able to listen for free.
John:
and do whatever you want but this would be like what if you're not awake at that time and you still want to hear the garbagey live stream there would be a feed with the garbagey live stream in it for members but maybe nobody wants that i don't know like anyway but like we started simple we're we're thinking of things we'll we'll figure it out as we go along but if that's something that you want write in and tell us uh you know baby steps we still gotta you know figure all the stuff out and get it churning along and
John:
See how many support requests we're going to get from people who can't figure out the website or whatever.