Riding the Autocomplete
Marco:
Have you ever been defeated by a bottle of seltzer?
Marco:
Because I just was.
Casey:
All right, it's story time, ladies and gentlemen.
Casey:
Tell me more.
Marco:
There's not much of a story.
Marco:
I can't get my bottle of seltzer that I first got open.
Marco:
I had to get a second one and open it instead.
Marco:
I'm trying to have Tiff open it for you.
Marco:
so okay so it's a bottle of house and as i believe i talked about on the talk show with john gruber here at the beach uh house is wonderful flavored fizzy water flavored seltzer uh it's my favorite brand by far for flavored seltzer way better than la croix problem is uh house is as far as fizzy waters go it is really
Marco:
really fizzy to the point where you have to actually be very careful to open in the bottle because even if you've babied it and treated it normally there's a high chance it will explode if you open it too fast it is the fizziest of fizzy waters that i've ever found and sometimes this immense pressurization results in the cap being really hard to open like it could like you feel the bottle it feels like rock solid like there's no flex in it at all you feel like it's going to explode
Casey:
All right, now slow down.
Casey:
Genuine questions.
Casey:
So this is like a plastic bottle with like a screw top cap?
Marco:
Yeah, it's like a 20-ounce plastic clear bottle with a screw top cap, just like a soda bottle.
John:
I was going to say, if it was glass, all you need is a sword, right?
John:
You could do that thing they do with champagne when ships go off.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Marco:
So normally my approach to this would be to get something that is rubbery, like the back of a potholder or something, and apply that to the cap with the twisting hand so that I have more grip and I can twist it really hard.
Marco:
I got out potholder number one made of silicone.
Marco:
Grab it, twist as hard as I possibly can.
Marco:
I cannot get this thing to budge.
Marco:
Got to the second point where I'm like, all right, you know what?
Marco:
Fine, I'll get a second one.
Marco:
Second potholder on the holding still hand, like the hand that holds the bottle still.
Marco:
I still can't open this.
Marco:
I'm like...
Marco:
I gave up and I just got a different one, but that bottle's going to be sitting in my fridge.
Marco:
I got to open it sometime.
Marco:
Do I use a drill?
Marco:
What am I doing?
John:
You got a pair of pliers?
John:
Maybe.
John:
You just need a tiny bit of leverage.
John:
It's only hard because it's so hard to grip because there's so little surface area and the diameter is so small that you don't have a lot of torque.
John:
You just need some kind of mechanical advantage.
John:
It'll come right open.
John:
Or you just need to do the...
John:
The thing from, you know, kung fu movies where you concentrate all of your power into that tiny little spot.
John:
For one, you know, it's all about instantaneous power.
John:
It's not about over time.
John:
You just need to get all of your power for a short period of time to just crack that thing open.
John:
That's what you need to do.
John:
I thought I was doing that.
John:
No, what you were doing is...
John:
You're trying to do it and your strength is spread out over a long period of time and doing nothing.
John:
You just got to concentrate it all.
Marco:
I have never actually been defeated by one.
Marco:
I've never even had to involve a second potholder.
Marco:
And so to involve a second potholder and then to still lose, this is new to me.
Marco:
I've never done this.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So here are a couple of things.
Casey:
First of all, do you remember the, I don't remember what the name of this was, but there was some like stupid challenge video, like the ice bucket challenge.
Casey:
But what you were supposed to do was do like some reverse roundhouse kick and then just graze the top of a bottle and have the cap like go spinning off.
Casey:
So first of all, I need to see film of you trying to do exactly that.
Casey:
A reverse roundhouse kick.
John:
Is that the one where they had all the videos of people getting kicked in the face?
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
So I need to see that.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm not doing that.
Casey:
Second of all, my college chemistry is coming back.
Casey:
So PV equals NRT.
Casey:
So if you make it... Now I'm going to screw this up and I'm going to get so much email.
Casey:
If you make the temperature go up or down, will that make pressure go up or down?
Casey:
God, I'm dumb.
John:
I think down.
John:
Yeah, but you're assuming it's the pressure.
John:
I don't think it's the pressure that's making it hard to open, probably.
John:
It's just a stuck cap.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
i don't know yeah i i think next up is pliers and that doesn't work i'm going drill well let me ask you another question because apparently i'm full of them today how much did this cost this single bottle of seltzer i don't know i i got i got like the case discount so just a ballpark estimate probably like a dollar to two something like that throw the freaking thing out and move on no you gotta get it open what are you doing
John:
You can't let it win.
John:
And it's black cherry.
John:
It's the best flavor.
John:
Yeah, there you go.
John:
It's a mechanical advantage.
John:
You use your smart little monkey brain.
John:
We have tools.
John:
We understand how we can magnify our force by moving over a larger distance with the help of a lever that...
John:
amplifies your torque by being farther from the center of the cap but also gripping on it with yes we have we can do this or like i said just give it a tiff and she'll open it for you did you did you try that yet because that's a lot of the problem is like you use up your initial burst of strength because you you you gradually bleed out that initial burst of strength you don't expect it to be that hard and then after that you're permanently we can just give it to a fresh person and especially if they're good at opening things tiff will just take it and go check and it'll be open and it will explode all over my office
Casey:
Come on.
Casey:
You have to have her try now.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Call her in and have her give it a try.
Marco:
It's upstairs now.
Marco:
I left it up there and took a second bottle down here.
Casey:
I'm sure she can go get it.
Marco:
I had to settle for mango, which is fine, but it's no black cherry.
Marco:
Just turn away from the mic and yell.
John:
She'll hear you.
John:
Hold on.
John:
I'll message her.
John:
Don't message her.
John:
Yeah, that's not as fun.
John:
You have to yell.
John:
In this house, we yell.
John:
We don't text message each other from one floor to the other.
Marco:
Tiff, Syracuse is yelling at you.
John:
No, that's not what you're supposed to yell.
John:
Tell her to get the bottle of seltzer in the fridge and bring it down.
Marco:
don't tell her why just have her bring it down and when she brings it down say can you open that for me just real casual like hey tips here all right we need you to go upstairs to the fridge please please and get a bottle of black cherry house it has to be a particular one that i just tried to open and failed to open oh no you ruined it oh boo apparently i ruined it by telling you that yes just tell her which bottle it is though i gotta figure out well hold on i gotta show you which one it is
John:
The excuses begin already.
John:
Oh, I didn't give her the right bottle.
John:
She got one of the easy ones.
John:
It's not the only one.
Marco:
It's a black cherry one that's rock hard.
Marco:
It should be.
Marco:
It's in the rack.
Casey:
Oh, golly.
Casey:
This is going nowhere good real quick.
John:
Do it far away from that computer, too, by the way.
John:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
Oh, no, why?
Casey:
Why?
Casey:
Where's Casey's computer?
Casey:
But we'll do it next to Casey's computer.
Casey:
Actually, I should cover mine just for safety's sake.
Casey:
You're 400 or 500 miles away, but you never can be too careful.
Marco:
Yeah, where's Gruber's review unit?
Marco:
I can do it over that one, too.
Marco:
All right, Tiff is back with two black chairs.
Marco:
Is this all that was in there?
Marco:
They're both very hard.
Yeah.
Marco:
I don't know which one of these it was that I tried to open, but I just tried before the show to open one.
Marco:
I couldn't open it.
Marco:
I have to open both of them.
Marco:
John wants you to open both of them.
Marco:
Careful, they're going to explode.
Marco:
They're going to go everywhere.
Marco:
Well, put a towel down.
Marco:
It's hard, right?
I got it.
John:
Tell her I believe in her.
Marco:
Yep.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
You got one.
Marco:
Oh, close it.
Marco:
We're counting on her.
Marco:
That was a close call.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Try the second one.
Marco:
I'm skilled.
Marco:
I'm going to really have to drink a lot of seltzer tonight.
Marco:
I am using my shirt.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
She's in progress on the second one.
Marco:
This one hurts.
Casey:
Yeah, it hurts.
Marco:
Title.
Marco:
It's so hard.
Casey:
Oh, even better.
Marco:
That's the one.
Marco:
You can't do it, right?
Marco:
My hand's like bleeding.
Casey:
My hand is bleeding.
John:
You do it.
John:
I can't do it.
John:
It's getting harder.
John:
All right.
John:
All right.
John:
Tiff gave it a try.
John:
Now it's time for Mechanical Advantage.
Marco:
We've got a pair of pliers.
Marco:
Now, John, why don't you open it with a pair of pliers somehow?
Marco:
I got it.
Marco:
We have one in that cheap little toolkit upstairs.
Marco:
We have the channel locks, but I think I lost them to the basement.
Marco:
Alright, pliers.
Marco:
Can you get the pliers from the cheap toolkit upstairs?
Marco:
I know we probably have them in there at least.
Marco:
We're probably going to need the channel locks.
Marco:
Yeah, we need good pliers.
Marco:
Alright, I'll be back.
John:
Here, this is the one you opened.
John:
You can put it back in the fridge.
John:
I'll drink it tomorrow.
John:
yeah and channel lock is the kind of pliers you need so that's the right tool for the job yeah well we don't have good tools here we have cheap crappy tools in like an amazon toolkit but cheap crappy channel lock pliers will do the job well channel lock is a brand it's not it's no it's a kind no it's not i know it's i know it's a brand all one word but like oh i didn't sorry i didn't hear the space in your face yeah
Casey:
Channel lock is an American company that produces hand cools.
John:
It's like, it's a, it's a, what do you call it?
John:
A proprietary eponym.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I don't even know what the generic term is.
John:
What is it?
John:
Channel lock.
Casey:
Channel lock with a space.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
She's back with pliers.
Marco:
Now, now John says you can open that with pliers.
Marco:
You absolutely can.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I can.
Marco:
Yeah, you can.
Marco:
I can't.
Marco:
I use all my strength.
Marco:
I got it.
Marco:
She got it.
Marco:
There you go.
Marco:
Mechanical advantage.
Casey:
Done and done.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Close it.
John:
The hairless apes win again.
John:
Take that bottle.
Marco:
Releasing pressure.
Marco:
Whoa.
Marco:
I got, I got, I've defused it.
Marco:
I've defused the bomb.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
It's done.
Marco:
Everything's fine.
Marco:
It's open.
Marco:
So.
Marco:
John was right.
Marco:
It took flyers.
John:
Not a drill.
John:
What are you going to do with the drill?
John:
Just drill a hole in the side of it and let it squirt out into your mouth?
Marco:
Bye.
Marco:
Thanks, honey.
Marco:
It's a tech show, right?
Marco:
Yep, it's a tech show.
Marco:
This is all about tech news.
Marco:
Bye.
Marco:
Love you.
Marco:
Bye.
Marco:
Tiff Arment, everyone.
Casey:
Yay.
Casey:
Did you know, Marco, that the Channel Lock Company, one word, no spaces, was founded in 1886 when George B. DeArment, D-E-A-R-M-E-N-T, a blacksmith from Evansburg, Pennsylvania, did stuff.
Marco:
His name wasn't George Channel Lock?
Marco:
That's BS.
Casey:
No.
Casey:
Turns out.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So people who are listening to this on the not bootleg feed, you have missed approximately 12 minutes and 10 seconds of Marco fumbling with seltzer.
Casey:
And while that may not sound like a good elevator pitch, I assure you it was quite funny.
Casey:
So if you would like to get a copy of the bootleg feed where all this shenanigans happens that we cut out for this version of the episode, you're welcome.
Marco:
That's staying in, though.
Casey:
Oh, no, no, no.
Casey:
Then this is all bogus.
Casey:
Not all of it.
Marco:
I mean, all of it won't be in.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So anyway, moving on.
Casey:
ATP.fm slash join.
Casey:
You should check it out.
Marco:
If you like that sort of thing, we do other stuff like that also on the bootleg often where something goes wrong or we mess with each other or whatever.
Marco:
So that's the kind of extra bonus content you get with lower audio quality but faster in the bootleg.
Casey:
You and I are just killing it on the sales pitches tonight.
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Should we actually get the show started?
Casey:
Is that a reasonable thing to do at this juncture?
John:
Waiting for someone to bring me a black cherry seltzer.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Now I'm still stuck with my mango, my second choice here.
Marco:
I probably should have kept one of those other ones.
Marco:
Ah, the struggle.
Marco:
Tip opened it.
Marco:
She earned it.
Marco:
Yeah, it's fair.
Casey:
So let's start with some info from friend of the show, Guy Rambeau, with regard to the T2.
Casey:
I think John was mostly talking about this last week, and you were doing it off the cuff, and you made a couple of minor errors.
Casey:
And so Guy, with the benefit of listening to it after the fact and being able to pause and probably actually already knowing all this stuff, wrote a little bit about the T2.
Casey:
This is a tiny bit long, but it's a pretty good summary of what the T2 is for and how it works.
Casey:
So, oh, no.
Casey:
What happened?
Marco:
Tiff just messaged me.
Marco:
Oh, no.
Marco:
A photo of inside the fridge saying, in case you need help tomorrow, and she has placed the pliers in the little bin that holds our seltzers in the fridge.
Casey:
That is excellent.
Casey:
That is excellent spousal trolling right there.
John:
It's an assistive device for your drinking.
John:
That'll be the show art for the pre-show.
John:
Well done.
Casey:
Well done.
Casey:
All right, so some information on the T2 from Guy Rambo.
Casey:
The T2 chip is not what drives the UI in the Touch Bar when your Mac is running on macOS.
Casey:
It only displays the function keys in the Touch Bar when there is no Touch Bar server, which is a macOS process running.
Casey:
When the Touch Bar server is running, all it does is get pixels from macOS and then blit them onto the rectangular OLED panel.
Casey:
You can verify this by using the show touch bar option in Xcode, which works even when the Mac doesn't have a touch bar.
Casey:
The same is true of the touch bar and sidecar.
Casey:
The T2 chip is required mainly for Touch ID and other security features, which are part of the secure enclave, which I almost said enclave there for some crazy reason, but that's all right, which is part of the secure enclave, which comes in all of Apple's chips.
Casey:
The way it works is that daemons on macOS act as proxies to daemons running on bridgeOS, which is the thing that runs on the T2, a system that Apple calls, quote unquote, multiverse.
Casey:
So from the point of view of consumers of the APIs for functionality provided by the T2 chip, it doesn't matter if the thing is going over to the T2 or if it's implemented directly, which means that the ARM Macs with a touch bar and no separate chip driving it aren't as big a deal as you'd think.
John:
Which is bad news because I was excited by the idea that it would be wasteful to...
John:
uh you know re-implement the touch bar in a single chip because i didn't think they would put two of the chips in there but it sounds like it's not a big deal unfortunately so that probably means they'll have touch bars right because if it really just is sort of accepting pixels that are drawn elsewhere and and all the other functions it provides are already built into the system on a chip so you don't need a separate one i think they could easily get away it sounds like you easily get away with a single system on the chip
John:
Plus a touch bar.
John:
And if they can get away with it, it seems like they'll do it because that's what they've been doing with the touch bar.
John:
They just keep including it on their expensive models and you get it whether you like it or not.
John:
It's kind of depressing.
Marco:
What this basically shows is there's not really a technical reason why they have to get rid of it.
Marco:
But there still could be a justification to gracefully bow out of this now that they are redesigning the hardware in a major way.
Marco:
And especially if they add touch screens.
Marco:
That's the big thing.
Marco:
If they add touch screens, I don't see how the touch bar would stay there.
Marco:
But that could just be wishful thinking.
Marco:
If they don't add touch screens, then I think it's more optimistic to expect them to remove it.
John:
and apple does my understanding is that apple does gather some basic metrics about how frequently the features they ship in their products are used by customers right just sort of you know completely anonymous back of the envelope statistical sampling of like do people use that's how they know things like oh messages is the most used app on eyes which they said like in a keynote or something right they only know that because they have metrics on you know what apps do people launch right um
John:
And so the problem with the touch bar is, like, well, maybe they would know, like, okay, it's time to ditch touch bar because it's not a very popular feature, and this is a good time to ditch your ball-saving face, blah, blah, blah, touch max, blah, blah, like we said in the last show.
John:
But the metrics on a touch bar have to be pretty high because you can't avoid using it if you ever need the escape key or a function key, like, or the volume keys, like...
John:
You can't really measure people's satisfaction with it, but it's unavoidable.
John:
So the usage numbers, they must say, look, you know, people who buy our Touch Bar Max, they all use it a ton.
John:
It's like, well, we have no choice.
John:
Like, it's the only place where those keys, those quote unquote keys are.
John:
So I hope that doesn't encourage them to keep it around.
John:
Or if they do keep it around, they need to enhance it.
John:
Like, they need to go some direction or another.
John:
Either make it better and cooler on a regular basis or ditch it.
Casey:
Well, and the flip side of the coin is I don't know what specifically about having their own CPU would make better, cooler, faster, stronger, what have you.
Casey:
But, you know, one of the things that everyone keeps saying is that, oh, when Apple controls, you know, the CPU and the rest of the hardware stack...
Casey:
They can integrate things better.
Casey:
And maybe that would be applicable to the touch bar.
Casey:
Maybe it would enable them to do something that they can't but want to do today.
Casey:
I haven't a clue what that would be specifically, but you never know.
Casey:
Maybe they'll make it better.
Casey:
Maybe just having it on the same system on a chip would make it less buggy for reasons...
Casey:
For reasons.
Casey:
I don't know.
Marco:
Alternately, I mean, they could always make it optional.
John:
That would be I know that's a crazy thing to suggest because that would be the real metric of like, do people like it?
John:
Are they willing to pay more for it?
John:
Hell, if they made it a zero cost option, even that would give them some info about do people want it or they not want it?
Marco:
And in the meantime, we do have kind of that choice because the Air doesn't have it.
Marco:
And so I think possibly one option that might open up as we make this architecture transition is assuming that this is probably going to result in an overall increase in performance on the Mac.
Marco:
The Air might become good enough for people for whom today they have to buy the MacBook Pro to get the resources they need.
Marco:
I hate the touch bar so much, maybe I would step down to the Air for my future purchase.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
That might become more realistic as the performance gets better.
John:
I don't think it's just the performance.
John:
I think we might have a question about this later or maybe in a future episode.
John:
When Apple controls the system on chips for all their laptops, the difference between the MacBook Pro and the Air...
John:
is going to be even more emphatically gpu power i would imagine right because i don't think apple is going to make lots of very different cores right maybe the core count will distinguish it but like i don't expect apple to make you know three different three completely different system-mounted chips that differ in tremendous ways i expect them to do kind of like what they do with the phone on the ipad where the ipad is kind of like the phone maybe with some more cores but then also a bigger gpu like that's what distinguishes but they don't have different cores like whatever the core of the year is or
John:
the core of that generation that's what you get right sort of no no equivalent at least until they do the mac pro of like a xeon level thing where it's like a very different chip than the the lesser chip so in that case if you don't care about gpu which you probably don't if you're just doing xcode or whatever it could be
John:
that for a given core count the macbook air cpu score is exactly the same as the macbook pro because it's exactly the same chip and if you have the same number of cores and you don't care about the bigger gpu which is easy to scale because they just add execution units and it scales up very easily maybe the air actually would be just as fast for xcode again assuming they give the same speed sst or whatever and the people with the macbook pro need the gpu power for final cut pro rendering or whatever people do with it or games or whatever
Casey:
Can I take us on a brief aside?
Casey:
Is that allowed, Dad?
Casey:
Because I know we're in the middle of follow-up.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
John:
We only have two items today, so plenty of time for this.
John:
We can even open up another seltzer.
John:
I mean, it's still follow-up as long as it's about something we have ever talked about before, even remotely.
John:
That is not the definition of follow-up, but feel free to ask me to answer that on Robot or Not, and I'll clarify.
Casey:
Oh, I should do that.
Casey:
16 hours of battery life, maybe even a day of battery life or something like that.
Casey:
And that seems to be the most logical conclusion on the surface because that's kind of what these chips seem to be aimed toward.
Casey:
You know, they are being put in these devices like iPhones and iPads that battery life is a pretty big priority, especially on an iPhone.
Casey:
And it occurred to me
Casey:
What if Apple continues to do the Apple thing and they just continue to target eight hours of battery life or whatever the number is?
Casey:
The actual number doesn't matter.
Casey:
Let's say eight hours.
Casey:
So what if they continue to target eight hours of battery life in this Phantom MacBook Pro that's going to come in like the fall or in the spring or something?
Casey:
But instead of being a smidgen faster than an Intel Mac or an Intel MacBook Pro, instead of being a lot faster than an Intel MacBook Pro, it is hilariously faster, just like night and day faster.
Casey:
Like, do you think that they would make, and I'll start with Marco and then I'd like to hear John's take as well.
Casey:
Do you think that they would, instead of going for infinite battery life, again, figuratively speaking, do you think they would just
Casey:
go for go for broke when it comes to these things being just incredibly incredibly fast or i guess the obvious alternative is would they try to do some sort of balance where maybe it gets you know it goes from eight hours to 12 hours of battery life but it's still like five times faster than the most recent intel macbook pro what do you think marco
Marco:
Well, I mean, it's hard for me to say because I'm going to nitpick the question as I tend to do.
Marco:
John?
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
I'm going to nitpick the basis of the question, which is I don't think they would have that choice because if you look at the way performance increases in battery life work over time,
Marco:
Battery life gains have largely come from advances in managing low power states for the processors.
Marco:
So when the computer is not doing much, how much can it reduce that power usage?
Marco:
And then it can peak to handle quick performance needs, then it goes back down.
Marco:
Almost all battery life gains in the last decade have been advances in that low power management, not reductions in the high power state and how much power it uses or how much performance you can get in a high power state.
Marco:
In fact, it's actually gone the opposite direction in a lot of cases.
Marco:
High powered states of processors actually draw more power now than ever.
Marco:
But we have long battery life because most of the time they can burst up to that high speed for a fraction of a second, do whatever work they have to do, and then kick back to idle.
Marco:
But the actual performance ceiling, if you're actually using it to do things to be really fast, burns tons of power.
Marco:
Now, we don't know what the performance characteristics of the ARM processors for Apple will be.
Marco:
We can kind of look at what they are in the iPad and iPhone so far.
Marco:
And they seem to be in a relatively similar pattern there of like, you know, the low power state can be super low power.
Marco:
They even have those low power cores that they can, you know, they can enable only those when only, you know, low power stuff is needed.
Marco:
And then they have these high power cores that can ramp up real fast.
Marco:
Like they're going to do the same thing on the Mac.
Marco:
I believe the documentation even says as much.
Marco:
but they're not going to be able to ramp up that peak power magically much further than intel could in the same power envelope so i don't think we're going to actually see massive battery life improvements when you're stressing out the processors whatever you know whatever apple decides to design their thermal limits in each product for that's going to decide like how much heat can you dissipate like you know in a
Marco:
16-inch macbook pro right now that's i believe a 45-ish watt cpu but the way tdp works with intel and everything it actually can go higher than that that's just kind of like the target average minimum rings that it should be able to cool but if you push an eight core i9 macbook pro if you push those cpus all the way it's going to use more than 45 watts until until it can like until it has to hit some kind of thermal limit and then it has to like slow down but
Marco:
for the most part, these processors, when you actually hit them hard, you get no battery life on any modern laptop.
Marco:
And that's been the case forever.
Marco:
So I don't think the Apple ARM transition is going to magically fix that.
Marco:
It might make it better.
Marco:
It might give you a little more performance or even if it gave you
Marco:
50% more performance.
Marco:
That would be huge.
Marco:
That would be a huge deal.
Marco:
But you're still looking at an hour of battery life if you're actually pushing the processor hard.
Marco:
So I don't think we're going to have that kind of jump.
Marco:
I think any gains we have are going to be on the power management doing lower needs kind of end, if that makes sense.
John:
john i mean other john so the the target battery life thing that the issue with the current pro laptops is that they're all below what i think apple would decide as an appropriate target like for whatever reason apple decided 10 hours ish is appropriate for ipads and they've been targeting that for years and they've been achieving it but it's because they're satisfied with that and i think customers are too like people who have ipads
John:
fairly satisfied with the battery life you're not out and about with them as much so you don't find yourself stranded with a with an uncharged ipad because you know like people complain about phones because it's not doesn't use isn't used in the same way the battery is physically larger on ipads like ipad battery life that 10 hour thing you could argue that they should be creeping it up over time but in general it is satisfactory not true at all for the macbook pros the battery no one is satisfied with the battery life in the macro pro almost no matter what they're doing
John:
uh and it's part of the reason that marco just said like you can if you ask that machine to do all that it can do it's such a difference from that machine being idle right um and then mac os compounds that because mac os does not have the draconian energy controls that ios does all that means that an arm chip in a mac laptop is going to be in a much more harsh environment than it would be in even the most powerful ipad right
John:
That said, I think with an ARM chip, Apple can probably pick a target that it finds acceptable for average usage and achieve it, right?
John:
Like they can, you know, they can design this and say, look, here's our goal for battery life.
John:
It is whatever our number of hours doing using
John:
These type of application, like they have to come up with some kind of scenario that they think is acceptable target.
John:
I think that target will be higher than the current target because, again, they could choose whatever target they want.
John:
They could choose.
John:
We want the battery life to be less than the current laptops.
John:
Right.
John:
And just burn everything out.
John:
But they won't.
John:
They're going to choose a higher target because they can achieve it.
John:
And at that target, it will also be embarrassingly faster.
John:
Like, they don't have to choose either or.
John:
I think they can get more battery life and also completely embarrass any Intel laptop in all benchmarks, right?
John:
Under all circumstances, right?
John:
So, yes, if you run it hard, it's going to have shorter battery life.
John:
But it will still be longer than if you ran an Intel laptop just as hard.
John:
And it will be faster and do more work during that period of time.
John:
Like, that's the beauty of this transition.
John:
It's like the PowerPC and the Intel transition.
John:
you know the same factors that conspire to make it the right time to make the move also mean that the new machines will be really good compared to the old ones in this case it's going to be that you know they ship five nanometer chips in their macs and their best macs now have 10 nanometer chips in them right and that's going to make a huge difference and also just the general performance per watt gains the performance for what lead that apple's arm chips have had over intel for a long time and do currently right so um
John:
I expect that the trade-off they will choose is more battery life than the current ones.
John:
In the big Pro models I'm talking about, more battery life than the current ones, and even more performance.
John:
On the very low-end fanless ones, I can imagine them making a different trade-off, which is adequate performance that is still way better than an Adorable, but a really long battery life because, you know, we can tune it for that thing.
John:
It'll have fewer cores, it'll have a smaller GPU, all that other stuff, right?
John:
So I'm still of the opinion that we will be able to have our cake any to two,
John:
we will get more battery life and tremendously bigger performance.
John:
They won't bounce it really far in one direction or the other.
John:
And I think what they'll do, I think their target for battery life will be higher than current ones.
John:
And by the way, Casey, you keep saying like eight hours.
John:
What planet are you on where you're getting eight hours of battery life out of a MacBook Pro doing any work?
John:
That does not happen.
John:
Like if you get five hours doing intensive work on a MacBook Pro, you're extremely lucky.
John:
So I think they will target, you know,
John:
maybe an hour more than the current MacBook Pro on whatever measurement they want to do in sort of average workload, and then the performance will be much embarrassingly better.
Marco:
One thing I hope that they tackle with this transition, and this might take a few generations because it's a pretty big job, but one thing I really hope they tackle is...
Marco:
There was this story, and I don't know if it was true or not, but there was a rumor that went around, I don't think it was ever actually backed up by anything concrete, where back when, I think when the MacBook Air was being developed, apparently, allegedly, and forgive me if I'm getting the details wrong, this is from memory, apparently there was a meeting with Steve Jobs in the room where
Marco:
He apparently like walked in the room and had like an iPad and turned it on and it just immediately woke from sleep.
Marco:
And allegedly he like dropped a MacBook on the table and is like, why can't this do that?
Marco:
Do you remember that rumor when that was going on?
Marco:
I do.
Marco:
And so, and there's always been this huge difference and there's lots of reasons for it, many of which are good reasons.
Marco:
Why, when you open up a Mac, does it not instantly, why isn't it instantly on?
Marco:
Like the way that an iOS device you power on, you hit the sleeping button, it just wakes up.
Marco:
Why in the background during all that time it was closed, why doesn't it keep things updating in the background the way that iOS apps do?
Marco:
Why can't it like receive a notification and ding at you or something or alert you or keep things up to date or whatever?
Marco:
And there's lots of reasons for that.
Marco:
And they've had all sorts of little baby steps like PowerNap over time, where PowerNap is allegedly supposed to solve that problem of letting things update periodically in the background while the computer is asleep.
Marco:
Does it work for anybody?
Marco:
Because it doesn't ever work for me.
Marco:
Nothing ever seems up to date.
Marco:
Maybe I'm just missing its effect, but
John:
It works.
John:
Mostly apps that support it are the built-in Apple apps, third-party support for it.
John:
I remember doing this section of the review.
John:
I don't remember what third-party support looks like.
John:
But basically, if you don't use Apple Mail and don't care about time machine running, you might not notice that it's doing stuff.
John:
But it does stuff.
John:
Related to this, one of the things that my Mac currently does that I haven't quite figured out how to stop it from doing yet is my Mac will wake from sleep.
John:
My Mac Pro will wake from sleep when a reminder appears.
John:
And I want the reminder to appear on my Mac, so I can't tell it, oh, don't show me that reminder.
John:
Like, literally, like the Reminders app, you know, the Apple Reminders app.
John:
I do want those to appear on my screen.
John:
But if my Mac Pro is asleep, I don't want that reminder to wake it up.
John:
And it does.
John:
It wakes it from a dead sleep.
John:
So, obviously, there's enough going on there when it's quote-unquote sleeping to, you know, it's checking for reminders periodically or it's accepting push notifications.
John:
Like, it's not really asleep asleep, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
um so that is happening and i think it does time machine when it's asleep and if i use apple mail i'm pretty confident it would be checking my mail but i forget how widespread that support is but but you're right that the main issue is like okay but what kind of sleep modes are available to me with an intel processor versus what kind of sleep modes are available with the
John:
apple system on a chip and obviously the sort of screen off fanless low power extremely hostile ios environment of just nothing runs unless i allow it to run allows ios devices to be basically running all the time when the screen is off they're still running and you know behind the scenes into very low power mode but mostly doing all the stuff that you would expect
John:
Because it's just as cruel when it's quote-unquote on about running background stuff.
John:
Whereas when the Mac's on, running background stuff, it's a free-for-all.
John:
And now when it's off, there's just suddenly this new set of rules that the Mac is not used to.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And so I hope this is an area that they can tackle.
Marco:
Like, when you combine...
Marco:
a more instant-on experience.
Marco:
And I do think the ARM transition is a necessary precursor to doing that well.
Marco:
You have advances.
Marco:
Not only is Apple able to control all the power states of everything, but they have those low power cores.
Marco:
So you can do things like only ever use one or two low power cores when the lid's closed or whatever.
Marco:
And so you do have, I think, a better ability to have low power states where you can keep things basically awake,
Marco:
but you know, not in a super low power seat.
Marco:
And then you can wake up very quickly.
Marco:
And then also when you combine that, hopefully with cellular options, God, I hope so that like part of the reason I love using the iPad with cellular as an out and about computer is,
Marco:
has nothing to do with the iPad form factor or the OS and has so much more to do with that instant wake and constant cellular connectivity.
Marco:
So if you could have that in a Mac, that would be way more of a productive travel machine for me when I'm out and about doing small errands and stuff like that.
Marco:
I could just have a MacBook that had cellular or a MacBook Air that had cellular and have it be instant wake, always on.
Marco:
That would be such a radically different experience than using a Mac laptop today.
Casey:
You know, to go back a step, I'm a little bothered by you having said that your skeptical PowerNap even works because I can tell you on my two-month-old MacBook Pro, I know PowerNap works because it causes the machine to reboot itself every time.
Casey:
And let's not forget that I turned it off because that was the only way to prevent it from rebooting itself constantly.
Marco:
I think we have different definitions of work then.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
It works in the sense that it does something that requires me to turn my computer or crash on the computer.
John:
I have PowerNop off as well and I also have Wake for Network Access off.
John:
I have all the things off because I want my machine, as we've discussed in the past, I want it to stay asleep.
John:
But it still wakes up and reminders come in.
John:
So obviously...
John:
The sleep mode is still awake enough to know that reminders are happening.
John:
And it's prompt.
John:
It's not like a periodic check.
John:
There must be some kind of push.
John:
So like I said, wake for network access is not on, but something is getting through to it to let it know.
John:
Maybe this is a timer.
John:
I don't even know what's going on inside there.
John:
But anyway, I wish I could stop it from doing that because all my other devices show the same reminder.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
Apple News has a podcast question mark.
Casey:
Marco, tell me about this.
Marco:
Asterisk.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
So Apple launched Apple.
Marco:
Is it Apple News Today?
Marco:
Is that what it's called?
Marco:
Apple News Today?
Marco:
I think that's right.
Marco:
Some generic name like that.
Marco:
Anyway, they called it the Apple Podcast.
Marco:
Today at Apple News Today.
John:
Apple News.
John:
By Apple.
John:
Plus.
John:
Apple News.
John:
Apple.
John:
Mark Jacobs presents Mark by Mark Jacobs.
John:
What is that one?
John:
You remember that one?
John:
I don't know.
John:
Someone put that meme in the chat.
Marco:
So this was interesting.
Marco:
Well, I think the story is a little more interesting than the podcast.
Marco:
So they launched this new podcast called Apple News Today that is about like eight to ten minutes a day so far.
Marco:
Basically a quick little news recap.
Marco:
And it seems to be
Marco:
promotion for apple news and news plus that seems to be the reason they are doing it and partially maybe promotion for apple podcasts because it is kind of an apple podcast exclusive and i'll get back to that in a minute but the the podcast itself is have you have you heard it either of you
Marco:
No.
Marco:
Well, you can listen in Overcast, but I'll get to that in a second as well.
Marco:
So it's kind of fluffy and light, and it's kind of bland to me.
Marco:
I don't listen to a lot of these kind of podcasts, but to me it seems kind of like a shorter and worse version of The Daily by The New York Times.
Marco:
If you want a once-a-day quick summary of what's going on in the news and you want it to have occasional depth and occasional interesting topics and well-produced and have it be made by a major news organization, I think The Daily is a way better version of this.
Marco:
If you want a tech version, there's Tech Meme Ride Home and the whole Ride Home Network.
Marco:
There's lots of other things that do this.
Marco:
Apple News Today, I've listened to it so far, and honestly, I find it really low value.
Marco:
But, you know, it's brand new.
Marco:
They're getting their feet under them, whatever.
Marco:
Maybe it'll get better down the road.
Marco:
The more interesting part of this is that this appears to be, to the best of my knowledge, the first Apple Podcasts exclusive podcast that they have launched.
Marco:
And the world of podcast business has really heated up a lot over the last few years, especially in the area of exclusive podcasts.
Marco:
This is not incredibly new of a concept.
Marco:
There have been exclusive podcasts before.
Marco:
Stitcher Premium, I think, is one of the longest running exclusive podcast platforms where they'll pay celebrities to do their shows there and you have to listen in their app using their paid service or whatever.
Marco:
Luminary famously raised a bunch of money and set it all on fire and is now setting even more money on fire, trying to reclaim the first pile of money they set on fire, which that is always going to work.
Marco:
But much more famously, Spotify recently has been doing all these tons of deals, including buying Gimlet, which, disclosure, I made some money from.
Marco:
But also they recently bought Joe Rogan in a very, very large deal.
Marco:
And so there's all this arms race heating up about exclusive podcasts.
Marco:
And Apple has been quietly hiring people to do what kind of sounds like make exclusive podcasts for a while now.
Marco:
And we haven't really heard anything about it or seen any results of it.
Marco:
And I think this might be the very first time that we're actually seeing the results of that.
Marco:
So Apple News Today is a podcast, quote, a podcast that is listed in Apple Podcasts.
Marco:
but is not seemingly public.
Marco:
Now there is an asterisk to this.
Marco:
And it kind of gets to like, what defines a public podcast?
Marco:
It has an RSS feed.
Marco:
I don't know where this RSS feed is listed, but it has one.
Marco:
And if you know the URL, which 9to5Mac published, anybody can access it and you can add it to any podcast app.
Marco:
It also has an iTunes ID, or slash Apple Podcast.
Marco:
They've rebranded it, but what used to be called an iTunes ID, where you have podcast.apple.com slash something something slash ID, and then like an 8-digit or 10-digit number at the end.
Marco:
And the way that most podcast apps get their directory, they get search results or what to show or whatever, usually they query the iTunes API, and
Marco:
and you can query it for title, URL, whatever, and it will send you back a list of iTunes entries that have these ID numbers, and they have an entry in them called... It's a JSON dictionary for each one.
Marco:
It has all the title, artist, whatever.
Marco:
And then it has an entry called feed URL.
Marco:
And so normally, with every podcast app that I know of, except for a couple of special cases like Google and Spotify that have their own directories, but for the most part, most podcast apps that you would all be familiar with...
Marco:
They search the Apple podcast directory for whatever the user searched for.
Marco:
They get that feed URL key out of the dictionary for each thing that they fetched.
Marco:
And then you go to that feed URL directly, and that's the RSS feed.
Marco:
And that's where all the actual podcast data is and everything.
Marco:
So the iTunes directory is serving as only a directory listing to tell you, here are podcasts that exist that are registered with Apple.
Marco:
that Apple's staff has vetted to be seemingly legit, seemingly not illegal or inappropriate or anything like that.
Marco:
Here's the RSS feed.
Marco:
And then you go to the RSS feed from that point forward and Apple's no longer in the picture.
Marco:
So they really are just like a listing service that's telling you, here's RSS feeds for these podcasts that we think are legit podcasts.
Marco:
And so the definition of what is a public podcast, the way most people interpret that is something you can get to in any podcast app.
Marco:
The more technical side of it seems to be it has to have a public RSS feed.
Marco:
But realistically, if it's not listed on Apple Podcast with a public RSS feed, it's not going to seem like a public podcast to most people most of the time.
Marco:
What Apple News Today has is a little bit interesting.
Marco:
Apple News Today has an iTunes ID.
Marco:
It is playable and searchable in Apple Podcasts.
Marco:
It shows up in the Apple Podcasts directory even in the API if you search for it.
Marco:
However, its entry in the API does not have a feed URL.
Marco:
That's just missing.
Marco:
So it kind of seems like Apple doesn't want other apps to play this.
Marco:
Now,
Marco:
if one were to manually set in a database in a podcast app, this feed URL matches this iTunes ID.
Marco:
If you happen to know the right feed URL and you happen to make it public, it happens to play just fine.
Marco:
So most podcast apps that have kind of been on top of this story
Marco:
You can now search for Apple News today and just play it.
Marco:
And it works because most podcast apps have realized, oh, we just add this RSS feed and make it searchable for this title and it will work.
Marco:
And I think the reason it has an RSS feed that's undocumented and not listed in the public API is I think Apple wants it to be an exclusive to Apple Podcasts because they're trying to gain some kind of leverage over Spotify, which is eating a lot of their market share in the podcast player space.
Marco:
But the Apple Podcast apps do not do server-side crawling.
Marco:
they crawl RSS feeds directly.
Marco:
Apple has some server-side crawling to update its directories and everything, but when you play a podcast in Apple Podcasts, it is directly crawling the RSS feeds from your app on your phone or on your Mac or whatever.
Marco:
And so for the Apple Podcasts app to be able to play this exclusive podcast without significantly rewriting it and rewriting some back-end server stuff, which is probably a bigger project within Apple than what they can probably get engineering resources for right now,
Marco:
For it to be playable in their own app, they had to give it an RSS feed.
Marco:
So I think it has one just for that reason.
Marco:
And they're just kind of quietly trying to keep it relatively hidden so the other apps don't all just play it and take away their slight benefit of having the show be exclusive to them.
Marco:
So in this way, this attempt at exclusivity to Apple Podcasts for a new show that they're probably going to promote pretty heavily,
Marco:
This one didn't really work.
Marco:
You know, we can all play it.
Marco:
Although Spotify can't play it because to be included in Spotify, you have to opt in because Spotify maintains their own directory.
Marco:
They don't use apples and they have their own crap that you have to agree to to be listed there.
Marco:
So it won't ever be playable on Spotify in all likelihood, but not because Spotify doesn't know the RSS feed URL.
Marco:
It's because Apple doesn't agree to be included in Spotify's directory and you have to agree to it to be included.
Marco:
But for the most part, for the rest of us, it's this kind of like weird move that Apple has made that is a little unsettling because...
Marco:
Apple has a ton of power in the podcasting space.
Marco:
They always have.
Marco:
They have, by far, the largest market share of the player.
Marco:
They have the directory that almost every other app for iOS and even some other platforms are just kind of not cool.
Marco:
Almost every podcast app uses their directory as its directory.
Marco:
To be in the podcast ecosystem, you have to register with Apple, basically.
Marco:
If you don't, you're invisible.
Marco:
We've been kind of comfortable as an industry with Apple having all this share so far because they've been pretty benign.
Marco:
They have all this power, but while they mean a lot to podcasting, podcasting doesn't mean a lot to Apple.
Marco:
It's a very, very, very small drop in the bucket to Apple, the company.
Marco:
So while they have all this power, the podcasting group seemingly has never really had the resources to do anything bad with it.
Marco:
They've never really tried to lock it down.
Marco:
They've run this API that allows apps like mine to search their directory, crawl the directory fairly frequently, fairly aggressively, and they don't seem to really care or mind that all these apps are built on their directory.
Marco:
They seem to quietly endorse it, actually.
Marco:
They have the biggest podcast player in the world by Cher, so they have just a ton of power.
Marco:
But they have so far been really good at only using that power to participate in and strengthen the open RSS-based public ecosystem of open podcasting.
Marco:
It's been wonderful.
Marco:
It's been largely a fluke that podcasting has been as good and as distributed and as free and independent and open as it is for all this time.
Marco:
And it's largely because Apple has all this power but hasn't ever really done anything with it.
Marco:
So now they're starting to do something with it.
Marco:
And that is a little scary.
Marco:
The good thing is they don't have 100% power.
Marco:
Their market share is estimated to be roughly about 60% of the player market, which is a ton, but 60% is very different from 90% or 95% or 100%.
Marco:
They have enough power that they can start wielding it in ways like this with exclusives and things like that, but they probably can't afford to alienate too many people because they have, in a way, you can look at it as only 60% market share.
Marco:
That other 40% is a lot of people.
Marco:
So I'm hoping this is just like a little, you know, I'm hoping this is part of some small effort that Apple, you know, Apple gave some money to the podcast team and was like, here, make some exclusive.
Marco:
You know, we're annoyed at Spotify and they're going to probably make a few more of these things.
Marco:
I hope it doesn't become much more than that.
Marco:
And knowing Apple, it probably won't be.
Marco:
Because again, podcasting is still a drop in the bucket for the company as a whole.
Marco:
And we know that Apple's not great at multitasking.
Marco:
And this is probably never going to be a major focus for the company.
Marco:
Even in their services push to try to get more services revenue, if you do the math and you look at how many people listen to podcasts and how much money could they possibly make from the podcasting business if they did various schemes, X, Y, or Z,
Marco:
it's a drop in the bucket for them.
Marco:
So I don't even think they're going to do much like that.
Marco:
I don't think there's going to be another like, you know, podcast plus service.
Marco:
I don't think it's going to be like a major thing.
Marco:
I think they might use it more like this, which is this podcast seems to be a promo for news plus.
Marco:
But other than that, I hope and I don't think that they're going to really do anything bad here.
Marco:
But it does give me pause that they did just launch an exclusive podcast for the first time.
Marco:
And they did it in a really basic way.
Marco:
They kind of like barely even latched the screen door shut.
Marco:
But it's still a notable move that is a little concerning, but hopefully not going to end up as a big deal.
John:
It's kind of weird.
John:
It's like security through the minimum possible amount of obscurity, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
We just won't tell you the URL.
John:
So it's weird for a couple of reasons.
John:
One, if they just want to keep it out of Spotify's hand, as you noted, you just don't give it to Spotify then.
John:
You don't have to hide the URL in the iTunes directory or anything.
John:
You can just not have it on Spotify.
John:
And it's an Apple podcast because they pay for its creation.
John:
They pay the host.
John:
It's Apple's property, so they're making their own podcast.
John:
Good for them.
John:
But let's think about how would things be different if they had just made it just like another podcast?
John:
It doesn't seem like things would be different at all.
John:
Like you said, every third-party podcast app has figured out the hiding of the URL and just connected the URL in their own database.
John:
And it's like, okay, well, basically, this podcast is playable everywhere now.
John:
The real question is, does Apple consider that to be a bad thing?
John:
Will they look up and say, oh, we actually mostly just wanted this to be playable in the Apple podcast app, but it looks like everyone has figured out our clever ruse and now it's playable in all the podcast app on iOS.
John:
Is that bad?
John:
I don't think it seems like they don't consider that bad because they could have locked down a lot harder, but they didn't.
John:
I have a question for Marco, though.
John:
I don't know if you know the answer to this, but how does the Apple Podcast app get the RSS URL?
John:
Is there another API endpoint that gives them that answer?
John:
Is it hard-coded into the binary?
John:
Where does that app get the URL from?
John:
We all know where the third-party apps got it from, 9to5Mac or whatever.
John:
Everyone else got it from just by snooping the network, basically.
John:
You can figure out where it's requesting the feed from.
Marco:
Or like, you know, reading the SQLite database or something like from desktop podcast app.
John:
Once you have an app that's requesting an RSS feed, it's pretty hard to hide what the URL is, right?
John:
But the point is, where does the podcast app initially get, the Apple podcast app, get the RSS feed URL for the show?
Marco:
Apple has all sorts of functionality for the podcast app that is not exposed in the public API.
Marco:
They also have a whole sync backend to sync your progress between different devices and everything.
Marco:
So I'm guessing they have a totally separate API that they use and that the iTunes API, which...
Marco:
Honestly, I'm shocked it was ever a thing.
Marco:
I'm even more shocked it's still a thing.
Marco:
I'm happy it is because it enables my entire business.
Marco:
If the iTunes API went away tomorrow for podcast lookups, we'd have a pretty significant problem in our business that all of us would have to solve somehow.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
As far as I can tell, it seemed like this weird one-off thing that they made this API back forever ago for the iTunes Music Store, and for some reason they still run it, and we're all very thankful.
Marco:
But anyway, I'm guessing that they have their own separate API for this, for their own clients, because their clients have so much more functionality.
John:
An authenticated API, you mean?
John:
Not just an open API.
John:
You can't actually use that API because it's authenticated using secrets that the Apple podcast has, but you don't, yada yada, all that business?
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, it also could be, I mean, given the relative lack of technical sophistication of this exclusive content, it could also be as simple as, like, they might have just a different user agent check.
Marco:
or something on the API.
Marco:
So if you pretended to be Apple Podcasts, that field would be filled in in your response.
Marco:
Maybe.
Marco:
I mean, I don't know.
Marco:
That wouldn't surprise me either.
Marco:
Because again, the podcast team within Apple, they don't seem like they get a lot of attention and resources from the parent company.
Marco:
It's always seemed like this kind of wonderful, incredibly benign and useful side project that's enabled this wonderful entire industry, but that Apple has never given a ton of resources to so that it could ever be anything evil or bad.
Marco:
it's been wonderful.
Marco:
I'm so happy it's been this way.
Marco:
Everyone listening to this show, everyone listening to podcasts today owes a lot of that to that exact dynamic of the podcast business being mostly locked up by Apple in terms of market share and power, but that Apple has just kept it
Marco:
as a participating and enabling member of the completely open RSS-based ecosystem, as opposed to making something totally locked down where it's all proprietary and everything, which is what everyone else does with podcasts.
Marco:
That's what Spotify does.
Marco:
That's what Google does.
Marco:
That's what Stitcher tried to do.
Marco:
Everyone else is trying that method.
Marco:
Spotify is having quite a bit of success with it, actually.
Marco:
They're having a scary amount of success.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
The world of podcasting being as awesome and free and open as it is owes that in almost entirety to Apple and to the way Apple has treated this.
Marco:
So if that dynamic is going to change with an Apple, that is scary to all of us.
Marco:
But fortunately, it has gotten so big and so mature and so diverse during that time that I don't – as I was saying with Apple having, quote, only 60% market share now –
Marco:
I think it's so big and so diverse now that they won't be able to screw it up too badly even if they try to.
Marco:
And hopefully they won't even try to.
Marco:
I've met a couple of people who work in Apple Podcasts and
Marco:
They have their heads on straight.
Marco:
They know what they are.
Marco:
They know what they do.
Marco:
They know their importance.
Marco:
And they seem to embrace their role in the open ecosystem.
Marco:
And they seem to have good intentions.
Marco:
Ultimately, I think they're generally in good hands.
Marco:
Um, and I think they're going to stay a small enough part of the company, like by like revenue and importance that they probably won't get screwed, get anything screwed up too badly.
Marco:
It's funny.
Marco:
Actually, I had a chance to, uh, meet Eddie Q once extremely briefly.
Marco:
We were like walking past each other in the press area once.
Marco:
And the only thing I told him was, you know, hi, I'm Marco overcast bubble.
Marco:
And I said, thank you for not ruining podcasts and please keep it up.
And,
John:
he said you too i don't know if he knew who i was he mentioned podcast to him he's like i haven't ruined that wait a second oh yeah hold on a second yeah podcasting owes its entire existence to eddie q basically the benign neglect of eddie q yeah yes eddie q is a very busy man and this is this is why this is why we are how we are he's too busy to deal with podcasts any many you know more intrusively than what we than what we have now which is good leave it alone please
John:
You mentioned that it might be like a problem if the iTunes podcast director went away.
John:
But that's like a classic crisis tunity there.
John:
So first of all, right now, we have a problem in the open podcast ecosystem that Apple owns the directory.
John:
It's not a big problem, because like you said, they've been good.
John:
And, you know, a good benevolent dictator is better than an evil dictator.
John:
Right.
John:
But still dictator.
John:
for it to be truly open, there should be an open directory, right?
John:
So let's say one day, you know, someone at Apple changes their mind and says, you know what?
John:
Forget about it.
John:
That iTunes podcast directory is proprietary.
John:
You don't have access to it.
John:
Third party people, tough luck, right?
John:
The good thing for us and the bad thing for Apple is that it has been open for so long that many, many people have copies of that directory as of the second they shut the door, right?
John:
You have one.
John:
Lots of other people have one.
John:
We have the info, right?
John:
And so from that point on,
John:
You could go in two possible directions out here.
John:
The good path would be, oh, everyone gets together in the open podcast ecosystem and collaborates on some open podcast directory that no one company owns or controls.
John:
And it's a collaborative exercise.
John:
It's all touchy-feely granola and everybody just shares the directory, right?
John:
And what that would mean would be worse for podcasts because they'd be like, oh, you have to add yourself to the iTunes directory and also the open podcast directory.
John:
Because if you want to be playable in the other 40% of podcast apps, you got to be in the open directory.
John:
And if you want to be playable in Apple's thing, you got to add to the iTunes directory.
John:
And then also add yourself to Spotify if you care about that, right?
John:
That would be bad.
John:
But at least we would have dislodged ourselves as a community from Apple.
John:
controlling the directory because we'd have the open directory which started as an exact match of the itunes directory and from there expanded in fits and starts and it would be a battle to actually get people to know that the open directory exists get people to submit to it like it would be it would be hard but i feel like you could do it in fact you could if you were very successful you get to the point where
John:
People only submitted to the open podcast directory, and Apple started reading from the open podcast directory to populate hits, you know what I mean?
John:
Like, that would be the tremendous success scenario.
John:
So then you've dislodged yourself.
John:
Like, podcasts are, like, Usenet now, and there's no, you know, it's all open and free and peer-to-peer and just, you know.
John:
The bad thing that could happen, which is probably more likely knowing the world the way it is, is they close the doors.
John:
Everyone's got a copy of it.
John:
And some new proprietary company springs up and says, we're going to be the new Apple.
John:
We're going to be the new private company that controls the podcast directory for the outside world because Apple's keeping their directory to themselves.
John:
So now we'll be the new evil dictator out here for the quote unquote open directory world.
John:
Ha ha.
John:
Everyone has to submit to us because we have a hundred million dollar VC money to advertise to the whole world.
John:
that we're the new open podcasting directory if you want your podcast to be listed anywhere except for Apple's app you have to list us and they spend their hundreds of million dollars to spread that message and eventually everybody does that and now they're the evil company that controls it right so we have that that would be Spotify that's how that would go
John:
Right, but they're not even pretending to be open.
John:
Like, this company would totally be like, oh, we're the new Apple.
John:
We're the new for the open podcasting world.
John:
Because all they would be is a directory.
John:
They wouldn't be a service.
John:
They wouldn't be like Spotify.
John:
Their whole play would be, we're just a directory and we don't charge you any money and everything's open.
John:
And they spend all their VC money to get to the point where they can start turning the screws.
John:
But they would just be a directory, right?
John:
That's the evil person.
Marco:
I mean, I think there are companies that are trying.
Marco:
They're just really small and nobody really cares.
John:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
And it's because Apple's directory is open.
John:
How are you going to compete with... Right.
John:
So, you know, so I'm... Obviously, the scenario of benevolent Apple controlling directory is way better than the evil dictatorial other company, you know.
John:
But, like, the longer this goes on, the more I kind of...
John:
I kind of wish that podcasting was as open as like the web or, I mean, the web is a problem too.
John:
So this is the problem with open stuff where you want to direct your things.
John:
Podcasts are small enough that you can imagine having an open directory.
John:
Again, like Usenet groups and everything where, I mean, I don't, I don't know the technical details about Usenet works, but like,
John:
Having distributed – I guess DNS is similar.
John:
Any of these things where there's a directory, it's a problem.
John:
The web, you say, oh, the web is open.
John:
Anyone can put up a website.
John:
But the web is so big that you need these huge billion-dollar companies to bank a search engine from, and then you get something like Google.
John:
Yeah, technically the web is open, but if you want to find anything on it, you're going through some company that has to have some way to make money because it's such a big job.
John:
But a podcast directory in the grand scheme of things is not that big.
John:
Someone could start a Patreon and run a podcast directory for the entire internet.
John:
Well, I wouldn't assume that.
John:
If only people would submit to them.
John:
That's the problem.
John:
But like the actual volume of data, like the number of podcasts in the world is way smaller than the number of web pages and does not grow as fast.
John:
So I think the actual volume of data is such that you could get a reasonable AWS bill that you could pay with a well-supported Patreon.
John:
And, you know, have a small couple person company that runs it.
John:
It's just that no one would send you your podcast.
John:
That's the big challenge.
John:
That's why the VC people are dangerous there.
John:
Well, there are a few exacerbating factors here with podcasting.
Marco:
So first of all, it's way more of a human problem than an engineering problem.
Marco:
Like your AWS bill is going to be a drop in the bucket compared to your staffing.
Marco:
Because the way that, like one of the biggest, most important things the Apple directory does is vet stuff.
Marco:
and keep out a large amount, not 100%, but a large amount of spam and illegal stuff and porn stuff that you don't want to deal with, they do a lot.
Marco:
And to do that, it wouldn't surprise me if the approval editorial side of the Apple Podcasts team is larger significantly than the engineering side.
Marco:
I bet it is.
Marco:
I don't know that, but I bet it is.
Marco:
Because they have to have people who speak every language.
Marco:
going through probably thousands of podcast submissions every day or week, figuring out which of these are legit that we should enable in our directory, and which of them are just bots or scams or copies of other people's podcasts that this person's uploading illegally as their own, or porn stuff.
Marco:
There's so much that they don't allow in their directory.
Marco:
that they that they filter out with human review so you have to have a lot of humans in a lot of different regions and cultures and languages to be able to adequately review those things and then there has to be you know some kind of way where like people when you have a directory you're going to have disputes you're going to have problems you're going to have claims you're going to have to have people who again who who know all these languages who can you know respond to claims and disputes from all over the world for all different kinds of language content and
Marco:
um and who have to resolve disputes when somebody says hey that's my podcast and someone else copied it somebody has to resolve that dispute uh if somebody files a dmca report you got to look at it you got to figure like is this legit like you know is it if they file a trademark dispute you got to look at that so like this it's a very like human messy expensive thing to run
Marco:
In a way, Apple, again, part of the reason Apple has done a great service to the podcasting business is it would never be possible for apps like mine that have a one-person staff to ever have anything close to a legitimate, useful directory that doesn't just get spammed constantly.
Marco:
It's already hard enough.
Marco:
There were some...
Marco:
weird, dangerous, hateful podcast that got through Apple's directory that I had to remove over time that had to omit from overcast promotional areas.
Marco:
You don't want them showing up in your like, hey, you might like this crazy hate content over here.
Marco:
Even me keeping up with that is nearly impossible as one person.
Marco:
To have the entire world of podcasting go into your directory and submitting stuff all the time, and to have so many apps like mine just kind of assuming that if it's in the Apple Podcast directory, it's probably not going to cause problems for me to display it in my app.
Marco:
Even simple stuff like
Marco:
If you search for certain keywords, it would be kind of bad if somebody's artwork had porn in it.
Marco:
That would be something I'd have to deal with.
Marco:
And with Apple Podcasts, I don't have to deal with that because they are very strict about that.
Marco:
They have rules against it.
Marco:
They have people reviewing it.
Marco:
And so as a result, I don't really have to worry that my app might accidentally display porn when somebody doesn't want to see it because it's all from this review directory.
Marco:
So you have to have people looking for that.
Marco:
You have to have people responding to those.
Marco:
So there's all those issues.
Marco:
And then there's also...
Marco:
This weird, really obnoxious podcast producer cultural issue regarding RSS feed locations and RSS feed changes.
Marco:
So when you are on any other part of the web, suppose you make a website.
Marco:
Suppose we're in the bad old days of GeoCities.
Marco:
where most people did not own their own domain name.
Marco:
So if you made a blog somewhere, your blog was some service name.com slash some directory slash your user ID.
Marco:
And imagine you wanted to change hosts.
Marco:
Well, you would create a new one, and you would move everything over, and the only way for your old audience to find you at the new place would be if you either left a link up forever and left that old account open, or if the old account host was willing to do a redirect, which most of them weren't.
Marco:
It was kind of crappy.
Marco:
And so in order to mitigate this, people eventually learned who produced websites professionally, hey, we should own our own domain names, and then we can point that to whatever host we're on.
Marco:
And if we happen to change where URL is, we can implement something called an HTTP redirect.
Marco:
What a great concept.
Marco:
You can even specify in the redirect whether this is a temporary redirect or a permanent one.
Marco:
So if you move your site from one URL to another one, you can have the old one send a 301 redirect that says a permanent redirect, and then any kind of bot or app or bookmark or whatever...
Marco:
to your old one, should then be updated to point to the new one.
Marco:
It's right there in the spec, it's technical, and it's clear.
Marco:
That's not how podcast RSS feeds are treated in the real world, almost ever.
Marco:
Podcast RSS feeds in the real world are treated the way web hosting used to be treated, where people host, like, big to small, lots of podcasts, they host their RSS feed at some service that's giving them analytics or...
Marco:
ad insertion or something.
Marco:
The RSS feed is almost never on your publisher's domain name.
Marco:
It is almost always at some stupid service.
Marco:
And then when their business unit changes and they want to go to a different service or if it's a novice and they're like, hey, I wasn't this free thing.
Marco:
I've hit their limits.
Marco:
Now I'm going to my own WordPress site or whatever.
Marco:
They got to move their feed.
Marco:
They don't do redirects ever, ever, ever.
Marco:
I don't know why.
Marco:
This part of the web and the way it works technically and moving hosts around never reached the podcast business.
Marco:
The way people do redirects in the podcast world is they go to Apple and they say, change my RSS feed from the old thing to this new address.
Marco:
and they expect every single other app to update as a result.
Marco:
And we have to.
Marco:
For a while, Overcast didn't for the first couple years or few years, and it was a constant problem.
Marco:
And I had to eventually build in this support for these, quote, redirects where like,
Marco:
The Apple ID just points to a different URL now, and there is no HTTP redirect in place for it.
Marco:
It's just now the ID goes somewhere else, and I have to account for that.
Marco:
I have to poll them every so often to see if they've moved, and when they have moved, I have to change where feed I'm crawling.
Marco:
It's this weird...
Marco:
administrative redirect basically.
Marco:
And to, and, and also that can be done not only like by people in their interface, but sometimes they have to like email Apple and say, Hey, I lost control of my podcast account.
Marco:
Can you please reassign it with this new feed?
Marco:
And then some, some human and Apple podcasts has to evaluate that and see like, is this legit?
Marco:
Is this a scam?
Marco:
Is this like, did this person really lose access?
Marco:
Are they trying to take control of someone else's feed?
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
So it's a really messy problem.
Marco:
And podcasters on a whole, they see Apple Podcasts as it.
Marco:
That is the entire world to them.
Marco:
And their podcast exists not as a URL of an RSS feed, but as an entry in Apple Podcasts that they can point to whatever they want to point to at any given time and not worry about the HTTP backend of everything.
Marco:
So that would be yet another thing that if the Apple Podcast Directory became closed,
Marco:
we would be screwed on that.
Marco:
The rest of us out here, we would be totally screwed on people doing these administrative redirects because they would just never tell us.
Marco:
Whatever directory we would launch instead or try to assemble, they would never tell us.
John:
Well, it feels like all this stuff can be overcome.
John:
Like, everything you described is true, but the Internet itself has a long history of solving these exact problems.
John:
Again, I go back to Usenet, which I don't know the deep technical details of, but it was very similar in that, like, oh, anybody can make a news group.
John:
Well, how are you going to stop people from making a million news groups?
John:
How are you going to stop people from making porn news groups?
John:
The answer is you have a bunch of administrators of various servers who basically work for free and...
John:
Making a news group had a process and all just a bunch of unpaid people, you know, collaborating to make sure that there aren't a million news groups in porn.
John:
Well, they just made a bunch of porn news groups and they're over there if you want to find them and they're sectioned off, right?
John:
Later in the more modern internet times, Wikipedia has basically every problem you just described, right?
John:
the biggest one to overcome is how do you get people to update stuff on wikipedia and that's like oh if they only if podcast producers only tell itunes about the update why would they tell some open directory well they tell some open directory because they want the other 40 of the podcast players to be able to hear their content and it's annoying for them now they have to tell two places but and again if you do a good job of it you can shift the center of gravity so that the podcast producers just start updating the open one and then apple pulls from the open one because the open one can't pull from apple because they closed it down right but all these problems
John:
spam porn how do i pay all these people verification like wikipedia has all those problems in spades and wikipedia is not perfect far from it right but it's a much larger scale system than a podcast directory in terms of sheer number of entries uh probably even just in english it's this huge large you know it's multiple languages all this stuff right these are solvable problems we have a way as a community based on open standards with uh
John:
A bunch of loosely assembled volunteers to provide this public good on the Internet, which is this relatively small in the grand scheme of things directory full of podcast information.
John:
But getting from where we are now to there has this dangerous middle area where lots of things can go wrong.
John:
And it's much more straightforward for someone to get a few hundred million dollars of VC money.
John:
And advertise that they're the new quote-unquote open podcast directory and get everyone to start submitting to them and pay people, like you said, to do all the things that you described the old-fashioned way just by giving people money.
John:
And then get everybody to do that and get everybody to stop sending it to Apple and then start turning the screws and mess with everybody.
John:
So I agree that there's lots of danger between where we are now and that goal.
John:
Every time I think about Apple having that much power and us just relying on their kindness and their good sense, like someday all those people with kindness and good sense are going to retire.
John:
And hopefully they hire people behind them who also have kindness and good sense.
John:
But, you know, in the end, like you said earlier, we're mostly protected by the fact that.
John:
the amount of money that podcasts can ever add to apple's bottom line is insignificant as far as they're concerned so they'll never pursue it unless they get much much much smaller um or spin off the podcast business or something terrible like that but i don't know i do i do dwell on it because an open podcast directory is absolutely a thing that could exist with systems that have been proven to work it's just very difficult to get from where we are to there in conclusion please eddie never retire
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Casey:
NVIDIA is going to buy ARM?
John:
arm i forget who owns arm now is it soft bank i don't know that's right the ownership gets passed around but they're apparently the company that owns it is thinking of selling arm uh and this is all just rumor stuff one of the rumored potential buyers is nvidia and i just want to touch on this briefly because for a couple reasons one apple is not super duper friendly with nvidia uh if you haven't noticed over the past years decades or whatever um
John:
um why exactly there's all sorts of reasons there's business reasons there's technical reasons back when steve jobs was around there was personal reasons but the bottom line is you don't see a lot of nvidia gpus in macs for a long time and they're not buddy buddy so the question is it what so what if nvidia buys arm i'm forgetting setting aside why nvidia might want to buy arm whatever what if they buy it um
John:
could that be potentially home for Apple?
John:
And, you know, the quick answer is, well, no, Apple's got an architecture license.
John:
They're all set.
John:
They can make chips.
John:
They don't need ARM for anything except for this license, which I don't know if this is rumor or truth, but it's a perpetual license or whatever.
John:
Like Apple was an early investor in ARM.
John:
Like,
John:
whoever buys arm, they're not stopping Apple from continuing to make quote unquote Apple Silicon chips, which by the way, our arm Apple just doesn't want to say that, but whatever.
John:
Right.
John:
So yeah, whoever buys arm, not a big deal for Apple, but that's just short term thinking.
John:
If you think on the scale that Apple thinks, and maybe in this next item, we'll talk about the scale that Apple thinks, um,
John:
You're fine until and unless the eventuality that I've talked about many times actually comes to pass, which is what if ARM becomes the next x86?
John:
As in, eventually, the whole industry moves to it.
John:
We're coming out of right now a long period of time where x86 was it.
John:
Personal computers used it.
John:
Eventually, it came to dominate on the server.
John:
It was just everywhere.
John:
It was so everywhere that Apple switched to it.
John:
It was just x86 was everywhere, right?
John:
And Apple, during that time,
John:
Gained a lot of benefit and added a lot of value to its product by selling you a thing that could also virtualize your server.
John:
Because, hey, if you have an Intel Mac, an x86 Mac, and you use x86 on your servers, you want to run a virtualization environment on your laptop that runs Linux at more or less full speed so you can test your stuff that you're going to run on your x86 servers.
John:
Great, that works great.
John:
What if you want to run Windows?
John:
Hey, we can run Windows at full speed.
John:
You can reboot into it, you can run into virtualization.
John:
That added value to Apple's Intel Macs.
John:
That's part of the reason they switched to Intel.
John:
As we come out of the Intel, Wintel, x86, everywhere era, now...
John:
We're not in an era where everything runs ARM.
John:
Now we're in this weird place where PCs and servers are on x86.
John:
All the billions of mobile devices run ARM.
John:
Apple runs ARM, and it's kind of split up here.
John:
But if we eventually get to a place where everything's ARM, there's ARM on the server, all the phones and tablets run ARM, all PCs run ARM, and they run ARM on Windows, right?
John:
All the game consoles are on ARM.
John:
Just everybody goes to ARM.
John:
It becomes as saturated with ARM as it was in x86.
John:
if that comes to pass which is still an open question whether we would ever get there but if it did apple's products would gain value by being a place where you could virtualize your server environment run windows do all the things like that would add values to apple products and and like i said if they have a perpetual license all right they're fine they don't care who owns arm they're good right what apple would be worried about for the long term is
John:
What happens when the ARM equivalent of x86-64 comes along?
John:
And I don't mean literally 64-bit, because obviously ARM is already 64-bit.
John:
But that's something that happened in the x86 world.
John:
Intel had x86, and they wanted to go through an architecture transition to what they thought was going to be the successor, which was not x86-64.
John:
It was the whole itanium thing.
John:
But anyway, they were going to make an advance.
John:
And it turns out their advance was crappy for a variety of technical and business reasons.
John:
It didn't take off.
John:
But AMD came up with x86-64, which was a more straightforward 64-bit enhancement of x86.
John:
And that turned out to be the thing that the whole industry moved to.
John:
So when we say Intel Max today, they're all running x86-64.
John:
It's not just x86, right?
John:
If ARM ever does something like that, where like, oh, here's the next leap in the ARM instruction set, and everybody adopts that except for Apple, like they say, okay, well, you know, all you ARM servers, this is the next leap.
John:
This is our next instruction set.
John:
It's the new variant of ARM.
John:
It's incompatible with the old variant, but it's our new next step.
John:
And it's a new architecture, and it's new IP, and Apple doesn't have a license to it.
John:
If someone that Apple doesn't like, you know, or someone that doesn't like Apple...
John:
owns arm during that time they have the ability to turn the screws on apple and say well you have a choice now apple you can continue to make your own chips however the hell you want it you don't need us you have great chip designers like technically you don't need us but if you do that you no longer can run easily or at all in virtualization
John:
this new arm instruction set that's going to come out 20 years from now that's incompatible with the current one right in the same way that x80 64 was you know incompatible with with obviously it was a 64 30-bit transition but anyway you can imagine if someone owns arm and they do that and they become the new intel they will make advancements in their instruction set and if they won't license that if apple's license doesn't include that because you know it's very easy to make something that apple's license doesn't include some entirely new thing
John:
That's a problem for Apple, and that would force them to make a choice.
John:
They'd either have to pay the money to this company that owns the new ARM instruction set, or they'd have to go off on their own.
John:
And neither one of those is particularly attractive.
John:
Now, maybe Apple's not thinking that far in advance, or maybe Apple already has enough of a stake in the company that they feel like, you know, Apple's, you know, ace in the hole here is no matter what happens with this whole ARM deal, at any point we can just buy them, right?
John:
And they could say, yeah, whoever owns them at any point, if they become a problem for us, we can just dump money on their head.
John:
And now we've solved this problem because in the grand scheme of things, ARM is a tiny fraction of Apple's size.
John:
And they can always do that.
John:
But the question in the near term is, do we want to do that now just to nip this problem in the bud and just buy up arms business just to protect future stuff?
John:
And the reason I mention this is because if Apple was going to go its own way with its own instruction set, now would have been the time that they did that.
John:
But they didn't.
John:
They move the Macs to ARM.
John:
All their other things are on ARM.
John:
It's ARM.
John:
Like, it's compatible.
John:
It's the ARM instruction set, right?
John:
It's not an Apple proprietary instruction set.
John:
They don't control.
John:
They influence the instruction set probably in a strong way by suggesting perhaps that ARM should include this instruction, which is useful for, you know, like that type of thing.
John:
But technically speaking, they don't 100% own and control the ARM instruction set, right?
John:
even though they call them Apple silicon chips, because the chips themselves are, you know, Apple's things.
John:
But the instructions that they run is a variant of ARM that you can look up and standardize and everything.
John:
So I'm interested in this negotiation and sale just to see if Apple cares enough now to just say, like, if we just buy them now, we don't have to worry about this anymore.
John:
Or if they say, we can buy them anytime we want.
John:
Why the hell would we spend money on them now?
John:
Because if you buy them, you've got to deal with all the other people's licensing arm, and it's just a distraction.
John:
You don't want to license things to a bunch of people.
John:
That's not the business Apple.
John:
Apple's in the business of making its products.
John:
It's not the business in licensing the FaceTime protocol so everyone can interoperate with it like Steve Jobs said on stage.
John:
Yeah.
John:
That's not what they're into, right?
John:
So the smart money says Apple just ignores this and lets whoever wants to buy ARM buy ARM.
John:
And the smart money says whoever buys ARM is going to be nice to Apple because they're a big customer, presumably.
John:
I mean, does Apple pay ARM any money now?
John:
Or was it just like a one-time thing where they just get their perpetual license and never talk to ARM again?
John:
I don't know.
John:
But I would imagine that they would still collaborate with Apple.
John:
So it's probably not that big of a deal, but it got me thinking about...
John:
how important it may eventually become under some scenarios for apple to actually control the instruction set that runs all of its things who knows if this is so long ago if it's 20 years from now then maybe they'll just move everything to risk five continue to call it apple silicon and use an open source instruction set that nobody owns and then the problem is solved again for another 20 years probably not a big deal but i just thought it was an interesting story going by today
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know what would happen, but it certainly seems to me like it would solve some problems if Apple just said, well, that's ours.
Casey:
We own that now.
Casey:
But I agree with you that they would have little to no interest in doing any of the licensing and stuff that's been going on so far.
Casey:
It kind of reminds me a little bit, and this is a very, very loose analogy, but it reminds me a little bit of...
Casey:
dark sky which was bought you know a few months ago and and they've heard they stated pretty much immediately that the api was going away for third parties in something like a year year and a half or whatever and and i almost wonder if if apple if they were to buy arm would just say well you know all the stuff that we've already got contracts for yeah yeah we'll keep that going but there will be no more evermore you know forevermore
John:
Well, it would be in Apple's interest to continue licensing if there is even a glimmer of getting to the point where ARM is everywhere.
John:
Because, again, Apple derives value.
John:
They want the same instruction set that's on their Macs and on their iPads to be on the servers.
John:
They want it to be the thing that Windows runs on.
John:
They want it to be everywhere, right?
John:
Because that adds value to their products by being interoperable.
John:
and we're not there now so if they bought them today they don't have that much incentive to continue licensing except for the fact that if you were to shut those doors you'd make a lot of enemies first of all and second of all the whole rest of the world would just come up with something different anyway and now you're isolated again and like you know i think with the intel transition and with the move to arm apple has continued to acknowledge that there is it is valuable to be on the same page as everyone else when it comes to an instruction set like
John:
The benefits you might gain from having your own secret proprietary thing, use that for the implementation, which they do.
John:
They certainly do.
John:
Their system-minded chips are great, right?
John:
But it's better.
John:
Apple wants to be on the same instruction set as everyone else.
John:
They just want to have the best implementation of that instruction set.
John:
And that's basically what they have with mobile and ARM.
John:
Everyone else is using ARM on their phones too.
John:
Apple's ARM chips are just better, right?
John:
That's a great place to be.
John:
The only potential risk is this, oh, well, what if the people who actually own ARM
John:
a get mean about it and b it would they would have to have a new incompatible a new new ip basically because i'm sure apple's license cover is like anything that is remotely looking like arm but maybe like the company that that owns arm goes the next leap you know it's just as simple as having a new like simd extension or one or two new instructions like you can make a new thing give it a new branding so that it falls outside apple's architecture agreement right and get the whole rest of the industry to move to that and now apple's isolated again
John:
I don't know.
John:
I'm probably overthinking this.
John:
In reality, someone's going to buy it and just reap that sweet licensing income and be friendly with Apple, and we won't care about it.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So Apple announced, was it today, yesterday, sometime recently, that they're going to be carbon neutral for its supply chain and products by 2030, which when I first read that, I was like, well, I mean, it's going to take a while.
Casey:
And then I realized, oh, God, we're already in 2020.
Casey:
And that's where we're going.
Casey:
We're never going to leave it.
Casey:
So maybe they do have time.
Casey:
Who knows?
Casey:
But in theory, they will be carbon neutral for its supply chain and products in less than 10 years, which is super cool.
Casey:
And as someone who's become more and more of a tree hugger as I get older, I really appreciate this.
Casey:
And I think that this is excellent.
Casey:
I'm impressed by it.
Casey:
And it seems like from what little I've read into it, it seems like there's a lot of a lot.
Casey:
They're doing a lot with solar.
Casey:
They're doing a lot with wind.
Casey:
And then I guess they're doing whatever that thing is where you like purchase credit or something like that to offset carbon that you're using.
Casey:
I never quite understood how that worked.
Casey:
But
John:
basically when you put it all together it should be uh completely carbon neutral yeah as apple says in their press releases like apple's own operations of its own buildings and all that stuff has been carbon neutral for a while this is ambitious and impressive because they're saying yeah like so obviously apple controls its stuff like it controls the the electricity that runs apple park and all of its stores and all the other stuff and yeah like you said that the offsets are mostly what they do which is like
John:
We don't have access to get solar power to this store, but what we'll do is we'll pay for solar power to go to someone who's near a solar plant, offsetting the carbon that we're causing by using electricity from this coal-fired plant that's near our store.
John:
They're basically trying to say how much CO2 is going into the atmosphere.
John:
Before we make the store and how much CO2 is going to the atmosphere after we make the store.
John:
And they're carbon neutral if that amount doesn't change.
John:
Like, we made a new store.
John:
It's using electricity, but the amount of carbon that's going to the air is not increasing.
John:
That's carbon neutral.
John:
That's my understanding of it anyway.
John:
So a lot of it is with offsets, but offsets aren't a cheat or a trick or something.
John:
It's just...
John:
a practical way to be able to do it because some maybe you make an apple store and there's no way to get solar power to it what are you going to do not make the store there right like they're you know so offsets are a reasonable thing to be doing but this is like okay apple stuff is all carbon neutral but what about all the tons of company that apple buys from
John:
Someone is manufacturing Apple stuff, whether it's Foxconn or whoever.
John:
Some other company is manufacturing it.
John:
And that company has factories and has workers and they get parts from someplace.
John:
And those parts are manufactured in different factories.
John:
And this is the whole supply chain, right?
John:
So their goal is to use their power, as far as I understand this, to use their power as a very big buyer of things and someone who puts a lot of money into manufacturing and all that stuff.
John:
To get the people it buys from to do the same thing that Apple does, is you have to be carbon neutral to get this contract.
John:
And that just trickles down the chain.
John:
Also, if you want a piece of the big iPhone manufacturing contract, which is probably very lucrative because they make a lot of iPhones and they're, you know, expensive to make.
John:
And, you know, you can charge a lot of money for the assembly because the product itself, you know, like...
John:
If you want that, you have to be carbon neutral.
John:
And then all the way down to the company that you're getting the tiny little screws from that hold the iPhones together, if you want the tiny little screw contract for the iPhone, you have to be carbon neutral.
John:
And that's why it's a 10-year plan.
John:
It's like, okay, well, we can't just say that today because no one would build our stuff, right?
John:
But 10 years from now, the goal is we use our power and influence in the industry, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
you better give us the lowest price.
John:
You better guarantee your parts all work perfectly.
John:
You better eat any costs on losses.
John:
If you're late, you lose all your money.
John:
That's normally what companies do with their power is they destroy their suppliers.
John:
See Walmart and other companies.
John:
They use their power in a capitalist system to crush their suppliers, to cause human suffering down the chain, to make other people make less money, make them more sad and hurt them.
John:
And Apple, I'm sure, does that too because they're a big company.
John:
But
John:
To offset that a little tiny bit, at least Apple also tries to do good things.
John:
And this is a good thing that Apple is doing, not because they make more money like, oh, it's all marketing.
John:
Apple will just say they have green products like I don't think that the marketing advantage of this effort is.
John:
comes close to matching what it's going to cost apple and the entire supply chain in terms of time and money and effort to make this happen apple is doing this because they think it's the right thing to do and yes also it's good for the company for pr so on and so forth but if it was really such a clear pr win every company would be doing this
John:
Every company isn't doing this.
John:
Apple is one of the standouts in this.
John:
And so the other link we'll put in the show notes is there's a Medium post by Lisa Jackson who's heading this initiative and also a Vogue article profile of her.
John:
You can read these interviews with her and read what she has to say in her own blog and decide for yourself if she's a corporate shill cynically doing something so they can put a green leaf sticker on Apple boxes or whether she really believes in it.
John:
I think she really believes in it.
John:
I think Apple as a company really believes in it.
John:
And I applaud them for doing this.
Casey:
Yeah, this is really excellent.
Casey:
And I don't know, to some degree, I almost feel like you kind of have to go on faith that they're doing what's right, they're doing what they're saying.
Casey:
But I tend to believe them.
Casey:
You know, Tim doesn't seem like he's really interested in BS.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
Yeah, this this looks excellent to me.
Casey:
I haven't had the time to read the interviews or the Medium post, but I will at some point.
Casey:
And I'm really excited for this.
Casey:
You know, it really makes me feel good that a company that I really enjoy and care about is trying to do the right thing.
Casey:
And I think that's something that Tim Cook's Apple has been doing better and more of is doing.
Casey:
the things not because they're easy but because they are hard that's a reference john uh in doing them that the things that are right because that's what they should be doing and even though it's really not in a company's interest to do what's right a lot of the time it's in a company's interest to make money which often means it's in it's in their interest to do what's wrong but for apple they're not perfect by any stretch there's a million things that apple does wrong but i think more than most companies they genuinely do try to do what's right and and i admire that
Marco:
They're spending their entire BS budget on the App Store 30% thing.
Marco:
Yeah, they do.
John:
The reason I buy the sincerity for a lot of these efforts is they happen regularly, and they don't happen in response to some problem.
John:
No one is out there right now saying...
John:
Apple is polluting the planet.
John:
They're one of the worst polluters in the world.
John:
I'm sure someone says it somewhere because everyone's always saying something bad about Apple.
John:
But in general, Apple has a pretty good reputation in terms of environmental impact of their efforts.
John:
Right.
John:
They've always been trying to make the packaging smaller, to reduce their carbon footprint, to recycle more.
John:
Of course, everyone, because they're the biggest company in the world or one of the biggest tech companies or whatever, but I don't know what their market cap is now.
John:
But anyway, because they're so big.
John:
There's always going to be someone saying, Apple, you're not doing enough.
John:
But Apple's reaction to that is not to sort of get cranky about it and argue.
John:
Their reaction to it is always to try to do better themselves.
John:
They would agree that they have more to do.
John:
And then they just keep doing it like they were already carbon neutral themselves.
John:
They could have just coasted on that and say, look, we're all our stuff is carbon neutral.
John:
We can't control what our suppliers do.
John:
But their answer with this plan, the answer to a question that very few people were asking, except for the most extreme is, well, what about your suppliers?
John:
Can you do something about them?
John:
And Apple saying, yeah, actually, we're going to have a goal that our whole supply chain is carbon neutral.
John:
um and you know and there'll be further efforts right so i think apple is 100 trying to do the right thing here and i admire them for it and as marco said there's plenty of other things to complain about even within the supply chain like there's this carbon neutral stuff even this could be implemented in a way that's uh you know draconian and of course there's all the the human labor issues of like
John:
how are they treating their workers and apple's been trying to address that which is proven a lot harder than this carbon neutral stuff because they have all these agreements with their suppliers that you have to not make your customers work overtime and yada yada but apple also has in their contracts oh if you're late your entire company goes under because we get all the money right and so you know this the incentives are aligned for their suppliers to say yes yes we're treating our workers well they're not working 20 hour shifts and then make them work 20 hour shifts right so
John:
Challenges remain, but on the environmental stuff, I'm glad to see progress.
Casey:
Do we want to talk about that 30% study?
Casey:
I know almost nothing about it, so I am useless.
John:
If Marco wants to say something about it, he can.
John:
I don't think we have anything good to say about it.
Marco:
I haven't read it because we all know what it's going to be.
Marco:
It's going to be like a PR puff thing that Apple is talking about how much they're contributing to the economy by allowing and enabling the entire business of everything going on in the world right now
Marco:
That flows through their phones and their stores and how it's all their fault this is all happening.
Marco:
They're going to claim responsibility for the entire economy, basically.
Marco:
And all that to try to change the discussion away from their pretty clear anti-competitive issues with various app store policies.
Marco:
This is just the next thing in their continued campaign to try to...
Marco:
deflect all the legitimate criticism of what they, what they do with, with app store and our purchase rules and things like that.
Marco:
So it's not really going to ever be like a, you know, a legitimate fair conversation from their end because they have, they're, they're clearly like, again, as I said, like they're spending their entire BS budget on this.
Marco:
They, they, they have a point of view on what they're doing and it is, I think far from everyone else's reality.
John:
Yeah, I think that Apple's biggest weakness in this area seems to be the sincere belief at high levels in Apple that it is actually reasonable, right?
John:
That the profits and the money and everything are apportioned in a deserving way, like that Apple really thinks that it does deserve what it gets because, in fact, maybe it even deserves more because Apple
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So that's the most dangerous place to be because if you sincerely believe that you are being wronged, right?
John:
It always seemed that Bill Gates believed this in the antitrust trial back in the 90s.
John:
You'd see his testimony.
John:
He believed in his heart of heart that just he was getting a raw deal and everything that Microsoft got they deserved and everyone else was just complaining and trying to dethrone them because they held all the money in power, right?
John:
You can see how you can get into that mindset, but if you're in that mindset, you're not going to make your case well.
John:
You're just like, these ungrateful developers, I can't believe they don't see what we see, which is that we deserve this, and just be quiet about it.
John:
That's not a good place to come from.
John:
Very often, it seems that
John:
that there is that sincere belief inside Apple.
John:
They feel aggrieved, and they feel like what they get is what they deserve, and they probably even deserve more.
John:
you're never going to come to sort of an amical agreement like that.
John:
Now I don't, I don't want to get into the whole legal antitrusting and competitive stuff because I think my opinions are probably different than most people's on that.
John:
Uh, but in the end it doesn't matter.
John:
Like there's what's legal and there's what makes everybody happy.
John:
Like you, you really do need to come.
John:
If you're a platform vendor and you have a reliance on third party application developers, which Apple 100% does, uh, no matter what they may think in their deepest moments or agreement, if that's a word, um,
John:
You have to get a relationship that makes everyone at least a little bit happy and at least a little bit unsatisfied.
John:
You have to strike a compromise.
John:
You can't have an adversarial relationship with your developers.
John:
Whatever the deal is, whatever the grievances are, you have to find somewhere that you can both benefit.
John:
And arguably Apple hasn't really crossed that line over the course of this whole time.
John:
Developers aren't fleeing Apple's platforms.
John:
There are lots of complaints.
John:
Apple makes changes just enough to keep everybody sort of on an even keel.
John:
But if the massive resentment from developers is about the 30% grows, or if various political factions that don't even represent developers but use them as a political tool decide it's time to take down Apple for whatever legal, ideological, or political reasons...
John:
that's a problem for apple and i think i think the microsoft trial i mean there's a couple lessons the microsoft trial but one of them is if you app if you as a corporate entity app like bill gates as an individual did in a testimony it's not going to make you look good and it's not going to make you a friend of developers and it will take a while to heal that relationship the other lesson of the microsoft trial is that yeah it seemed to go bad for them but in the end money power momentum and some good decision making after that led to the microsoft of today which is resurgent and
John:
better off than it was then arguably from a technological and business perspective, right?
John:
So yeah, Hubble's probably too big to fail.
Marco:
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Casey:
Let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
And Edward Rosenberg writes, if our Macs can run iOS apps, could iPads soon run Mac apps?
Casey:
What if the new touchability of Big Sur apps in their toolbars is not about touchscreen Macs, but about bringing Final Cut Pro, Logic, and Xcode to the iPad?
Casey:
I mean, I understand the logic here, but I don't see any of that happening in no small part because all of these apps that Edward is citing, those are all AppKit apps as far as I knew.
Casey:
And that would be extremely not fun and not easy to bring back to iOS.
Casey:
And so I just I really don't see this happening.
Casey:
But Marco, what do you think?
Marco:
I mean, it's even worse.
Marco:
Those are probably ProKit apps, which is even a whole other level.
Marco:
Anyway, yeah, I'm with you.
Marco:
I don't think the major Mac Pro apps are coming to the iPad in a meaningful way anytime soon.
Marco:
And part of that is about the frameworks they're built on not being available on iOS, as you said.
Marco:
But another part of that that's probably an even bigger part, because if they really wanted to, yeah, they could rewrite the Final Cut UI for iPad.
Marco:
They could rewrite the Logic UI, all billion screens of it, for the iPad.
Marco:
They could rewrite Xcode for the iPad.
Marco:
Or they could make Xcode Lite for iOS, which is kind of what Playgrounds is, but not quite.
Marco:
But ultimately...
Marco:
All of these apps would have significant real-world trouble running on iOS because all of them depend on a platform in which you are heavily multitasking and making heavy use of lots of external files and plugins and all sorts of other stuff, external tools integrating with the workflows in lots of different ways.
Marco:
And while iOS can technically do a lot of that stuff,
Marco:
It's so much more of a hindrance on iOS.
Marco:
It's so much more clunky.
Marco:
Many of those tools and plugins and everything aren't available for iOS.
Marco:
You could probably bring over each of these apps to iOS.
Marco:
However, the ecosystems around them either can't or won't be there in practice.
Marco:
And with all these pro tools, you're not going to get any pros to actually switch over and to actually start using these in meaningful volume on the iPad.
Marco:
Until those ecosystem dynamics change, which may never happen.
Marco:
Until all those other pro tools get involved.
Marco:
When I'm using Xcode...
Marco:
I'm not just using Xcode.
Marco:
I'm also using Git Tower, and I'm using Terminal, and I'm using web browsers, and I'm using TextMate to do the web side of things.
Marco:
I'm doing so many other things.
Marco:
I'm using command line tools.
Marco:
I'm using build scripts that deal with other tools.
Marco:
It's not just one tool that you're using.
Marco:
I'm using terminal windows to connect to MySQL instances.
Marco:
There's so much in a development workflow besides just what's in the Xcode window itself.
Marco:
And so much of that stuff would be clunky or impossible or missing on the iPad.
Marco:
And the same thing applies to when pros use Final Cut and Logic and everything.
Marco:
So again, I don't see it happening for those reasons in particular.
Marco:
And while Apple could technically make these apps available on iPad,
Marco:
I don't think they would because ultimately, I don't think anybody's really asking for the reality of what that would actually be.
John:
Yeah, one of the reasons that they brought iOS apps to the Mac with Catalyst is that the Mac can handle you chucking a whole other bunch of frameworks on there.
John:
So they basically brought a bunch of UIKit over, and suddenly you launched Catalyst app, and now it's loading this whole other set of libraries that your other Mac apps aren't loading.
John:
The Mac has had a bunch of different APIs for years.
John:
You mentioned ProKit, which is this private framework that a bunch of Apple's Pro apps use.
John:
And then some apps are running AppKit, and then some apps used to be running Carbon.
John:
And it's just...
John:
The Mac has always had lots of different frameworks and libraries there, and it's wasteful.
John:
It's wasteful to have it all.
John:
And there's a reason, you know, why don't we have two of them all the time?
John:
It's a wasteful in development effort, but you don't want to have them all in memory.
John:
That's why they got rid of 32-bit.
John:
It's a waste to have both 32-bit and 64-bit copies of AppKit in memory just because you launch one 32-bit app that uses AppKit.
John:
Now you have 32-bit equivalents of all those libraries in memory.
John:
It takes memory, right?
John:
But you can get away with that on the Mac.
John:
at various times because the macs just have more ram if you wanted to bring final cut pro to the ipad i mean final cut pro doesn't run on ios yes they have the same core os uh but a you need all the frameworks you need pro kit app kit whatever bits of foundation that it needs all sorts of frameworks and stuff so all of a sudden right away you're loading a whole second set of libraries that no other app on ios is loading so now you've like doubled your memory footprint and
John:
You know, because when you run five apps running UIKit, there's just one copy of UIKit in memory, right?
John:
But there's also OS features that don't exist in iOS.
John:
Probably not a lot of them, but enough of them that Final Cut Pro or underlying things use that, you know, you would need to either add those features to iOS, add those, you know, those particular behaviors or those particular system calls or kernel abilities or, you know, whatever else.
John:
Even if something as simple as, hey, iOS doesn't have swap.
John:
and the mac os does and final car pro might rely on swap existing and not being killed when it gets out of memory during a brief period you know like bringing it over would be a big deal and the ipad and certainly the iphone don't have that kind of overhead they usually have just enough ram to get by with a bunch of apps running ios they're not going to give ipads twice the amount of ram so you can suddenly load app kit apps on them or app kit and pro kit apps or whatever right
John:
And Apple's behavior when trying to, quote-unquote, bring apps to the iPad has been the opposite.
John:
It's been to make a new app that fits within iOS and then bring that to the Mac.
John:
Remember they did that with iWork?
John:
They want to...
John:
re-envision logic or final cut pro or whatever or xcode for that matter for the ipad and there's the new vision of how it's going to work and it's it works with touch and it's you know it's it's a different conception of how it works they don't just take the mac apps import them so there's a whole bunch of philosophical and hard and fast hardware uh you know eventually monetary reasons why they're not going to do this like the monetary reason is you'd have to pay more to have ipads with more ram just so you can support this
John:
Probably unsatisfying, very clunky, memory-hungry port of Final Cut, and you have to change iOS to support it.
John:
And in the end, if they wanted a way for you to edit a video on the iPad, they'd do what they've already done with iMovie and stuff.
John:
They'd make a way for you to edit a video on the iPad that is iPad-centric and that is actually good on the iPad.
John:
In the same way that, like...
John:
Final Cut or whatever, there are iPad audio apps.
John:
They do not look like a straight port of Final Cut or a straight port of some Mac audio editor.
John:
They look like purpose-built iPad audio editors, and that's what that market wants.
John:
So I don't expect this.
John:
People also ask about virtual machines, like, oh, if you just run a VM,
John:
arm-based mac vm inside there then you don't have to worry about all the operating system framework things but you still have to worry about the ram even more so you're running a whole second os in there so maybe we'll get there someday where ipads eventually have enough ram where you can run little mac virtual machines and run mac apps but
John:
Then you run into all these stuff that Marco talked about, which is, oh, you're going to run Final Cut?
John:
I guess your 17 terabytes of video footage are just going to be hanging off the edge of your iPad, aren't they?
John:
Oh, they're not?
John:
I guess you have a 10 gig Ethernet.
John:
Oh, you don't have that either, do you?
John:
Hmm, well, how will it be reading those files over Wi-Fi?
John:
Oh, can't stream 8K footage from your, you know, like, there's always associated stuff with these pro apps that, like, the iPad's just not the right platform for them, so...
John:
Don't hold your breath for this, but someone will probably jailbreak one and run a cool little ARM-based Mac virtual machine sometime in the next few years, and that'll be a fun YouTube video somebody will make.
Casey:
Moving on, James would like to know, each line of Intel-based Macs has a range of CPU options available.
Casey:
Do you think Apple Silicon Macs, like a new MacBook Pro, will also have multiple system-on-chip options, or will they simplify the offering?
Casey:
I think this is a good question.
Casey:
We kind of alluded to this earlier.
Casey:
I think they would only offer one.
Casey:
I think, John, you were talking about this pretty early in the episode.
Casey:
I think it will be only one.
Casey:
I think it will be, this is the chip for the 13-inch MacBook Pro, this is the chip for the 16-inch MacBook Pro, and that's that.
Casey:
John, I'll give you a chance in a second to weigh in one more time in a little more detail.
Casey:
But Marco, what do you think?
Marco:
I'm actually going to go the other way on this.
Marco:
I think there will be multiple options on at least some of the products, probably the higher-end ones.
Marco:
Two reasons, basically.
Marco:
Number one, some of the products, like if you look at the Mac Pro, for instance, or the iMac Pro, or even to some degree, the highest end of the other products, like the 27-inch iMac or the 16-inch MacBook Pro,
Marco:
usually in most of these products you have significant differences in core count between the low end and the high end.
Marco:
Now some of this is just because of the way Intel has done their product lines and everything like that, but some of it's also because there are significant differences in need.
Marco:
So for instance, the Mac Pro and the iMac Pro have huge ranges in how many cores you can get and therefore how much parallel performance you can get for your CPU.
Marco:
And there's thousands of dollars in price difference between the low end and the high end.
Marco:
So it does make sense to offer that for profit reasons alone because they're not going to put the biggest chip they can possibly make in everyone if they can charge you $3,000 extra for the 40-core version for your Mac Pro compared to the base model that might only have 16 cores or whatever.
Marco:
So there's a pretty significant profit margin motive to just have segmentation on that basis.
Marco:
A second reason that's related economically
Marco:
is one thing we talked about in the past, binning.
Marco:
This idea that when you're making chips, not all of them are going to have all their cores work properly.
Marco:
Not all of them are going to be able to run at full speed because you'll have minor imperfections from the manufacturing process.
Marco:
And so you will have in the manufacturing of these chips, you'll have some that can run faster than others and some that can only run 8 cores instead of 12 or 20 cores instead of 40 or whatever.
Marco:
Apple is going to have the same issues with their manufacturing as Intel does.
Marco:
Everyone's still making chips.
Marco:
You have the same issues when you make these large, complicated chips for main processors and high-end computers.
Marco:
They're going to have binning of different chips into different abilities and speeds.
Marco:
So they might as well do something with them.
Marco:
So they can do what everyone else does.
Marco:
They can sell the ones that didn't pass the test at the high speed, clock them down, and sell them as low speed chips at a low price.
Marco:
And if they can only make a few that can run all the cores super fast, then they'll make that a high end option for a high price.
Marco:
I don't think they're going to be able to escape that dynamic simply because they're making the chips, you know, their own way now.
Marco:
And I hesitate to say themselves because, like, they have a fab partner.
Marco:
Presumably, I assume it's TSMC making the chips.
Marco:
Oh, I don't know if we know that.
Marco:
There is still a chip fab making these chips that will have all these economic issues with them.
Marco:
I have a feeling there will be multiple options for anything that is high-end.
Marco:
The low-end products, things like the MacBook Air, if a 12-inch comes back, maybe even the other 13-inch Pros...
Marco:
Or maybe if the 14 happens, that might because that's kind of half high end.
Marco:
But I'm guessing the low end products might not have multiple options.
Marco:
But the high end ones almost certainly will for those reasons.
John:
Yeah, all that stuff about binning and everything is the unescapable reality of silicon manufacturing.
John:
But the thing is, that's true of every chip they've ever made for iPhones and iPads, too.
John:
And historically speaking, Apple has chosen not to do that with the iPhones and iPads.
John:
You can't get an iPad with a faster clock chip.
John:
You can't get an iPad with more cores.
John:
You get what you get, right?
John:
I think, though, the Mac line, since it goes up so much higher, eventually you get to the point where you can't do that.
John:
So what I think they'll do is there will be fewer CPU choices because the low end to the low mid range will just have one choice just because that's the way Apple has historically done things with its own system on its ships.
John:
Right.
John:
So there won't be on like the low end MacBook.
John:
whatever like or even the macbook air you won't oh you can get the i7 or the i9 they'll just be one chip right but as you start getting closer to the higher end machines yeah they're absolutely and they'll vary things like core count like i don't i don't even know if they're very clock speed but they're going to definitely say okay well you can get it with the with the regular cpu or the big one and then of course the mac pro they'll have seven options then they just get ridiculous in price right so they can't avoid giving options i think they will give fewer than they have with intel
John:
And honestly, I'm not entirely sure where they've been so insistent that like, you know, every single Mac down to the lowest end has like one CPU option, another one for a little bit more like,
John:
They could have just chosen, and I think they have with a few models here and there, just chosen one CPU for them.
John:
But they always said, well, Intel will sell us another one of these that has a slightly higher clock speed.
John:
We'll take 50% margin on that.
John:
We get the chip from Intel for $50 more.
John:
You pay us $300 more.
John:
Done and done, right?
John:
But I just don't think they'll do that from a manufacturing simplicity perspective when they're the ones paying to...
John:
make all the chips just because they haven't done it with their phones and ipads even the ipad pros the closest they come on the ipad pros is you got more ram with the one that had the one terabyte flash or whatever but the system on a chip have just been the same and i think they will stick to that simplification for everything at least halfway up their line
Casey:
Colby Todisco writes, as a person super new to code, I feel like each language is nearly infinite and so daunting to learn all of.
Casey:
Knowing so little of the industry, I'm curious how much you guys know of your preferred language and how much is spent on Stack Overflow to keep learning.
Casey:
This is extremely hard to quantify.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
For me, looking at Swift particularly, I know some of it.
Casey:
maybe even a lot of it, but I don't know if I would even go that far.
Casey:
I know some, and there's a lot, a lot, a lot I don't know.
Casey:
The good news is for most of it, I either have a vague notion of what things do or how I could accomplish something, but I wouldn't say I can solve any problem immediately without having to consult with Stack Overflow or Google or DuckDuckGo or what have you.
Casey:
And for any language I've ever worked in professionally for any amount of time, even C-sharp, which I did for probably longer than anything else, I mean, I knew C-sharp pretty well, but at best I knew half of the language, 75% of the language, maybe.
Casey:
I mean, the thing is there is so much breadth and so much depth to all of these languages that
Casey:
that I don't think it's really reasonable to expect to know a whole ton of it.
Casey:
The idea for me anyway is just to know enough that you can understand the gist of what's happening and know how to look and dig to get more information if you need to.
Casey:
I've been picking on Marco first a lot.
Casey:
John, what do you think about this?
John:
In my experience, it's rare for working programmers to know the language they're working in to extreme depth.
John:
Like in most companies and most teams, there's one or two people who you know as the language gurus.
John:
But that doesn't mean the other people are lesser programmers.
John:
You don't need to know...
John:
anything that you're working with in huge amounts of depth you need to know enough of it to get your work done but there's very rapidly a point of diminishing returns which is why most developers unless they're actually interested in languages don't know every obscure nook and cranny of the language they're working with even if they've been working with for years and years just because there's no benefit to them knowing it but if they come across some thorny thing they know oh ask this random person they know
John:
They know the intricacies of this particular feature of C++, and they'll help me debug this situation.
John:
And I think that's a reasonable, like, that's a smart thing to do.
John:
Like, you spend all your time like, oh, I can't write anything in this language until I know everything about it.
John:
That's wasted time.
John:
That said, the question was, how much do you know about your preferred languages, blah, blah, blah.
John:
Through both my inclination to be a language nerd and an accident of history that has allowed me to use Perl for years and years and years, I know way more than anyone should ever know about Perl.
John:
I'm sure Marco has the same thing about PHP.
John:
I know all sorts of nooks and crannies in Perl.
John:
I've done all sorts of things outside work that have nothing to do with work that has let me explore all the nooks and crannies.
John:
And it's not a benefit at work other than me being the person people go to at work when they have some obscure Perl problem.
John:
which fine i'm glad to help but in day-to-day work it's you know it's not worth the time and effort that i put into it and you don't get there unless you really really apply yourself and or use the same language for a really really long time and arguably i've been working with pearl way longer than any person should ever work with pearl too so i think it's fairly rare for that to happen to give a more modern example swift i know very little of swift like the good that you know we talked about this before this is not really what this question is about but like
John:
Knowing languages with lots of features lets you very quickly get up to speed in any other language because you're like, okay, where is this feature?
John:
Where is that feature?
John:
Like Bargo was talking about the whole async await and promises and stuff.
John:
If you've never used a language with those features, it's kind of weird to wrap your head around.
John:
But once you use a language with them, then like Casey, you're saying, okay, well, how do you do that in Swift?
John:
What's the equivalent of Swift?
John:
Do you have futures in Swift?
John:
Do you have promises?
John:
Do you have async await?
John:
Whether it's exactly the same or a little bit different,
John:
you know do you have coroutines like just if you know the concepts you can jump into a new language and you're just like okay you don't have to explain to me what this is just say like does your language have this and if it does have it how does it work and then you can be like oh it works a little bit differently than the thing i'm used to it working and you can sort of build from there right which is why i'm able to write you know two apps that are on the mac app store knowing very little swift and practically speaking
John:
Most of the time that you're spending on Stack Overflow, you're looking up stuff about APIs.
John:
It's all about APIs.
John:
Language is like, okay, you just got to get enough language to get by.
John:
It's all APIs because we're building on top of this huge stack of stuff.
John:
You're always looking at how do I do this thing in this API?
John:
And if you ask the question of how well people know APIs, I think it's a similar thing.
John:
You could look at an app and say, wow, this is the best Mac app I've ever seen.
John:
I bet the person who wrote this knows everything about AppKit.
John:
Probably not.
John:
Probably just like any other thing, that to know an API like a language, there's one person on the team who knows every nook and cranny of AppKit, but everyone else knows enough of AppKit to write an app, but never has delved into that weird corner that you don't even use in your app.
John:
Why would you?
John:
With all things, there's a point of diminishing returns.
John:
In particular, for languages versus APIs, if you're doing
John:
Pretty much anything.
John:
You need enough of the language to get going and to be able to fix bugs, and then you're just going to spend the rest of your time figuring out whatever umpteen APIs you have to work with, right?
John:
Because that's where the bulk of your actual effort is.
John:
It's not in language problems.
Marco:
Yeah, I find I'm very similar in that as soon as I saw this question, I was going to, if John did not, I was going to make the distinction between APIs and languages as well because my preferred languages so far being C, PHP, and Objective-C
Marco:
They're all fairly small languages in the sense that the languages don't have a lot of language features, or at least they didn't when I was first learning them.
Marco:
Some of that has changed now, but they all had fairly few language features compared to something like Swift, which has a lot of language features.
Marco:
Part of my resistance to Swift so far had been that
Marco:
I don't like having a lot of language features.
Marco:
I like small, simple languages where you're relying on the functions and APIs and libraries you're calling to do the cleverness, not having a bunch of built-in stuff in the language itself.
Marco:
This is why I love C so much.
Marco:
C is a very small language, really.
Marco:
I know there's a whole bunch of weird edge cases of certain behaviors that nerds like to pick on, but...
Marco:
For the most part, it's a very small, simple language.
John:
But that's kind of what I was talking about in that C, yeah, syntactically it's simple, but C is fiendishly complex at the deep level.
John:
And if you had some weird C problem, you'd need to go find some C guru and say, I don't know enough about C to say, what the heck is going on?
John:
I can't figure out what this bug is.
John:
And they'd be like, oh...
John:
It's a super obscure feature of C that you never had any reason to know, but let me tell you about it.
John:
All the different corners of undefined behavior in C, there are nuances.
John:
This is the whole point.
John:
There are nuances to C, which is syntactically simple language with not a lot of features, that you will never need to know if you just are a C programmer just doing normal stuff.
John:
The same is true for Swift, I feel like.
John:
There are obscure features in Swift that you will never need to know.
John:
It's just that Swift has way more features that you will need to know than see, right?
John:
Because it just has more features, period, right?
John:
But all languages, no matter how simple they look, there are dark corners of that language that only some language nerd knows that you probably don't need to know and shouldn't worry about pursuing and becoming an expert in unless that's your thing.
John:
Like, the people who are language experts in your team or your company...
John:
They're probably that because they're into it.
John:
It's the whole reason I learned all the nooks and crannies of Perl, because I was into it, because it interested me.
John:
But if it doesn't interest you, it's not going to hold you back as a programmer.
John:
You don't need to know those to write a really great app or a really great website or whatever.
Marco:
Right, and I've said before, whenever people ask about getting into programming or doubting their skills, you can be a very successful, working, full-time programmer employed by someone else or working on your own as your own business
Marco:
without being that great of a programmer you only have to be moderately capable and you have to care and if you have those two things like you'll be fine because you'll be ahead of almost everybody and you'll be able to you know churn out stuff that works just fine um and and yeah so to actually answer the question how much of these languages do i actually know um i know a lot of c and objective c um
Marco:
I know a lot of what PHP used to be, but PHP had a whole bunch of stuff added to it in the last five or so years that I haven't really kept up with.
Marco:
But the core of PHP, of what it was up through about PHP, the late five generations, I'm very familiar with that part, and that's most of what I use.
Marco:
Objective-C is...
Marco:
also not that big of a language once you get past the C part.
Marco:
You have to know C, but what Objective-C adds on top of C is not that much, relatively speaking to other languages.
Marco:
So I'm able to know a lot of that because I've worked with it a lot.
Marco:
It doesn't change that much, although it still is occasionally adding things, which is kind of fun, but it doesn't change that much.
Marco:
So I know a lot of Objective-C, but
Marco:
My real stored-up strength, my real built-up strength over time as an iOS developer is not knowing Objective-C really well.
Marco:
It's knowing UIKit and foundation really well.
Marco:
Because as we were saying, it's much more about the frameworks and the APIs of achieving what you need to do.
Marco:
One of the reasons I know PHP so well is that I know all the built-in functions and all the weird idiosyncrasies of
Marco:
God, what order does the inarray parameter go in?
Marco:
I know all that stuff in PHP because I've worked with it forever.
Marco:
I know how to use UIKit pretty effectively.
Marco:
I know where a lot of the weird little edge case behaviors in UIKit are, and I know how to do certain difficult things in UIKit
Marco:
Because I've been programming a UI kit since it existed.
Marco:
Since 2008 when I was able to start doing it.
Marco:
So I have a lot of experience programming a UI kit.
Marco:
Any new language that you come upon or any new platform that you start programming for, it's probably going to take you way longer to learn the UI frameworks and all the utility frameworks for the other low-level stuff.
Marco:
That stuff is where you're going to spend all your time.
Marco:
And that's where some of my Stack Overflow searches can be great.
Marco:
Because that's
Marco:
whenever I'm searching for something, I'm usually not searching for, hey, how do you make an array in this language?
Marco:
That kind of stuff you can figure out in a weekend if you're an experienced programmer, or even a few weekends if you're not.
Marco:
But
Marco:
figuring out how do you set the accessibility label on a custom button that has this one behavior that's the kind of stuff that you have to look at documentation or Stack Overflow for and it doesn't matter how much experience you have as a programmer you just kind of are always looking for that kind of thing and that's just part of the job as John said what you get better at over time is not having to search for things
Marco:
but you get better at being able to find them quickly because you know more of the terminology of what you're looking for.
Marco:
So you can say things like, how do I make a loop in this language?
Marco:
Instead of, how do I do something more than once automatically with a number that goes up each time?
Marco:
You learn the terminology for what you're looking for so you can more easily find it.
Marco:
That's how you get better over time.
Marco:
It's not by magically memorizing everything or knowing every framework or API that you're going to come across in infinite depth immediately.
Marco:
That never happens.
Marco:
You just get better at stumbling through like the rest of us.
John:
I will say that there is one level of competence that it is actually useful to get to in at least one language, especially languages that have...
John:
I don't want to say standard libraries or have lots of features.
John:
So the standard library is a concept in lots of languages.
John:
Swift has its own where they build the entire foundation of Swift in its standard library, and it's actually pretty big.
John:
There's the C standard library.
John:
You can consider the world of Unix system calls as a thing.
John:
Like, Perl is my example in that Perl.
John:
Like, it has a bunch of built-in features that almost exactly mirror the standard Unix APIs for doing stuff.
John:
For good or for ill, they do.
John:
But there's a lot of them, right?
John:
So if you know Perl the language, or if you say you know the language, and if things like doing file.io are built into the language as they are in Perl, like it's not even a library.
John:
It's like literally built into the language, you know, open, close, read, write, you know, all that stuff with files that's built in.
John:
If you have a language like that with lots of stuff that's built in, like Swift arguably has lots of stuff, quote unquote, built in in the standard library.
John:
PHP does as well.
John:
Right.
John:
If you learn those languages, learn like the main 80% that you need to know about those languages, you will reach a point where you can write a program that just uses those features.
John:
Again, going from Perl, it's like, what if you just need to do a bunch of file IO and do a bunch of math and have a bunch of data structures?
Yeah.
John:
it's good to be able to reach the level of competence where you can just write that program from top to bottom and never look anything up like i don't have to look anything up for the basics of pearl and you know you do want to get there in some language the problem with most modern development is okay well what if i get there with the language it doesn't help me i'm still looking up stuff with ui kit or app kit because you just can't fit those in your head they're just too darn big they have too many freaking arguments you forget which are they go in
John:
The names are weird.
John:
You're riding the autocomplete.
John:
You're doing the best you can.
John:
And I would say riding the autocomplete is an example of looking something up, right?
John:
Because Perl, bless its heart, there's no good IDs with autocomplete.
John:
So if you don't know what it's supposed to be in Perl, you just got to type it, right?
John:
Using Xcode for a long time, I was driving some Perl and I was waiting for it to autocomplete.
John:
Of course, I knew what it was going to be, but I'm like, do I have to type that out?
John:
It's like, no, there's no autocomplete.
John:
Anyway.
John:
Um, I think it's good to reach that level of competence in some language because it lets you, you know, this is about like the language you know best or whatever.
John:
It lets you do like your one-off little thing that you just need to do for yourself.
John:
without constantly looking stuff up right it's just it breaks your flow so if i'm you know like my you know we all wrote our own stupid little blog engines here i wrote my stupid blog engine in pearl i need to look anything up when i was writing that it just all does manipulate a bunch of files and make http calls and like it's you know and shell out to the rsync command like and that's all basic stuff so i could just write it and it's nice to be able to do that to just
John:
to get to the point where you can just write a thing from top to bottom and never have to look anything up.
John:
And it's really nice to be able to do that in a language that has lots of features built in.
John:
Oh, file IO, that's all built in.
John:
Regular expressions, that's all built in.
John:
A whole bunch of basic data structures, that's all built in.
John:
Swift has that.
John:
PHP has that.
John:
Pro has that.
John:
JavaScript to a lesser extent has that because they lean on this NPM thing for like everything.
John:
But anyway, I would suggest trying to reach that level in whatever languages that you actually like because it's just, I can't imagine,
John:
programming if there was if i know if i knew no languages that well because it would just be too much of looking stuff up before there was the web we would look things up and like you know on man pages you know you're like typing you know whatever man 3 s printf to try to figure out what the hell the format string is for this one particular thing like
John:
Looking stuff up is annoying.
John:
You're going to have to do it almost all the time in your regular job.
John:
Try to learn at least one language enough for you to do little projects without looking stuff up.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Mint Mobile, Raycon, and HelloFresh.
Marco:
And thank you very much to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
If you want to become a member, get a whole bunch of cool benefits, go to atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
Thanks, everybody, and we will talk to you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental, they didn't mean it.
Casey:
Accidental Tech Podcast So long
John:
I put all these screenshots in this week.
John:
We didn't even get to it.
John:
I'll just add more for next week.
Marco:
Our doc is massive.
Marco:
I have so much to say on some of these.
John:
Yeah, we will see that for next week.
John:
Yeah, I didn't do the update today.
John:
All these screenshots are before the update.
John:
So I did get one updated screenshot from Twitter of the new battery thing.
John:
But anyway, I don't want to add too many more screenshots.
John:
We have plenty to talk about.
John:
But I tried to make some of them square for you, Marco, did you see?
Yeah.
John:
oh yeah because you know that chapter art has to be square yeah i actually what i'll do instead what i really need i don't want to distract you from this i don't actually do it but i found myself wishing we had static content upload to the cms because i want to just put these to be links in the show notes like they can't all be chapter art and people use players don't support chapter i just we're gonna if we're gonna be talking about pictures which we will be on a future show i would like to be able to people to go to the show notes and see the picture that's loaded from a web page because i have all the actual
John:
images right and it's like okay why don't I do that oh we're gonna host the images I'm gonna do I end up hosting them on my own website again like the other ones that are there eventually the CMS will get static content but you can do that after you're done with overcast stuff at the end of the summer yeah you think I'm gonna be done by the end of the summer well you'll be so sick of it you'll be dying to add static content upload to your PHP website
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
This is going to be one of those situations where I... Because I'm basically starting Overcast stuff, like, now.
Marco:
And it's, you know, end of July.
Marco:
Assuming that iOS 14 and everything probably launch a little bit later than usual, which even that's an optimistic assumption, but let's say they launch in early October.
Marco:
I'm still like, I'm not going to make it in time for that because there's too much to do.
John:
Just for iOS 14 compatibility?
Marco:
No, compatibility, I don't have to do anything.
John:
Compatibility, it works great unchanged.
John:
All right, well, then there you go.
John:
As long as you have something you can ship that says, yes, this works on iOS 14 on day one, I figured that problem done and your other projects can take longer.
Marco:
Yeah, and because what I want to do, I talked a little bit about this on Under the Radar this week.
Marco:
What I want to do is much more substantial, like reworking of a lot more of the UI, the watch app, stuff like that.
Marco:
Stuff that's going to make me basically have to require iOS 13 at least, which I don't yet.
Marco:
I still require 12.
Marco:
Require 13 at least and more accurately probably require 14.
Marco:
And so I really shouldn't release something that requires 14 before like December or January probably.
Marco:
So I think I'm just going to have what ends up being a very long beta test where I'm going to very slowly build this stuff throughout the whole fall and hopefully launch it in the winter sometime when I can responsibly launch something that requires iOS 14 and watchOS 7.
Marco:
So that's that's what I'm looking towards.
Marco:
But what that means is I have lots of time that I'm going to blow right past the I'm going to blow right past the iOS 14 chip date.
Marco:
And you're probably not going to see like an overcast widget on day one, which I don't think is that bad of a thing, because honestly, I don't think an overcast widget would be that useful.
Casey:
Yeah, I was going to say, what is it going to do then?
Casey:
Because you're not going to have play state or anything like that in all likelihood.
Casey:
So I don't know what you would... Do you have an Overcast complication?
Casey:
I don't recall.
Marco:
All it does is show the Overcast logo and it lets you launch the app.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
Because basically...
Marco:
you know, for people who don't know, like the way, I think we covered this already, but yeah, the way complications work is very similar to the way widgets work, which is like you just basically render like a static thing and you give it a timeline of future values to use.
Marco:
So you say, you know, at this time, change to this value or whatever.
Marco:
And that is, so it makes perfect sense if you have like a weather forecast.
Marco:
that you can only update every few hours, you can totally give a complication like, all right, at this hour, it'll be this temperature.
Marco:
At this hour, it'll be this temperature.
Marco:
And that works for that kind of app.
Marco:
For a podcast app, that doesn't work for a lot of functionality.
Marco:
You can't really use it for play state at all because you don't necessarily have a chance to update it as often as you want.
Marco:
It might fall out of sync with the reality of what's going on and what's being played.
Marco:
And you can't really do rich things like have it be constantly adjusting during playback.
Marco:
That doesn't really work in practice with these APIs.
Marco:
So the only thing that really makes sense to use a widget for that I can think of so far is kind of like what some of the Apple stuff does for the podcast and music app of basically just offering a little grid of podcasts or playlists like what's up next and you could tap it to play it.
Marco:
And you could say like, all right, make these three playlists buttons on the screen.
Marco:
And that's, I mean, I'm sure people would use that.
Marco:
I don't think it would be a lot of people though.
Marco:
And for everyone who thinks they'll use it now,
Marco:
that's wonderful everyone thinks they'll do stuff like this and then the os comes out and no one does it because it turns out this is not a great uh api for the kind of app that i do like the kind of like you know live updating you like interactive it's not an api for interactive stuff like that's that's what i think people are envisioning there being a little square on their home screen that is a tiny little application interface and you can't do that with the current api
Marco:
yeah not at all and I don't see them ever doing that again like the old ones you could kind of do that the old today widgets but one of the big problems with the old today widgets is you swipe over to whatever page or you pull down whatever page is displaying them and then they all start loading and there's it's just like the old dashboard for macOS like you have like you open it up and everything has just been frozen in time it has not been updating and then everything has to update for a second and then the things you want like pop in
Marco:
That sucks as a user, and you could tell the system's always kind of struggling to do it, whereas the new SwiftUI-based, complication-based widget setup is something that basically can get pre-rendered and can just update in the background without ever launching your app.
Marco:
That's the big thing.
Marco:
It's like...
Marco:
Your app's process is hardly ever launched to actually update that data because it requests a big block of time ahead of time for it and can just display that and can have that ready to go.
Marco:
As soon as you swipe over to display that page, that data is there.
Marco:
It doesn't have to wait a second for the app to launch and then render it.
Marco:
It's already rendered.
Marco:
So it's wonderful from a user perspective for the few things it'll work for.
Marco:
So for things like weather or to-do or stuff like that, that'll be great because it's going to just be there without that little delay of having to wait for it to load and update itself.
Marco:
Downside is there's a whole bunch of apps like mine where it doesn't make a lot of sense to use it for those apps and there's not a lot for those kind of apps to do.
John:
Given that it's tailored to information display, like I'm trying to think of what kind of information would I want from like because a weather app wants to tell you information about the weather and like calendar is another example.
John:
I can tell you here's your next two events today.
John:
Right.
John:
Or, you know, even something as simple as like, you know, here's how traffic is looking for your ride home, like all sorts of things that there's information that could be displayed.
John:
Right.
John:
What does Overcast have to tell me?
John:
mostly just scenarios don't apply to my podcast life but you could say you know you could designate favorite podcast and say uh there's three new episodes in your favorite podcast and just show little icons you got a new episode of this podcast new episode of that like just to know what's waiting for you in overcast when you get there it's an information display i don't even think you can can you do individual tap targets i think you just get one tap target for the whole thing you can on the medium and big sizes oh that's right yeah but not the the small one even though it's way bigger than a finger you can only get one tap target
John:
but like information display or you know how many hours of podcasters i would never want to see that number so don't ever do this but how many hours of podcasts are sitting in overcast right now waiting for you like information display like because podcasts things happen kind of like weather during the day new episodes of podcasts are released and you have some amount of progress through the podcast you're in so in a little widget you can imagine showing kind of summary of
John:
your podcast life here's what you've got waiting for you when you get to the point where you want to listen to podcasts and here's where you were um and that type of information display fits within the widget model but i just not sure anyone cares about that information to dedicate even four squares worth of space on their home screen to it that's the thing is like how many people are going to actually want to devote a quarter or half of a screen to that
Marco:
I'm using the beta.
Marco:
I've been using it since the day it came out on my main phone.
Marco:
I've had relatively little use for widgets so far.
Marco:
The way I see myself using this so far, once iOS 14 is out and everything, I'm probably going to end up regularly using between 0 and 2 widgets.
Marco:
And I don't think a podcast app would make the cut, even though I use my podcast app constantly, which is why I made one.
Marco:
I'm using it all the time, but even I, I don't think would have a use for that.
John:
I think light users might like it.
John:
Like, I think the main thing, even though, yes, I know there are notifications that you can
John:
get but hey a new episode of this american like came out and you know it's your favorite your designated favorite podcast so you'd like to know what comes out a notification comes and goes right but maybe you don't have notifications on or maybe you forget about it glancing at your phone like you're getting you get into your car you get into your car and you're like oh what do i want to listen to it on your home screen you see three little icons of like the new episode of this american life the new episode of atp and the new episode of whatever and of course you pick atp because it's your favorite podcast
John:
You know they're waiting for you.
John:
You don't have to launch the app.
John:
That sort of thing, should I listen to music or should I listen to podcasts?
John:
Today, you had to launch Overcast and look into it, but if you have this mechanism that's just going to bubble up, oh, new episodes of your shows just came out, and those three little icons are in a little square, that can save you a trip into the app.
John:
It doesn't work for someone like me who has a million podcast subscriptions.
John:
There's no way I can make any sense of them in any kind of widget.
John:
It's just...
John:
it's just overwhelming but if you only subscribe to two or three podcasts maybe maybe you dedicate that because it does it is it does have utility you you look at your phone on your way home and you and you decide is it podcast your music for this ride you're like oh new episode of the show i like came out and then you tap on it and you're right in dovercast uh and listening to that right
Marco:
I know I have to do widgets for reasons like that.
Marco:
Just make it a giant overcast icon that's the size of four squares when you tap at the app launches.
Marco:
It's like the watch complication.
Marco:
I definitely have to do widgets for reasons like that.
Marco:
Those are legitimate benefits and some people will want them.
Marco:
But I think it's a pretty small group that's going to end up actually using it in practice.
Marco:
That's why I'm not rushing to be there on day one at the expense of other things.
Marco:
There's a lot of features I'm working on that I've been building up for months or trying to build for months that have nothing to do with iOS 14, that I could launch for iOS 12 if I wanted to.
Marco:
And so I have to allocate my time of like, how much time am I actually going to spend doing iOS 14's new stuff for widgets that maybe 1% of the customer base won't get any benefit from whatsoever?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Or should I be spending that same amount of time first doing something that I don't even have to bump up my requirement for, for OS version, that way more people would actually find useful, that my customers are actually asking for?
Marco:
And things that customers have been asking for for a long time.
Marco:
Or things like, I have to fix my watch app because it's broken again, surprise.
Yeah.
Marco:
What a surprise.
Marco:
My Apple Watch app needs to be rewritten.
Marco:
Welcome to every time ever.
Marco:
That's something that's affecting my users a lot more.
Marco:
It's affecting my reviews.
Marco:
That's kind of on fire right now.
Marco:
I have to deal with that and
Marco:
you know, doing some fancy new thing for iOS 14 that isn't even out yet, and that when it does come out, how much these things end up being used in practice is going to be a huge question mark.
Marco:
That's just a lower priority.
Marco:
And it's going to remain lower priority for months, probably.
Marco:
So I think what's actually going to happen is I'm going to probably not even start the widget stuff until very late in the beta period.
Marco:
And then I'll have a chance then to see iOS 14 actually get released before my widget stuff is likely to be released.
Marco:
And then I'll get a chance to see what people actually use, what people actually say.
Marco:
Hopefully my beta testers at that point will be able to tell me on iOS 14 how much they are using widgets and how much they actually want out of mine.
Marco:
So I can have some idea of do I spend a month doing just widget stuff?
Marco:
Do I spend just a weekend doing a smaller version one?
Marco:
I don't really have a good concept of that right now.
Marco:
Whenever it was, two years ago when the first Siri Shortcuts API came out?
Marco:
That took a while.
Marco:
That took substantially more time than I ever expected it to.
Marco:
Way more time than that feature should have taken.
Marco:
And it was used so far by almost nobody.
Marco:
And that ended up being almost not worth doing at all.
Marco:
My entire shortcut stuff is almost not worth it at all.
Marco:
Last summer for iOS 13...
Marco:
they gave me something I really wanted.
Marco:
At least I thought I wanted it.
Marco:
They gave full-blown serious support for music libraries and podcasts.
Marco:
I can do way more with shortcuts than I was able to do the first time around.
Marco:
And it deprecated everything I wrote for shortcuts.
Marco:
And so all that work I did that was way more work than it was worth is useless.
Marco:
And I had to remove a lot of it already.
Marco:
I'm going to have to remove more of it soon and I have to replace it someday.
Marco:
And
Marco:
There's all these new abilities that I have with what they released last year that I still haven't even gotten to using because other parts of the app have been more important to work on or there have been other more pressing features and the people who use shortcuts mostly haven't been asking for any of that stuff.
Marco:
And I don't even know how many of my competitors use it.
Marco:
Castro just launched a lot of that new Siri shortcut support recently.
Marco:
I think a month ago they launched an in-depth Siri API for the Siri stuff that was added last summer.
Marco:
And they are usually way more on top of new OS features than I am.
Marco:
So that should say something that took them almost a year to do it.
Marco:
And I haven't even started that.
Marco:
And again, I don't think I'm really planning on doing that for a while.
Marco:
Just because so much of these new APIs that come out
Marco:
The power users will ask for them because it's cool and it's new and we have these new OSs and we want to use these new features.
Marco:
But then in practice, almost no one uses a lot of this stuff.
Marco:
And you don't really know before the release what's going to be used and what's not.
Marco:
But every time I've skipped one of those potentially trendy things that was going to be a lot of work, I message apps.
Marco:
I never made one of those because I wasn't really, I couldn't think of a good reason of why someone would want that for a podcast app.
Marco:
And it turned out to be not really a thing for my entire app category and most app categories.
Marco:
And so I saved all the time and I'm glad I didn't do it.
Marco:
And so, you know, I'm kind of taking the same like wait and see approach on the widget.
Marco:
I know I need one.
Marco:
I will do one, but I don't know if I need a lot of work in one or if it can be something a lot more simple.