Receive Their Honking
Casey:
Can I give you a little bit of touchy-feely to start the show in a nice, convenient place for you to remove it if you so desire?
John:
Sure.
John:
Is that like force touch?
John:
What are you talking about?
Casey:
I would like to 3D touch you, gentlemen.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
I told – I don't remember if it was Aaron said it to me or I said it to Aaron.
Casey:
But when we were debating me quitting my jobby job and being independent –
Casey:
my goal was to last until Declan reached kindergarten because at that point in the before times, uh, there would be a kindergarten to go to.
Marco:
I was going to say like, did he actually reach kindergarten?
Casey:
Well, he reached it.
Casey:
He's not going to it though.
Casey:
But anyways, um, he, he started virtual kindergarten on Tuesday and my first goal for the Casey list world domination corporation, uh, was to last until, uh,
Casey:
Declan
Casey:
You never know.
Casey:
But that is that is a very random way for me to say thank you to anyone who listens to the show, to anyone who is a member of the show.
Casey:
And I will be that sleazeball that turns this into a roundabout pitch and say ATP dot FM slash join would be a great way to continue to keep me home with my kids, which would be lovely.
Marco:
Masterfully done.
Casey:
But no, seriously, it is.
Marco:
Listen, otherwise Casey's kids will starve.
Casey:
they will starve um no but all kidding aside it it is a really unbelievable um i was gonna say achievement but that sounds too back patty of myself it is an achievement you are part of the show well i don't i don't want to sound i don't want to sound gloaty i just i want to sound appreciative that that it's because of the show and other things not just the show but a lot the show that i've been able to be home with the family and that's that's super awesome and
Casey:
And I think anyone who listens to the show who patronizes sponsors of ours, who is a member of ours, all of you, you have made my life better and I appreciate it.
John:
Mine too.
John:
So thanks.
John:
Go team.
John:
Let's see if we can't get that second child, first child treatment and keep Casey and keep Casey independent through all of his children's kindergarten.
Marco:
Something tells me that we're all going to have things to say about technology for at least the next two and a half years.
Casey:
I hope so.
Marco:
Just a guess.
Casey:
All kidding aside, I have a genuine fear that – I don't know if it's better or worse – that I have a genuine fear that one of you is going to just be like, I'm done, either because it's like a screw you guys or it's just a I don't feel like it anymore.
Yeah.
Casey:
and i the thing that's funny to me though is that that fear is stronger to me than the fear of one of you getting hit by the proverbial bus given that we're all homebound now i guess that does make sense but prior to us all being homebound i don't know given that we've been doing this for like seven years and we've never even had an argument about anything that's true except for show titles
Marco:
And given that I live on an island with no buses, I think we're mostly in a low-risk category right now.
John:
There's the sand bus.
John:
You could be out there taking a walk on the beach.
John:
Sand bus comes.
John:
You can't hear it.
John:
Totally silent.
John:
Boom.
John:
Kills you.
Casey:
You know, this might be destroying your OPSEC, so hopefully I left you a clean edit point.
Casey:
But yeah, I was made aware of the sand buses on the island in which you live.
Casey:
And it was described to me either via text or verbally.
Casey:
I don't recall how.
Casey:
and then i saw a photograph of it and it turns out no holy crap there is a little you know a short bus not in the like you know yeah demeaning way it's just physically a short bus and it's driving on the sand i would have expected it to be like lifted with like you know humongous tires on it or something like that but no it looked like a regular bus except you know a short bus but a regular short bus just driving up the sand casually well
Marco:
Well, they're pretty knobby tires.
Marco:
They're like half inflated, so they're pretty flat to the ground for traction, and they are modified to be 4x4 buses.
Casey:
Oh, that's wild.
Casey:
That's super cool, though.
Casey:
And yeah, you could get run over by it, and it is quieter on the sand, I would assume, than it would be on the pavement, so be careful out there.
Marco:
They're not that fast, though.
Marco:
Fair enough.
Casey:
And you're a runner now, so you can outrun them.
Casey:
yeah the running on sand sucks i tried that a couple times years and years and years ago because everyone everyone makes it look like it's so fun and delightful and i'm not even talking baywatch i'm saying like literally people i've seen in person make it look like it's so delightful and fun and now no not in my experience no it's like somebody decided running running okay needed to be made worse
Marco:
Someone said, you know what?
Marco:
This running I'm doing is too enjoyable because everyone loves running so much.
Marco:
We need to find ways to make it harder.
Marco:
And so some people decided to try to run on sand.
Marco:
That is not something I would recommend and certainly not something I have any interest in doing.
Marco:
By the way, I did want to take a very quick apology here.
Marco:
Last episode during the exercising segment, we made a reference to running and how California with its awesome weather is an easier place to run.
Marco:
This was a terrible time to reference California's great weather because California is going through some terrible stuff right now.
Marco:
It's really on fire.
Marco:
It's not in a good place.
Marco:
So we're sorry about that.
Casey:
Yeah, I think I piled on with you on that because making fun of Californian weather is one of my favorite pastimes and I feel like a big jerk.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So my bad.
John:
I agree.
John:
You two did sound like big jerks.
John:
I'm glad I didn't say anything.
Casey:
I have picked out my favorite listener of the show.
Marco:
6668 guy?
Casey:
James Neal.
Casey:
Yes!
Casey:
Who donated $6,668 to St.
Casey:
Jude Children's Research Hospital.
Casey:
You are, bar none, my favorite listener of this show.
Casey:
And thank you, James, for doing the service that...
Casey:
all of us, but really me, needed so badly, which was moving me off of the leaderboard on the St.
Casey:
Jude website.
Casey:
James, just yesterday, as we communicated via email, just yesterday, not one, but a veritable handful of ATP stickers was dispatched in our failing United States Postal Service to send to you.
Casey:
And so I would like to publicly thank James Neal, my favorite ATP listener.
Casey:
For buying my love 6,668 times by donating to St.
Casey:
Jude.
Marco:
And by knocking KC star Aaron Liss off the top of the list.
Marco:
After only about a day, it really wasn't that long.
Casey:
It was not long at all.
Casey:
And you know what?
Casey:
If you're going to troll somebody, you're going to do it.
Casey:
You got to do it the way James did.
Casey:
You've done good by donating a genuinely extraordinary pile of money to what I believe to be a really great charity.
Casey:
hospital and all that and beyond that the message was James Neal star or asterisk I should say you're welcome Casey just masterfully done from top to bottom and an extra thanks for all of our members or all of our listeners who donated to St.
Marco:
Jude which Casey's probably about to resell you all on but an extra thanks for all of that not only for donating to this amazing cause but also for the hilarious Casey trolling that so many of you did in your name and description fields
Marco:
So many people were named star, other name, or Casey where the A was made of stars.
Marco:
It was glorious.
Marco:
It's so great to be able to laugh so much at Casey's expense about this thing that is a really good cause and that is actually resulting in meaningful amounts of money being donated to a really, really good cause.
Marco:
So thank you all for both the goodness that came of this and also the amazing trolling of Casey in the process.
Marco:
I was laughing my butt off that whole next day reading all those names.
Casey:
I am happy to be trolled in this way.
Casey:
Additionally, I am really perturbed because I swear to you, I looked and quickly proofread the form where I did Casey Ampersand Aaron list.
Casey:
But there have been ampersands all over these different names.
Casey:
So I got to be wrong.
Casey:
I got to be wrong.
Casey:
As many people have proven you wrong.
Marco:
Everybody has proven that it does accept ampersands.
Casey:
Yeah, I must have fat fingered it.
Casey:
I swear I looked at it.
Casey:
Again, I'm not debating.
Casey:
I must be wrong.
Casey:
But my lived reality – let's talk politics now.
Casey:
My lived reality is that I swear I looked at that ampersand, but I guess not.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
So anyway, so what are we talking about?
Casey:
So in September, it is national cancer.
Casey:
Is it national or worldwide?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It doesn't matter.
Casey:
It's Childhood Cancer Awareness Month.
Casey:
And so RelayFM and associated people like us are trying to raise a whole pile of money for St.
Casey:
Jude Children's Research Hospital.
Casey:
St.
Casey:
Jude is a hospital where they treat all sorts of things for particularly childhood cancers, and they do so for free in the sense that they do not charge the families just not even a cent.
Casey:
And it's such an incredible thing, and it's such an incredible place, and it's near and dear to all of our hearts in many, many, many ways, but in no small part because our dear friend Stephen Hackett, you know, his eldest son, his life was saved by St.
Casey:
Jude, and I mean that literally, and that's really incredible and really phenomenal.
Casey:
And if—
Casey:
I have to get trolled a little bit every September to try to pay that back.
Casey:
It's well worth it to me.
Casey:
So if possible, please go to stjude.org, S-T-J-U-D-E.org slash ATP and throw a few bucks their way.
Casey:
It would be great if you could throw $5, $10, $15, $100, $1,000, $10,000, whatever, whatever you have.
Casey:
That's cool.
Casey:
Whatever you have would be great.
Casey:
Again, I'm doing the easy sell.
Casey:
Hopefully Marco will do the mean sell here in a second.
Casey:
But any amount of money you can donate to this cause is really great.
Casey:
And we're trying very hard during the month of September to raise money for St.
Casey:
Jude.
Casey:
So stjude.org slash ATP.
Marco:
So yeah, in addition, by the way, before I forget, live listener Weed Mountain in the chat has an amazing idea.
Marco:
They say, I think someone should do $6,669 as Casey Starr Aaron List.
John:
I was just going to say, so James Neal is at the top of the leaderboard now, but that doesn't mean you can't beat him, person who's listening now who has this much money who wants to give.
John:
You just have to do $1 more than you're the top of the leaderboard.
John:
And yes, Casey will send you stickers because I'm volunteering him to do it right now.
John:
Yes, I will.
John:
Every person who reaches the top of the leaderboard will get stickers until Casey has no more stickers left, and then he'll order more.
Marco:
Yeah, we can order more stickers if there's actually so many people who do this.
John:
There's a freaking question about James Neal, by the way.
John:
I don't want to reveal anything because I have no idea.
John:
I don't know anything about James Neal other than what he entered in the form, which is just James Neal space asterisk space.
John:
You're welcome, Casey.
John:
Lots of people have been asking, is this the famous hockey player?
John:
I don't know.
John:
If it makes you feel better to think it is, sure.
John:
Why not?
John:
I don't know.
John:
Maybe.
Casey:
I do not think so, but I don't know.
John:
Yeah, could be, but maybe not.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Anyway, if you want to beat James Neal, whether or not he's a professional hockey player, $6,669, that's all it takes.
Marco:
And then you too, you can put whatever you want to say up there until someone else donates one more dollar and beats you.
Casey:
Are we turning this into Bodie McBoatface all over again?
John:
Hey, if it keeps raising this much money, I think it's worth it.
John:
So it's great that James Neal did this, but statistically speaking, there's got to be more people who listen to the show who can afford to give that much to St.
John:
Jude.
John:
And it just feels like too much to do for a stupid podcast prank, but I'm here to tell you it's not.
Marco:
Because it's not like you're donating the money into the air.
Marco:
You're giving it to this amazing cause.
Marco:
This is incredible.
Marco:
And I will repeat my sales pitch slightly from last week.
Marco:
In summary, we are all, many of us who listen to this show, about to spend stupid amounts of money on Apple hardware we don't really need.
Marco:
because it's that season and so if you are lucky enough to be able to set money on fire every fall to upgrade a one to three year old computing device that still works fine but there's just a new flash one that you just want more I have to have the camera for my kids whatever your excuse is we all know that this is mostly a purchase because we like these things and they're nice not necessarily out of need or at least we don't need them as much as we say we do or as frequently as we actually upgrade them
Marco:
So if you fall into that camp, if you are lucky enough to be able to get all these fun gadgets, you know, in a less needful way, you can probably also afford to drop a nice donation to St.
Marco:
Jude on the order of like, you know, 50, 100 bucks, something like that, you know, more if you can.
Marco:
But, you know, if you're not in the like, you know, setting money on fire kind of capability range, I'm sure you can at least give them like 50 bucks, 100 bucks.
Marco:
So please give what you can and thank you very much.
Casey:
All right, let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
We have a lot to go through, but I'm sure it'll be quick, right?
Casey:
Tell me about, John, a GUI for APFS snapshots, if you please.
John:
I think it was Ask ATP last week where someone was asking about how to get that space back that's being taken up by snapshots, and I was saying you can use the TMUTIL command line, but it's kind of...
John:
fidgety and maybe you don't want to delve into that and it would be nice if the os had a gui for it we had two main suggestions for how to solve this problem one was that boot camp assistant like the little app that comes with your mac that you run to essentially set up boot camp on your mac as part of the process where it like you know makes a new partition where it's going to install windows or whatever it first apparently purges all snapshots just to like free up space and everything so some people saying hey if you just want to clear the snapshots just run boot camp assistant um
John:
I suppose that would work, but I'm a little bit leery of going through the process of bootcamp assistant and being confident that I'm not hitting the next button in the little wizard one time too far because I don't actually want to install bootcamp on my main drive.
John:
And so just using it for the side effect of cleaning snapshots seems not great to me.
John:
But anyway, that is an option if you like that better.
John:
Second thing that was suggested is Carbon Copy Cloner, which is a great disk cloning program that...
John:
I own and use for various purposes.
John:
Lots of people said that had a GUI for snapshots.
John:
It does have a GUI for snapshots, but it shows no snapshots from my disk, whereas TMUtil, this local snapshots, shows seven snapshots.
John:
So there's some disparity between what that GUI shows and what's actually there.
John:
It may just be showing the snapshots that you make with Carbon Copy Cloner because it can do a bunch of APFS snapshot stuff.
John:
It's very cool.
John:
But it doesn't... It seems like it's not...
John:
a general purpose GUI for removing snapshots.
John:
Cause like I said, it didn't show any, but I know I have some cause I can listen from the command line tool.
John:
So that's all I've got so far, but I just did want to list those because many, many people wrote in to tell me about them.
Casey:
And then tell me about the Xbox elite series two, if you please.
John:
That super expensive controller that I talked about as part of our sponsorship last week.
John:
A couple of things that I forgot to mention.
John:
One, I was talking about the trigger activation point, like how it's good that you don't have to pull the triggers as far, but it feels kind of bad because they hit these stops.
John:
Right.
John:
So you have to decide between a good trigger feel and, you know, faster reaction time.
John:
Another option that I saw when I was setting it up but decided not to go with is the software that you use to configure these.
John:
It's Windows software, so I was in Windows when I was doing this.
John:
I'm so sorry.
John:
That's why I'm playing Destiny anyway.
John:
You can set the trigger activation point in software.
John:
So you can leave the triggers on their full throw but tell it to activate when you just push them down 10%.
John:
which seems like, oh, that gives you the best of all worlds.
John:
Now it's the good trigger feel, and also it activates immediately.
John:
But to me, that just felt weird to have sort of a hair trigger, like the trigger has this huge amount of travel, but only the first 10% of it counts, and then after that, it's just wasted.
John:
So I decided not to go with that, but if you want to, it's an option.
John:
Also, a lot of people asked about reliability of these controllers.
John:
Obviously, I just got it, so I have no idea what the reliability is, but I have heard from a lot of people who had the original Elite and the Series 2 that
John:
a surprising amount of issues with switches going bad after a short period of time always after the warranty runs out because apparently the warranty is not very long but a shorter period of time than you would think and that that makes me think about like i don't know if i don't i've never owned a luxury car so i don't know if this is true of luxury cars like the idea that if you're going to make you know hundreds of thousands of a thing and you're going to sell it for years and years you can afford to do a huge amount of sort of reliability testing whereas if you're going to sell a hundred of them
John:
Maybe you didn't test every single little part of it so that it's completely durable.
John:
So if you get some kind of boutique car that they only make 100 of, it could end up being significantly less reliable than a Honda Civic that they are going to make thousands and thousands of.
John:
And I think it might be the same way with console controllers, where the controller that comes with your PlayStation or Xbox...
John:
has been tested to death because they know they're going to ship thousands and thousands of those it's not the world's greatest controller it's not super expensive it's not metal and magnetic and you know have all these fancy features right but it is extremely well tested and whatever those durability testing machines so that it's not going to go bad that's why you don't hear about oh don't get the xbox because the controller goes bad after your people buy xboxes and they use the controllers for years and years and years and they're fine
John:
Yes, all controllers can eventually break, and if you spill water on them, you have problems, and so on and so forth.
John:
But they're pretty durable.
John:
But this boutique $180 controller, apparently, maybe they didn't do enough durability testing, or it wasn't, you know, monetarily worthwhile for them to do enough durability testing, but it seems to have worse reliability than the super cheap controllers.
John:
That's one possibility.
John:
The other possibility is that every time it breaks, someone wails out so loud that the whole internet hears them because they spent $180 on a controller and something broke on it, so...
John:
it could be magnified by that.
John:
And the final thing is a couple of people recommended the PS4 back button attachment, which lets you put like paddles on the underside of a PS4 controller.
John:
I had been watching that thing when it came out, but I didn't decide to buy it.
John:
And then I said, you know what?
John:
I should just get that like months and months ago.
John:
I figured I should just get that.
John:
I should try it.
John:
But then they were out of stock everywhere.
John:
I don't know if Sony just stopped making it or whatever, but I did manage to find one thanks to a listener who gave me an inside connection to get one of these.
John:
So I have the PS4 back button on its way to me and I will let you know how that is when I get it.
Casey:
Nice.
Casey:
So last week, I somehow allowed you two jerks to force me to talk about my culinary habits.
Casey:
And I talked about this particular kind of rice-a-roni that I make occasionally.
Casey:
And we'll talk about that in a second.
Casey:
But in the process, I was telling a story about how I came from a family wherein mom made a meatloaf once and she threw it out in the backwoods in Connecticut.
Casey:
And we had tons of deer there at the time and it never got eaten after like a week either.
Casey:
And then you guys very rightfully pointed out, well, wait a second, aren't deer herbivores?
Casey:
And that never crossed my mind before.
Casey:
And then Matt Harmon saved the day and wrote in to say, I'll save you guys some videos of deer eating birds, but they are technically opportunistic omnivores.
Marco:
Aren't we all?
Yeah, right.
Marco:
Yeah, and I should have known this because where we live, there's a huge problem of deer eating people's trash.
Marco:
And they don't just eat, like, the plants out of the trash.
Marco:
They'll eat any kind of food that's in there.
Marco:
Like, they'll eat pretty much any food they find.
Marco:
So, yeah, I guess I should have known that but didn't.
Marco:
Sorry to all the deer out there who I misstated your food preferences for.
John:
I'm excited to see a video of a deer leaping through the air and biting a bird out of the air.
John:
I mean, I guess maybe they eat them after they're already dead.
John:
I don't know.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't know if they – I've never considered them as like hunters of other animals.
Marco:
But yeah, maybe I don't want to see that.
I don't know.
Casey:
Either way.
Casey:
And then with regard to the Rice-A-Roni, I only got a little bit of feedback.
Casey:
Thank you, listeners, genuinely for not lighting me up about this.
Casey:
But there were a couple of very angry people about this Rice-A-Roni thing.
Casey:
Let me just make it clear.
Casey:
This happens like two, maybe four times a year.
Casey:
This is not like a weekly Rice-A-Roni night.
Casey:
So everyone, don't worry.
Casey:
Aaron cooks us nice, nutritious meals pretty much all the time.
Casey:
I would if I wasn't a disaster in the kitchen, obviously, because I'm cooking Rice-A-Roni when I'm cooking.
Casey:
So yeah, we're okay.
Casey:
We're not going to keel over and die, I promise.
Casey:
I had a request for help with regard to replicating a Synology from one place to another.
Casey:
A lot of people wrote in to tell us a couple of things.
Casey:
Thomas Barak was the first person or perhaps the best summary I saw.
Casey:
And Thomas wrote, "'Hi, Hyper Backup is the client.
Casey:
Hyper Backup Vault is the server.'"
Casey:
So as with Apple TV, Apple TV Plus, Apple TV the app, Apple TV the hardware, all these things, I feel like the Synology naming convention is truly terrible.
Casey:
But again, Hyper Backup is the client.
Casey:
Hyper Backup Vault is the server.
Casey:
Thomas continues, put the vault in the Synology at your parents' house.
Casey:
This is the one that was going to receive the backup.
Casey:
And use Hyper Backup to copy your entire Synology.
Casey:
This is better than a sync.
Casey:
If you delete a file on your Synology and you're syncing, it gets deleted on the synced machine.
Casey:
A regular backup allows you to go back in time and get files that are no longer on your home Synology.
Casey:
Hyper Backup can do incremental backups, so the first one is the longest.
Casey:
So I have not yet tried that because my parents' internet connection is still wonky for reasons that I can get into in the post show if you care, but you probably don't.
Casey:
And then finally, Evan Jay was the first I saw, but many, many, many people wrote in with a video from Linus Tech Tips, which I'd heard of but never seen before.
Casey:
And there was an episode where I think it was a sponsored episode, if I'm not if I'm honest.
Casey:
But nevertheless, they talked about setting up astrology and they very briefly ran through how to set up hyper backup and hyper backup vault.
Casey:
And that was very convenient for me to watch.
Casey:
So thank you for all of you who wrote in with regard to that.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by a new podcast called Bring Back Bronco, The Untold Story.
Marco:
This is the story of a truck and the story of a country.
Marco:
The rise, fall, and rebirth of the Ford Bronco is a metaphor for the last 50 years in America.
Marco:
The Ford Bronco is one of the most beloved brands in American automotive history.
Marco:
But when the last Bronco rolled off the assembly line in Wayne, Michigan on June 12, 1996, it was the end of the brand and the start of a lot of questions.
Marco:
This eight-part serial podcast is a 50-year odyssey of blood, sweat, and dirt, taking you from the dizzying heights of the post-war boom to the most watched police chase in American television history.
Marco:
I actually got that reference.
Marco:
I was there.
Marco:
and this year's rebirth of the Bronco.
Marco:
Host Sonari Glinton goes on the road trip of a lifetime to find out why Ford killed the Bronco and meets the passionate fans and team of Ford employees who went underground to bring it back.
Marco:
Season one digs into questions that tell us about as much about America as it does about this iconic vehicle.
Marco:
The OJ Simpson chase, see I got the reference, happened more than 25 years ago, and yet there are still a lot of questions about its impact.
Marco:
For the first time ever, they will take you inside Ford to discover what was happening that night.
Marco:
Inside a Ford factory, inside the Ford call center, and inside the chairman's office.
Marco:
And almost as soon as the last Bronco rolled off the line, people began scheming for it to return.
Marco:
From fans in the hills of East Tennessee to renegade employees within Ford, they followed the desperate attempts to revive the brand.
Marco:
So join Bring Back Bronco as they go inside Ford's most secretive building, Studio S. This creative laboratory gave birth to the Thunderbird, Mustang, and even the original Bronco.
Marco:
Inside, designers struggle to turn the Bronco mythology into reality.
Marco:
So search for Bring Back Bronco anywhere you listen to podcasts.
Marco:
We will also include a link in the show notes.
Marco:
So once again, Bring Back Bronco, this great new podcast about the rise, fall, and rebirth of the Ford Bronco.
Marco:
Our thanks to Bring Back Bronco for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
i took my fancy pants flashlight marco and i took it into a big long tunnel all right how did it go it went very well actually i i appreciate the suggestion uh it occurred to me that in order to have the privilege of touring the tunnel before it opens uh i donated the princely sum of 100 to this foundation in order i mean 100 is a lot of money but i mean in the grand scheme of things it's not that much
Casey:
So anyway, I donated $100 to this charity thing, to the Blue Ridge Tunnel Foundation, in order to help them turn this into a park sort of thing.
Casey:
And then it occurred to me earlier today, I spent $100 for the privilege of going in and, what, $70, $80 on this stupid flashlight in order to take it through the tunnel?
Casey:
I mean, I'll use the flashlight other times.
Marco:
I believe it's about $70, yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, so it was funny to me that it was almost the entire cost of the trip, if you will, to go and see this thing.
Casey:
But yeah, the Blue Ridge Tunnel, I'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
I think we talked about it briefly a few episodes ago.
Casey:
But suffice to say, it's a nearly mile-long tunnel that was dug in the mid-1800s, and it was dug from each direction toward the center.
Casey:
And when they met...
Casey:
They were like six inches off or something like that.
Marco:
No, it was even better than that.
Marco:
It was like a quarter of an inch or something.
Casey:
Yeah, whatever it was, it was preposterous.
Casey:
And so I did tour it.
Casey:
You know, the first hundred or so meters slash yards...
Casey:
We're a little creepy.
Casey:
I'm not going to lie.
Casey:
But the flashlight worked well.
Casey:
It was plenty bright, even on the high but not turbo setting.
Casey:
And once I got through the first 100 yards or so, I felt like, oh, actually, this is just cool.
Casey:
It's not creepy at all.
Casey:
And again, I'm very glad I had the flashlight.
Casey:
The turbo setting, which is the thing where it's like 1100 lumens or something like that and can only last for a couple of minutes.
Casey:
That thing's bright, man.
Casey:
That thing is super bright.
Casey:
I wish it could go more than two minutes, but it gets seriously hot.
Casey:
I don't remember if I ever talked about it on the show, but if you shine the flashlight against your hand with a couple-inch gap between the flashlight and your hand, in the turbo mode, which is this 1100 lumen mode, your hand starts to hurt from the heat after just five or 10 seconds.
Casey:
It's preposterous how much heat that thing throws when it's in the turbo mode.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Again, I appreciate the recommendation.
Casey:
We'll put a link in the show notes if you care.
Casey:
The flashlight worked out super well.
Casey:
And if you happen to live in West Central, I guess, Virginia, over in the Waynesboro area, supposedly sometime in the next couple of months, the Blue Ridge Tunnel will be open to the public.
Casey:
And I highly, highly, highly recommend it.
Casey:
It was an extremely cool experience.
Casey:
So you should check that out.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Tell me, John, about other people who have similar woes as you with regard to their beloved Mac Pro.
John:
this is jan holzman who says that he experienced the same mac pro problems as me and he went through the same things as me smc reset and vram or whatever and he just gave up i was like well i'll just i'll help beta 6 fix the issue uh and he's happy to report that since beta 6's release uh with the new boot rom apparently it fixes the issue and we have we have the versions that are included with beta 6 maybe we'll put them in the show notes but they're so long uh
John:
but it's good and i got this report from a lot of other people that basically beta 6 came and their mac pros that previously wouldn't wake from sleep do wake from sleep this makes me happy not because i'm planning on installing betas but because i had this fear in the back of my mind that my obscure problem like maybe with some weird one-off thing with my computer or whatever and it would just never get fixed and then the the you know the final version of big sir would go out and i'd be afraid to even install the release version because like what if i install the release version and i can't wake from sleep i could be in the same situation again
John:
But it sounds like Beta 6 fixed it, so I feel better about the release version now.
John:
Unless it breaks again in Beta 7, so I'll be watching for that.
Casey:
Did you notice that you probably don't even use SMB very much, but SMB is completely hosed in Beta 6 now?
Casey:
That you have to manually load the CACs each time you reboot in order to get it to work?
John:
Yeah, I saw you say that, but I'm not booting into Big Sur anymore, except on the DTK.
John:
And when I'm on the DTK, I'm just using Xcode, so...
John:
No, I have not noticed that, but that sounds crappy.
Casey:
Yeah, it was not.
Casey:
Because I happened to see it.
Casey:
I think it was Daniel Jowcott that had put a tweet of his own or somebody else's in front of me.
Casey:
And if it wasn't for that, I would never have figured out what was going on because it looked like a networking failure rather than a, like, I don't know what Samba is right now failure.
Casey:
So, yeah, it was very, very peculiar.
Casey:
But I have decided that even though I was very enthusiastic about Big Sur at first, I'm kind of backpedaling on that a little bit.
Casey:
And I think I'm going to wait it out for at least a month or two.
Marco:
Oh, definitely.
Marco:
I mean, first of all, if you're a podcaster, many...
Marco:
There's audio apps, including I think still everything by Rogue Amoeba, which we all depend on a lot, simply don't work in Big Sur because they changed some critical functionality that these apps use.
Marco:
And so it basically doesn't work yet.
Marco:
And they work on it, but I don't think it's ready yet.
Marco:
And so that's one problem.
Marco:
And then also...
Marco:
Big Sur is such a big change to so many parts of just basic stuff like Window Chrome, the way widgets are drawn.
Marco:
It's a huge change to the OS's fundamental functionality, really.
Marco:
And
Marco:
So much of it is really still very rough around the edges.
Marco:
We've been in beta now all summer.
Marco:
Summer's over.
Marco:
We're nearing likely release times, and I don't think it's anywhere near ready yet.
Marco:
I really hope that they don't push too quickly to get the first Apple Silicon Macs out there, which will require this, and therefore will probably require it to be released.
Marco:
But it's so not ready.
Marco:
Here we are in mid-September,
Marco:
and it's like every time i use big server which isn't even that often because i'm using it only on the laptop every time i use it i run into graphical glitches and other like weird behavior stuff i mean heck even like even i was 14 like the last couple betas of ios 14 have been buggier than the earlier ones in the summer
Marco:
So we're coming in hot with the software this year.
Marco:
Among other issues I've had with it, Spotlight has stopped working sometimes and requires a reboot.
Marco:
Apps, instead of zooming in when you launch them, instead of zooming in from their icon, they sometimes will get stuck sliding in from the right.
Marco:
Who knows why?
Marco:
And my favorite bug of all time, the other night my phone wouldn't charge via Qi charging until I rebooted it.
Marco:
Oh, neato.
Marco:
That was a fun one.
Marco:
So yeah, I would say don't jump on these releases on version dot zero.
Marco:
If they come out anytime soon, give it some time.
Marco:
They could use a bit of time.
Marco:
However, I have amazing follow up.
Marco:
A bug has been fixed.
Marco:
I have been complaining on this show for about 14 or 15 months that
Marco:
That ever since iOS 13 beta 1 last summer, there was a bug in iOS mail where periodically new messages would stop appearing in the list.
Marco:
And the only way to see your new messages was to go out of the inbox view to the root screen and then go back into your inbox view and then they'd be there.
Marco:
And this was infuriating because you just seemingly stopped getting mail.
Marco:
And what was actually happening is the messages were being inserted at the bottom of your inbox instead of at the top.
Marco:
So you just weren't seeing them if you had more than five messages in your inbox.
Marco:
But it was really frustrating.
Marco:
And that's a horrible bug because you could be missing email without realizing you're missing anything.
Marco:
That bug persisted through every single version of iOS 13, to the best of my knowledge.
Marco:
I don't know if it's in 13.7.
Marco:
However, I can verify that bug has been fixed.
Marco:
Not in iOS 14 beta 1, not in iOS 14 betas 2 through, I think, about 5 or 6.
Marco:
However, as of the last few weeks, that bug is fixed.
Marco:
I have confirmation it is fixed.
Marco:
Finally, the Apple Mail bug that prevented new messengers from showing up sometimes is fixed since last year.
Marco:
I am so happy.
Marco:
Finally, something's getting better.
Marco:
Hooray!
Marco:
So, I can honestly say iOS 14 is better than iOS 13 in this one very important to me way.
Casey:
oh man well that's exciting uh so maybe since you're having such good luck you can get some changes made to app review that's yeah yeah i don't even know what to say about this so supposedly apple is uh implementing some of the promised changes to app review and you can now suggest changes to the guidelines and there's a place where you can do that online
Marco:
Yeah, this was announced earlier this summer, I think right after WBDC or like the second day of it or something.
Marco:
And we talked about it, how this was potentially really, you know, it sounds really groundbreaking that they were making these couple of changes.
Marco:
This was seemingly like directly in response to the hey brouhaha that happened right before WBDC.
Marco:
So basically, yeah, two things that they weren't going, they were no longer going to delay like minor bug fix updates over guideline violations.
Marco:
except for those legal issues.
Marco:
So that's nice.
Marco:
Uh, that basically they wouldn't like delay your like 1.0.2 update because you, they disagree with your internet purchase stuff.
Marco:
Like they would give you a chance to get that bug fix out and then work on whatever they want you to work on, like in the next version.
Marco:
Um, and then yeah, as you mentioned, Casey, they also said that you could appeal decisions more easily, which is kind of already had that, but also that you could suggest changes to the app store rules.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
John covered it well when this came out.
Marco:
It's hard to suggest changes to the rules and expect those to go anywhere because you're suggesting the changes to the rules to Apple, who made the rules.
Marco:
And the judge in any argument you make is Apple, who made the rules.
Marco:
And so I can't imagine that this is actually going to result in any meaningful changes, because if Apple thought the rules should be different, they would change them.
Marco:
If Apple says, here's the rule, and you say, I disagree with that...
Marco:
what are your chances of them saying oh okay you know what we were you know turns out you changed our mind we're going to change this rule now for everybody like that it just it seems like this is much more likely to end up in just some lip service and no real meaningful changes
John:
Well, the way I'd phrase it is that it doesn't – this sounds good from a PR perspective, but the chances are probably about the same as they ever were that things will change.
John:
Because in the past, Apple has certainly changed the rules.
John:
And in the past, people have complained about the rules.
John:
It's just that there was no official formal system defined for this, right?
John:
So I think the odds of the rules changing are the same as they've ever been.
John:
App Store rules change all the time, and developers give feedback all the time.
John:
And those two things are –
John:
connected in some way but now there's an official channel for them to be connected like there are already examples of people saying oh this apple is doing something dumb because they didn't have a rule that covered my specific case and i used the new system and said hey uh my thing should fit within the rules and apple agreed and they changed the rules that happens all the time and it's always happened all the time but it's it's like you're saying marco is it going to happen more now that we have this official channel no it's just
John:
a more formal recognition of a process that was already happening informally and your odds are probably about the same as they ever were if you if you point something out and apple's like huh we hadn't thought about that they'll change the rules and they always would have done that it's just that now that you'll get like essentially like with marco's bug report now you'll be able to see i did a thing and they told me in response to that thing they changed the rule as opposed to the old system which was you complain about it and at some point in the future the rule changes if apple agreed with you but they never say oh we changed this rule specifically because you asked about it right
John:
And in the same way now, like, they may tell you, we fixed this bug because you reported it, but they might have already known about that bug, couldn't duplicate, multiple people could have reported it.
John:
It's a similar system.
John:
So these are all good, positive changes.
John:
And sometimes just having an official channel is a perceived advantage, even if, in practice, it doesn't increase your odds of getting any changes.
John:
The one thing they fumbled on this, though, was...
John:
The bug fix is no longer delaying guideline violation issues or whatever.
John:
when they announced that and then like the next week someone was like i tried to to send the 1.0.1 update and apple blocked it because i have some problem with iap right i thought they said they weren't doing that anymore and apple's response was i think i don't know if this is an official apple response but someone said you know secondhand they heard that oh well that whole thing about not delaying bug fixes that starts when ios 14 ships
John:
it's like well don't announce it and then say oh we're not doing that yet so there's a whole bunch of people who said i thought they weren't doing this anymore they said they weren't going to delay things and so that's the main reason i put it in follow-up is apparently didn't have to wait for i was 14 release but as of now i guess now apple won't delay now why did it have to wait why couldn't as soon as they announced it that be the rule i don't know like takes a long time for big companies to do anything but starting now those things they said they were gonna do they're gonna do so good job apple
John:
all right so i should have mentioned this earlier apparently john you've also gotten a bug fixed by apple yep just wanted to update that bugs do occasionally get fixed there was a simple bug in the finder that i reported on like one of the early big sir betas and it actually got fixed and it wasn't a duplicate so i got to actually see that it got fixed without just noticing that it got closed when the duplicate got closed um so there we go bugs are being fixed it's exciting
Casey:
Imagine that.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then tell me about the Big Sur menu bar, please.
John:
So this is interesting.
John:
We've talked about the Big Sur menu bar and how, not how translucent it is, but how much it shows through what's behind it in a weird kind of smeary way.
John:
I actually took a run at trying to fix this a while back.
John:
What I was trying to, I was actually just doing it as part of Switch Glass.
John:
I was like, yeah, that'd be a cool extra feature to have that maybe I can make the Big Sur menu bar be opaque.
John:
Wouldn't that be cool, right?
John:
And my idea was to just
John:
put a big white window behind the menu bar and so i messed around with that and i was pretty sure that i could get a big white window behind the menu bar but the menu bar did not care like it's like yeah i've got a window underneath me but i don't care like the menu bar in big sur was as of the betas that i was doing was hard-coded to only look at the desktop background picture and decide based on the desktop background picture to do a smeary thing
John:
And so then the other option is like, okay, well, how about you just put a big white stripe at the top of your desktop picture?
John:
Apparently the menu bar, the way it sort of samples the desktop picture, it's not simply sort of showing through the pixels that are behind it.
John:
So even if you put a white stripe at the top of your desktop picture, it doesn't quite do what you expect.
John:
It's a complicated algorithm.
John:
So A, it doesn't care what's behind it.
John:
And B, it doesn't just show through the pixels that are behind it.
John:
So that seems to, and I gave up.
John:
I'm like, well, I guess this is not going to be a feature of Switchglass.
John:
So I just let it go by.
John:
right but tyler hall uh has a a good web page explaining his attempt to hack this um it's is it clever it's a type of approach that i would have dismissed without trying it and i think i continue to dismiss it and not want to try it but it shows how desperate people are for this to work so tyler found the same thing that i did that you put a window behind in the menu bar it doesn't do anything right
John:
but you can put a window on top of the menu bar.
John:
And I was like, okay, okay, Tyler.
John:
Yes, you're right.
John:
You can do that.
John:
But if you put an opaque window on top of the menu bar, you can't see the menu bar anymore.
John:
So he's like, aha.
John:
But the way I fix that is, can you guess without reading the article?
John:
No.
John:
You make the window slightly transparent?
John:
You just read the names of the menu and draw them yourself on top of your window that you put in the menu bar.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
So he's basically drawing the menu bar.
John:
The good part is you get to choose your own font and whatever, but he just draws the words on top.
John:
uh and then they don't highlight yet he had he had the highlighting sort of working uh but as you can imagine like trying to get that to work and be responsive and keep up with changes in the menu bar is an absolute nightmare so i don't think this is a valid solution to this problem but it's you know 10 points for for desperation programming which is like i'm just gonna draw the menu by myself i don't need the os to do that that's incredible yeah yeah
John:
yeah so but no but the main reason i put this in there is that you know kudos to tyler for for trying this out but in the article where he talks about this he he brings up some stuff that i had forgotten about all past keynotes one of them was like he dug out the i talked about this on past shows that how leopard was the first translucent uh menu bar and that that apple wimped out because it was just too darn translucent and they made it more opaque in the
John:
When Leopard was announced on stage, there was a segment where they were talking about the new desktop on Leopard.
John:
This is when Steve Jobs was still alive, so you should watch the little segment.
John:
It's like a two-minute clip that he has there.
John:
And one of the things that was on one of the slides about the features of the new desktop was prominent active window.
John:
That was listed as a feature of the new look of the desktop.
John:
Basically that you can tell which window is active, which is something we talked about on past shows with Big Sur, how it's hard to tell.
John:
So Tyler's also got videos showing active versus inactive windows in Big Sur versus what they were like in Leopard.
John:
Another big selling point on Leopard, by the way, was Unified Appearance, which, you know, they basically got rid of Brush Metal and made all the windows look the same, right?
John:
But it's just funny to see prominent active window on an actual slide with Steve Jobs standing in front of it as a feature of their new OS.
John:
And this is the same presentation where Translucent Menu Bar was also pitched.
John:
So there's some good and there's some bad.
John:
Take them both and there you have what, Casey?
Casey:
The Facts of Life.
John:
You got it.
Casey:
Yeah!
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
God, I was really put on the spot there.
John:
I'm sweating.
John:
It was a paraphrase for the first part, but you got it.
Casey:
That's intense.
Casey:
I guess I can just check out for the rest of the episode, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Marco, you're going to get that one?
John:
No.
John:
Okay.
Marco:
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Casey:
Uh, so Epic and sign in with Apple who, uh, this is, this is gross.
Casey:
Like, is it?
Casey:
Well, so when I first read this, I was like, this is disgusting.
Casey:
And then I thought about it.
Casey:
Well, Epic broke the rules.
Casey:
Like Epic is being a bunch of jerks.
Casey:
But then, well, but it seems like if Apple wants you to treat this as like a... What is it?
Casey:
A common carrier?
Casey:
I think when he made this point a few episodes ago before I was able to, and it really made me mad.
Casey:
But if Apple wants to treat so many of their services as a thing that you can rely on always, including the App Store...
Casey:
Then they should act like that.
Casey:
And, you know, there are a million and seven reasons why signing with Apple may not work with Epic anymore.
Casey:
It could be something as simple as a certificate that expired that they can't recreate.
Casey:
But it's a bad look, man.
Casey:
I don't dig it.
John:
As of this recording, all we have is a tweet from Epic that says, this is from Epic Games itself, that says, Apple will no longer allow users to sign into Epic Game accounts using Sign In With Apple as soon as September 11th, 2020.
John:
If you use Sign In With Apple, please make sure your email and password are up to date.
John:
So this is Epic communicating out to its customers.
John:
And I have a webpage that I'll put in the show notes that says, if I was using Sign In With Apple, what do I do now?
John:
Because Sign In With Apple is going to stop working, right?
John:
and the angle Casey was taking on this of, like, oh, you know, Epic broke the rules, but then this is a consequence, and so on and so forth, I feel like is the power, crime, and punishment angle, which is not constructive in this debate of, like, they did something bad and they deserve to be punished, but how severe should the punishment be?
John:
How many lashes with the stick could they have?
John:
Or they signed a contract, they have to agree to it, here are the consequences.
John:
I continue to want to frame this as...
John:
If you're Apple, you should do what's good for your business and the ecosystem and not spend all your time thinking about exactly how harshly the rule breaker should be punished as a lesson to the others or something, unless that somehow you somehow think that's going to further your long term goals.
John:
So in this case, there's a bunch of complicated technical factors, as we discovered when we were looking into using sign in with Apple as the in the ATP membership program, ATP dot FM slash join.
No.
John:
we discovered that in order to use sign in with apple you need to have an app like it's basically made for like apps whether on the mac or on an iphone or ipad you need to have an app because when you go to to create a sign in with apple thing it says just tell us what your app is and you can't get past that part as far as marco told us anyway without putting in some kind of app so we talked to apple about that and said is this do you actually need an app can we just make like a dummy app or whatever and they were like you know like you can technically yes you can just make an app and have it just be a dummy app and
John:
But it just seems like it's not made for that.
John:
So we said, OK, well, it's not it really wants you to have an app and we're just not going to use it for our purposes.
John:
You can see where this is going with Epic.
John:
Epic Games entire development account was terminated.
John:
And so if sign in with Apple only works with an app and that app was part of an account that was just terminated, you can see all sorts of technical reasons why sign in with Apple may eventually stop working.
John:
with the associated app that no longer exists in the account that no longer exists now obviously apple's back end is complicated and they have all sorts of databases of stuff and they probably only soft delete things it's not like they're actually deleting the stuff or whatever but you can imagine that their system is not set up to support sign in with apple associated with an app that no longer exists because the account that belongs to was terminated so there are technical reasons to explain why this might be bad
John:
But again, I don't want to take the crime and punishment angle, and I don't want to take the, oh, technically this is hard angle.
John:
The real angle is Apple.
John:
Do you want signing with Apple to be successful?
John:
Do you want people to use sign-in with Apple?
John:
We know the stick with sign-in with Apple, and we've talked about it, which is like, hey, if you make an app and you use any kind of third-party login, login with Facebook, login with Google, you have to also offer sign-in with Apple.
John:
That was a good move because sign-in with Apple is good, and you don't want all these apps using a login system that you don't control, and you just have to have as an option.
John:
You're not forcing people to use it.
John:
So a sign-in with Apple then has to compete with sign-in with Google, sign-in with Facebook, and creating your own account, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Or if apps don't want to use sign-in with Apple at all, they can just have their own sign-in system.
John:
So I was a proponent of that rule.
John:
But now, after this, everyone is looking at this right or wrong.
John:
Developers are looking at this right or wrong and saying, oh, I don't want to use sign-in with Apple because Apple can yank it away at a moment's notice.
John:
And yanking it away is like, okay, well, you're yanking it away from the developer.
John:
But the real impact is the tens, hundreds, thousands, potentially millions of users who use sign-in with Apple with your account.
John:
And now you have to communicate to them and say, oh...
John:
because of something that you don't care about having to do with us fighting with apple all of your user accounts are about to disappear so you better come to our website and enter an email address and associate with the thing before it all goes away again right or wrong you can say well those you know they they have the wrong picture of it it's actually all epic's fault or whatever
John:
this events like this make developers feel less safe using sign in with apple and that is apple's problem not how much should i punish epic not what are the technical limitations of terminating someone's account and so on and so forth apple's real problem is if you want sign in with apple to be successful you have to make developers confident especially now where it's like it's a it's a new feature it's not well established yet it's just getting going
John:
Something like this can really make signing with Apple unattractive.
John:
Because you're forcing everyone to offer it if they have with Facebook or Google, it's not like it's going to disappear from apps, but it's going to make developers less likely to promote it, more likely to keep offering Facebook and Google and Twitter or wherever else as alternate sign-in services, and in general just being more wary of it.
John:
And that's bad for Apple.
John:
So I hope Apple is looking at this and thinking...
John:
we should do whatever it takes on our back end to make sure sign in with apple continues to work for epic under these extraordinary circumstances not because we like epic and not because we think they didn't deserve it or do something wrong because we totally did and we'll get to that in a second like apple really is mad at epic but because if we want sign in for apple sign with apple to be successful we need to make developers feel comfortable using it that it's not going to go away even if developers are
John:
irrational or wrong or not understanding the limitations the fact is every single sentiment i saw from a developer you know online today was i am now more scared of signing with apple than i was before and that's bad for apple
Marco:
See, I actually am going to take a slightly surprisingly forgiving approach on this particular point.
Marco:
I mean, you're right that pragmatically Apple has a problem on their hands with PR with signing with Apple because of this.
Marco:
However...
Marco:
I think that a lot of people are saying Apple is taking this away.
Marco:
And I am one of the people who assumes that this is actually a technical side effect of the developer account disappearing.
Marco:
I don't think Apple separately decided to do this to them, to take this away from them.
Marco:
I think this is just what happened because, as John and Casey said...
Marco:
Signing with Apple is one of many Apple online services related to apps that depend on some kind of certificate or identifier or something that is associated with the app.
Marco:
And so if the developer account gets terminated and the app is gone, then it is reasonable, I think, that some of these services will stop working.
Marco:
Like, if the account is totally gone and the app is totally out of the store...
Marco:
People at Apple who were designing these services presumably thought, well, that business is over.
Marco:
That app or that service is over if the app is just gone and the developer account is gone.
Marco:
That's a significant business disappearing thing.
Marco:
This, I think, is somewhat unique.
Marco:
that Epic's app is gone from the store and their developer account is gone, but they still are trying to run a business.
Marco:
That wasn't something that they did intentionally.
Marco:
Well, asterisk, they basically did.
John:
And people still have the app installed.
John:
That's the most important feature.
John:
Even though it's gone from the store, people still have it installed.
John:
And what you're saying is why I mentioned it may be irrational for people to be wary of it.
John:
Because if you think about it, it's like if you are a developer and you're afraid of this scenario happening to you, what it means is you develop an app
John:
your Apple support signing with Apple, then Apple removes your app from the store and deletes your developer account.
John:
And you're like, yeah, but I still want signing with Apple to work.
John:
You will still want it to work with what?
John:
They deleted your account and removed your app.
John:
You have way bigger problems than signing with Apple not working.
John:
So like from a rational perspective, it's like developers shouldn't be worried about this scenario because if this scenario happens to them, they have so much bigger problems than signing with Apple not working.
John:
But it doesn't matter.
John:
Perception is what matters.
John:
And the perception is,
John:
Sign in with Apple.
John:
I've got to be careful of that because Apple could, quote, unquote, take it away at any second.
John:
Apple can take anything away at any second.
John:
They can take your app away.
John:
They can take your developer account away.
John:
That's part of the whole Apple having lots of power.
John:
So, rationally speaking, I don't think this instance should make people more wary.
John:
But I think it does make people more wary.
John:
And that's why, despite everything you said about the technical limitations, I think it would be a smart move for Apple to go to heroic measures...
John:
To preserve sign in with Apple for their bitter enemy, because it's it will make people more confident using sign in with Apple.
John:
They'll be like, even if Apple totally terminates my account, at least I won't have to deal with the headache of dealing with user accounts and all my users will still have account identifiers that I can map back and you know, the whole nine yards like that's what you have to do sometimes with services like this.
Marco:
yeah but i don't think apple has the like first of all i don't think they can make web services that are that resilient to these edge cases they have shown repeatedly that they can't um or at least that they won't but i think ultimately like as a developer this shouldn't affect your choice whether you sign up with apple or not this should affect your choice whether you have an ios app or not right because like this if my app is gone from the store
Marco:
Whether or not my developer account still exists, if my app has gone from the store and I'm not allowed to put it back, my business is over.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
Overcast is done.
Marco:
It's over.
Marco:
If I don't have an iOS app, it's done.
Marco:
That is the bigger risk here.
Marco:
Now, I think what this means and what you're saying, John, with Apple's problem here and being more pragmatic, this just goes to show...
Marco:
You shouldn't be offended that signing with Apple is going to stop working.
Marco:
You should be offended that Epic's developer account was suspended because that's the actual cause here, and that's the part that seems like it might have been an overreach with this dispute that they're having.
Marco:
So removing Fortnite from the App Store for violating the rules seemed at the time to be, you know, well, yeah, of course they're going to do that.
Marco:
That is, you know, whatever you think of the rules, that is a reasonable reaction for Apple to have had as a reasonable counteraction for Apple to take.
Marco:
Epic's app violated the rules blatantly.
Marco:
Okay, so it gets kicked out of the app store until and unless they decide to fix it.
Marco:
That's one thing.
Marco:
But then to also kill their entire developer account, like whatever it was two weeks later, that seemed like extra punitive and an extra overreach.
Marco:
And that had much more destructive outcome than just removing the app from the store temporarily while they worked this out.
Marco:
And that's the part that if you want to be mad at Apple for something, get mad at them for that.
Marco:
Get mad at them for killing this entire account two weeks after they removed the app from the store seemingly out of spite.
Marco:
The account removal was seemingly out of spite.
Marco:
It doesn't seem like they really needed to kill their developer account.
Marco:
It seems like they found a justification to do it and then did it.
Marco:
And that's what's causing the extra ripple effects of all this other stuff.
Marco:
so get mad at that but i don't think this has anything to do with signing with apple and i don't think developers should draw any conclusions related to signing with apple based on this draw conclusions about the cause of this problem that this business that everyone that all these users and this company expects to go on in other ways and eventually possibly back in this way that this business is going on but the developer account was killed like
Marco:
that's the real problem here.
John:
I can just hear the crime and punishment people saying, but Marco, you don't understand.
John:
The contract clearly said, if you violate the rules, we can terminate your account.
John:
And so Epic had to know this would happen and therefore it is all valid and useful.
John:
And again, I would say the crime and punishment angle of what did the rules say?
John:
What did you agree to?
John:
What did the contract say?
John:
this is not a court we're not debating whether it was legal to do these things right there actually is a court case going on about that now but like i come back to the same perspective was this the best move for apple in terms of the whole big picture the future long-term developer relations customer satisfaction like whatever you know continuing to have fortnight on the store there are so many factors that mix in here and and
John:
Anytime Apple does not use a holistic lens to guide its decision making, but instead falls back to perhaps the crime and punishment mindset, which is like they broke the rules and these were the rules.
John:
Therefore, we're going to do it.
John:
Use the contract you signed.
John:
It said we could terminate your account.
John:
Guess what?
John:
We're terminating your account.
John:
That's fine.
John:
And maybe that will hold up in court.
John:
We'll see.
John:
But that doesn't mean it's necessarily the right move.
John:
The right move isn't the maximum extent that you are legally entitled to according to your lawyers.
John:
That's not always the right thing to do.
John:
Again, corporate relationship management.
John:
Sometimes it's more important to...
John:
smooth over the relationship than to quote unquote win the argument and speaking of arguments as you would expect in all these type of giant corporate legal cases apple is counter suing epic and we know that epic was suing apple to say give us all our things back and of course in all these cases the other party says well guess you're suing us we're suing you because you can sue anybody for anything and these companies have a lot of lawyers so they are if you want to read
John:
uh, Apple's, uh, whatever it's called complaint document.
John:
It's filled with all sorts of, uh, flowery expressive language about how terrible Epic is and how mean they are.
John:
Uh, and speaking of being mean to each other, the latest mean thing that Epic did and the final bit, I promise on the Epic Apple thing, uh, and this follow up for this week, uh, Epic before, I don't know when they did this, but on the same day that the, that the Epic, uh, games account was terminated, uh,
John:
epic through their server side stuff turned off in-app purchase in fortnite so now the only option is to buy the vbucks directly through through epic before it had the in-app purchase and also the epic one and they said see 50 of the people chose the cheaper option now right now as we're saying this the only option available in fortnite if you still have it installed is to do it through epic probably because you can't do an app purchase if you don't have a developer account anymore i was gonna say that actually might be forcing them as well it almost certainly is
John:
Right, but there you go.
John:
Like, just one final wave goodbye, which is, all right, see ya.
John:
Millions of people have this installed, and they'll be giving us money, but maybe not because this new season started, and they can't play it.
John:
And so everybody's a loser, as usual, and the court cases wind on.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
But John, here's the thing.
Casey:
You know, iOS is the most secure platform, and it's the most secure because it has rules, man.
Casey:
It has rules and policies.
Casey:
What do you expect?
Hmm.
John:
Crime and punishment.
John:
You knew the rules, you disobeyed them, now you get the punishment.
John:
Is the punishment just?
John:
Is it what's best for all of us as a collective?
John:
I don't know, but it's the punishment, so now you will receive it, and that is just.
John:
Crime and punishment people, like, they just, I don't, they just sort of, I don't want to say the A word, authoritarian, not the other A word, but like,
John:
I was thinking the other one, actually.
John:
Just rush to the aid of whether it's rushing to the aid of Epic, this billion-dollar company, or rushing to the aid of Apple, just to say they are the power wielder that I subscribe to, and therefore their written rules and their contracts are automatically just and the best thing to do.
John:
And I continue to argue this from the perspective of trying to help Apple help itself.
John:
by doing the right thing for the collective, and the collective being, as we've said before, customers, developers, and Apple itself.
Casey:
Yeah, the thing that bothers me is I hear people say, like, well, you know, we care about the user experience here at Apple.
Casey:
We care about the user experience, and the user experience is paramount.
Casey:
That's all Apple cares about is user experience.
Casey:
It trumps everything, darn it.
Casey:
And that's why, you know, that's why Apple only allows in-app purchase through Apple's thing, because it's safer and people can trust it.
Casey:
It's for the better user experience.
Casey:
It's better than having to enter a credit card.
Casey:
It's better than any other way.
Casey:
Oh, and by the way, we're taking away Fortnite because somebody was mean.
Casey:
Like, is that better?
Casey:
Is taking that away better for me, the Fortnite player?
Casey:
Well, I'm not actually a Fortnite player, but you know what I mean.
Casey:
Like, is that better for me, a Fortnite user?
Casey:
Hmm.
Casey:
Doesn't feel like it.
Casey:
Like, it doesn't feel like this is better for Fortnite players to have Fortnite disappear from the app store.
Casey:
It doesn't feel like it's better for Fortnite players to have no access to the next season or whatever they call it.
Casey:
Like, I don't know.
Casey:
I do have some amount of sympathy for the crime and punishment people because, yeah, I mean, there was a clear set of rules that were broken.
Casey:
But at the same time, like, you can't say that Apple only cares about the user experience and then in the next breath say, but we made the user experience way crappier.
John:
And oh, oh, well.
John:
But what you're getting at is not a crime and punishment angle.
John:
What you're getting at is like, you know, that if you let big companies violate the rules because they're important, see Facebook or whatever, but if you just let Epic get away with this and didn't take Fortnite off the store, that's bad for the big picture.
John:
Not from a crime and punishment angle, like we must punish to show that we have the power.
John:
Everyone knows Apple has the power.
John:
If you let Epic get away with that and give them no punishment,
John:
Like that's bad corporate relationship management, too, because then now you're announcing to the world that you can walk all over us and do whatever you want.
John:
And if you're big enough company, we just won't say anything.
John:
And, you know, like you do not want that to happen.
John:
You want to work it out between the companies, which apparently whatever those talks were, they fell down or, you know, if they happened at all.
John:
Right.
John:
So.
John:
But what you don't want to think is, what do I do to make sure I don't look weak or that I punish them so I scare other people away?
John:
That's not a good dynamic.
John:
It's also not a good dynamic for it to be a free-for-all.
John:
So you have to strike a balance.
John:
When you're striking the balance, if what's in your head is like saving face or...
John:
Trying to intimidate other things or worst case scenario, if you just get angry and you're like, I want to punish them because punishing them feels good.
John:
Right.
John:
That's the worst headspace to be in.
John:
Right.
John:
And again, I'm personifying Apple, which is a big company with lots of people.
John:
I'm sure they talk this out and have lots of strategies.
John:
But in the end, it is run by people and people.
Marco:
people are people so why should it be casey well and apple's apple's run by people with pretty thin skins in certain areas and and i think this this does appear you know i i said i believe like the second weekend like they seem like they lost their cool a little bit on this and that's how it seems i mean you're right they had to do something epic basically walked up and punched him in the face right like what epic did totally
Marco:
totally justified removing fortnite from the app store that i have no argument with not only did not only should apple have removed fortnite from the app store they had to they absolutely had to epic blatantly violated the rule intentionally like punched him in the face so yeah apple had to enforce the you know the rule as they enforce it to most other places they had to kick it out of the app store
Marco:
They didn't have to do the developer account.
Marco:
And the developer account suspension has caused so many of the knock-on problems that are not so clear-cut in Apple's favor.
Marco:
It even caused the judge in the court case to basically tell Apple that this was a bit much.
John:
The judge said it about deleting the other account, the other one that the Unreal Engine is developed on.
Marco:
Which Apple was going to do.
Marco:
Yes, the judge stopped them.
Marco:
Which was even more of an overreach.
Marco:
So, like, Apple, like, clearly the app store removal is justified.
Marco:
The developer account suspension and what Apple even wanted to do was depending on the other one about the SDK, like...
Marco:
That is clearly like – it looks so much like Apple lost their cool with that.
Marco:
And they're doing things out of spite or anger or just wanting to flex in such a big way that they intimidated Epic out of being able to fight the main in-app purchase policy part of this fight.
Marco:
Almost all the parts of this that make Apple look really bad are a result of that area of what they did, not just removing it from the App Store for violating the rule.
Marco:
If you look at this from the big picture, again, you have all these corporate relationship issues.
Marco:
You have the developer relations issues, which just keep compiling – or keep compounding, rather –
Marco:
Certainly what's going to amount out of this is increased regulatory scrutiny.
Marco:
I don't think the judge in the case is going to look kindly on Apple's actions on this because they sure haven't so far.
Marco:
And so there's all these other bad outcomes for Apple or negative effects from Apple that come from them having pushed too far with the punishment way further than they had to with the developer account terminations.
Marco:
I feel like Apple...
Marco:
was not thinking strategically when they went for that.
Marco:
They were just thinking with anger and with spite and with a big giant flex to show their power to try to intimidate this first lawsuit out of existence.
Marco:
And that's not a good look for Apple and also strategically probably unwise.
Marco:
And it's kind of hard to see – again, it's hard to see this company that we like –
Marco:
Acting this way, that seems not only mean, but also like ill-advised.
John:
if i cared more about epic i would like all these things i'm always trying to give apple advice on what i think they should do that's because i care much more about apple than epic uh i i could give advice to epic to say epic if you want to do what's right for your customers and for your business that what you're doing is stupid and that would also be true but i care so much less about epic that i'm not making maybe if bungie ever gets in a fight with apple i will it'll be harder for me to pick sides but the the reason i'm arguing from the perspective of apple is trying to say apple what you're doing is stupid for yourself
John:
What Epic's doing is also probably stupid for themselves, but I don't care that much about them.
John:
So just want to make that clear.
John:
Even though I'm always coming in, quote unquote, on the side of Apple, what I'm doing is telling Apple they're making the wrong choices for all of us.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, that's why we do every Apple complaint on this show, because we like Apple.
Marco:
We love being their customers.
Marco:
We love their products, most of them.
Marco:
And if it was something that we didn't like, we don't talk about Windows that much.
Marco:
Because none of us like Windows.
Marco:
So we don't need to nitpick every detail about it because it's just not something we even care enough about to do that.
Marco:
We don't really talk about Android even when they do stupid stuff because we don't care about Android because we don't use it and we don't love it.
Marco:
We love Apple stuff.
Marco:
And that's why we care so much about the parts of it that aren't right.
Casey:
So, John, what would you do if you were Apple right now?
John:
Oh, I mean, boy, the ship has sailed on so many things.
Casey:
That's the thing.
Casey:
What would you do today?
John:
Yeah, I don't know.
John:
At this point, I feel like with the court cases in motion, usually what tends to happen is that both parties have to get to the point in the case where they can smell which way the wind is blowing, and then you cut a deal based on who has an advantage.
John:
I don't think now is an optimal time for Apple to try to deal with
John:
Like that time has passed for them.
John:
But when these court cases go through and the lawyers on both sides have an idea of like, does it look like we're going to win this or does it look like they're going to win this?
John:
Then you end up with like a settlement to just make it all go away.
John:
And the settlement is structured based on both of their reckons about who is probably going to win or not, right?
John:
And so I feel like that's the time to deal.
John:
But yeah, what you do is you make some kind of deal.
John:
Like Epic clearly thinks their cut is too much.
John:
And I've said this, the Apple's cut is too much.
John:
We said this on past programs that I personally...
John:
have absolutely no problem with apple cutting favorable deals with netflix and amazon and all these things in fact i want them to cut more deals and i don't think it is unfair or anything that like an individual developer doesn't get the cheaper price and amazon does just because
John:
That's the way the world works, right?
John:
That would be successful corporate relationship management.
John:
The big, powerful partners you have, try to keep them happy and in a mutual beneficial relationship, even if it is, quote unquote, unfair, because why, you know, for how long did Netflix get a better deal than everybody else?
John:
Who knows?
John:
And if you are a developer of an app, that might seem unfair to you.
John:
But bottom line is we're all happy we had Netflix for that time.
John:
And it makes sense because your app, you are not Netflix, right?
John:
So you don't have that kind of cloud, right?
John:
So I have no problem with that structure.
John:
An alternative would be if Apple just can't stomach that and really wants to ride this whole train of where we treat everybody equal, which has never been true.
John:
But if they really want to go that way.
John:
Fine, Apple.
John:
Like the way you make a deal with somebody who is upset about the cut you're taking is you work out something with them that you have to give something to.
John:
If what you have to give is like I know they already gave by doing 8515 for the second year of subscriptions and that was good.
John:
make a similar gesture lower the rate for everybody lower the rate for everybody subject to a certain new set of rules that just happens to be gerrymandered to include fortnite like there's tons of tons of options you can do that apple has done in the past it just seems like these two couldn't quite get it together and now it's an all-out shooting war right and you know you don't want it ever to get to that point but here we are and having a
John:
When it comes time to settle, yeah.
John:
Depending on how the things go, Apple may have to give a little bit, right?
John:
That's how these things work.
John:
Everybody has to come out unhappy about something, right?
John:
There's no magical deal where you can smooth it over with Epic, but Apple gets everything they want and vice versa.
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Casey:
So there's an Apple event next week.
Casey:
Yay!
Marco:
I gotta say, I'm having a hard time being excited about Apple's new stuff right now because their attitude is so off-putting.
Marco:
This is going to be a hard Apple season for me to get excited.
John:
I don't have that problem.
John:
I'm very excited about it.
John:
I know Marco is very upset about it.
John:
He's very disappointed in his good friend Apple doing things that he doesn't like.
John:
I'm disappointed too, but I am super excited about RMAX and whether or not RMAX arrive in this event.
John:
They're supposed to be coming before the end of the year.
John:
I'm getting a lot of pressure in this household to get another laptop for the kids to do remote school stuff.
John:
And I am mightily resisting that because now is not the time I want to buy an Intel laptop.
John:
And I keep saying, just wait, just wait the arm.
John:
And then I hear, but when are they coming?
John:
I'm like, I don't know.
John:
But before the end of the year.
John:
So I am excited about our Macs.
John:
I'm super excited about all that stuff.
John:
I'm even kind of excited about iOS 14 because I had to install it on my iPad to use the Xbox controller thing.
John:
As for this event, well, let's talk about the invitation.
John:
The invitation with another weird treatment of the Apple logo.
John:
The word is underneath it.
John:
Our time flies, period.
John:
Please join us for a special Apple event from Apple Park.
John:
Watch online, blah, blah, blah.
John:
September 15th, 10 a.m.
John:
Pacific time.
John:
Time flies, and the logo is a swirly kind of apple thingy.
John:
The criminology in this that I've heard is, one, the obvious one,
John:
uh apple watch is one of the things that is rumored to be announced here time that makes sense time flies apple watch fits perfectly another is time of flight sensors which have been rumored to appear on a bunch of apple devices where it sends out something and sees how long it takes to bounce back and using that information judges depth as a better way to do depth for ar and everything don't we already have that on the ipad pro that changed nothing except that uh is that the lidar one i forget but anyway i think um the rumor is that it's coming to the phones though um
John:
But this isn't supposed to be a phone event.
John:
And then the final one I feel like is time flies is the whole like COVID time warp where time has no meaning anymore and no one knows what the data is.
John:
And it's like time flies.
John:
Is it time for an Apple event?
John:
What's happening?
John:
I don't know.
John:
But anyway, the rumors are that I've seen in this is that don't expect iPhones because in the earnings call, Apple said the iPhones are going to ship later this year by a few weeks or whatever.
John:
The fact that the iPhones are going to ship later doesn't necessarily mean they have to be announced later.
John:
So that's not confirmation there won't be iPhones.
John:
But it seems like the sort of hinting to the world of leakers and other news sources is trying to set expectations that you shouldn't expect an iPhone.
John:
So if we're not expecting an iPhone at the September 15th event, what should we expect?
Casey:
I think watches seems most reasonable.
Casey:
Um, maybe iPads.
Casey:
I mean, I could see, I could see them lumping watches and iPads together and then saving the phone for later.
Casey:
Uh, I could also see actually we're probably due for Apple TV and come to think of it.
Casey:
If you look at apple.com or at least if I last, I looked a day or two back.
Casey:
Oh no, they changed it a day or two back though.
Casey:
Apple.com was like nothing but Apple TV stuff or Apple TV plus or whatever the hell it's called.
John:
Oh, there was, that was because the Emmy awards.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Um,
John:
When you say iPads, though, I think what you mean is the the low end iPad getting, you know, a nicer version with like there's a bunch of rumors like the one that's not going to have face ID, but it won't have a home button either.
John:
And like just basically bumping the bottom end ones because the iPad process recently got updated.
John:
So this would be I forget what they just call that one.
John:
they got updated but it was literally like only that oh yeah they enabled the other the other gpu core yeah right and i think they might all have the the full ram now instead of just the big one something like that but it was not a real update but anyway the only the only ipad rumors i've seen have been like oh the low-end ipad is going to get the look of the of the pros but it won't actually have face id one of the rumors was like touch id would be in a power button on the side or something it's really confusing crop of rumors but anyway
John:
Low-end iPads, potentially.
John:
The over-ear headphones I saw floating around in the rumor mills.
John:
Obviously, we're not keeping up too much with the rumors on this, but there's a bunch of things that could potentially be announced.
John:
Plenty to fill an event, especially an online event where they don't have any kind of minimum time they have to fill.
John:
They'll just...
John:
announce a bunch of products and when they're done announcing it the thing will be done potentially also the first arm mac i mean you know maybe like they said before the end of the year but september i don't know it seems early for me for mac but that's what i'm rooting for 100 i have no expectations but i would love to see an arm based laptop up here because i would immediately order it for one of my children
Casey:
Yeah, so I don't know if I'm really in the market for anything, because I was on Clockwise earlier today, and one of the questions was, what are you excited for at this event?
Casey:
And I would like a small watch.
Casey:
What is it, 40 millimeters?
Casey:
Yep, it's a wonderful size.
Casey:
It is a wonderful size, but with cellular, it's not the best battery life.
Casey:
Like, I don't even use the cellular that often, and my phone is almost always near my watch unless I'm going for a run.
Casey:
And, man, the battery life on mine has been not good recently.
Marco:
Do you have a beta?
Casey:
No, no, no, no, no, no beta, no beta, nothing like that.
Casey:
I just feel like it's not been great.
Casey:
I'm not beta on my phone, not beta on my watch, nothing.
Casey:
And so I really feel like battery life would – more battery life on the small watch, particularly with cellular, would be welcome.
Casey:
But there's nothing else about this watch other than battery life that I'm like, it's time to upgrade because it's a Series 5.
Casey:
Like it's very nice and I do like it a lot.
Casey:
But –
Casey:
I don't know what else I really want.
Casey:
I guess blood oxygen sensing would be kind of convenient right now, wouldn't it?
Casey:
But I mean, I don't know what else I want.
Casey:
But I always say this and then they announce something that seems mundane, but I've decided it's going to change my life.
Casey:
And about half the time I end up buying that hardware because it's going to change my life even if it doesn't.
Casey:
So who knows?
Casey:
But...
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
In terms of hardware, the watch is pretty good right now.
Casey:
You know, battery life aside.
Casey:
I'd really like a new Apple TV, though, actually.
Casey:
I would really like a new Apple TV because I am still rocking my original... I don't remember what generation this is, but the original of the swipey remote...
Casey:
1080 apple tv that's on my my fancy 4k screen and i've been waiting for a year now to get a new 4k apple tv and move this one to bedroom duty but it hasn't happened yet and i feel like it's imminent right right anyone those are those are slow too yeah i want to talk about the apple tv angle but i want to give marco a second to to talk about any other things that he's looking forward to or expects in this event
Marco:
The Apple Watch, I'm interested.
Marco:
I'm like I'm watching it.
Marco:
Hey!
Marco:
I'm interested.
Marco:
The Series 5 with the always-on screen was a huge departure.
Marco:
Actually, I should plug also our last episode of Under the Radar where David and I basically – we did our annual thing of spend Dan Riccio's hardware surplus –
Marco:
Which is the idea is like technological progress marches on and every year you kind of get like, you know, some some efficiency gains through the progress of technology.
Marco:
And so how do you how do we want Apple to spend those gains?
Marco:
Sometimes they spend those gains making the things smaller and lighter and thinner.
Marco:
Sometimes they spend those gains making the things faster.
Marco:
Sometimes they spend those gains adding power hungry features or sometimes some balance of all of those things or some of those things.
Marco:
And so the Series 5, you're right, Casey, the battery life, at least in the 40mm, the small one, which is the one that I wear as well, the Series 5 battery life is not great if you do battery-hungry things like running more than an hour of workout mode or...
Marco:
cellular streaming especially streaming audio over cellular is is pretty rough on the battery and so i have had actually a couple times when my watch ran out of battery before the day was over during those heavy usage days uh where where i would where i was doing like a workout like doing a run outside recording the gps of the run while streaming audio over the cellular is about the worst thing you could possibly do to it
Marco:
And on those, like if I did like, you know, say a half hour run with workout mode, cellular, GPS, audio streaming, then that evening it'll be at like 15% or 10% or it'll have to go into low power mode.
Marco:
So that, you know, that's not a great...
Marco:
But the Series 5 had this amazing Always On Screen that spent a lot of that surplus battery that we had in previous generations.
Marco:
So what I mostly want from the Apple Watch is just a small evolution of that.
Marco:
It's already, processor-wise, it's already fast enough for everything that I need to do with it.
Marco:
All I want is more battery life out of the watch.
Marco:
And what I especially want, again, this is stealing from under the radar, so go listen to that, please.
Marco:
But what I especially want is for them to...
Marco:
If they're going to spend battery surplus on some kind of new feature for the watch, I want it to be letting apps update more often in the background and letting them use more CPU time when they do.
Marco:
Because the software restrictions on watchOS...
Marco:
of how incredibly stingy it is with giving apps any kind of CPU time or letting apps background update more frequently or letting complications get updated more frequently.
Marco:
Those are all for power needs, to minimize power usage.
Marco:
And those are really just massively holding back what apps can reasonably do and do well on watchOS.
Marco:
And so anything they can do to raise those limits or to let apps update more frequently, whatever, all those, that will have significant, like hard to see and hard to quantify, but real benefits to the watch in practice, how it actually is to use the watch, both Apple's apps and especially third-party apps.
Marco:
I've given up on wanting custom watch faces, and that's more of an OS thing anyway.
Marco:
We would see that kind of thing probably at WWDC, not during the hardware event.
Marco:
So that already looks like it's not going to happen this year.
Marco:
I still want it to happen, but I don't think they'll ever do it.
Marco:
Yeah, I mostly just want for the watch an evolutionary, let's have Series 6 make everything a little bit nicer and maybe add one little novelty somewhere.
Marco:
If we're looking at our traditional exit interview of the outgoing model as it's about to be replaced...
Marco:
I think the series five is mostly great and I don't have many complaints that aren't related to every Apple watch.
Marco:
I have some complaints, believe me, but it's like, they aren't things I expect to change.
Marco:
And there are a lot, a lot of them are like, you know, design nitpicks about the faces and stuff.
Marco:
So anyway, moving on to other items.
Marco:
I would like to see an update to the iPad mini for totally selfish reasons.
Marco:
My son's is slowly dying or slash being killed.
Marco:
And it is, I think about almost two years old now, but it's still the most current one.
Marco:
And so I would like to see an update so that if and when it gets fully killed, if I decide to replace it, I'm not just replacing it with the exact same one for the exact same price that I bought two years ago.
Marco:
How is it dying?
Marco:
What's dying about it?
Marco:
The Lightning port is having significant problems charging.
Marco:
And based on some research and some Twitter responses, this is actually a known issue specifically with the current generation of iPad Mini.
Marco:
Part of it is due to the way kids are...
Marco:
kind of heavily use iPads they're always plugged in so there's always like some some pressure on that charging port as they're like holding the iPad with the charging cable in it using it so there's like you know flexing that goes on but there's also apparently some like significant firmware issues specifically with this model and charging where charging cables often aren't recognized for a long time after they're plugged in and there's it seems buggy as well so
Marco:
There's some kind of issue with this that we are hitting that I'm not super happy about.
Marco:
But anyway, separately from that, yeah, I'm with all the rumors.
Marco:
I don't expect to see iPhones quite yet.
Marco:
And so beyond that, this could be the other accessories, things like headphones.
Marco:
I would love to see the over-ear headphones.
Marco:
It's probably too soon to see any kind of significant AirPod update.
Marco:
But, you know, over ear versions of the AirPod Pros would be very interesting to me for like, well, if I ever travel again.
Marco:
And then finally, I would also love to see Apple TV like everybody else.
Marco:
You know, that's I keep having to buy them because they keep either dying or we keep buying more TVs.
Marco:
And I feel terrible having bought so many of the old Apple TV, the very old Apple TV 4K.
Marco:
I don't even know what I would want out of a new one.
Marco:
I mean, I've given up on the remote ever being better.
Marco:
I don't think... As long as Alan dies in charge of what Alan dies in charge of, I don't see anything like that getting better.
Marco:
And he still is, so I don't expect changes there.
Marco:
But, you know, we can dream.
Marco:
I just don't want to have to... Again, same thing with the iPad Mini.
Marco:
I just don't want to have to keep buying the same thing for the same price it's been for years and years.
Marco:
Either make it cheaper or make it better.
Marco:
That's what technology does.
Marco:
But ultimately...
Marco:
I do have concerns, as voiced earlier, about where the software is right now.
Marco:
I don't think iOS or macOS are really in a very releasable state right now.
Marco:
iOS is closer.
Marco:
iOS 14 could be released, and I guess it would be in some ways, like my mail bug, it could be in some ways better than iOS 13 has been for a year.
John:
As soon as they fix that mail bug, you're like, ship it, that's it.
Marco:
but there are still little bugs in Springboard and stuff that feel very beta that being said some of these hardware releases are probably going to be nice and even though I'm kind of mad at Apple right now in general I think they'll probably get me to buy some stuff I think they will your wallet will get over it so back to the Apple TV and transitioning to this item that I'm probably going to clear out of the notes here the item is from June 11th
John:
and in the notes it reads ps5 hardware reveal that's right the playstation 5 hardware was revealed in in june uh but we're not in june anymore but anyway the reason i want to talk about it today is related to the apple event and it's related to the apple tv and it's related to the xbox which also made a bunch of announcements actually recently as in like yesterday or the day before or whenever it was um
John:
So the PlayStation 5 hardware reveal, briefly, I don't know if you two probably saw it.
John:
What it looks like is a regular game console that's kind of swoopy and it's like vertical and all the photo shots or whatever.
John:
The thing you don't realize when you look at it is just how huge it is.
John:
You thought Xbox was huge LOL?
John:
PS5 is huge LOL.
John:
It is the biggest console you've ever seen.
John:
It's like comically big.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Sony is careful not to put it next to other hardware, but in all the sort of scale drawings that people had, it's... I don't even know if it's going to fit in the place where my PlayStation was.
John:
But anyway, it looks like a controller.
John:
It's white and blah, blah, blah.
John:
The interesting part of it, as compared to the PS4 announcement, is they announced two models.
John:
One that has an optical drive and one called the PlayStation 5 Digital Edition that does not have an optical drive.
John:
In typical Sony fashion, at least in the release of PlayStation 5, first they showed the controller, and we talked about it on the show.
John:
Then they showed the console...
John:
they still haven't announced i think as of our recording a shipping date and they still haven't announced prices and since june that's been the case right maybe they're waiting for microsoft to go first maybe they just haven't decided yet uh but that led to a lot of speculation looking at the playstation 5 the one with about the optical drive saying all right well i mean i i'm not gonna use the optical drive i've never even had an optical disc in any of my playstations so i'll get the one without the optical drive will the one without the optical drive be cheaper
John:
if it is cheaper how much will it be cheaper because that you know that blu-ray drive is not that expensive in terms of the you know the components right but maybe they'll make the other one cheaper as a loss leader or my hope and this is not going to happen but i would have loved it if they made the the digital edition one without the optical drive made it more expensive and gave it more internal storage but it's like hey you're you don't need you know who doesn't need optical discs people who
John:
are willing to pay more to store everything on internal storage or to use the external storage expansion, which will also be very expensive because it has to be this super fast SSD that qualifies according to their specs or whatever.
John:
So make the digital one more expensive.
John:
People's heads would explode if that happened.
John:
I don't think it's going to happen, but anyway.
John:
I'm probably going to get the digital one.
John:
This is all relevant and relevant to Apple TV because Microsoft, in typical Microsoft fashion, has now announced all their stuff and they didn't hold stuff back.
John:
They'd shown the Xbox Series X a while ago.
John:
It's that Black Monolith thing I think we talked about on the show.
John:
Um...
John:
And it's Xbox Series X, and the whole naming scheme was like, this is Series X, but we're going to have other series that are different versions of this console.
John:
Xbox naming is a mess.
John:
It makes Apple's naming look beautiful.
John:
But this generation of console is going to consist of, as far as we know now, the Xbox Series X and the Xbox Series S versions.
John:
And these are not the Xbox One or the Xbox One S or the Xbox One X. And the Xbox One is not the first Xbox.
John:
Yes, it's... Anyway.
John:
So, Microsoft has two consoles as well.
John:
We'd seen the Series X, which was their big, powerful one, and we compared that, and we talked about how they were going to use a constant clock speed and big fans and this big vertical tower thing, and it looks weird, and everyone's using SSDs and all that stuff.
John:
The Series S was the other shoe to drop.
John:
The Series S is...
John:
The smaller, much smaller, like 60% the size of the Series X, less powerful console lacks an optical drive.
John:
So if you look at it, you're like, oh, it's just kind of like the PlayStation one.
John:
The only difference is the PlayStation just took one giant console and just removed the optical drive, but...
John:
Microsoft has their optical drive-less one is actually smaller.
John:
How can it be so much smaller?
John:
Well, the smaller one doesn't do games at 4K.
John:
It's up to 1440p at 120 frames per second, whereas the big Xbox Series X one is up to 4K at 120 frames per second, right?
John:
So this is for if you don't have a 4K TV or you don't care about 4K, because the Series S will upscale to 4K for your 4K TV.
John:
But if you don't care about the resolution, this plays... Like, what games?
John:
This plays...
John:
in the previous generation i could say this plays xbox one games what the hell do i say now this plays xbox games this plays xbox series x slash s games like they both play the same games is what i'm saying this is a next generation console this is microsoft's next generation console they both play the same games but the series s doesn't play them at 4k but that's like the only difference right so maybe you wouldn't even notice the difference depending on how far away you sit from your tv because again it will upscale to 4k if you needed to or whatever
John:
um it can play video streaming at 4k so you can watch netflix in 4k and everything like that but it's way smaller presumably maybe quieter or whatever but here is the killer microsoft announced prices and a ship date so their ship date is released on november 10th pre-order starts september 22nd so now it's up to up to sony to say what they're going to do both of them are aiming for holiday this year right but sony hasn't announced yet right but here's the pricing
John:
The Xbox Series X is $499, which is less than a lot of people expected.
John:
$500 is still a lot for a game console, but it's, you know, it's a launch console of their most powerful thing.
John:
The Series S is $299.
John:
You know what else is $299?
John:
The most expensive Apple TV.
John:
this is apple tv's problem as marco said either make it good or make it cheaper wait it's that expensive the apple tv the 64 gig apple tv is oh no maybe i'm getting this wrong am i getting this wrong it's like 199 it's 179 versus 199 right still embarrassing 199 versus 299 the the apple tv does not play games 100 less well than the the next generation xbox console that just doesn't happen to do 4k
John:
i know the apple tvs are powerful i know the gpu is good but like as a gaming platform to be even within shouting distance of the next generation xbox console granted the wimpy one without an optical drive you know the apple tv doesn't have an optical drive either
John:
that's a bad situation for apple tv to be in i like that box is just i don't know what they're thinking with the apple tv is that what is what market are you aiming at because i don't feel like it's a particularly premium experience in terms of streaming stuff i think some of the built-in uh software on televisions is starting to compete with apple tv maybe the the roku stuff and the fire stick are still a little bit janky but some of the tv building stuff has the advantage of being built in and can be pretty snappy and has a good picture quality and supports all the features anyway
John:
FDV has got serious problems.
John:
They need to fix the remote, they need to fix the price, or they need to make it a high-end thing or whatever.
John:
But back to the console world, this pricing is a problem, potentially a problem for Sony, and potentially the ship date is a problem, because that Series S console, if you set aside the sort of spec wars and just sort of, I don't know, like, desire to have the best of everything...
John:
If people are honest with themselves, and especially if they don't have a 4K TV, there's no real reason as far as we can tell right now to get the Series X. The Series X also has double the internal storage, just one terabyte SSD instead of 512 or whatever.
John:
But $299 is a very attractive price for a launch of a next generation console, even if it's the wimpy version.
John:
And everyone thinks, and I agree, that the PlayStation 5 will not be able to come close to $299, either one of them.
John:
People are thinking that the good PlayStation 5 is going to be $600, and then they're saying, well, how much can they remove if they remove the optical drive?
John:
Because that, as far as I know, is the only difference.
John:
I mean, obviously, they could do storage size differences if they wanted, but it seems like the only difference between the two PlayStation 5s is one has an optical drive and one doesn't.
John:
How much can one optical drive cost?
John:
$10?
Marco:
Yeah, $30 maybe?
Marco:
We're not talking a lot of money here.
John:
How much does it cost Sony to buy that optical drive?
John:
And they're going to sell millions of these things and they probably buy tons of optical drives for their actual Blu-ray players if they still sell those.
John:
So the parts cost isn't that much.
John:
So if the big good PlayStation 5 is $600...
John:
Can you imagine the digital edition being less than $500?
John:
And $500 is the price of the good Xbox with all the features.
John:
So this is going to be interesting.
John:
And also the ship date of November 10th.
John:
The fact that Sony hasn't even announced the ship date, does that mean Sony's not even sure if they're going to hit holiday season?
John:
Or is their ship date going to be later?
John:
If Sony ships after Microsoft, like if their ship date is after November 10th,
John:
I don't know.
John:
I think Sony has some problems here.
John:
Sony, I feel like, still has a good reputation with gamers.
John:
People like it.
John:
People like the exclusive titles.
John:
Everything's going for it.
John:
It's the leader in this generation of consoles.
John:
But come holidays, especially in these COVID times, you want to get the kids a new next-generation console.
John:
One of them costs $299, and the other one starts at $500.
John:
Boy, that's going to be a tough sell.
John:
And I'm still getting a PlayStation 5, obviously, but...
John:
I'm a little bit worried about Sony in this generation, and I'm also worried about Apple.
John:
With the Apple TV, which now has a competitor that, you know, a next-generation gaming console for $100 more than an Apple TV, and it comes with a controller.
Marco:
Well, Apple will sell you a set of Mac Pro feet for that same price, the $299.
John:
But the Mac Pro feet are the next generation console of feet for your computer.
John:
At least they're the best.
John:
That's what you were saying.
John:
If you're going to make a set-top box or whatever thing... Anyway, if you're going to make an Apple TV type thing and you want it to cost a bazillion dollars, at least just make sure it's the best.
John:
I mean, I think we agree those are the best wheels available for the Mac Pro.
John:
So yeah, you're paying way too much for them.
John:
But when you get them, you're like, but they are nice wheels.
John:
You get that Apple TV and you're like...
Marco:
is it really that nice yeah i mean you can play games in 4k i suppose but you can't play the kind of games that you're gonna be able to play on the xbox or playstation yeah i mean and what apple would probably argue is like well i mean first of all they don't care about what value they deliver second of all there is that 329 ipad in the lineup so that i think that is their 300 gaming device not the apple tv apple's heart was never super into apple tv gaming and
Marco:
And it also seems like Apple's heart is not super into the Apple TV hardware product at all in general.
Marco:
And it's always been kind of like the Mac Mini of like, it remains a product in their lineup, but it's never much of a priority for them.
Marco:
And I think what has become clear is that
Marco:
there's not much market for that kind of device anymore.
Marco:
It's especially not much market for a premium.
Marco:
If you consider the Apple TV premium, which in some ways it is, and in some ways it isn't the, the ubiquity now of smart TVs quote has really taken a lot of wind out of the sales of this market for like premium TV connected streaming boxes.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
Because now you have these two massive competitors that when the Apple TV was first kind of coming up didn't exist.
Marco:
You have extremely cheap streaming things you can plug into TVs that will also play Netflix and stuff like that.
Marco:
And you have smart TV stuff being built in to almost every new TV.
Marco:
You can't buy most good TVs without all that smart stuff built in.
Marco:
It's there whether you want it or not.
Marco:
If you buy a halfway decent TV, it's going to have all this built-in apps and stuff.
Marco:
And so there's decreasing need for Apple to even make the Apple TV at all.
Marco:
And I think their effort in the product line reflects that.
Marco:
And that being said...
Marco:
It also doesn't help that the most recent generation of Apple TV has been so mediocre.
Marco:
And I'm not talking about just the 4K.
Marco:
I'm including the whole Siri remote generation.
Marco:
It's been so mediocre in so many ways.
Marco:
So much of what Apple seemed to want for it in the app ecosystem didn't pan out.
Marco:
The Apple TV, the app-based Apple TV was always a mediocre entrant in the market.
Marco:
And now the market's gone.
Marco:
And so while I still use them almost every day, and I have smart TVs now, and I don't want to use the TVs built-in garbage because the Apple stuff is nicer in many ways, and I trust Apple a little bit more with privacy stuff.
Marco:
But I have to admit the difference is getting smaller and smaller.
Marco:
We recently had to set up a new TV, and I was out of HDMI cables.
Marco:
I have an Apple TV ready to go for it, but I couldn't hook it up because I didn't have a cable for a few days.
Marco:
We just watched Netflix using the built-in app on the TV.
Marco:
It was a little worse in some ways, but it was mostly fine.
Marco:
I always hear, whenever I invest heavily in the overcast UI...
Marco:
I will often hear from like pragmatic users or friends like, you know, it's not really worth investing so much into this because for the most part you like hit play and then most of the time you're using the app, you're not looking at or operating the UI.
Marco:
Like you're just listening to your podcast, right?
Marco:
That's kind of how TV stuff is.
Marco:
When they showed all these demos of browsing real estate listings on your TV and buying clothes on your TV and stuff, that kind of stuff, the OS and platform sophistication might matter.
Marco:
But what most people ended up actually doing with their Apple TVs is watching Netflix and stuff.
Marco:
And the difference between the Apple TV watching Netflix and any other device in the universe watching Netflix is not that big of a difference.
Marco:
And whatever differences there are, are kind of minimized by the nature of watching stuff on TV.
Marco:
You know, like the podcast app of like, you can design it as much as you want, but the reality is you're hitting a few buttons and then you're just laying down the remote and watching something.
Marco:
So the actual time you're interacting with this stuff is not that high, especially as a percentage of time you're using it.
Marco:
And the differences are getting smaller and smaller over time as the built-in TV stuff is getting better.
Marco:
And I don't expect any of these built-in smart TV makers to ever be as capable of making good software experiences as Apple is.
Marco:
Notice I'm saying capable, not like Apple is capable of making great experiences.
Marco:
They largely haven't on the Apple TV, but they are capable of it when they try.
Marco:
But I just don't see how this market matters anymore.
Marco:
And even Apple, they even brought their own content services to other TVs now.
Marco:
Because I think even they saw, you know what, this market, this is not a hill to die on.
Marco:
Like trying to get somebody to pay an Apple relevant price for an Apple version of something every set-top box is, or every TV is including for free.
Marco:
that's a harder and harder sell as time goes on.
Marco:
So I think for the same reason why Apple just bowed out of the Wi-Fi router business, it wouldn't surprise me if they just kind of let the Apple TV business slowly die because their contribution is less and less relevant and what they really want is services revenue now because they can now get by spreading their content services onto everyone else's TVs.
Marco:
So the Apple TV, it's less and less necessary.
John:
Yeah, that's totally the reason why they put Apple TV on other platforms is when you have a services business, you don't artificially limit yourself by saying you have to get an Apple TV.
John:
That would be ridiculous.
John:
Right.
John:
But I think Apple should absolutely continue to make the Apple TV.
John:
They just got to figure out, like you said, which direction they want to go.
John:
You got to make it way cheaper, which they can do.
John:
Like Apple is totally capable of making a an Apple TV that is that does essentially all the things that it does now, except for maybe not play games as well.
John:
for way less money in one of those little tiny stick form factors or they have to actually make a high-end streaming box that has high-end features that has a remote that people like that people that more people recognize the value in you know that it's not just a little bit better than the built-in tv features but a lot better in ways that people appreciate and then you can sell that for more money what they can't do probably is compete with gaming consoles because again if you look at the xbox series s
John:
I don't know what wattage it's taking, but it's probably like 100, 200 watts in there.
John:
It's got a gigantic fan.
John:
If Apple wants to compete with that level of gaming power, it has to compete with that level of electrical power, which is a whole different ball of wax.
John:
You can't have these tiny little things with silent or non-existent fans inside them.
John:
It's not...
John:
It's not the puck market, right?
John:
But they can compete in a premium streaming box with a updated version of the Apple TV with a much better remote and better OS and features, right?
John:
And the reason I think they need to stay in this market is it's not so much that, you know, that selling the hardware is important.
John:
It's that Apple, I think, needs to continue to have an app platform connected to your television.
John:
Televisions will all have all these apps built in, right?
John:
They'll have Netflix and they'll have HBO and so on and so forth.
John:
But maybe if you buy a TV and then like a new, you know, whatever, Hulu and CBS All Access go out of business because Disney dominates them and there's, you know, a new service pops up.
John:
How long is it going to take for your TV manufacturer to have that for that service versus how long would it take for an Apple platform to have an app for that service?
John:
Apple, I think, needs to continue to cultivate something you can buy for your TV that runs apps vended from an app store that's run by Apple.
John:
And that's just the cost of doing business for them.
John:
I don't think they're ever going to be an important player and they'll have to pick a direction for the hardware to be either cheap or good.
John:
But I think they need to have that platform because that platform is an advantage.
John:
The advantage of like, we don't know what people are going to do with this, but you can make games and you can make this and you can make that.
John:
And it turns out shopping for sweaters in real estate is not the killer app feature.
John:
But if there is a killer app feature, if Apple doesn't have...
John:
a platform that connects to your tv they're not going to participate in it so i think it is important for apple to continue to be in this market they should and they should just accept it as a cost of doing business and they just need to figure out how to make their product a little bit better so it'll be more palatable like i don't you know whether it's a hobby or not or whatever like they just need to be there because if they're not there
John:
Someone else will fill that void, and one of the other players will become, oh, they're the app platform that if there's some new killer app for televisions that no one ever thought of, it's going to appear on their platform.
John:
It's going to appear on, I don't know, Roku, on Amazon Firesticks, on the Google TV things or whatever.
John:
Because all the competitors are there, Apple needs to be there because I think, you know, apps that you can download from a store and run on your television –
John:
is a reasonable idea and we've seen lots of lots of useful versions of that it's mostly streaming apps for now but gaming is a potential thing but who knows who knows what the future will hold so i really hope apple doesn't give up on this like the wi-fi hell i want to make wi-fi routers again but i really hope apple doesn't give up on this they just need to do a little bit better
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I echo what you were saying, Marco, that when I first got my 4K TV, which is an LG, I started using the onboard apps.
Casey:
And like Disney Plus, we still use all the time because I want to watch in 4K and I don't have a 4K Apple TV yet.
Casey:
And the Disney Plus app is not demonstrably worse than the Apple TV app.
Casey:
It is not great, but it is not worse than the Apple TV app, in my personal opinion.
Casey:
Plex, I haven't tried in a while, but Plex was definitely way better on the Apple TV than it was on my actual TV.
Casey:
Although I really am not the biggest fan of some of the UI changes Plex has made recently.
Casey:
And so I should actually go back and try the TV's Plex app one more time.
Casey:
But all told...
Casey:
I agree with you guys both that I still want an Apple TV and I still am looking to buy an Apple TV to plug into there, but I think I could survive without it.
Casey:
And that was not the case just a couple of years ago.
Casey:
Well, granted, I hadn't bought a TV in like 10 years, but you get the point.
Casey:
It wasn't that long ago that I don't think that that was the case.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I hope that Apple doesn't give up on this particular platform, but I think of all the platforms that I participate in of Apple's, this would be the one that I would shed the fewest tears over if it did go away.
John:
And by the way, the sort of no-brainer updates that Apple needs to do just for the keeping up with the Joneses things.
John:
They need to update the HDMI 2.1.
John:
They need auto latency mode.
John:
They need variable refresh.
John:
They need just all the features, basically all the features of the new HDMI standards and all the features that the new televisions support.
John:
That's just to keep up, right?
John:
I think Apple's already got Dolby Vision, and I think they've got the HDR standards handled.
John:
and they have the adjusting frame rate from previous releases.
John:
But those HDMI 2.1 features I mentioned, all the TVs support them now.
John:
Streaming boxes are going to follow.
John:
If Apple continues to not update their thing, eventually not only will it not be premium, but it will be recommended against because you won't be able to play games at a higher frame rate or play games with less input lag with the auto-low latency mode.
John:
There's a bunch of features that...
John:
modern television support that apple needs to keep up with so even if they do nothing except for give you another puck with that horrible remote they just need to bump like bump the internal specs maybe give it more storage and let it support all the new standards of hdmi 2.1 and to me the number one thing they need from my point of view is to drop the price like that's because it's so egregiously out of line with the rest of the market right now
Marco:
It's one thing when Apple has a premium offering and they charge a premium price and you can look at it and say, well, it's more expensive than the competitors, but it's so much better.
Marco:
It's worth it.
Marco:
It's not just the quote Apple tax.
Marco:
It's actually a better product and you're paying to get something nice.
Marco:
And I'd say that's true of many of the products Apple sells, that you are actually paying a reasonable price for the quality you're getting and for the competitiveness that you're getting.
Marco:
That's not true for the Apple TV.
Marco:
I don't think it ever has been, and it's less true now than it's ever been because the competitors are so capable and so cheap and so ahead of the curve on a lot of those spec things.
Marco:
And the Apple TV is just sitting there, just ancient and super expensive still and pretty half-assed.
John:
i've got an apple solution for that uh that gets back to the price comparison to the xbox series s ship a new apple tv with updated hdmi like i said maybe fix the remote include a gaming controller keep the price the same because because the expensive apple tv plus a 50 game controller is now within 50 of the xbox series s right
John:
and i think i'm you know an apple tv with a gaming controller doesn't suddenly become more capable of games but it becomes more capable of games for people who don't want to buy another controller to use with their apple tv and if they don't want to pair one of their console controllers and you know like i know it doesn't seem like a big barrier but it's like hey if you got a playstation just pair with your apple tv have you got an xbox just pair like but that is a barrier if you buy this thing and for the same price it came with a first party apple controller
John:
more people would view it as a potentially viable gaming platform granted maybe just for young kids or whatever but like look it comes with a game controller here you go like and yes you can play games to the remote and yes you can buy third-party controls and yes you can pair other ones just it's it's just a psychological barrier if apple wants this to be taken seriously in any way as a gaming platform and it is perfectly capable for many genres of games even if apple doesn't have the big triple a titles
John:
Now, you've got this good GPU in there, even on the current model.
John:
For a new one with a better GPU and a better CPU and system-on-a-chip and the whole nine yards, supporting the new HDMI standards with high frame rate and 4K output, ship it with a controller and then you can keep the price the same.
John:
And then it will seem more reasonable because, hey, you're getting a free $50 controller.
Casey:
But I don't want a free $50 controller.
Casey:
I don't have any interest in having a game controller.
John:
Well, keep the price the same with the controller and then make the one without the controller $50 less.
Marco:
Yeah, because, I mean, the reality is...
Marco:
Apple TV gaming has been such a flop for so many reasons, really.
Marco:
Not having the controller in every box is a big reason for sure.
Marco:
And their early requirement for the first few years of the TVOS version of Apple TV, their early requirement that all games must also work with the little stupid remote and couldn't require a controller, that rule is now gone, but it used to be that way for a long time.
Marco:
So the combination of those two things really did make it so that it was
Marco:
basically dead in the water.
Marco:
But even if Apple really tried to make the Apple TV a serious gaming platform, a gaming platform at all today, I don't think they would succeed.
Marco:
I don't think, first of all, their heart is just not in gaming.
Marco:
All of Apple's success in gaming on iOS has been inadvertent.
Marco:
It has kind of happened to them, not as a result of anything they did.
Marco:
Actually, even with Apple Arcade,
Marco:
I don't think the Apple TV needs to be a gaming device, and I don't think it ever will succeed at being one, even if Apple were to really try and do things like put a controller in every box.
Marco:
Ultimately, their heart is not in it, their expertise is not there, and Apple already has gaming in the casual way locked up pretty well with the iPhone and iPad, and that's where they will continue to do well.
Marco:
uh i i just i don't see the apple tv ever succeeding as a game platform i think they're they're better off i mean heck even like like i did everything ideally for them when when tv os first came out i went and i i went and bought the steel case nimbus controller and i eventually bought the the hori ultimate because everyone said it was better and
Marco:
So here I am sitting there with two MFI compatible controllers, each of which was extraordinarily expensive for a lark that I was taking.
Marco:
And I downloaded a whole bunch of Apple TV games back before people knew that it was going to be worthless to make them.
Marco:
So there was actually some good effort put into them.
Marco:
And I had a lot of fun with one or two games, and then that was it.
Marco:
The types of games that succeed in iOS and iOS-like platforms like tvOS, these types of games that succeed are casual games.
Marco:
They're usually much smaller in scope, much simpler than what you get on a console from a major publisher.
Marco:
And that's great for the phone in your pocket when you're standing on the line at the bank or when you're just trying to kill some time with your phone or your iPad.
Marco:
That's one thing.
Marco:
But if you're going to have a home console-like experience, you're going to sit on the couch with a controller that you had to pay $60 for separately that you have to then get the games installed on your TV with this clunky interface, and you're going to sit down and play a game on your big TV on your couch –
Marco:
The standards are pretty high for the quality and depth of those games because the console world is so mature and has so many amazing games that if you're expecting that kind of experience, you're not going to find it in the iOS game world.
Marco:
Even if you can get past all the hardware requirements, the controller being there or not being there,
Marco:
Apple's ecosystem of software and of games does not contain a lot of those super high quality games with lots of depth.
Marco:
They contain a lot of really simple games you can play with your finger on your phone when you're waiting in line.
Marco:
And that's a huge market, don't get me wrong.
Marco:
But most of those people aren't wanting to then play this on the big screen on their TV with a controller on their couch.
Marco:
They're happy to keep playing those games on their phone while someone else watches TV with whatever built-in smart crap is in their TV.
Casey:
I just don't see the Apple TV as a gaming device.
Casey:
And I think that's probably because I just never use it as a gaming device.
Casey:
And there may be tons, dozens of people even that use it as a gaming device.
Casey:
But I personally do not know of anyone that plays games on it.
Casey:
Now we're going to get all the email about the people who play games on it.
Marco:
Well, it's even worse because like the –
Marco:
Even Apple seems to have significantly backed away from the Apple TV as an app platform when they introduced the TV app for Apple TV and made that the default home screen.
Marco:
So now, if you want to do anything on an Apple TV besides watch TV in the TV app on TV on Apple TV TV, they fight you at every turn.
Marco:
Like, it's like, and now it's extra button presses, or you've got to go back a level, and then every time you hit home, it goes back to that, and you have to go change that setting if you really want to, which no one probably does.
Marco:
So, like,
Marco:
Apple has backed away significantly from the app model, and any chances of it being a game platform, I think they have also probably backed away from, even though, yes, I'm very much aware that Apple Arcade games are required to, I think, also work on the Apple TV.
Marco:
I don't think, first of all, I don't think Apple Arcade's that successful, honestly.
Marco:
But also, I don't think that matters.
Marco:
I don't think enough people are doing it on Apple TV for that to be a thing or to notice.
Marco:
So, ultimately, I hope
Marco:
that Apple gives Apple TV what it actually needs, which is make the process of watching video content better, which would be things like some software tweaks, MIUI tweaks, and the new remote, and make it more appealing to the market by dropping the price.
Marco:
That's what Apple TV really needs.
Marco:
Better TV experience and lower price.
Marco:
And if they have to really cut its abilities as a game platform to get there, that's what they should do.
Marco:
Because those things are more important to that product's actual future than a gaming ideal that they will never achieve.
John:
Can you imagine what a first-party Apple console controller would look like given what that remote looks like?
John:
Oh, God.
John:
Like, what would that be?
Marco:
You thought the original NES controllers had bad ergonomics?
Marco:
Wait till you see this.
John:
I mean, I feel like they would – I feel like because they've been selling like those, you know, the Nimbus controller and they see what the other – I feel like they'd be sort of much more cowed by the established form of a console controller.
John:
They wouldn't make something totally weird, but I also don't think it would be a good controller at all.
John:
Because I feel like they would make something console controller shaped, but then in all the surface details, they would do some kind of thing that's in the spirit of the current Terrible remote and make it smooth and featureless so you can't feel the edges of the buttons and they're just like this hairline cut out where they press in or something terrible like that where when you're trying to feel where the face buttons are with your thumb, you can't feel them because they're all flush, right?
John:
Just, yeah.
John:
I don't have much faith in their ergonomic design.
John:
No.
John:
I like their keyboard, but...
John:
Their mouse I don't like, their remote I hate with a fiery passion, and I just can't imagine what their console controller would be like.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Linode, Mack Weldon, and Bring Back Bronco.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join if you want to at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
Thanks, everybody, and we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Margo 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-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C, USA Syracuse.
Casey:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They did it.
Casey:
So, John, I would love to know what it's like to teach someone how to drive.
Casey:
Actually, more importantly, I would love for you to get your son on the horn so I can ask him what it's like to learn how to drive from you.
Casey:
But to the best you're willing to share, what's it like trying to teach a small-ish person how to drive?
John:
I don't know if I'm just an amazing teacher or my son is an amazing student, but he's doing great.
John:
Here it is.
John:
He is doing fantastic.
John:
I've been taking him on driving pretty much every weekend, both days, for...
John:
what months now ever since he got his permit and we started you know we did the whole thing start off just in a parking lot and then work our way up to back roads and then we work our way up to driving back and forth through the parking lot we're doing a lot of stuff that's like drills for the actual test so we're doing parallel parking drills and three-point turns and apparently in massachusetts you have to back along the curb for 50 feet i don't i don't never even heard of that one but that's another part of the test so we do a lot of you know teaching to the test but we also do plain old driving on the roads do errands you know like
John:
Go around in the various difficult intersections in the neighborhood in practice.
John:
And this is all on a stick shift car, which I didn't didn't give him an option.
John:
I didn't say anything about it.
John:
I said, guess what?
John:
We're going to go learn how to drive.
John:
And he just accepted it as the reality.
John:
And he's doing great.
John:
We found a parking lot that has a hill in it.
John:
Like it's a one parking lot and there's like a lower level.
John:
There's another parking lot.
John:
Uh, and we use the hill to do hill starts.
John:
So we just go to the bottom of the hill and we just go up like a foot and then come to a complete stop, then go up another foot and come to a complete stop and go up and the hill gets steeper as you go.
John:
So the, the, you know, and the contest was how many, how many stops and starts can you get before getting up the hill?
John:
Right.
John:
And if you stall the engine, it's, uh, you disqualified.
John:
So we did that game for a while and he's great at hill starts.
John:
Now he can just basically do an infinite number of them.
John:
all the way up the hill it's a little bit tricky in the top part and he's annoyed that the hill hold on the accord is a little bit unreliable but i think that's great because it teaches us not to rely on the hill hold um the hill hold gives off after like a fraction of a second like it will hold you and then it's like well you better be ready to go we've been doing driving around the neighborhood through intersections uh we recently got up to the point where he was saying you know since we're doing real world driving it's like sometimes you need to get out onto the road
John:
a little bit quicker because you're trying to like you know get get into a spot in some busy traffic so he asked me how do i get out onto the road a little bit quicker and i said now we're going to learn how to do burnouts and we learned how to actually give the thing some guests first thing i tried to get him to do is like you're going to find where the red line is and you're going to see what a rev limiter is and wait did you do that and i would well did you have him bounce off the rev limiter without the car in motion
John:
No, no.
John:
With the car in motion.
John:
Because it's a stick shift car.
John:
It's got a tack.
John:
And he's just been tooling around, shifting it to 3,000 RPM or whatever because he's going slowly.
John:
And by the way, when we started doing this, we went to this.
John:
It's like a parking lot of an office complex.
John:
And on the weekends, there's nobody there.
John:
So it's great for learning to drive.
John:
There's a whole bunch of office buildings and a whole bunch of parking lots.
John:
And we've been sort of touring them all.
John:
But at some point, maybe like two or three weeks into this, other people learning to drive started to show up.
John:
So now the parking lot is filled with people like stopping and starting and parallel parking and just, you know, we're widely separated.
John:
It's big parking lots.
John:
But when I was trying to happen to have him bounce off the rev limiter, he was embarrassed to do it because he's like other people who are learning to drive are going to think that he doesn't know what he's doing.
John:
Right.
John:
So.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So we learned how to start quickly.
John:
We learned how to start quickly without spinning the wheels.
John:
We learned how to start quickly with spinning the wheels.
John:
We learned what it feels like to hit the rev line.
John:
We learned to do, you know, fast shifting instead of, you know, first, second, third, but do first, second, third and get up to maybe 5000 RPM between shifts.
John:
Right.
John:
We're not doing performance driving here, but we did enough to know here's how you can squirt into traffic.
John:
And the reason why I wanted him to do burnouts is to show him this is what you don't want to do because this will not get you into traffic quickly.
John:
This is if you mishandle the clutch and the gas, you will just sit there spinning your wheels.
John:
And instead of getting into traffic quickly, you will just be making smoke and ruining my expensive tires.
John:
So don't do that.
John:
We did emergency stopping.
John:
Emergency stopping so you can feel the ABS pulsing the brake pedal.
John:
All sorts of drills like that.
Casey:
I thought you were doing this in Tina's car, no?
John:
Yes.
John:
That's all my wheels.
Casey:
I see how it is.
John:
Here's some accessories we got.
John:
We got a set of cones, collapsible cones, so I could set up parallel parking.
John:
So we're not parallel parking with an actual car, we're parallel parking with a phantom car made up of cones.
John:
Which is actually trickier because the cones are low to the ground and you can't really see.
John:
But anyway.
John:
And since they don't want you to look at the backup camera during various maneuvers, I block the backup camera with a towel.
John:
So we can't look at that during the maneuvers.
John:
I got some student driver magnets that I slap on the back of the car whenever we go out to prevent people who are behind us from honking.
John:
It works about 50% of the time because before I had them, you know, people would honk because, you know, you're behind a new driver and they're like, why aren't they going?
John:
Or, you know, the light changed or whatever, whatever new drivers do, people are going to honk at you.
John:
And with the student driver stickers on, it takes about half the honks out.
John:
Right.
John:
But I like the honking because as I've been telling him.
John:
The part about being a new driver is that people are going to honk at you because you're going to do stupid stuff.
John:
And the worst thing you can do as a new driver is get freaked out by the honking and do something stupid.
John:
Just accept that they're honking.
John:
Receive their honking.
John:
Take it within you and say, yes, I am learning to drive.
John:
I have done a thing that perhaps deserves to be honked at.
John:
But you honking is not going to make me suddenly squirt out into traffic and get hit by a cement truck because I don't feel like it's safe for me to go right now.
John:
So feel free to honk.
John:
And I will still not get so nervous that I stall the car and not do something stupid.
John:
And so it's great experience being in the car and having people honk at you and just learning to accept the honking and not do something.
John:
Cause honestly he deserves to be honked at cause you know, but he's just learning.
John:
Right.
John:
But anyway, I've been amazed.
John:
He picked up the clutch brakes, you know, gas stuff so quickly.
John:
He just pretty much never stalls anymore unless he's super duper nervous.
John:
Maybe we're doing like one stall and two hours of real world driving.
John:
If that, I think this, you know, we just had a trip today.
John:
I had him drive us to the high school to drop off a book that he had to drop off.
John:
He did that driving there and back, no problem.
John:
This weekend, I think he had one stall, maybe, during several hours of driving.
John:
So overall, I think he's doing great.
John:
Like I said, I credit to my, and I'd be the only person teaching him because I feel like my wife is a little bit
John:
too nervous about her dying but also a little bit maybe applies more pressure to him i try to remain calm despite the fact that i feel like my life is in my hands sometimes and i feel like that calming influence is helping him
John:
understand and I did by the way start the teaching procedure with a with a classroom portion before we got in the car of course you did the classroom portion was me drawing terrible like pencil drawings of conceptually the you know the engine the clutch the transmission
John:
The drive train, the gear shift and to explain like how it all works behind the scenes.
John:
I wish I could have found a good YouTube video, but drawing it was fine to just say like, this is what happens when you press the clutch and when you don't press it.
John:
This is what the gear shift does.
John:
This is what it means when you're in neutral.
John:
This is what the engine is doing.
John:
This is how an engine works.
John:
I'm not sure my daughter will tolerate the level of detail I went to, but I think it really helped just to conceptually understand what's going on because then it becomes less abstract of like which pedal do I push when you understand what they're doing and you understand like what the engine is doing and the whole nine yards.
Casey:
So I have a question then.
Casey:
Is your son going to be a manhole or is he going to drive like a New Yorker?
John:
neither he's a very very calm sedate driver like he's you know he he drives gently he's not in a hurry he you know and right now mostly he's he's in test taking mode like i don't know if you'll find out but i feel like this generation of kids is very very attuned to test taking because there's so many more standardized tests and so much more teaching to the test so this is just another like oh i know this mode this is i'm going to be tested on something and i have to learn it so it's just like
John:
Let's do three-point turns.
John:
Let's parallel park.
John:
Let's back up along the curb.
John:
Why?
John:
Because it's on the test.
John:
And that type of stuff.
John:
The same thing with, like, the double stopping.
John:
Like, there's a bunch of stuff that they want you to do in Massachusetts.
John:
Like, stop at the stop line.
John:
And they also want you to, after you stop at the stop line, when you creep up again so you can actually see, do a full stop again.
John:
Don't roll through that second part.
John:
Do a full stop again.
John:
And then go, because that's something they want you to do for the test.
John:
And it's also good driving habits.
John:
But anyway, like...
John:
I feel like he's going to be a fairly calm driver, at least until he gets way more confident, because he's not nervous driving, but he drives carefully and sedately.
John:
He's a new driver, so new drivers don't know where to look, and so that's why they get hit by cement trucks and stuff, right?
John:
But I'm in the car with him, making sure that I'm at least being aware of everything else.
John:
I'll let you know when he gets up to the hooligan level, but I feel like he's generally a very calm and careful person who will most likely get into accidents due to inattention and not hooligan-ness.
Casey:
I see.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I just, having spent the beginning of my driving career in Connecticut, relatively far away from the Massachusetts border, but not that far, I remember that the pecking order was Connecticut drivers were fine.
Casey:
New York drivers were jerks, but generally skilled jerks.
Casey:
Massachusetts drivers were...
Casey:
jerks but didn't know what they were doing and then there was jersey which was just a whole new disaster in every way shape and form so i mean they don't even pump their own gas there like just they don't know how you can't trust them with it yeah we did that too we every time we're in the car i make them go get gas if we need gas and i make them pump it
John:
To learn how to do that, which that's the part he likes at least.
John:
Like, why do I have to get gas?
John:
He feels like it's beneath him.
John:
Like, because that's part of driving.
John:
I pay for it.
John:
He should be happy.
John:
I tap my phone on the gas meter thing.
John:
That's the hard part.
John:
I still miss SpeedPass.
Casey:
Wait, SpeedPass isn't the thing?
Casey:
Oh, you're talking about the mobile thing or whatever it was.
John:
Yeah, it used to just be the little thingy on your keychain.
John:
Instead, now I have to take my phone out and do face ID.
John:
It's worse.
John:
Like an animal.
Casey:
Like an animal.
Yeah.
Casey:
Well, I'm glad that you're teaching him.
Casey:
I'm glad that he's enthusiastic about it, too, because your son is not the most overtly enthusiastic person I've ever met.
Casey:
And from what I understand, teens these days, the kids these days, aren't generally enthusiastic about driving anyway.
Casey:
So I am very impressed that he has been taking it so seriously and doing so well.
Casey:
That's awesome.
John:
Yeah, I mean, it's a fun thing to do.
John:
And, you know, when you first learn to drive, driving is fun.
John:
So, you know, I don't think he views it as a utilitarian thing.
John:
As in, when I was viewing it, it was like, now I want to ride my bike to the mall and I want to buy a model at the model shop.
John:
Now I'll be able to drive there because the mall was 20 miles away or whatever.
John:
10 miles, fine.
John:
20 miles round trip.
John:
Now I'll be able to drive.
John:
So it has utility in my life.
John:
I don't think he sees that angle because in this modern age,
John:
The car has no utility to him, especially since we live near public transport.
John:
If he really wanted to go somewhere, he could just take the tea.
John:
But driving is fun.
John:
And so I think it's kind of like a real life video game.
John:
In the good sense, again, he's not being reckless or whatever.
John:
But boy, driving is complicated.
John:
And you don't realize it until you're trying to teach somebody new about all the different places you have to look and why and when and how to judge the behavior of other cars and what blinkers do and don't mean.
John:
And Massachusetts with its totally invisible lane markings that rubbed off three winters ago.
John:
And it's intersections that don't line up.
John:
And it's signals that are all hidden in the bushes.
John:
Like, just...
John:
it massachusetts setting aside the whole mass whole new york driver connecticut driver whatever massachusetts roads are a mess the pavement is a mess the alignment is a mess the signage is a mess everything like conspires to make it difficult it's not like those driver ed videos where you're in some beautiful place with like wide open roads where the signals are suspended directly over your lane all the lanes are clearly marked and there's huge soldier's
John:
none of that here so i feel kind of bad for him in that respect but that's why we're that's why we're driving around on railroads and learning about where the worst intersections are and how to successfully navigate them and alternate escape routes if you can't manage to get through this intersection you can make you know three rights instead of a left and it's easier in this place