Lasers Are Great
John:
Anyway, this is boring.
John:
Let's move on.
John:
I'm going to cut all this.
John:
Although, yeah, well, that's good because I only started recording four minutes ago.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Casey, come on, man.
Casey:
All right, so let's move on to some follow-up.
Casey:
We have some follow-up from fee-fi-fo-fum.
Casey:
John, would you like to tell us about this?
John:
I got to undo my pronunciation here.
John:
So we got an email from the dog collar people, the company name or the product name, and I guess the company name as well is spelled F-I, and I was pronouncing it fee because that seems reasonable.
John:
But Lucy from the company that's spelled F-I tells us,
John:
that it's pronounced like Fido or Wi-Fi.
John:
So it's fi, like fee, fi, fo, fum, or F with the word I after it.
John:
Lucy says, many, many people go for fee first.
John:
We should probably put it as the banner at the top of the website.
John:
You think?
John:
Every company that has a weird name should have the pronunciation prominently placed on the website.
John:
You
John:
And some people don't have it at all, which is bad.
John:
But some people have it like, oh, if you dig and go to the about page and read all the text, we'll tell you how to pronounce it, right?
John:
That's better than nothing.
John:
But if you have a weird name and people instinctively go for the quote unquote wrong pronunciation first...
John:
you have to like address that in an obvious way right in front of people otherwise you're just going to be called fee forever it's going to be so hard for me to change this in my mind because i can't i don't know if i can say fi i think fee might be a better name i mean it makes sense with the fido like i understand where it's coming from anyway so there's that um also uh i can't even i'm like casey now i go for the right pronunciation and i put the wrong the
John:
The Fi company created a discount code just for us.
John:
I actually put it in last week's show notes because they got it to us in time for that.
John:
But it's ATP100.
John:
That's the $100 off thing.
John:
There's a bunch of other codes.
John:
There's all the same $100 off.
John:
If you go to their website, at the bottom of the website is the $100 off code.
John:
Different $100 off codes.
John:
This is not like a secret that you can only get through this podcast, blah, blah, blah.
John:
They continue to not be a sponsor.
John:
This is not a sponsored spot at all, period, whatever.
John:
But...
John:
If you want to enter JDP100, you can get $100 off their collar, or you can just enter the code that's at the bottom of the webpage that you go to buy it on.
John:
So I just thought I would include that here.
John:
Collar's still working out fine.
John:
I actually charged it for the first time since having it.
John:
It was only down to like 38%.
John:
I think it probably would have made it one month on a charge, but definitely not the three months that they say is possible if your dog, I guess, stays within Wi-Fi range all the time.
John:
But my dog doesn't.
John:
She goes out on the doggy play date four days a week, and that is probably draining the battery a lot.
Casey:
good deal uh we also got word i think we saw this from a couple of different people that a new mustang is in the works for 2023 or 2024 so i actually i should have looked this up and i completely forgot is the mustang available brand new right now you know the chip shortages and whatnot not withstanding it is but it's like it's not it's an older model that they're just still selling and putting new model years out with like different options or trim or you know whatever
John:
But reportedly, there actually is going to be a no less thing.
John:
So Ford will actually sell cars.
John:
Lots of other people who are outside the U.S.
John:
point out that Ford does sell cars as opposed to trucks and SUVs outside the U.S.
John:
We should have been more clear in our typical U.S.-centric thing when we say Ford doesn't sell cars anymore.
John:
We meant in the U.S.
John:
But yeah, they sell lots of cars elsewhere in the world because no one else in the world is so obsessed with trucks and gigantic SUVs as we are.
Casey:
That is true.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then we lied about something else.
Casey:
Apparently, the Sony PSVR 2, that is a mouthful, they did show the controllers off somewhere.
John:
Yeah.
John:
In their press release, they didn't have any pictures.
John:
And in their presentation, they didn't have any pictures.
John:
But on their website, in like the...
Marco:
pictures for media they did have pictures of the controllers they look like i forget which other uh maybe marco knows these look like the quest controllers they're existing vr controllers that are like this maybe it's the valve index yeah the the quest controllers are i mean sorry whatever it's is it called the quest now what the hell is quest 2 isn't it yeah whatever that the thing formerly called the the oculus quest um yeah the controllers look pretty similar this they're just white and but otherwise they're they're pretty similar
John:
Yeah, and if you look at the controls, it's got similar to the PlayStation buttons with the different shapes on them, and those thumbsticks are like PlayStation thumbsticks.
John:
So they did show this.
John:
I don't think they showed the thing itself.
John:
One of the technologies they mentioned, which is worth noting, is that they're moving to what they call inside-out tracking, which I think maybe the Quest does as well, a bunch of other ones do, where...
John:
the way you know the way it keeps track of where your body and head and hands are positioned in space is not with external sensors that you have to put around your room but rather with sensors on the headset thing and also on the hands so they see each other so they position themselves relative to themselves that's what they call it inside out tracking instead of having like fixed locations around the room that are trying to keep track of where your hands are um
John:
again it's not not a notable new technology but it's notable for sony to be switching to that from their previous system so all the tech and everything looks pretty good but uh you know no price no picture of the headset that i could find and i think no real release date yet but it's coming along
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then Justin Krohn wrote in with regard to Canon DSLRs.
Casey:
And so I'm going to read a little bit of this.
Casey:
A major advantage of mirrorless is that that isn't often discussed is the dramatically reduced flange focal distance or FFD.
Casey:
Having a smaller FFD allows lens designers more flexibility in designing lenses for the camera as they can place lens elements closer to the camera sensor than was possible with DSLRs.
Casey:
and that's because they need the additional distance for the mirror to flap.
Casey:
This has enabled some unique lenses exclusive to the Canon RF or mirrorless line of cameras, including, and according to Justin, his new personal favorite zoom lens, the 2870 F2L.
Casey:
From Canon's white paper on the RF system, quote,
Casey:
The reduction from a 44mm flange back distance in the EF mount system to the 20mm of the new RF mount system opens important additional degrees of freedom in lens designs.
Casey:
The pivotal innovation offered by this short distance combined with the large 54mm diameter RF mount is the freedom to deploy large diameter optical elements at the very rear of the lens and closer to the large image sensor.
Casey:
So back to Justin.
Casey:
While Canon simply said that they don't plan on making additional flagship DSLRs like the 1DX, etc., I would still be extremely surprised if the 3 or 5 series get any additional DSLR models.
Casey:
The R5, which is the mirrorless 5D replacement, has been extremely well received both in terms of reviews and in sales to where they had a difficulty in keeping it in stock for the first year of production.
Casey:
Same for the more recent introduction of the R3.
Casey:
Plus, all Canon R&D is focused on the RF line of lenses as opposed to the EF, so any DSLR purchases are buying into a static system.
John:
Into the road for those lenses that are far away from the sensors.
John:
Yeah, that's one of the advantages of, I mean, the small, the APS-C system.
John:
sensor I have that's small, small sensor also means you can have small lenses.
John:
And I think the distance from the lens also helps everything be a bit more compact with the mirrorless cameras.
John:
Some people who are replying to our discussion last week are really just extolling the virtues of being able to see through the lens that's going to take the picture.
John:
Right.
John:
And, you know, they say no, no electronic viewfinder has to come close to that.
John:
Electronic viewfinders continue to get better and better in terms of responsiveness.
John:
They have like 120 frames per second, very high resolution.
John:
No, it's probably not going to be exactly the same for a little while as literally looking through the lens because that's real time, real light going to your real eyeballs.
John:
But there are advantages to the electronic viewfinder as well in that electronic viewfinder can be brighter than what you see through the lens because it's, you know, it's an emissive screen that you can adjust the brightness of.
John:
And sometimes that is useful.
John:
And if you have really bad vision, they're probably about, you know, there are like retina screens at this point for my eyeballs and really good cameras as well.
John:
So I think the tradeoff is well worth it for the compact size.
John:
And apparently there's an advantage to lens design as well.
Marco:
i would say like i don't i mean having having spent a lot of time with both i don't think electronic viewfinders will ever be as good as optical viewfinders in the ways that people care about when they make this distinction however i think there's just so many other advantages to electronic viewfinder based cameras like the whole mirrorless you know that whole world there's so many advantages there that we're just gonna let that go like it
Marco:
Not everybody will.
Marco:
There's always going to be some people who keep the optical viewfinder, just like some people still use things like rangefinders today, even though there's more modern alternatives that most people use.
Marco:
But there's always going to be something like that.
Marco:
But I think it's going to become a narrower and narrower part of the market because everyone's choosing mirrorless despite the fact that electronic viewfinders are worse in certain ways because of the other value that they're getting as a result.
John:
Which ways do you think there were still?
John:
It used to be the thing was basically frame rate.
John:
Reality doesn't have a frame lag behind it.
John:
You're just literally looking through the thing.
John:
So as soon as you move the camera, you see the change.
John:
But at 120 frames per second, I feel like that has basically gotten that one good enough that most people can't tell.
John:
So the only thing left is color reproduction and resolution.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I think the advantages of the viewfinder for the fact that it can light up and be brighter than what you're actually seeing probably balance those out.
John:
I know people just want it because it's traditional and because 120 frames per second is only on a few high-end cameras and it drains the battery faster so you don't use it all the time.
John:
We're not quite there yet, but I think we're getting close to the point where
John:
there won't be a strong argument for why you need uh the optical viewfinder especially because there is like oh i like being able to look through the thing and but you can't look through it when you're taking the picture because the lens the mirror blocks you right and like oh that's only for a short period of time well if you're trying to shoot at 30 frames per second
John:
you know it's going to be blacked out for a very long portion of that time as the mirror goes flap flap flap flap flap uh and then i don't think you can really look through the viewfinder at all while you're taking video on one of these cameras which is a big application of a lot of these you know the big interchangeable lens cameras to do video and yeah the mirror has to be up the whole time during video and you're not seeing anything then right
Marco:
I've always enjoyed how the optical viewfinder system is just direct and simple.
Marco:
There are advantages.
Marco:
You quickly mentioned battery life.
Marco:
I think that's one of the reasons why
Marco:
uh dsl or wide mirrorless cameras rather have had such horrendous battery life for the for the first portion of their of their like takeover of the market compared to regular slrs because they're having to run these screens all the time and having to run the image sensors to capture data for the screens and display the screens and light them up and everything and that's that's such a more power hungry process than what a dslr is doing when it's not taking a picture which is almost nothing
Marco:
And so there are there are advantages in practice to optical.
Marco:
But as you mentioned, they're just there are also advantages to electronic that optical systems can and will never achieve.
Marco:
And mirrorless will never really have an optical system.
Marco:
And so, you know, the industry has moved on and everyone holding on to the optical systems will be forced to move on at some point as well, unless they want to just want to keep being relegated to decreasingly useful parts of the product line.
Casey:
All right, John, tell me about TV technology.
John:
Some self-follow-up.
John:
Listening to myself in the last episode, I got a few things slightly wrong.
John:
I heard myself stumbling over them when I was saying them, but I just pulled the wrong answers out.
John:
So first thing, WRGB OLEDs have white backlights, not blue.
John:
The
John:
QD OLEDs have blue backlights, but WRGB have white.
John:
And I stumbled because I realized what I was saying didn't make sense unless they were white.
John:
So the white backlights in WRGB OLEDs, it's a big white field of LEDs, right?
John:
Every one of them are the size of a pixel, so they're individually controlled, right?
John:
But each one of those white lights shines through a thing that has a color filter.
John:
And it takes white light and it goes through the red color filter.
John:
And that red color filter only lets through the red portion of the white light, right?
John:
The red wavelengths.
John:
And then there's a blue filter that only lets through the blue wavelengths.
John:
And there's a green filter that only lets through the green wavelengths, right?
John:
When you're filtering light in that way, when you're taking white light and only letting through the red, the green, or the blue, you're losing brightness because you're just discarding all the other wavelengths of light.
John:
The backlight is emitting a bunch of different wavelengths of light.
John:
And then, of course, WRGB has the WPixel, which just lets through the white light, right?
John:
Straight through, but then it washes out the colors, right?
John:
So that's why one of the reasons that OLEDs have trouble getting bright, they are intentionally filtering around a lot of the light from their backlights.
John:
And remember, the magic of QD OLED is...
John:
The backlight is blue because that's cheap to make and you can make it super duper bright.
John:
And then the quantum dots don't filter out wavelengths because it's just blue light.
John:
It's like pure blue, just blue wavelength.
John:
The quantum dots change the light.
John:
The light hits this material that excites it.
John:
And we put the link in the show once last week of the electrons changing energy states and stuff or whatever.
John:
But it essentially changes the wavelength of the light from blue into red, from blue into green, and then just lets the blue through on the blue side.
John:
But apparently QD OLEDs do have quote unquote filters on them, which act as diffusers to make sure the light goes out in all directions.
John:
The thing is the diffusers don't end up blocking a lot of light because by the time the light gets through the QD layer, it is very purely blue, red or green.
John:
already and so the red filter is just blocking out any wavelength that didn't get converted by the qd oled by the quantum dots and the quantum dots are very efficient much more efficient than the filter so you're taking 100 of your backlight and putting it through the qd layer maybe you get 80 of it out and then that gets diffused whereas in wrgb oled you're taking 100 of your white light and cutting off like 60 of it to just get the blue wavelength or whatever so
John:
That's why in theory QD OLEDs have the potential to be much brighter.
John:
Of course, there's no white subpixel to wash out the saturation of the light.
John:
So the QD OLEDs have better viewing angle because that diffuser is the very last layer in the layer cake and spreads the light out in all directions.
John:
So you have amazing viewing angles.
John:
Uh, especially it's also especially a problem on WRGB OLEDs that off axis, even before the brightness, uh, changes, you tend to get like a tint to it.
John:
Like the most recent, uh, high end, uh, LG WRGB OLEDs get like a reddish tint off axis, which is kind of annoying.
John:
And Q, uh, QD OLEDs don't have that.
John:
um and they could potentially be brighter and i found an old story when looking at this uh from 2019 about samsung's investment in their qd oled factory they put 11 billion dollars into this in 2019 to be able to make qd oled panels uh so yeah this is kind of it's almost like silicon fabs where like it takes a lot of money just to be able to eventually many years later get a factory that can make these things
John:
And finally, I think we mentioned it briefly in the last show, but it's worth mentioning again.
John:
Micro LED is still the holy grail.
John:
That's where every single subpixel is like a red LED, a green LED, and a blue LED.
John:
Instead of this business where there's a white LED behind the color filters or a blue LED behind quantum dots, why not just have a red LED, a green LED, and a blue LED?
John:
You're done, right?
John:
The answer is because it's insanely expensive to do that.
John:
That's what we want.
John:
That's what everybody wants.
John:
But those screens are five and six figures at this point, but they look amazing.
John:
So if you're super, super, super duper rich and you have a really big house because it's actually kind of hard to make these things small, get a micro LED TV, but be prepared to pay as much as Lamborghini for one.
Casey:
No, no.
Casey:
It's worth noting.
Casey:
So you put a video in our notes, which I've put in the show notes, and it's some individual like recapping CES and talking about the $180,000, something like that.
Casey:
It was over $100,000, which I know you just said, but really think about that, people.
Casey:
$100,000 plus for a television that some people are apparently able to and willing to spend the money on like a 90-inch, $150,000 or whatever it is, TV.
Casey:
It's bananas.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
And they're more expensive when they get smaller.
John:
They used to sell them that they were like 700 inches.
John:
Because as you can imagine, if you make the screen bigger and bigger and it's still like 4K resolution, it's much easier to make a red, a blue, and a green LED when they're not that small.
John:
At that point, I believe you have a scoreboard.
Yeah.
John:
right exactly that's the same the same technology right but when you try to say i want it to be 4k or even worse 8k and also be on quote unquote only 90 inches diagonal you have to make those things so tiny and it's so expensive and even now uh the way they do it there is a segmented display technology like they can't make one
John:
screen like that they have to make these sub screens and then they just tack them to make like tiles basically and they just tack the tiles together and hope that you can't see the seams between them and they do a pretty good job of covering it up but it's it's very expensive and it's expensive because of the manufacturing they have like robots like putting down these microscopic little red green and blue leds and you know they all have to be right next to each other with no spaces between them and uniform and bright and they all have to work and it's expensive but yeah but that's that's the ideal where
John:
Everything is its own LED.
John:
Here's the big thing about why micro-LED is great.
John:
Notice the O is not anywhere in this.
John:
There's no organic elements in it.
John:
The organic stuff in OLEDs, that's the stuff that wears out, that causes burn-in, image retention, all that.
John:
Because the more you run it, you wear it out over time.
John:
And if you have like a...
John:
Something that's on the screen all the time that wears out those pixels faster than everything else.
John:
And you get image retention.
John:
No organic stuff in a micro LED is just plain old inorganic LEDs of the kind we all have.
John:
And we all know those things last forever and maintain their brightness and do not decay.
John:
So, you know, it's going to be a while before micro LED comes down from the $180,000 price.
John:
But boy, when it does, those screens are going to be amazing.
Marco:
So I'm not I don't really follow this kind of stuff the way you do.
Marco:
I'm curious, like, on an infinite timescale, on what kind of timescale do you think micro LED TVs might be accessible?
Marco:
Like, are we talking about a decade from now?
Marco:
Five years, 20 years?
Marco:
Like, what are we talking about?
John:
I think a decade is reasonable.
John:
If you remember, Apple was investing in micro-LED.
John:
I think the rumor was for the Apple Watch because it's way easier to do a watch than 89-inch 8K television, right?
John:
Because there's just fewer pixels.
John:
But if you notice, Apple didn't release a watch that's micro-LED.
John:
Everyone wants this technology.
John:
I think a decade is a reasonable timeline.
John:
Look at QD OLED.
John:
You'll find all the quantum dot explainer videos from six, seven years ago, and just now we're getting the very first televisions with QD OLED in them, although we did get quantum dot LCD before that.
John:
So I think a 10-year timeline for...
John:
micro led to come down in price is very reasonable because every year someone you know micro leds have been at ces for like the past five years and they used to be 300 000 and 200 000 and 100 000 i think there was a five figure one this year um so they are coming down and like every year they brag about we've made it like 1500 times less expensive to manufacture but it still costs as much as a car right so we're getting there like everyone wants to go there because this solves so many problems that they have to deal with with these other display technologies
John:
Uh, but 10 year time horizon seems conservative to me.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Mo Rubenzall writes, I was okay with the explanation of chroma subsampling until John Insignia insulted analog TV as quote, weird and complicated quote.
Casey:
I am older than even John.
Casey:
That's possible.
Casey:
And worked with, uh, with analog broadcast video back in the dark ages.
Casey:
It is a very clever system.
Casey:
The reason for the signal structure is compatibility.
Casey:
When color came along, RCA and CBS had competing systems.
Casey:
Uh,
Casey:
CBS's was simpler, but demanded a different broadcast spectrum, which would obsolete black and white TV sets.
Casey:
RCA system was compatible with black and white bands because of broadcast color on a chroma subcarrier, which a black and white TV would not see.
Casey:
A color TV would add or subtract the different signals to get the color signals.
Casey:
That's cool.
Casey:
I didn't know that.
Marco:
I would strongly recommend watching the Technology Connections video series on analog TV.
Marco:
The way it works is fascinating.
Marco:
However, I think both Mo and John are correct.
Marco:
Analog TV is very clever and also weird and complicated.
Marco:
You are both correct.
John:
Legacy, compatibility, tech debt, the standards they win often have to do weird stuff and bend over backwards to
John:
accommodate existing conditions uh and you know whoever set up the first system uh didn't have color in mind and the standard that didn't obsolete all those tvs was obviously going to win even if it's weirder and more complex or quote unquote worse
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Casey:
We should at least quickly mention that Apple is apparently going to allow alternate payment systems in the App Store in South Korea as per laws there.
Marco:
Asterisk, asterisk, asterisk.
John:
This was discussed a lot when this was going around of like basically saying, OK, well, even if Apple follows this law, they're probably going to charge fee anyway, which threw a lot of people for a loop who hadn't been following the trial closely because Tim Cook said this flat out in the trial and people flipped out about it then because he was like,
John:
well, if they don't go through our payment system, we'll have to find some other way to collect the money.
John:
And everyone's like, what?
John:
What?
John:
No, the whole point is, if we use our own payment system, we don't have to pay you.
John:
And Apple's like, oh no, you have to pass.
John:
And so here is finally a concrete version of that where Apple has proposed to the South Korean lawmakers, here's how we're gonna comply with your new law.
John:
we're going to do x we're going to do y we're going to do z and part of the how they're going to comply is they say oh and of course we're going to take a fee for all of these uh payments that are made through payment processes that are not ours i don't think they said what the fee is or anything like that but they said they're going to do that so i think this is basically confirmation that if you thought apple was going to allow
Marco:
third-party payments and not also take a fee no they're definitely taking a fee yeah and to be clear this is actually uh google had the same law applied to them in in south korea in fact i'm pretty sure they're much bigger there and this law was actually meant really to change google's behavior not necessarily apple's um but uh google is doing this exact same thing basically like they're i forget the exact numbers but it's something like you know instead of charging 15 we'll charge you 13 or something like it's and then you can you know you can apply the rest to your credit card fee
Marco:
So when people say alternative payment systems, what we're actually getting in these places where this exception is being made is not a monetary savings.
Marco:
It's the ability to use other systems for other reasons, their features, their flexibility, their customer service implications –
John:
Yeah, the ability to give people refunds, like the visibility into who's actually buying your stuff, you know.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
But Apple will.
Marco:
I mean, as they said, and as it blew all of our minds with rage, they will presumably devise some kind of system where, like, in order to comply with their App Store rules, you as the app using an external payment system will have to somehow, like, report your transactions to Apple so that they can collect their commission.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Or it'll go through it.
John:
Like what Google did is they made you use an API.
John:
Like it'll go through an API that sees the amount and it doesn't do anything with it except for Note.
John:
I see you're charging someone X amount and then it knows how much that Apple says you owe them.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And you can imagine the massive amounts of
Marco:
edge cases and complexities that this will bring up.
Marco:
So for instance, what if the rate that you are paying in something like foreign currency exchange is slightly different than what Apple's paying?
Marco:
What if you issue a refund?
Marco:
What if the customer issues a chargeback and you lose that money later?
Marco:
There's so many weird complexities that will make this...
Marco:
pretty much impossible to for most people to use this ability to run their alternative payment system that this is going to be limited only to the largest of large companies and you know BS game companies like that's going to be who uses it and it's going to be a mess and this it's ultimately going to change
John:
probably as far as i can tell roughly nothing for the better for almost anybody like i i can't imagine this is actually going to help pretty much anything it has the potential to make customer support better for a company for big companies that can navigate all these things and also want to have better customer support they will be able to have better because they have like no ability to influence customer support whatsoever when they go through apple's payment because they literally can't issue in a refunds have no visibility into it they have nothing right
John:
So if you are a big company and you want to give a better customer experience that will make your customers like buying from you, you'll be better about refunds and customer support and troubleshooting and being able to contact customers and stuff like that.
John:
But really the main reason most developers care about this is money.
John:
It's not the customer experience.
John:
It's not even being able to run metrics on the customers and getting customer data.
John:
It's we want to not give someone 30%.
John:
uh and so they make this law and i i think the intention and a lot of people are looking at this law thinking this will save us money and it will kind of because it seems like the fees are going to be less well that's not a given apple could charge more for this if they wanted i don't see anything stopping apple from saying yeah we took a 90 90 commission on all third-party payments right like that would follow the letter of the law probably
John:
But they're not getting what they want.
John:
It's like, wait a second.
John:
The whole point is we didn't want to have to pay Apple anything.
John:
It's like, oh, you're going to pay Apple.
John:
And who controls how much we pay Apple?
John:
Apple still controls that.
John:
You're just lucky that it seems like they're going to say we will charge you less than 30% because we understand.
John:
I mean,
John:
You know, obviously you can't kill the golden goose here.
John:
If Apple did try to charge 90 percent, that becomes economically unfeasible.
John:
People would lose money in every transaction because these people do have to pay the actual payment process or whatever they're using.
John:
Right.
John:
Some amount of money.
John:
And then they would have to pay Apple and there has to be something left for them.
John:
Right.
John:
So Apple's not going to make the fee too high.
John:
I think by making it lower, they're acknowledging that there is another party in the middle here.
John:
Taking a cut.
John:
So again, there has to be enough left for the company to stay in business.
John:
Otherwise, everybody loses.
John:
But otherwise, yeah, it just seems like this has made things more complex for a lot of people and has not really made anyone, including Apple, particularly happy because Apple has to implement these stupid APIs and support them, right?
Marco:
And have some kind of program to, like, go chase people down and get – They have to collect money.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Like, that's kind of – like, that's a big operation.
Marco:
And this is why, like, I don't think anyone is happy with this, including Apple.
Marco:
I think Apple is reluctantly doing this in this way, almost in a way – it's like when, like, you know, a jerky spouse, like, loads the dishwasher poorly so they won't be asked to load the dishwasher anymore.
Marco:
Like –
Marco:
Apple was asked to make something, quote, better that they were doing in a way that angered a lot of regulators and things like that.
Marco:
And so they're like, fine.
Marco:
We told you our system is great and our system is best and best for everybody.
Marco:
But if you really want to go out there in the Wild West, we will finally comply with your law.
Marco:
And they're going to do it in the crappiest way possible that will – just the most –
Marco:
half-assed, poorly implemented way so that they can then point to that and say, look, this doesn't work.
Marco:
Like now, everywhere else around the world that tries to pressure them into, you know, or tries to force them into doing this, they can point to South Korea and say, look at this huge mess that we have when this actually happens, even though it's a mess that they themselves have created by inserting themselves into the process and requiring that they somehow deserve this commission over all commerce that happened to their platform.
Marco:
But the reality is it's going to suck for all the companies involved.
Marco:
It's going to suck for Apple.
Marco:
It might be – the only way I can think of that it's actually going to be better is that a lot of times the primary concern why a lot of people want to use their own payment system is usually money.
Marco:
But a secondary concern is not just customer support, which is no small thing, but integration.
Marco:
Like –
Marco:
I know just from running my own stuff, I don't want to have two different payment APIs and providers and platforms to the same product.
Marco:
It's much easier to run a product if you have one payment system and one user account system and one shared thing, one platform.
Marco:
And right now, if you want to offer something through Apple's system and on the web somewhere, you have to have two different payment systems.
Marco:
And that is complex and causes customer support headaches and generally sucks.
Marco:
So I understand the argument of like, well, we want it on our own system even if the money difference is not that big or not at all because having something on one shared platform is easier to develop, easier to support, easier to do customer service and maintenance stuff over time and everything.
Marco:
And there are things that – like I've said before –
Marco:
If Overcast ever wanted to do something like the readability thing where you pay Overcast some flat fee and it gets divided up into donating to the podcast you listen to.
Marco:
By the way, I'm not going to do this.
Marco:
I don't want to do this.
Marco:
I'm not going to do this.
Marco:
I have no plans to do this.
Marco:
But part of the reason why that kind of idea never got off the ground is because I knew that it would suck to have to give Apple 30%.
Marco:
And another part of the reason that never got off the ground was...
Marco:
The way the payment system works with Apple makes it very hard for you to be able to know for sure exactly how much money you got from a particular person.
Marco:
And that difficulty is one of the reasons why every music streaming service doesn't work on that basis.
Marco:
It works on the giant pool of money basis.
Marco:
where they pool all the money together that they get from everybody, count the number of streams, and then people get paid by the number of streams, by the giant pool divided by the number of streams, not like your $5 gets divided into $2.50 each for the two bands you listen to this month.
Marco:
That's not how it works on almost anything.
Marco:
To make that kind of system, which is how I would want to do such a system if I were to do it, which I'm not, but if I were to do it, that's how I want to do it.
Marco:
You have to know exactly how much money you got from each person every month.
Marco:
Things like failed charges or chargebacks or refunds or especially international currency conversion make that very difficult to know.
Marco:
If you had your own system, things like that would become easier or possible that weren't easy or possible before.
Marco:
And all the other advantages, customer service, refunds, shared payment, like having one unified payment system, all of those things are strong advantages.
Marco:
But the reality is both the California lawsuit and the Korean law –
Marco:
do not say Apple can't charge a commission.
Marco:
They were very clearly about alternative payment systems, not commission-free alternative payment systems.
Marco:
And I didn't follow the Korea law creation that much, but in the California case, the Epic case, the judge specifically called out Apple's ability to still collect a commission.
Marco:
Whatever movement we've had on that front,
Marco:
is not touching the 30% or the 15%.
Marco:
That's not being addressed at all with these recent regulation things.
Marco:
All that's being addressed with those is the alternative payment processing system.
Marco:
Now, I wonder if this is the same thing they're doing for the Japan Trade Commission thing.
Marco:
I don't know if we've heard anything about that.
Casey:
I don't think so.
Marco:
they mentioned with the japan trade commission thing that they were going to be implementing that sometime like in this i believe this spring like sometime in the next few months and that they had to like do work required to support that one link to a payment system that they would allow or to an account creation system that they would allow and i wonder if this is the same system like i wonder if they're developing like one api that they can use for both of these uh regulations in both of these regions or the japan thing i think it's everywhere but
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
This whole thing, as long as Apple is still able to demand attacks on all transactions that happen on their platform of the types they can enforce it on, they're going to keep doing that.
Marco:
And so I don't think we're much better off here.
Marco:
This is not a win for the little guy.
Marco:
This is not a win for consumers or most developers.
Marco:
This is...
John:
a small number of big companies getting things to be a little bit more convenient for them that's about it and a huge pain in the butt to anybody else who tries to go anywhere near it i don't think apple's going to do a bad job on this though i think they'll make the api as good oh they're going to do a terrible job i like not intentionally and then you know like the things that'll be bad about their in-app purchase apis are terrible like even even their official system is horrible the things that will be the things that will be bad about it are the things that are already bad about apple's current system and
John:
Those are things that Apple doesn't want to be bad, but they just are.
John:
Like, you know, Apple's own in-app purchase and its own system of handling money and accounts and all that is creaky in a bunch of ways due to its heritage as the iTunes Music Store.
John:
And that I don't expect to improve.
John:
But the rest of it, I think they'll try to make as good as they can.
Marco:
No, it's like the DMV.
Marco:
It's like...
Marco:
The reason why you go to get your driver's license renewed and you have really mediocre service most of the time is that the government has a monopoly on that service and you have no choice and they have very little incentive to make that really good.
Marco:
That's Apple and their payment system.
Marco:
Apple's payment system has always been really mediocre, really weird at certain supporting things.
Marco:
It totally doesn't support a lot of a lot of common requests at all.
Marco:
And that's just that's how it has always worked because they have no competition.
Marco:
I mean, this might change things in a very small way, but not not in a big way.
Marco:
They have no competition and they have no incentive to make that really great.
Casey:
So I agree with the broad strokes of what you're saying, but you clearly have not touched StoreKit 2, which is a brand new API this year that is actually pretty good.
Casey:
It's not perfect, but it's pretty good.
Casey:
And it uses async await.
Casey:
It's all, you know, Swifty and all the best and sometimes not the best ways.
Casey:
But all in all, it's really pretty good.
Casey:
And I have no idea why they did this other than the fact that StoreKit 1 was a pile of garbage.
Casey:
But I can't help but wonder if like, what is it, RevenueCat that has like the really good front end in front of all this stuff.
Casey:
So you can basically just use the RevenueCat API, which was designed by humans rather than the weirdos that designed StoreKit 1.
Marco:
Nobody designed StoreKit 1.
Casey:
Well, fair enough.
Casey:
Fair play.
Casey:
But you know what I'm saying.
Casey:
Here's a bunch of humans who have learned lessons from Storkit 1 and said, oh, what should this API look like?
Casey:
And that's what I believe RevenueCat's API is.
Casey:
I haven't actually used it, and I believe they're a past sponsor, but I'm saying this to you not because they've sponsored, but because this is what I've genuinely heard.
Casey:
But anyway, Storkit 2, which I'm using in my forthcoming thing, is pretty good.
Casey:
Again, it's not perfect, but it's pretty good and fixes most of the problems I had with Storkit 1, which is to say all of Storkit 1.
Marco:
It's hard to tuck Storkit and make it not better than Storkit 1.
Marco:
But no, to be fair, I haven't used Storkit 2 yet.
Marco:
But I'm talking not only about the app-level API, but also the entire backend system, the capabilities it offers at all.
Marco:
how it offers certain capabilities, certain things that are possible versus not possible, the limitations that it has.
Marco:
Famously, how Amazon couldn't use Apple's payment system if it wanted to for e-books because they have too many SKUs and they literally can't put that many in Apple's system.
Marco:
There's problems like that.
Marco:
The system is...
Marco:
it's very old and creaky.
Marco:
There's lots of weird gotchas and bugs and a new API on the client side helps some of that, but it doesn't fix most of the core problems.
John:
I think, I mean, there's two aspects to Apple putting this API in front of it.
John:
The second one is kind of getting to what you're talking about is that they're essentially they're sabotaging third party APIs by giving them the best that Apple has to offer.
John:
Right.
John:
Because as you noted, like the best that Apple has to offer is not competitive in the grand scheme of things with APIs like Stripe or things that actually have competition that are developed like in a meaningful way without tons of tech debt.
John:
Right.
John:
Right.
John:
And so by putting an API in front of third party ones, that API, best case, is going to be as good as Apple's current offerings.
John:
And Apple's current offerings are a little bit feature poor and creaky and old and weird, right?
John:
So that necessarily drags down the competing ones.
John:
But the first reason they're doing this, and we just mentioned before, is...
John:
Yeah.
John:
When you go through us, you use our API that has our limits and our weird bugs and behaviors, whatever.
John:
And also, we get to see everything that goes by because we want to charge you.
John:
If Apple wanted to comply with this law, they could say, the way we're going to comply with this law is we're going to add a new sentence to our App Store guidelines that says you can use third-party payment processors if you want.
John:
And then Apple's done.
John:
They don't need to do anything.
John:
If they didn't want to collect any money, they could say, oh, we're not going to collect any of this.
John:
Just go do whatever you want.
John:
Right.
John:
And then every individual developer would be able to use whatever payment system they wanted to use.
John:
And, you know, some of them would be way better than Apple.
John:
Some of them will be way worse.
John:
But Apple wouldn't be involved at all because they didn't have to take a cut.
John:
That would have been the least work for Apple and the most benefit for developers, but they didn't do it because then you don't get any money, and Apple likes money, right?
John:
So I really wonder how Apple's going to spin this, what their safety argument's going to be, because they're going to have to say, like, you know, we added this great new API for third parties, but third parties don't want that.
John:
Like, the whole reason they're adding the API, it's not...
John:
primarily to drag them down to their world the whole reason they're ending is because they want to cut and whenever apple says anything about app store and the way they run it they never say we're doing this because it makes us the most money even though we all know it like it's the elephant in the room why are you doing this oh because it makes us money right so hey apple why didn't you just say okay you can use whatever payment processor you want
John:
They're going to have to come up with a reason that doesn't say because we wanted your money.
John:
They're going to have to say like, oh, we felt it was the safest because we can, if we use this as a gateway and there's a malicious actor, we can shut them down by turning off their API access.
John:
Or they're going to come up with some reason like that.
John:
Or maybe they just won't say anything at all.
John:
The little quote we have from Apple here is fun.
John:
I thought it because... All right, so...
John:
this is the apple pr statement we look forward to working with the kcc which is korean something or other and our developer community on a solution that benefits our korean users and then apple goes on to say apple has a great deal of respect for korea's laws and
John:
yeah right i'm sure korea's long and a strong strong history of crowd collaboration with apple with the country's uh talented app developers blah blah but like maybe korea's other laws yeah when a company has to say we have a great respect for your laws they say that as if it's optional as if well we know we don't have to necessarily follow your laws but apple has always had a great deal of respect for korea's laws in particular i
John:
other countries laws we don't care we do whatever we want we don't even look at the laws we just do what we want but we've always had a great deal of respect for korea's laws so we've decided that we're going to follow your laws it's like like it's an open question apple has like apple is going to do this in the most begrudging way possible because they not only are they cheap
Marco:
they are offended that they even have to do this.
Marco:
They are offended that anybody would think that A, they don't deserve every penny they can extract from everything happening on iOS, and B, that somehow other companies are going to do a better job in any way, that there's any possible benefit to this.
Marco:
Both of those things are deeply offensive to Apple from every level, top to bottom.
Marco:
Now, Apple knows its payment APIs suck.
Marco:
I guarantee they know it.
Marco:
No, they don't.
Marco:
I'm telling you they don't.
Marco:
In the same way that the money angle really corrupts all the crypto discussion.
Marco:
In the same way, the amount of money Apple is able to skim off the top of the App Store corrupts their thinking so much and their culture.
Marco:
We saw this in the trial.
Marco:
We've heard this from their executives.
Marco:
Apple really thinks...
Marco:
Honestly, I don't think they're just putting on this show for lawyers.
Marco:
They really truly believe from everyone, executives top to bottom, that they deserve a cut of all commerce that happens on this computing platform.
John:
But they don't think they have the best payment APIs in those same emails.
Marco:
No, they really do.
John:
They really truly do.
John:
In those same emails, they were always very honest when a competitor had a better thing.
John:
What they would say is we can't let this happen because competitor X has a better Y than we do.
John:
Therefore, we must change the rules to make sure that we don't have to compete with them.
John:
I think they're clear-eyed about when they have worse things.
John:
Like our payment system is not as good as Stripes.
John:
Our API is not as good as Stripes.
John:
Therefore, we have to do something else to make sure to negate that advantage.
Marco:
So I think... Well, I think the story they tell themselves with that is our payment system is best for our users.
Marco:
therefore nothing else matters as much like that's the way they say that what they what they tell the public and i think they tell themselves the exact same thing is like any other payment system is going to be worse for privacy for user control for scams even though the app store is full of scams and is still exploding with scams to this day somehow but like that's what they're going to tell themselves
John:
I see a lot less of that.
John:
In the trial emails, did you see that?
John:
What you just said is what they say in public, but in private, I don't see them saying to each other, we have to do this because it will protect our customers' privacy.
Casey:
No, they do.
John:
All the emails we saw, maybe it's just because the selection of the juicy ones are all about dealing with competitors, but it was all about how can we protect revenue streams?
John:
How can we find new revenue streams?
John:
There was the one I just saw today.
John:
Someone was sent around.
John:
It was in that letters of note Twitter account of saying the email where Apple was saying, hey, you know, Uber and Lyft have these memberships.
John:
We should try to get 30% of those.
John:
We're not currently collecting that money, right?
John:
There was no mention of user privacy and how it would be better for users to be able to go through Apple API to take a cut.
John:
No, they're just saying like there's money out there and we're not getting any of it.
John:
Can we get some of that?
John:
They're so...
Marco:
gross like apple is a company they just do so much gross stuff now in the name of relatively small amounts of money like relative to their whole company it's just it's so unfortunate i i mean the people in those emails that's their job is increased revenue from the app store like it's not the whole company that's the time then they're gross people well they're called sales people marco lots of companies have them well
Marco:
But look – no, I think this goes to the top.
Marco:
I really do.
Marco:
I think there's this – again, this prominent culture in the company of entitlement to everyone else's money.
Marco:
And I think Apple has been well-rewarded for the platform, but because they still can –
Marco:
collect a tax on every, a large tax on everything that happens on a platform financially, you know, their brains get infected with money.
Marco:
It's like a drug addiction.
Marco:
Like they can't, they can't see any other possibility than we deserve this because it's so easy to think that when, when you're profiting from something that you're in the right and you, you're so easily rationalizing every part of it.
Marco:
Of course, this is ours.
Marco:
This, we have to go out and find this money that belongs to us in everyone else's pockets.
Marco:
Like that's, and it's so gross because it's so unnecessary.
Marco:
you know it there's they keep making these these missteps in in you know recent times that they do something that's that really lands like a lead balloon or that is really gross in some way that doesn't actually really affect their bottom line that much and they don't necessarily need to be doing as much or at all see also by the way like a lot of the controversy with air tags recently like they keep having these stories of this bad pr with air tags being used for stalking and carjacking or whatever and like they're so they
Marco:
are so many of these stories building up now and a lot of people are starting to ask the question like should apple have even made air tags should they keep making air tags is is the whole find my network actually worth it for them to be doing or is it bringing on too much negative attention and too much liability and and i think that's a good question because you can look at that and you can look at what portion of the business it is for them like you know
Marco:
Really, is this worth dragging them through the mud constantly and exposing them to all sorts of possible problems in the public or legal areas for something that's like this little $30 accessory that they're probably not selling in massive quantities?
Marco:
And I think the App Store, they're...
Marco:
incredibly like money grabbing attitude of the app store is and believe me i i don't use the term money grabbing lightly because i'm an app store developer and we get that term used against us all the time in customer reviews believe me i'm not using this term lightly but no other word can possibly describe apple's tightening of the fists over the last couple of years scrounging around trying to extract even more money from companies activities that happen to have an app on the app store or need to have an app on the app store
Marco:
Like it's just been so gross and it has cost them so dearly in so many areas that are not money that I wonder like who is deciding that this little amount of money that the difference here is making them is worth all of this?
John:
I mean, you mentioned they go like Tim Cook in his statements.
John:
It's made it clear that he actually seems to believe that they deserve the money, that they they deserve a cut of everything, including third party payments.
John:
So if you're wondering, like, where does this go?
John:
It's it's Tim Cook.
John:
But I feel like if you trace the and I think it's Phil Schiller.
Marco:
And I think it's a lot of the people down below as well.
John:
Maybe Phil Schiller, but I think if you trace this, I was talking about the part of the organization, like with people whose job it is to increase revenue with the app store.
John:
It's their job to do this, right?
John:
But you need to have a counterbalance to that.
John:
Like, okay, it's your job to maximize revenue, but there's someone else's job to be like the product manager to make the user.
John:
experience good and it's someone else's job to over look over the whole company and make sure we're going the right direction blah blah and so i don't i don't fault like sales people for selling like it is literally their job you don't want them to be too slimy but their job is to sell but if the top person in the company
John:
subscribe to the belief that we really deserve to take whatever kind of revenue we want from this entire thing uh that's where you end up getting in situations where apple makes bad decisions because it's it's coming from the top so it doesn't really matter what everybody between tim cook and the salespeople believes if tim cook believes that it's going to trickle down to everyone below who are just trying to do their job which is to you know
John:
implement the will of the ceo and the corporate plan for doing things so that's definitely a problem that starts at the top for the air techs because you brought them up i feel like apple was trying to do the right thing there and your point there is like okay well maybe you tried you screwed it up let's reconsider because in the end uh maybe it's not worth taking the hit for what is probably a piddling amount of revenue as far as apple's concerned
John:
I'm not totally signed up to the belief that AirTags are making this worse and not better compared to their competitors that don't notify you about this.
John:
But it's worth considering for Apple, how much are we really making off AirTags?
John:
Do we really think we can defeat this or do we want to take a reset and think more about it?
John:
But that's not from a place of greedy motivation.
John:
They didn't make AirTags because they're just like, ah, now we're going to be in the money.
John:
They're trying to make a genuinely good and useful product.
John:
And they knew that there were going to be problems with,
John:
stalking and everything like that and they tried to make features to mitigate that maybe that it weren't successful but like that's all coming from a place of we're trying as you know as best we can to do a good thing it's not coming from the place of tim cook saying you know what anything that happens in the platform we deserve take whatever we want and don't tell us otherwise
Marco:
No, and that's a whole separate – like the AirTags is not one of these crazy money grabs.
Marco:
The AirTags is more like this thing that we're doing is causing us problems in these other areas.
Marco:
Is it really worth what we're getting out of it to expose ourselves to those problems?
John:
Or do we think we can figure it out?
John:
We thought we had a good handle on it.
John:
We made a good try.
John:
No one else has solved this.
John:
It's not like Apple's doing something that everyone else has figured out how to do.
John:
No one else has even come as close to Apple to solving this problem.
John:
With tile trackers or whatever, they don't tell you anything.
John:
The reason you don't hear about it is because nobody knows they have a tile in their car because it doesn't notify you that it's there.
John:
So that's kind of a problem of Apple's own creation.
John:
I mean, tiles also suck.
Marco:
It's a very different amount.
Marco:
The scale that we're operating at between
Marco:
These things can be found if somebody happens to launch the Tile app, which nobody does, relatively speaking, compared to every iPhone out there is automatically finding the AirTags.
Marco:
It's a massive difference in what that thing actually is.
John:
Yeah, they're a victim of their own success.
John:
For their positive use case of people doing all the right things, they're great.
John:
But for the negative use case, all the positive aspects work against Apple.
John:
But yeah, it's definitely worth Apple considering, like...
John:
Do we think we have a way to fix this or should we like take a break?
John:
And let's say, you know, they have to.
John:
The problem is they have a bunch of product out there, so they have to do something about it.
John:
They can't just say, oh, never mind.
John:
We're not selling those anymore.
John:
Kind of like the big home pod.
John:
Just never mind.
John:
Like they can't actually do that.
John:
They do have to, at this point, figure out a way to make these safer than they are or to improve the safety of them.
John:
And I'm sure they're working towards that.
John:
I believe it is possible for Apple to fix AirTags to the point where they
John:
are you know are net good um but you know obviously smartphones themselves are always going to be you know the tools of bad people you know lots of things that are out there uh can be used badly and there's no reason you know we shouldn't carry cell phones because they can be used by bad people and the government can use drop on us and you know like that's that's true you just need mitigations right and i feel like airtags can get there but but i see your point of like
John:
Sometimes you do things and they start causing problems.
John:
And in the grand scheme of things, is this really important enough to be worrying about?
John:
Unfortunately for us, the app store is big enough for Apple to be worrying about.
John:
They make a lot of money from that.
Marco:
So I don't think they're going to cut their losses there.
Marco:
Well, but the thing is, whenever anybody looks at how much money Apple makes from the App Store, the thing is, if they loosened up some of these rules and changed some of these rules that would alleviate the vast majority of the problems, it wouldn't actually drop that revenue they're making to zero.
Marco:
It would create the ability for it to be reduced, but it wouldn't be 100% reduced.
Marco:
Suppose they allowed all apps, including games, to offer whatever payment systems they wanted and Apple wasn't involved, so Apple got no commission.
Marco:
I think enough people would still be paying with in-app purchase because it is easy.
Marco:
And suppose, for instance, Apple also required them to offer both, in-app purchase or your own system, if you're going to have your own at all.
Marco:
which I don't think would be that unreasonable.
Marco:
I don't think their numbers would actually go down that much in practice.
Marco:
Now, if you did, I think, what is probably a smarter thing, which I know Ben Thompson talked about this a lot on Stratechery, of, like, treat apps and games differently, which, by the way, the Epic lawsuit, the judge was...
Marco:
clearly on board with that ability of a possible way Apple could do this is just treat apps and games differently and apply the mandatory in-app purchase only to games and let non-game apps have their own business models if they want to.
Marco:
That, I think, would have an even smaller impact on Apple's actual numbers because such a massive majority of App Store revenue is from in-app purchases and games.
Marco:
the numbers came out in the trial.
Marco:
I think it was something like 80% of their in-app purchase revenue is games.
Marco:
And, and even that it's like, it's not that many games.
Marco:
It's like the, you know, the top, you know, the big top winners.
Marco:
And so if they let games or if they make games keep using their system and let other apps like, you know, Spotify and whatever, Netflix, if they let other apps use their own payment systems,
Marco:
I feel like that's both much more defensible of a position for Apple to maintain over time for regulators, and also that alleviates so many other problems, and I think ultimately that would cost Apple a very tiny percentage of their App Store revenue.
Marco:
and so that's what i'm saying like the the the balance here of like risk versus reward of continuing on the path they're going down versus making a change like that it doesn't seem to make sense to me they would still have most of their app store revenue and it would still be growing like crazy but they would relieve all this regulatory pressure and eliminate so many problems and dramatically improve developer goodwill and so many other things and i i don't understand why they keep shooting themselves in the foot for like two cents
Casey:
Because it's not about the two cents.
Casey:
So I'm going to try to speak with authority about something I don't really have authority to speak about.
Marco:
Welcome to the show, Casey.
Marco:
That's all of us.
Casey:
Yeah, I know, right?
Marco:
That's everybody in life.
Marco:
Go ahead.
Casey:
Well, so I agree with what you're saying in principle, but—
Casey:
Something I've had to wrestle with over the last couple of years is, even though I haven't been riding the, you know, the apple cart, I'm already hating this analogy, but here we are, even though I haven't been on the apple cart since, you know, 82 or whatever that John has been, I...
Casey:
I still am a big fan of the company and I still have been paying attention since, you know, right around the time of the first iPhone, which at this point is what, 15 years ago as of a few days ago.
Casey:
Um, and so I've been, I have a fair part of my life invested in Apple and I think of them.
Casey:
And so I can't imagine how John feels.
Casey:
I think of them still as like a plucky upstart and that's really just not reality.
Casey:
It's just not.
Casey:
And yeah,
Casey:
Apple is, if not the biggest, and I know it goes back and forth, but is one of the top four biggest companies in the world.
Casey:
I think they are the biggest right now.
Casey:
And even though the plucky upstart Apple that I like and care about and think about a lot...
Casey:
probably agrees with you, Marco, and probably thinks, why are we nickel and diming developers?
Casey:
Why are we being such stingy jerks?
Casey:
To be honest, the plucky upstart might also believe that they're entitled to all the money that's ever generated on any iPhone ever, but that's neither here nor there.
Casey:
But the problem is that Apple isn't the plucky upstart, and Apple isn't the little company anymore.
Casey:
They are, by value, the biggest company in the world.
Casey:
And
Casey:
If they said to a bunch of app developers, hey, we're going to make your lives better and you decide how, maybe it's alternate payments, maybe they take less money, whatever the case may be, then the hundreds of thousands of app developers start cheering.
Casey:
But the millions, question mark, of shareholders aren't going to be too happy about that, potentially.
Casey:
If the cost of making us happy, the app developers, is making shareholders upset,
Casey:
If I'm Tim, my duty is not to app developers.
Casey:
It's not really to anyone but shareholders.
Casey:
Right.
John:
And this is where I'm a little fuzzy because that's I mean, his duty is whatever he decides to think it is.
John:
There's no legal thing making him do crap like that within reason.
Casey:
I don't mean it in a legal sense.
John:
What I mean to say is – It's a question of attitude.
John:
But like the thing you described has happened though.
John:
Apple has reduced it, as they said many times in the trial.
John:
Apple has reduced the cut for developers.
John:
And each time Apple has done that, they have not been punished by people driving their stock price down.
John:
Because the way they did it affected almost nothing again.
John:
It's a thing that they've done.
John:
And surely they did leave revenue on the table by implementing all the plans they did for the 8515 and everything or whatever.
John:
And, you know, aside from any one or two day volatility, like their stock prices continue to go up since then.
John:
So.
Marco:
Yeah, and their services revenue has stayed exactly the same.
Casey:
That's exactly what I was going to say.
Marco:
Because, again, look at how many people that affected it.
Marco:
I got a raise last year because it was great.
Marco:
I'm so happy.
Marco:
That affected almost every developer I know.
Marco:
And yet, it cost Apple effectively nothing relative to everything else because they're making all their money from a handful of giant games.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
By changing App Store policy in ways that don't affect giant games, it basically costs them nothing.
Marco:
And yet even that, even the App Store small business program that we're talking about, they did that in the most half-assed, hostile way they could have possibly done it.
Casey:
You are not wrong.
Marco:
even that they clearly did extremely reluctantly and i think for cynical reasons because of all the regulatory thing like they wanted something they can point to say look how good we are like and there's if you can see you can see how they did it and you can see okay they have this convoluted system it's not automatic it has this weird revenue cliff thing that you you have a strong incentive to not make between like 1 million and 1.2 million or whatever it is like
Marco:
They did it in a pretty bad way, and it affects so many developers, but nobody that makes them tons of money, really, relative to the tons of money they're making from the handful of big games.
Marco:
That just shows their attitude right there.
Marco:
They have...
Marco:
I'm sure there are some people in the company, I'm sure there are many people in the company, who have good intentions at heart and are trying to give developers the best chances of success and give us the most money they can and everything.
Marco:
But that's clearly not the priority up top.
Marco:
Now, Casey, you're right.
Marco:
That doesn't necessarily need to be Tim Cook's priority, both professionally or legally.
Marco:
But there are knock-on effects, right?
Marco:
If all of this pressure from them squeezing the pennies out of all of us results in more regulation, then Apple could lose control of critical parts of their infrastructure and critical parts of their product line.
Marco:
That's what I'm saying.
Marco:
What they're risking by continuing to be...
Marco:
really money-grabbing jerks in a lot of these ways, what they're risking is something like governments force them to allow sideloading or governments force them to allow alternate app stores and other governmental interventions into iOS that we probably don't want that probably would result in worse outcomes for everybody, including them.
Marco:
But by continuing on the path they're continuing on, they just keep inviting this over and over again because they don't think they're ever going to lose.
Marco:
But at some point they will, and then we all will.
Marco:
And I really don't want that to happen.
John:
And I think what Tim Cook's actual motivation is, is he's not trying to make shareholders happy or anything like that.
John:
I think his motivation is what Marco said before, that he believes we built this platform and we deserve to take a cut of it.
John:
So it's the principle of it.
John:
Right.
John:
And as a CEO, he's one of the few people in the company who is allowed to have principles because, you know, if you're below that, it's like, yeah, you can have your principles.
John:
But in the end, your boss kind of dictates a lot about what you're going to be doing.
John:
And we should have a few more.
John:
But his principles might not be the ones that are the same as yours, but he has his principles.
John:
And one of them is, we built this.
John:
We deserve to take cut of it.
John:
And he doesn't want to be regulated.
John:
He wants to make decisions for himself because he wants to.
John:
It's like, we built the thing.
John:
We should be able to steer it.
John:
And that, I feel like, comes from the top.
John:
And every time he makes a statement, the more honest he becomes, the more it becomes so clear that Tim Cook really believes that, why are you messing with us?
John:
Like, this is a thing we made, and we're trying to make it the best we can according to our principles.
John:
And that means we should get to decide why.
John:
how it runs don't tell me how to run it um and of course he also wants to make money and you know he's a businessman and everything like that but it's it's sort of intrinsic motivation he's not running scared of like oh i have to do things to make the shareholders happy no it is all his sort of his internal motivation right and part of that motivation is if if we have the most control that means this is another businessman type thing and not driven by shareholders but just being a good business person
John:
Just because we make all our money from games today doesn't mean that it's going to be like that in the future.
John:
the best thing for the company is not to hem ourselves in by narrowly carving out like the, the rules such that we're okay for now.
John:
But if suddenly the next big thing turns out to be selling like hollow skins that technically aren't games or something, or like, I don't know, whatever the next big thing is, it's not necessarily true that app store revenue will, will be 80% games forever and ever and ever.
John:
Right.
Yeah.
John:
um so we shouldn't hem ourselves in by making that carve out even though it seems okay today because it's just future proofing it's just like a good idea i'm running the company i don't want to do anything that puts us in a bad position in the future again not because he's like oh i have to make the shareholders happier i want to make more money because i need that 17th house or whatever like that's not his motivation at all but he is motivated to do what's best for apple and it is not good for apple to
John:
to quote-unquote unnecessarily constrain itself by narrowing its rules.
John:
But as we've said every time we discuss it, and Marco just said it again, yeah, but those aren't the only two possibilities.
John:
There's a third one, which is government comes in and screws you over big time, and you should be doing whatever you can to avoid that.
John:
And we kept having this debate when the trial was going on.
John:
I was like...
John:
Does Apple really believe that there's still the possibility that they're just not going to get regulated at all?
John:
Like that they're going to win it all?
John:
And so far, that bet has mostly, at least in the US, mostly paid off for Apple.
John:
Like they're playing chicken saying, we know, like they have to know there are lots of really bad scenarios where Apple regulates them to the point and makes them do terrible things they would never do in a million years.
John:
And it's like, avoid them by giving concessions.
John:
And Apple's just like being steely eyed and saying, nope, I think we're, I think I'm going to make it.
John:
I think we're going to come out of this scot-free.
John:
And so far, they seem like they've mostly been right.
John:
So it would definitely be the safer bet to make more concessions to avoid regulation.
John:
The other possibility, I think I mentioned this on a past show, is that Apple has been convinced through their internal conversations with lawmakers that there is no amount of concessions that they can provide that would be satisfactory for
John:
right like the the what we're proposing oh if you do some of these small changes they'll lay off and they won't do the big changes that's not actually true and there's nothing apple can give up to stop these people from trying this and then you know of course in our country it's usually a safe bet to uh it's usually safe to bet that
John:
No actually functional good laws will ever come out of our lawmaking bodies because they're just so dysfunctional that they can't do literally anything.
John:
So that's that may be a safe bet is like no matter how much and how many people want to do this, it is impossible to make happen because our system no longer functions.
John:
There was there was some paper someone put out recently showing the there is no connection whatsoever, no statistically significant connection between things that the American people want and the laws that get passed.
John:
I guess you'll find it.
John:
Things that have a 90% favorability rating across the entire country cannot get passed as laws.
John:
There is no longer a connection between what people want and what laws are made.
John:
Laws that get made are made because some rich person wants it somewhere and has nothing to do with what people in the country actually want, which is depressing, but true to our experience, and someone did an actual study on it and has some numbers behind it.
John:
I wish I could find that link, but I think I saw it somewhere on Twitter.
Marco:
In related news, I paid $1,000 for the last 11 days of not having health insurance because the health insurance company just messed up.
Marco:
And so I just out that $1,000 for that part of the policy that I just didn't have coverage.
Marco:
And if I happened to have gotten an injury or sick or anyone in my family did in the last 11 days, we would have had no coverage and would have had to pay 100% out of the pocket and be totally liable for everything.
Marco:
Not because I failed to book an insurance policy, but because they failed to activate it.
Marco:
And it took 11 days to do it.
Marco:
Oh, and am I getting my discount on half of my $2,400 a month of premium?
Marco:
No, of course not.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
I'm so sorry.
Marco:
And that's because we can't pass laws that everybody wants.
Casey:
Yeah, but Republicans like small business, so surely they're going to come and save the day, right?
Mm-hmm.
Marco:
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Casey:
All right, so moving right along.
Casey:
John, tell us about your gross printer.
John:
I got a gross printer.
John:
I bet a lot of people have gross printers.
Casey:
What makes your printer gross?
John:
I have a crappy printer.
John:
I wouldn't say it's gross.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
Well, also here, I'll tell you why.
John:
I have a printer that we've had for a long time, and it stopped printing recently.
John:
You never want to hear about printing problems.
John:
Why can't I print?
John:
It's been a little flaky lately for a bunch of reasons, mostly related to software and drivers, but...
John:
When someone can't print, the call goes out.
John:
Why can't I print?
John:
And that's my signal to come and fix the printer because that's my life.
John:
But this time it was different.
John:
This time it was like a hardware error on the machine.
John:
Like you go up to it and there's a little screen on it.
John:
It said error code, you know, whatever.
John:
One, two, three, four, five.
John:
you know, contact support, blah, blah, blah.
John:
So of course I Googled for the error and it was, you know, it was not, it wasn't a, it wasn't a driver problem.
John:
It wasn't, it was like a mechanical issue with the printer.
John:
Right.
John:
And I very quickly found that what it wants you to do is clean some stuff out in there.
John:
Right.
John:
It's, this is an inkjet printer.
John:
Okay.
Casey:
Oh, well, that's your first problem.
John:
We've had it for many, many years.
John:
Now, if you ever look inside an inkjet printer that someone has had for many years, it's like what I imagine the inside of one of those Theranos machines is like.
John:
Yeah.
John:
right with just blood splattered everywhere but it's not blood it's printer ink like if you think you think of the printer as like oh i put these little ink cartridges in and then the little bits of ink go and they squirt out onto the page and these microsoft with little dots and and that's how you think the printer works but then you look inside and you're like why is the inside of this printer covered with ink like it's like there was an ink murder inside there
John:
so that i mean that's bothersome just from the perspective of like how does anything ever work when ink is just leaking and spraying and going everywhere but yeah eventually after many years of this it just gunks up the print head right so i took the print head out and i cleaned it carefully and got all the gunk off and like the gunk was just like like solidified sticky thick disgusting caked on ink from years and years of use i cleaned all that out put everything back together and it worked again right
John:
But as per my usual policy of once a device starts to betray me, it's going to get replaced.
John:
I can't afford the printer to just not work and stop working permanently.
John:
When some kid has to print something out, I'm going to be driving to Kinko's in the middle of the night to get something printed before school or some crap.
John:
Although that doesn't happen.
John:
They do it all online now.
John:
But anyway, when we need the printer to work, we need it to work.
John:
So I'm like, all right, printer.
John:
uh i now that i've seen what you look like on the inside you know it served its time i don't know how long we've had this printer many many years it's done what it had to do but i'd like i should get a replacement i looked at a replacement in the past as well but uh you know this time i was like well okay but now you're actually breaking i think it's time to get a replacement so i did um you know everyone including mark was going to say you should have got a color laser or something like that i i wanted one but the problem is i don't have a place in my house for
John:
uh for well i don't have a place in this room in the quote-unquote the computer room for a printer that big and so i asked my wife what's more important to you a better faster more problem-free printer that you have to walk someplace to and that place would probably be the basement
John:
or just get another crappy inkjet that fits in the space we have in this room.
John:
How big do you think a color laser is?
John:
I know how big they are because I read the dimensions.
John:
I know how much room we have.
John:
I know how big things are.
John:
I have a tape measure.
Marco:
To be fair, yeah, to be fair, like modern inkjets, especially the kind that like fold up when you're not using them, can be very, very small.
Marco:
And color lasers, while they have gotten very small relative to where they used to be, they are still, like you still can't get a color laser anywhere near the size of a small inkjet.
Marco:
But, I mean,
Marco:
They do get pretty small these days.
Marco:
Like, I'm kind of surprised you couldn't like, you know, like the low end models.
Marco:
I'm kind of surprised you couldn't fit one of those in.
John:
But the the the use case here is my wife demands and I kind of agree with her, not just a printer, but a printer scanner copier.
John:
uh that's what i've got there we go and you can get them you can get combination color laser printer scanner copiers but they are i'm looking at one right now but they are but they are bigger still and my space is very constrained it's it could technically maybe fit but it would like dominate the room in kind of a gross way and it's how much space do you have just ballpark
John:
um about enough space for the printer i have there it's it's a bay window i mean my room has a bay window on it right and so you know the little shelf that is like the the floor of the bay window that's where the printer is so think of a typical bay window and that little floor and by the way there's other stuff there not just the printer right that's where the printer goes and so if you can imagine taking marco your color laser and putting it on on the little floor area of a bay window it would be blocking your window it would be ugly it's just
John:
no so i mean because so those are the options color laser everything blah blah but you have to go someplace else probably the basement for it or another printer in this room and honestly the inkjet multifunction that we got it's done its job we've used the scanner we use the copier i don't think we ever use the fax we print things pretty rarely but we do print them and it's fine right it's fine and so i figured like it's not like we use color lasers and they were terrible and they broke all the time we had this one for years and years i can't remember when we bought it so i was just looking to replace it
John:
And I did, and I got another color laser that is smaller than the previous one.
John:
You mean color inkjet?
John:
Yeah, sorry, yeah.
John:
Color inkjet that is smaller than the previous one, which is nice.
John:
And apparently, I don't entirely understand this.
John:
I think it's like the half sheet of paper towel thing that I always bring up, that someone came up with an idea that makes consumers think they're saving money, but in the end, they end up spending more money or something.
John:
But anyway, the new trend in the new fad, whatever, the new way they sell you inkjet printers
Marco:
is what they call ink tank printers have either one of you heard of that yep i actually i had one briefly i think i returned it or it broke yeah i had i had like one of the epson ink tank ones where the idea was you know to save money in ink you could instead of spending a hundred dollars on a cheap printer that had very expensive cartridges you could spend like three hundred dollars on a printer that had these giant ink tanks and that you would have a lower cost per page than as a result
John:
yeah and they don't sell you i mean back in the day they used to sell you the entire print head plus the ink right and then eventually they stopped doing that and the print head would just be in the printer and they would just sell you these little ink cartridges that just were basically containers with ink right well and that that varied per brand by the way like i like i know like epson i think always had permanent heads and then little little you know slot cartridges hp for a while i don't know if they still do but they're
Marco:
So HP's ink cartridges contained the head on the bottom of each one, which is actually very nice in the sense that over time as the head would get all permanently clogged up eventually, you could just replace the ink cartridge and you would also get a new head every time.
Marco:
So that was actually – I preferred that.
John:
But it's more expensive for those cartridges because they had the heads on them.
John:
Right.
John:
That's the downside then.
John:
And it was harder to get third-party ones for cheaper because they have the heads built into them and stuff like that.
John:
But yeah, the ink tank one, the idea is that they –
John:
they don't sell you the head they don't sell to your conscience they sell you a bottle that you essentially pour into a tank and the theory is oh these bottles cost less per ounce of ink than the cartridges did and that's true if you do the math if you say the cartridge holds this piddling amount of ink and this whole bottle that looks like a soda can holds this amount of ink and do the do the division and you can see that it's way cheaper right um
John:
And also the capacity is larger.
John:
The capacity of my old one was like a couple hundred pages in color before it ran out.
John:
And this new one is like 6,000 pages before it runs out.
John:
They just hold more ink, which I worry about because we print so little.
John:
I'm like, are we ever going to run through this ink?
John:
Is it going to dry inside the tank just from age?
John:
We'll find out.
Marco:
By the way, my experience with ink tank printers, yes.
Marco:
Yeah, that's that's why I got rid of mine, because I remember now I had an Epson ink tank probably five, six years ago, something like that.
Marco:
It eventually just like it just got permaclogged because I wasn't using it on a regular basis.
Marco:
Like I would print something.
Marco:
So just quick, quick aside, my printer philosophy is.
Marco:
I have a small, cheap color laser for most printing needs, but we also keep an inkjet printer, not usually a very good inkjet printer, but we keep an inkjet printer in the house for occasional photo prints, whether that's to make somebody a quick card or just print out some photos to stick in something else that we're doing or some craft project because...
Marco:
Color lasers are amazing in almost every way, except they suck at photos.
Marco:
And it's not anything they can really ever overcome because toner is just not as good as ink on paper to really make a really nice photo.
Marco:
So inkjet is always going to be better for photos than laser.
Marco:
And I've even tried some of the other weird ones.
Marco:
I used to have a Xerox phaser wax printer.
Marco:
That was interesting.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
But yeah, Inkjet is great for photos.
Marco:
It's ridiculous.
Marco:
If you get a nice new Epson printer, you don't even have to get a very high-end one.
Marco:
Get one around the $150 to $200 range.
Marco:
Usually, it's the kind that has six ink cartridges, but not eight, but not four.
Marco:
Something like that, like a mid-range photo printer.
Marco:
and give it like nice glossy photo paper, usually from the same brand as the printer.
Marco:
And you can get amazing photo prints out of that.
Marco:
It looks so much better than anything a laser can produce, but it's an inkjet and they don't last forever.
Marco:
And in particular, the ones that have permanent heads like Epson's, if you don't use them very often, you will get clogs.
Marco:
Eventually those clogs will not be able to be blasted out by the cleaning process and you'll have to replace the whole printer.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
So it's not great for infrequent use, but I always keep one around anyway because it's relatively inexpensive.
Marco:
And we end up printing, I don't know, maybe like 20 or 30 photos a year on it.
Marco:
And I know that like if we planned ahead, we could like...
Marco:
have those photos printed by somebody that would just mail them to us, like, or, you know, go to a drugstore and have them print stuff or anything.
Marco:
But we don't do that.
Marco:
That's not the kind of life we have.
Marco:
And we know that about ourselves.
Marco:
You know, we have the stuff in-house, literally.
Marco:
But anyway, inkjets are great for photos.
Marco:
But you have to understand that they're probably not going to last many, many years.
Marco:
I'm surprised your previous one did.
Marco:
Or maybe you just don't have a high tolerance for... Or have a low tolerance for gaps in the printhead and stuff like that.
Marco:
But lasers last forever...
Marco:
and are perfectly happy to be used very occasionally, and are way less gross because toner is just plastic powder with dye, not liquid ink.
Marco:
So you might have to vacuum up some toner if something really bad happens, but I've never even seen that happen.
Marco:
So lasers are great in every other way.
Marco:
They just kind of suck for photos.
John:
Yeah, we don't really print photos.
John:
I would worry about an inkjet printed photo, like the longevity of that ink, especially with exposure to UV light and everything versus the dye sublimation printers that you hope like the actual photo processor place uses.
John:
But either way, like the printer we're replacing did have permanent heads, like the heads weren't on the ink cartridges and it lasted for years and years with
John:
now granted it's gunking up right now but i did clean it out and restore it to health enough so like i'm debating what we want to do with that old printer because it works and and we have tons of ink for it because the good thing about you know the all the lawsuits with like the drm ink cartridges is the printer manufacturers lost those so you can go to costco and get like really cheap ink for not really cheap but
John:
cheaper than the official ink for sure like half less than half the price of the official still like the most expensive substance on earth right but it is half the price of the you know the official ink so we have all this ink and we have the printer and it still works uh but like i think the main feature of the new one that i care about is one that it actually is smaller and two uh the dpi of the scanner is way up since like the crappy one that i had before like i think that's the scanner we had was like 600 dpi max and this one goes up to like
John:
2400 uh max optical and like 9800 interpolated or something and i do scan things probably more often than i print them often when i'm scanning your old photo prints surprisingly and then i'm trying to clean them up and stuff so um and of course this one has a fax just like the old one i think did but i don't think we're ever gonna use that the only downside of the one i got is it doesn't have a rear paper feeder
John:
it just has a top paper feeder and it's kind of a bottom like has like a set and then it has a paper feeder on top for doing copies but for prints it only has the cassette and you can put photo paper in the cassette and it's fine but it's more convenient to have a rear feeder as well so i don't know maybe we'll keep the old print around just for the hell of it as a
John:
as a backup printer or if we ever want to do something that requires the rear feeder or something like that um on the interface of this printer it's got a touch screen and i was like they still may it's a pressure sensitive touch screen like when's the last time you saw a pressure sensitive touch screen i had to bring back my old palm skills of using my fingernail to hit small buttons and everything it's like wow that's it's terrible um
John:
But it's a printer.
John:
It supports AirPrint out of the box.
John:
You don't have to install any drivers to use it from a Mac.
John:
Everything just works on it.
John:
We'll see how it goes.
John:
I am worried about the EcoTank thing with the ink running out, but live and learn.
John:
And it wasn't that expensive, so it's not going to be too big of a mistake.
John:
As opposed to the lasers where I bought this big heavy thing and put it in the basement and then we made trips up and down and decided we can't do this anymore.
John:
Especially for scans.
John:
You don't want to be walking up and down if you're scanning stuff to the computer.
John:
Yeah, that's true.
John:
but you need to bring it i was like oh you could bring a laptop down it's like no but i want to use my big screen when i do scans and so we'll see how it goes but i just thought i'd bring it up for the reason of like my shock about the inside of my printer looks like after all these years like you don't think of computer you think of computer devices as being exacting especially since the job of the printer is to put very precisely aligned tiny dots of ink on a paper carefully but then the whole inside of the printer is like you know like there's like i said like there's been a murder in it it's
John:
It's kind of amazing that the paper goes into that machine and comes out and isn't splattered with ink.
Casey:
So which actual printer did you get?
Casey:
Because we're going to get asked a thousand times.
John:
I put the link already in the area that you don't look at.
John:
Guess what?
John:
I didn't look at it.
John:
The place where you cannot look as said in the David Lynch version of Doom, which is better.
John:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Well, I will put a link to Epson EcoTank ET-4850 in the show notes.
Casey:
Do you have dimensions on this handy or can I vamp for a minute while you figure that out?
John:
It's on the website, but it is smaller than my previous one.
John:
One of the problems with the dimensions they give you for a lot of these is they extend all the flappy things.
John:
You know, like they extend the big paper tray that comes out.
John:
They extend the back thing.
John:
And those dimensions are bigger than the actual like dimensions of the box and everything.
John:
And you don't need to extend anything on this one.
John:
You can print with everything retracted and it works fine.
John:
Like the page comes out and it kind of sticks out halfway.
John:
Okay.
Casey:
So I take your point about this maybe including things extended.
Casey:
I understand what you're saying.
Casey:
I take your point.
Casey:
So your printer is about 20 by about 16 by about 10 inches.
Casey:
My color laser, which has, I don't know if it has a fax, but it definitely has a scanner, in Prince Duplex, mind you, is 16 by 16 by 13.
Casey:
16 by 16 by 13 would...
John:
Probably mostly fit, but the... It's smaller.
Casey:
It's three inches taller.
Casey:
That's the only difference.
John:
But I'm saying, like, you're reading, like, that tray extends a lot.
John:
Like, the actual size of this thing is much smaller than... I can go get a tape measure and measure the thing, but it is...
Marco:
Yeah, I just measured my little laser with the scanner on top is about Casey's size.
Marco:
It's like 16 by 15 by 12 or so.
Marco:
It's not very good.
Marco:
So I have here, I have my smaller setup.
Marco:
And this is a HP Color LaserJet M182.
Marco:
And it is an incredibly mediocre printer.
Marco:
I feel only mild hostility towards it.
Casey:
Well, that's an accomplishment if it's only mild.
Marco:
yeah it's hp i don't know what they were thinking with this printer it it is otherwise pretty good except that what there's something wrong with the network stack that it just you print something to it and the network stack seems to just go to sleep randomly and oh cool so about every fourth print that you try to print it'll just not do anything and you know just sit there eventually and you basically have to reboot it and there's like there's been no firmware updates like nothing that would possibly fix this meanwhile like i i
Marco:
Last time I visited my giant printer back home, which is... Let me see.
Marco:
That's an M553, which is almost a computer lab-sized printer.
Marco:
And I've talked before, I love that printer so much because it has...
Marco:
the most delightful feature a printer could ever have, which is you hit print, you get up, you walk over to the printer and your print is sitting in the tray done when you get there.
Marco:
Cause it's so fast and so trouble free.
Marco:
Cause you know, it's basically made for like small computer labs or small offices.
Marco:
So like,
Marco:
it's it's a big printer to have in your house and i got it on some weird clearance deal so it costs as much as like a house printer and it is just so unbelievably fast and you just hit print but i had a weird issue when i was there over christmas um the ssl certificate of its built-in interface expired
Marco:
Oh my gosh.
Marco:
And so it was throwing weird errors, weird air print errors and stuff, and I eventually traced to that, and I had to go and do something weird to fix it.
Marco:
I remember that was a very strange thing to happen that would never have happened in the past, but now modern technology...
Marco:
Yeah, the SSL certificate of the built-in web server of your printer that was probably self-signed expired because it's now five or six years old.
Marco:
But man, I love that printer.
Marco:
And I understand where John's coming from because that printer is only a few inches bigger in each dimension than my crappy M182 that I have here.
Marco:
And I love the big printer so much more, but that extra few inches in each dimension means that I really don't have a good place for it here, anywhere in this house.
Marco:
And every time I look around my office, I'm like, I wonder if I could rearrange this maybe.
Marco:
Maybe I could put the printer over there.
Marco:
I keep trying to find ways that I can get that printer here, and it just doesn't fit in the room.
John:
Here's the dimensions, by the way, Casey, of everything retracted, which, by the way, you can just leave it this way.
John:
It works fine.
John:
It's 14 by 9 by 13.
John:
all right no i will concede that is it is very tiny that's much smaller i will allow it that's why the extended trays really screw things up right um it does a neat thing i mean maybe it's just because it's new like when when you don't have the tray like that's supposed to catch the paper it sticks the paper out like seemingly more than halfway from the printer but it cups it so a single sheet of paper stays perfectly straight you know what i mean like you just go over to it and great like doesn't flop down it's pretty neat
John:
um and speaking of printers that like print things faster than you have them so working in offices for many years we have like the printers that are the size of a golf cart and those things are terrifying but amazing like first of all there's no way to get to the printer before it prints out because like it prints instantly i don't know if it has like seven print engines inside there but it prints like 48 pages double-sided and like in like the blink of an eye and
John:
There's like 17 drawers where you put paper of all different sizes.
John:
Right.
John:
And the interface in it is this giant screen.
John:
And, you know, it's just it's terrifying.
John:
Like, but they are the most amazing devices.
John:
You know, but like I just remember going up to them and trying to figure out if I was to use this without a computer, but just here I am.
John:
I'm here.
John:
I want to make copies.
John:
Right.
John:
And you start going through the interface and it's like this whole world.
John:
It reminded me like the SGI screen from Jurassic Park where you fly through this 3D type interface.
John:
what is this it's like i was like what operating system is this like a custom like canon operating system i don't and and the machines the other thing about those golf cart size ones they're constantly making this low level humming noise i don't know if it's the fans or like lasers or something is something i would never want to have a desk near one because they're just so that was another thing i was worried about with lasers like any kind of idle noise where the ink jets are totally silent when they're on but
Marco:
No, modern lasers are – they go into a sleep mode.
Marco:
Even my giant one goes into a sleep mode after a few minutes of not being used.
Marco:
What makes them fast is that they can heat up the fuser really quickly because that's like when a laser printer is like warming up, what it's doing – like the way it works, dropping plastic beads of ink on the page and then melting them onto the page with the fuser –
Marco:
And I'm pretty sure what it's mostly waiting for for startup is like the fuser has to get hot enough to melt plastic before they can put a piece of paper through it.
Marco:
And they're really the nice high end laser printers.
Marco:
This is why like if you ever had a laser printer on like a home circuit.
Marco:
And you hit print and all the lights flicker for a second.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marco:
Because they draw a huge amount of power up front to try to heat up that fuser as fast as possible so they can be ready to print that first page out.
Marco:
And generally the higher end printers will have a faster heating fuser and they can respond more quickly.
John:
Or just keep it hot all the time like this giant golf cart size thing.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And that's I'm guessing the noise you're hearing on like your giant copier basically is it's just keeping it running all the time and there's a fan blowing to keep it cool.
John:
please copier i think these things can produce bound books like they're just ridiculous devices they're like they do that little paper binding and it just they are terrifying i kind of i kind of miss messing with i also miss like we had so many of them like you'd have to try to add a printer to your computer and it would be like a challenge to find out like you know there would be not well labeled like so i want to print to this printer like you'd print a test page and then you'd be wandering around the office going where did that come out and you just look through the stacks of paper that are sitting there from past months in the printer it's it's a mess
Marco:
I will say, though, one joy of modern inkjets... I keep saying most people should not even have an inkjet, but they are great for photos, as I said.
Marco:
They also are fantastic for if you have some kind of media that you're trying to print on that is either not rectilinear, it's not rectangular, or it's something that you can't bend very much, or might have a problem going through a laser print path...
Marco:
usually has to wrap around it has like you know make a 180 with the paper to wrap around and come out the little slot on top whereas an inkjet print path is just a straight line if it has one of those rear input flaps and so you can put stuff through an inkjet that like like tiff had me print the other day she was she was making a pattern for a glass piece and she had this like this this like sticky contact paper that could be printed on one side but she only had like one sheet left and she'd already cut part of it off so it wasn't a rectangle anymore
Marco:
And we tried feeding it through the laser, and it was just like, no.
Marco:
That's not going to happen.
Marco:
But we fed it through the inkjet, and sure enough, it took a little bit of doing, but it got through there, and it printed on it just fine.
Marco:
Inkjets will print on anything.
Marco:
They had the ones back in the day that would print on CDRs.
Marco:
They couldn't print labels on them.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
Those were amazing.
Marco:
They would print on anything.
Marco:
But what's also nice about inkjets today...
Marco:
Even though they are largely garbage technology, they are garbage technology that is very cheap that can somehow still do a lot for the short period of time in which it actually works.
Marco:
The reason I got my last inkjet was we had – I forget exactly what it was.
Marco:
We had some kind of family – like old family pictures and something like that where we wanted to scan them, and they were too big for a regular 8x10 scanner.
Marco:
And the cheapest 11 by 17 scanner that we could find was part of an Epson all-in-one printer.
Marco:
Like it just happened.
Marco:
Like I challenge you, go try to find a standalone 11 by 17 flatbed scanner.
Marco:
They exist, but not many of them.
Marco:
And they're very expensive.
Marco:
And this Epson all-in-one was an 11 by 17 scanner and 11 by 17 printer, which we occasionally made use of.
Marco:
All of that was, I think like 250 bucks.
Marco:
It was ridiculously cheap for what it was compared to the rest of the market just because printers are so insanely cheap because they kind of have to be for various reasons.
Marco:
It is kind of delightful.
Marco:
Most people don't need this stuff, but when you do need it, it costs nothing and can do incredible things for how little it costs.
John:
Trying to look up how old my previous printer was, and I can't believe I can't find the order, like, order receipt from it in my email, but I did find an email where I'm conversing, or I was conversing with someone about something, and I referenced my model of printer, and this is from 2010, so that printer was at least...
John:
11 years old at least that's that's bananas yeah that's for an inkjet that's that's incredible and for multifunction like scanner printer copy again we're extremely light use but it took 11 years for it to clog with ink with its permanent head so hopefully this ink tank one will last as well and this one does actually have a three-year warranty so if it craps out in the first three years we'll just you know get it replaced or whatever but
John:
Here's hoping.
Marco:
Well, good luck.
Marco:
And for all those people out there who are like, I don't even know why anybody needs a printer.
Marco:
I don't have a printer.
Marco:
Just, I don't care.
Marco:
Please keep that to yourself.
Marco:
We use our printers occasionally and we like them and I'm very glad we have them.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you so much to Trade for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
And Asajj writes, opinions on React or React Native?
Casey:
I've been working React Native for the last year and enjoying it more than I expected to, and was curious if you all had ever used either variant.
Casey:
I have not used any third-party front-ends on top of iOS or Android, for that matter.
Casey:
I did very briefly dabble with mono like forever and a day ago, and it was very good, but this was easily 10 years ago.
Casey:
There's a Twitter account that I occasionally pay attention to, iOS underscore memes, who posted just a week or two ago an image that's a person being dragged in each direction in the caption, which is slightly uncouth.
Casey:
I apologize, but you'll see where I'm going with this.
Casey:
Divorce leads children to the worst.
Casey:
places and you know this kid is being like torn between their their mom and dad going opposite directions and about to land on a book learning react native so uh divorce leads children to the worst places like learning react native um i am not in favor of any sort of right once run anywhere thing unless it's right once run anywhere on that platforms or on that vendor's various platforms like swift ui has many problems but at least apple is in control of it everywhere
Casey:
I don't particularly care for having some third party standing between me and the platform vendor.
Casey:
It's not for me.
Casey:
I don't like it.
Casey:
I don't like that it, it requires somebody else's code and a mountain of somebody else's code.
Casey:
This is where Marco jumps in and says, you know, don't believe other people's code.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
I don't personally feel like that juice is worth the squeeze.
Casey:
Now, I have dabbled in React a teeny bit, particularly on the web.
Casey:
I think there might still be a React-based version of the Showbot that we use to track titles, or at least the front end to the Showbot.
Casey:
And I did like it in the brief window of time that I used it.
Casey:
I was able to put something together pretty quickly.
Casey:
And if I remember right, it had vague SwiftUI-style feeling to it.
Casey:
Or I guess I should say SwiftUI has React-style feeling to it.
Casey:
So in principle, yeah, whatever, it's fine, I guess, but I would never ship something based on React Native, not me personally.
Marco:
Yeah, I think you nailed the problems of like, you're putting a large amount of other people's code between you and the platform you're writing on.
Marco:
And that has multiple costs to you.
Marco:
One of them, obviously, it's bloat to your app.
Marco:
But also, you are not using the APIs directly.
Marco:
So you might be only able to access things in a limited way.
Marco:
You might be accessing them in a worse way.
Marco:
And you are possibly inviting problems from the platform vendor in the future.
Marco:
Like if Apple decides that something's going to change the way it works, then the frameworks have to modify to catch up before you can even do it at all.
Marco:
They might cause problems for you, including things like policy problems.
Marco:
If Apple decides, hey, this thing uses an interpreter in a certain way, you can't do that anymore.
Marco:
And so there's all these problems.
Marco:
you know, potential costs and real costs to doing something.
Marco:
So you have to look at what's the upside here.
Marco:
And generally speaking, you know, the upside is something like React, which admittedly I've never used these things.
Marco:
But the upside to frameworks like this or alternative app frameworks for a platform usually is either cross-platformness, which, as Casey said, like has its ups and downs,
Marco:
Or it just allows you to make apps in a different language or paradigm that you might be more comfortable with or wanting to use for some reason, or both.
Marco:
That's usually the appeal of these platforms.
Marco:
The downsides, though, are pretty large.
Marco:
And so you have to say, all right, well...
Marco:
Are you actually making something that's going to be running on like Android and Windows and everything else where the cross-platform nature of one of these things would make sense?
Marco:
And for me, the answer is no.
Marco:
I'm running an app for iOS.
Marco:
I don't need to run or want to run on Android and Windows and WebOS and BOS.
Marco:
That's fine.
Marco:
I don't need to run anything else.
Marco:
I'm fine just running on iOS.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
By running against this other set of APIs, basically, like this whole other platform that you're putting on top of the platform, you are tying yourself to that platform.
Marco:
You are beholden to them.
Marco:
You are reliant on them.
Marco:
You are taking all of their good with the bad.
Marco:
and for me i'd rather just write right to the platform i'm writing on like i'd rather i'd write i'd rather write native code native to the apis on the platform i'm running on directly from their vendor because those are going to always be the best supported for the longest time which another thing like are you writing this app to last for six months are you writing this app to last for 10 years if you're writing it more for the 10 year time span
Marco:
or if you think that might be a possibility that you want to account for and allow to happen, you're probably going to be wanting to write into the literal native stuff, not React Native, because whatever the cool framework is that you might want to write today might not exist in 10 years, might not be supported anymore in 10 years, and might not be what is cool anymore in 10 years.
Marco:
So instead, you might as well stick to the platform...
Marco:
apis directly that are going to be supported probably way longer and way better than anything else out there and will have way more resources for help and example code and everything else if you have problems that would involve something like apple's dts ticket system where they could like look at your code to solve a problem that's going to be way more likely to help you and be able to help you in native code you know there's all these upsides to using the native frameworks that are you know kind of my style old and boring but
Marco:
But those are massive upsides, not to mention, again, all the bloat and everything.
Marco:
And so these other platforms have never shown that they've had enough value to me and my priorities and my needs to be worth all of their downsides.
Marco:
Now, obviously, if you're working for a big company and you have a giant team and you're sharing a bunch of code with various other platforms and maybe your server-side stuff might share some JavaScript, who knows?
Marco:
I don't know how any of this stuff works anymore.
Marco:
Like, I can kind of see the appeal there.
Marco:
But a lot of this stuff just seems like reinventing for the sake of reinventing.
Marco:
And I've, you know, in the same way, like...
Marco:
I'm a bad nerd because I don't like Star Trek or anime, fantasy stuff.
Marco:
I've never seen Lord of the Rings.
Marco:
Oh, you're not missing anything.
Marco:
I feel like I'm a bad nerd because I don't follow a lot of the common things that nerds like.
Marco:
I'm also, in that way, a bad programmer.
Marco:
I don't like the idea that we have as programmers that we have to constantly be reinventing the foundations on which we are trying to build stuff.
Marco:
I like the foundations to be foundations, to be foundational, to mostly not change very often, only change when there's a really good reason, and to be very well supported for a long time and in deep ways.
Marco:
And that's why I like building on stable ground, because Casey, you're writing a new app right now.
Marco:
Is any customer going to care at all what framework you use to make it?
Marco:
Nope, not a bit.
Marco:
Will they even know?
Marco:
Will they even be able to tell?
Marco:
Eh, maybe, but probably not.
Marco:
It doesn't matter.
Marco:
For the purposes of creating something for use and for shipping and getting it out there and making a thing, a lot of these implementation details...
Marco:
don't matter nearly as much as we like to think they do.
Marco:
We are always attracted to the new and shiny in our languages and frameworks and everything.
Marco:
But all that does is distract us and keep us busy and add complexity that keeps us busy.
Marco:
And a lot of times it doesn't lead to the ability to ship good products faster or better or whatever else.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
These things need to convince me not, why am I not using them?
Marco:
But why should I use them?
Marco:
Like, what massive benefits are there going to be to make it worth me tolerating all of these massive costs that they definitely do have no matter what people say?
Marco:
And most of the time, whatever new thing people are talking about doesn't pass that test.
Marco:
Usually,
Marco:
The upside is not worth the massive downside.
Marco:
And that's, you know, React and React Native.
Marco:
I've never looked at my current situation, which is the default, which is develop against the platform native APIs, and said, I want to solve problems that can only be solved by jumping to some totally different thing.
Marco:
That's not a problem I've ever had.
Casey:
Yeah, and I think it's worth noting, I think you said this a minute ago, that sometimes you would turn to React because you're really good with JavaScript and HTML, and you're not very good with Swift or Kotlin or what have you, and you just want to write something native with what you got.
Casey:
And that makes sense.
Casey:
But if you have the time and energy to learn the native thing, and sometimes because of jobs, you don't have the time or perhaps don't have the energy, but if you do have the time and energy...
Casey:
I've said many times and I stand by it that even if you don't care for Swift, learning Swift will help you think about JavaScript and HTML and all the other things you might already know differently in a good way.
Casey:
It doesn't necessarily make you better at the things you already know, but I would argue it does because Swift has many things and if it's anything, it's opinionated.
Casey:
So it has opinions about how you should do things.
Casey:
And maybe those are translatable to other languages and platforms and paradigms, or maybe they're not.
Casey:
But it gets your brain to be mushier in the happy sense and to think of things differently.
Casey:
And any time I've learned a different language, even ones that I don't particularly care for,
Casey:
I found it useful as a different way to approach problems, even in the stuff I already knew.
Casey:
Now, again, I can't stress enough.
Casey:
Sometimes your job says, tough noogies, we've got to do this yesterday, and you've got to do it with stuff you know.
Casey:
But a lot of times, if you have the flexibility, it will ultimately pay off, even if you only write this one single-serving app and never look back at Swift ever again.
Casey:
John, thoughts?
John:
I agree with what you said about React Native.
John:
There are limited circumstances under which it makes any kind of sense.
John:
Very limited.
John:
As for React itself, the only thing I actually have experience with, it's fine.
John:
It's neat.
John:
It's got some questionable ideas in its design that nevertheless were the right ideas at the right time for the hamster wheel that is JavaScript frameworks.
John:
Yeah.
John:
uh arguably it has already uh you know on the been replaced by newer fancier javascript frameworks that seems to be the way of the world for front-end frameworks that they just go in cycles but it doesn't mean that any of these front-end frameworks that we had are necessarily bad or even necessarily worse than the things that eventually quote-unquote replace them um
John:
It's got the support of big companies.
John:
I think Facebook does react, right?
John:
I don't recall.
John:
uh keeping things going just because lots of people have software written in them so lots so sites end up either stuck on an old framework that is no longer in favor slash being actively developed or they're constantly changing frameworks or the most common in my experience sites use seven different frameworks which is kind of defeating the purpose of frameworks because now you're paying the cost of each one of them
John:
uh and it's a little bit of a mess but that's just the way the web works it's uh it's a fast-paced environment as they say um and i think in the grand scheme of things of all the front-end javascript frameworks i've seen react is fine like again i i disagree with parts of it philosophically but i understand why the decisions were made it rubs me the wrong way in some aspects but you can make uh apps with it easier than you could without it which is kind of the job of javascript frameworks
Casey:
Do you know what the JavaScript framework du jour is today?
Casey:
Because I am so out of that world.
John:
Vue is one of the ones that was competing with React.
John:
What is the other one?
John:
Chatroom, what is the non-Vue one that's in the mix with the top three these days?
John:
This stuff just makes me so sad.
John:
Angular, there you go.
John:
I just typed React Vue into Google and it auto-completed to React Vue Angular.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So yeah, those are the ones that are currently in the mix.
John:
And I'm sure they'll wait a couple of years.
John:
There'll be a few more to come and be the next batch.
Casey:
Yay.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Some guy called Todd Vaziri writes, noticing this huge discrepancy between how much data is in my photos library, as in, you know, in photos, and the photos library as in the stuff in Finder.
Casey:
Should I be concerned?
Casey:
So, dear friend of the show, Todd sent a couple screenshots.
Casey:
One of them is, you know, getting info on the photos library within the photos app, and it shows 504.11 gigs.
Casey:
Then Todd went to Finder, looked at the photos library, looked at information on that.
Casey:
734.65 gigs.
Casey:
So, John, is that something that Todd should be worried about?
John:
Well, I bring this up partly because of when Marco had a similar experience, I think, when we were like looking at the size of stuff and did you like do get info?
John:
Or maybe it was you, Casey.
John:
Which one did you do?
Marco:
I had the opposite.
Marco:
My photo library on disk was like 60 gigs.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And then I had all this mystery space on my main hard drive where it wasn't even supposed to be that was exactly the size of my photo library.
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, so setting aside that, whatever that was that Marco had, for Todd's case, where the numbers are closer and the photos library is bigger than photos reports...
John:
There are some things that might make that make some semblance of sense or at least explain why it is that way.
John:
And I thought of this because I've been messing with my photo library.
John:
Photos was doing a thing, my giant photo library, where it thought it had one file to upload.
John:
It's like uploading one file and it would just never, like it was never uploading that whatever one file thing.
John:
I had all the files.
John:
Like I wasn't missing anything.
John:
It was the same on all my computers as it was on my wife's phone.
John:
You know, it's like, but it was always like, oh, uploading one file.
John:
Me being me, I dove into the SQLite database to try to find out is there somewhere in the SQLite database where there's like a row and a table where it thinks it has to upload a file that doesn't exist.
John:
And I could just delete that row and decide.
John:
And I could not make heads or tails of the schema.
John:
It's such a mess in there.
John:
And there's no good recent articles explaining the schema because they change the schema all the time.
Yeah.
John:
You know, I came up with nothing there, although I did vacuum the database for them, which I felt like was a nice thing to do while I was in there.
John:
Right.
John:
SQL light jokes.
John:
Wow.
John:
That's that's just the day.
John:
It's just it's just the nice thing to do when you're in there.
John:
but and then i remember like well i might volume this but i just do repair library if people don't know if you've launched photos and hold down command and option at the same time it'll offer to repair your library which will basically rebuild it and and sort of reconcile the sqlite i'm assuming it's reconciling the sqlite database with what's on disk or whatever and i did that and it rebuilt it and it no longer said it had one file left to upload right but while i was in there while i was like searching around i dove into the actual photo library like
John:
it's it's just a directory like the package or whatever if you do show package contents or you just go there in the terminal right and because my photo library has just been passed from iPhoto to all these versions of photos there's tons of cruft in there right there's just leftover crap mostly leftover empty directories sometimes directories with files on them like especially since they did the big renaming where they renamed all your photos to have UUID names and
John:
Things used to be organized inside photo libraries by year folders, and that hasn't been true in many years now, but those year folders are still there.
John:
So I did a little bit of house cleaning in there.
John:
Do not do this.
John:
If you're listening to this program, do not go into your photo library folder and say, I don't think I need that directory.
John:
Recursive delete.
John:
I do not recommend this.
John:
But I did this very carefully because I'm willing to take that risk and I feel like I have some semblance of knowing what I'm doing and I have 100 backups of this elsewhere.
John:
So do not do this.
John:
But it reminded me that it is possible that there is lots of cruft in your photo library folder.
John:
But setting the cruft aside, what there definitely is in your photo library folder are multiple versions of images because there's like the original, but then you have the modified version that it sometimes bakes in.
John:
There's thumbnails and
John:
There's all the databases for all the photo analysis, face recognition, all that stuff.
John:
And then, of course, the main metadata databases.
John:
So there is more in your photo library folder than just the photos.
John:
And it is plausible, although kind of dumb, but plausible that the photos application is just summing up the sizes of all the photos, like by running a query against the SQLite database, right?
John:
But that is not how big the photo library is because the photo library has multiple copies of the photos and has a bunch of giant data dictionaries for all that other stuff that I – would that be 200 gigs worth of stuff?
John:
Probably not.
John:
But I think the photo library on disk, like the actual package thing, is always going to be bigger than the sum of the size of the originals that are in the photo library.
John:
Should it be that much bigger?
John:
Maybe not.
John:
If you use iCloud photo library and you have good backups, you always have the option of just chuck that whole library in the garbage, delete it, make a new system library, hook it up to iCloud and tell it to redownload everything.
John:
And then you'll have a, in theory, a fresh new and, you know, set the thing that says to download everything, a fresh new library with the minimum amount of stuff in it.
John:
But it does like the whole point of photos is it builds databases and indexes and all sorts of other crap on your photos.
John:
And it does make multiple copies of your photos so it can quickly show the thumbnails and all that other crap.
John:
So it's always going to be bigger on disk than just the size of your photos.
John:
So should you worry about this?
John:
Probably not.
John:
Just have lots of good backups.
John:
Make sure it's actually good to have your photo library on multiple computers.
John:
So you want to see the same thing on both of them all the time, right?
John:
If you do something on one, you should see it on the other.
John:
If you say import 100 pictures, you better see the 100 pictures elsewhere because if you see them elsewhere, that shows that it's getting up to iCloud and back down to the other computer.
John:
And that's what you want.
John:
And then, of course, you want that to go into your backups from there, right?
John:
So as long as that's all working and you think you have everything and the sizes are reasonable, I wouldn't worry too much about it.
John:
But if you're concerned a little bit and you use iCloud photo library and you're sure everything is all uploaded, right?
John:
It's another thing you can do.
John:
You can make a smart album that says, show me all of the photos that we were unable to upload to iCloud.
John:
You should just always have that in your sidebar and it should always show zero items.
John:
That's, you know, if you have some problem uploading something because it's a weird format or it's complaining about it or whatever.
John:
if you're sure everything's fine and or even if you don't want to delete it if you can like set it aside or copy because it's just a folder full of file if you can copy that photo library to a disk disconnect that disk from your computer then delete it and redownload it and make it fresh then maybe see if your library on disk gets a little bit smaller or something but maybe not maybe it comes down on disk and it's still 700 gigs or whatever
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Hover, Memberful, and Trade Coffee.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
We will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Tech Podcast So long
John:
all right do do we want to do the animal products follow-up yeah let me let me do uh i'll do my opening statement and marco can do his prepared statement okay maybe my my opening statement is that we talked about like diet and animals and veganism and leather and agriculture and all sorts of stuff in the last show uh
John:
This is one of those topics where we talk about it.
John:
We get lots of feedback.
John:
It's mostly good feedback, but the feedback basically says this.
John:
Whatever thing you talked about, it is both worse than you said, but also not as bad as you said, and you should not do it or do it a lot more.
John:
every single item you name it name an angle on it pick a random thing like oh leather uh that's a byproduct of meat production so you don't have to worry about it oh leather did you know that leather is not a byproduct of meat production and they and they raise animals just for leather you should eat lots of vegetables you should eat less vegetables actually meat is great for the environment did you know meat is worse for the environment than you even said did you know that leather is actually good for the environment did you know leather is worse for the environment than even you said in your program
John:
pretty much evenly split on every single topic we talked about there is one group of people telling us that is worse than we said and one group of people telling us that it's better and depending on what like the sort of prevailing like the popular opinion is one side of it gets to say that they're the turns outside
John:
like despite what you may suspect it turns out that unexpected thing is true and it wasn't always on the you know sometimes the unexpected thing is like the current consensus is this is actually really bad but turns out it actually is good right and anyway so it's not to say that you know the truth must be somewhere in the middle because that's not true the truth is not in the middle of those two things the truth is closer to one side than the other but this is to say we got a lot of good feedback and a lot of things to think about but
John:
it's very difficult to draw conclusions without actually studying it more.
John:
I felt like overall, we didn't get lots of angry people because our handling of this topic was sort of middle of the road where we're just kind of saying, here's what I've heard and here's my thinking of it and here's what I'm doing.
John:
And we did get the strain of feedback, which I think is true, which is like, in the end, nobody's going to lead a perfect life and we're all doing the best we can with the information we have.
John:
And I would fall back to my statement during the show, which is,
John:
your individual behavior here, uh, is worth thinking about, but in the end you still are only one person, right?
John:
Like, you know, I made the point that your individual behavior on, on what you choose to do with your diet can actually affect demand.
John:
And that demand affects what's produced much more so than things like electricity, other systemic problems.
John:
But there are also systemic problems in agriculture.
John:
As you mentioned in the show, there are subsidies for lots of good and bad things.
John:
Um, but yeah,
John:
There's no way to lead the perfect life where you're doing the perfect thing.
John:
And certainly there is no way to lead the perfect life or be the perfect company or whatever to the point where everyone is happy with your decision.
John:
Because as I mentioned at the top, we got feedback in both the directions of extreme.
John:
So no matter what we do, no matter what you do, and including no matter what Apple does, someone is going to be upset about it.
John:
And that's just, you know, you just got to do what you think is best and adjust that opinion as new information comes to light.
Marco:
And I'm going to make you more upset.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So just quickly.
John:
Now for Marco to inflame your anger once more.
Marco:
I did want to – so we got two good links to share.
Marco:
One is actually today Matthew Iglesias' column Slow Boring had a whole thing referencing our show and basically evaluating like –
Marco:
um the argument that more nutritious or non-animal based food is more expensive and therefore inaccessible to people um and and he breaks down a lot of data and citations and and numbers showing like some pretty good stuff to think about basically you know healthy food is not as expensive as people think it is um so that's good read that for sure um and then also let me dig this up here um
Marco:
Listener Renfred wrote in, linking to this article in the BBC, citing a scientific study about water emissions and land use, comparing different milks, like all the dairy, rice milk, soy milk, oat milk, almond milk, because part of the discussion that we were having about how cows especially, but in general, animal products tend to be significantly worse for the environment and less efficient and everything else.
Marco:
And John kind of breezed by also like, oh yeah, almonds.
Marco:
We know almonds take a lot of water to grow and everything.
Marco:
But actually, it turns out that almonds do take a lot of water to grow compared to most of their alternatives, but not compared to dairy milk because cows drink water and eat food that was grown using water.
Marco:
And so I feel like we oftentimes –
Marco:
People start – whenever we present like an alternative like, hey, maybe you should drink oat milk instead of dairy milk for your coffee or whatever, a lot of people will get defensive and I'll have more of that in a second.
Marco:
But we'll get defensive and we'll jump and say, well, almonds use too much water.
Marco:
They're bad for the environment.
Marco:
But it's very often when you're making that kind of argument or reaction –
Marco:
to not properly account for the status quo that you're implicitly arguing for.
Marco:
You know, if you're saying like, yeah, almonds use tons of water, well, how much water do cows use?
Marco:
And it turns out the answer is a lot.
Marco:
And that's just, that's water.
Marco:
They're also, if you look at this study, it's kind of ridiculous, the differences in emissions and land use as well, that basically...
Marco:
Like, yeah, animal stuff is really bad for the environment, so much more than you might think.
Marco:
And, you know, the individual choices here matter a lot, I think, you know, in the sense that, you know, the collective action in a lot of things that we do, as John was saying, can't make large differences in the world.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
The food choices that we make are one area where many of us can make that kind of difference.
Marco:
We can make that choice.
Marco:
And often in situations where we don't have a lot of other choices that we can do that would make big effects.
Marco:
But animal consumption basically uses so much more environmental resources compared to plant-based stuff of similar nutritional value that it's not even close.
Marco:
And so we actually can make a difference there.
John:
I should just point out that we did get feedback that's the exact opposite of what Marco was saying, just to prove my point, that some people said, actually, cows are way better for the environment than they seem like, and they're actually beneficial, and here are the reasons why.
Marco:
I didn't find a lot of data to back that up.
John:
Well, if you'll find a study, just like you cited the thing about how almonds aren't that bad, it was probably funded by the almond industry, and the beef industry funds their own studies to say that beef isn't that bad.
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, well, and almonds aren't great, but they're way better than cows because it's not it's not hard to be way better than cows.
Marco:
But and we also the other the other main thing that we got is feedback was basically saying like, yeah, you know, veggie burgers or meat alternatives, they're unhealthy, too.
Marco:
And I covered this and I think it's worth covering this a little bit more.
Marco:
If you're replacing meat with a meat alternative directly, then what it's probably made of is some kind of plant protein and a whole bunch of vegetable oil.
Marco:
And yeah, vegetable oils are unhealthy.
Marco:
Eating large amounts of oils is unhealthy.
Marco:
So is eating lots of meat for many of the same reasons.
Marco:
Although meat also introduces some bonus like inflammatory issues, carcinogens, lots of fun stuff.
Marco:
But and believe me, I say this as a meat eater.
Marco:
I still eat meat.
Marco:
I just eat less of it.
Marco:
But reducing meat consumption does not mean just replacing all of your meat meals with meat substitutes and making no other changes.
Marco:
But we need a bridge.
Marco:
Imagine, I'll go to another much safer, less heated topic, gun control.
Marco:
Imagine if we were trying to take away everybody's guns.
Marco:
gun people wouldn't be ready for a radical change all at once so we'd say like you can't have your gun anymore and their question would be well what am i supposed to shoot people with that's that's obviously the wrong question but to get them to start down a better path maybe we would address that need with some kind of bridge solution maybe we would like replace their guns with rubber band guns and give them like little little targets to shoot because you know it's a sport right it's not about fantasies about killing people it's definitely a sport right um that's that's what they're all about right
John:
It's also about killing animals, just to be fair.
Marco:
Yeah, true.
Marco:
The rubber bands don't work on them.
John:
We go right back to the meat question.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
But anyway, we don't need these bridge solutions for people to use rubber band guns forever.
Marco:
That's just like a bridge to help them wean off guns long term, right?
Marco:
Fake meat burgers are...
Marco:
They're the rubber band gun of the meat world, basically.
Marco:
They are typically healthier than meat, although not by as much of a margin in many ways as you might think.
Marco:
They are usually far better for the environment.
Marco:
But a much healthier diet would reduce the total frequency of burger-style meals altogether, because
Marco:
If you think about what a burger is, it's basically a very heavily salted circle of fatty protein covered in fatty squares of cheese, real or fake, either way, it's similar nutritional profiles, garnished with sugary condiments, sandwiched between...
Marco:
two big pillows of refined white flour.
Marco:
And then next to the burger on the plate is a side of deep fried salty carbohydrates that usually have enough calories by themselves to be a second dinner for an adult.
Marco:
Okay, so.
Marco:
So just leave the burger and just eat fries for dinner is what we're saying.
Yeah, no.
Marco:
A burger and fries, the way we think about that, that's unhealthy for lots of reasons, not just whether it has an animal or vegetable oil in the middle.
Marco:
The problem is the ratio of these rich, fatty, salty, carby foods to nutritional vegetables.
Marco:
On that typical platter, I think you're lucky if there's a leaf of lettuce on the burger.
Marco:
If there's a tomato slice, that's probably the healthiest thing on the plate.
Marco:
And so what needs to change for lots of reasons is that the ratio of how we eat these things in general.
Marco:
We need to elevate healthy vegetables from garnishes or small side dishes to be a much larger portion of the meal.
Marco:
Like this is like –
Marco:
This morning, like today, I had a vegan breakfast.
Marco:
I had a mostly vegetable lunch and dinner, but lunch had a bit of cheese and dinner had a bit of chicken.
Marco:
But the bulk of it was vegetable stuff.
Marco:
That's the kind of thing I'm talking about because we don't need everyone to eat zero meat and dairy forever, ever again.
Marco:
Like that's not what anybody's arguing.
Marco:
What needs to change, like, you know, meat and dairy are mostly fine, just in smaller, way smaller quantities than the typical American diet is eating these days.
Marco:
So, have a big pile of vegetables, and if you want to put some meat or cheese on top, cool, that's fine.
Marco:
The idea is to greatly reduce animal products with vegetables as the main sources of bulk in your diet.
Marco:
And this idea...
Marco:
sets people on fire they are so defensive about this concept and there's i understand why like if you think you know food is it's so deeply tied to family culture identity you know we learn we learn what to eat from our parents and our grandparents so when something is presented to you that presents like hey you might want to change the way you eat it's it feels like an attack on your family um and you know just like
Marco:
The worst, hardest hitting insults are the ones that you kind of know are a bit true.
Marco:
The defensiveness around food is made so much worse when the idea that you're being presented with is something that you know is kind of true.
Marco:
This is why everybody hates vegans.
Marco:
Vegans get an unbelievable amount of crap from the world.
Marco:
Every vegan I know avoids bringing up that they're vegan if they don't have to.
Marco:
This is why they even invented the wonderful euphemism plant-based, because they had to say plant-based now, because the term vegan makes people so angry, just the term, that they needed a new word.
Marco:
The reason why veganism makes people so angry is that deep down we all know that the vegans are kind of right about some stuff.
Marco:
You know, what we do to animals is reprehensible.
Marco:
What the animals do to the environment at the scale that we cultivate them is obscene and horrendous.
Marco:
What eating all of this stuff does to our bodies in the amounts that we typically eat them is pretty unhealthy.
Marco:
And veganism kind of reminds us of all this and it makes us face that really uncomfortable fact that the growing number of vegetarians and vegans demonstrates that for an ever increasing number of us meat eaters, our lifestyle is optional.
Marco:
It's not a necessity.
Marco:
We don't have to be doing this and they make good points on the other side.
Marco:
And this feels like an attack to so many people, but it doesn't have to be.
Marco:
It's a choice you can make.
Marco:
It's like choosing to recycle aluminum cans.
Marco:
That's a pretty effective recycling method.
Marco:
Choosing to walk or use mass transit instead of driving somewhere.
Marco:
Choosing to get vaccinated during a global pandemic to help us out.
Marco:
These are things that you can do, choices you can make because it's better either for you or the world or both.
Marco:
You're choosing this just because it's better, not because there's a cop breaking down your door to come in and take your hamburgers away.
Marco:
No one's coming for your guns and no one's coming for your hamburgers.
Marco:
You can keep your meat.
Marco:
No one's going to make you stop eating meat.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
The food that you choose to eat doesn't need to be this deep-rooted part of your identity.
Marco:
If you switch out your beef meatball dinner for chicken meatballs or turkey meatballs or vegetable meatballs, that's not like an insult to your grandmother any more than she was insulting her grandmother by not wearing fur coats anymore.
Marco:
Times change, and we stop wearing fur coats because our standards moved on over time.
Marco:
We developed different standards for things like animal cruelty and animal use over time, and also plenty of good alternatives to fur coats became available, as we were talking about last week.
Marco:
So we are now in, I think, a transitional period, a similar transitional period, for just the amount of animal products that we consume.
Marco:
The difference here, though, is that nobody's expecting you to suddenly become 100% vegan or ever become 100% vegan.
Marco:
You don't need to.
Marco:
No one is asking for that.
Marco:
I can't be more clear about this.
Marco:
No one is asking for you to totally stop eating meat and using leather.
Marco:
No one's asking for that.
Marco:
What would make a huge difference is a large reduction of animal consumption.
Marco:
And it's so much more accessible than you think.
Marco:
I would never have guessed.
Marco:
Two years ago, I was eating barbecue like three times a week.
Marco:
I would never have guessed it was possible to change in this direction.
Marco:
And it turns out it was way easier than I thought and way healthier.
Marco:
Everything about this is better for my health and for my mental conscience as well.
Marco:
And again, you don't have to go all the way.
Marco:
Just reduce.
Marco:
Start with one meal a day.
Marco:
Have one meal a day be totally plant, totally vegan.
Marco:
Whatever word you want to choose, if you want to say plant-based, fine.
Marco:
Have one meal a day be totally vegan.
Marco:
And then just try to make conscious efforts to cut back as you go.
Marco:
That makes a huge difference.
Marco:
If you look at what we actually need for things like carbon emissions and global warming and climate change and water usage, land usage, everything.
Marco:
Our food supply is such a massive footprint due extremely heavily to meat and dairy, but mostly meat and especially cows.
Marco:
Just reducing those things in a big way.
Marco:
Just cut your beef consumption in half.
Marco:
That's a huge difference even.
Marco:
That's not even saying never eat a burger again.
Marco:
It's just saying eat half as many burgers.
Marco:
Like that's such a huge difference.
Marco:
And change your mindset to start looking at meals not as a giant block of meat with some cheese on top or some butter and dairy and carbs everywhere.
Marco:
But like, hey, how can I work in a lot more vegetables and reduce the amount of meat that's on the plate or reduce the number of meals I have that have to include meat at all?
Marco:
That's what I'm saying is a really good idea that many more of us need to start doing, and that can make a really, really big difference without making you never have X, Y, or Z again.
Marco:
No one's asking for that.
Marco:
You can make a big difference with what is actually not that big of a change to your life, and it will be fine.
Marco:
You can do it, and we'll all be better off.