Own Your Pricing
I want to spend a lot of time on CallSheet.
I want to hear a lot about that.
Yeah, that's going to be the main thing.
Yeah, main topic.
So it's not a lot of follow-up.
Not a lot of follow-up.
All right.
Mark your timers, everybody.
Here we go.
Buckle up.
But you can look at it.
There's physically not a lot in the thing, and I think the number of things that we're going to cover aren't that big.
Does follow-up have a physicality to it?
Yeah.
It's like a length in the page.
In this virtual document that we have never and will never print.
You can measure it in inches, points, centimeters, lines, vertical height.
Yes, number of pixels taken.
Points, please.
So when we have a brief chat before the show, typically we'll cover any urgent needs and then we'll do pre-flight.
But every great once in a while, there's something funny that happens before we go live, which is never deliberate.
We always try to save that for our beloved members and bootleggers and live listeners.
But this time you missed something kind of funny, so we'll have to see if it ends up.
And regular listeners.
It's not like our regular show is just like, okay, here's the tech news from the day.
Plus you don't have to be a member to listen live, right?
Hey, everybody, Apple made a whole bunch of money, but not quite as much money as everybody wanted them to make, but still many billions of dollars.
And we're going to cover this in excruciating detail in our financial analyst segment of today's show, as we always do.
So they made a lot of money.
Now, they made a lot of money with some of their products, but they also made a lot of money with other products.
And don't forget, they made a lot of money with services.
Oh, did they make money with services?
They did.
And in fact, analysts expect they will make in the future a lot of money with services and with old products and with new products.
So we'll see as they make a lot of money over time in different ways.
It's going to be very interesting.
We're going to report every single detail.
You know, they made a certain percentage more or less money in each of these categories that made them a lot of money this quarter.
So next quarter, we expect them to make a lot of money.
Indeed.
You know who should also be making a lot of money this quarter, maybe next quarter, is John Syracuse, because this is your last chance.
This is it.
This is your last chance for hypercritical shirts.
And it's not a low-stakes scenario.
It's not like ATP shirts.
Those come back all the darn time.
These ones, these are like a freaking eclipse.
They're even less frequent than an eclipse.
Once every five years.
I don't remember what animal we decided that's like.
We figured it out a few episodes ago, but once every five years, this is your chance to get hypercritical shirts.
So I will do the same spiel that I always do.
If you are driving, signal.
Use your signal because you're not a jerk.
Use your signal.
Pull over to the side of the road and go to hypercritical.co slash shirt.
If you're walking, use your signal.
Use your signal if possible.
Pull over to the side of the sidewalk.
hypercritical.co slash shirt.
This is your last chance for five years.
To put things in perspective, five years ago, I had a newborn and Declan was three.
In five years, Michaela will be 10, for goodness sakes.
And Declan will be in what grade will he be in?
He will be almost done with middle school in five years.
This is your chance.
Hypercritical.co.
If you're listening to this and it is August 12th or earlier, you can still get one.
If it's after August 12th, you probably can't.
I say the August 12th date because I don't want to do any complicated time zone math.
So no matter where you are on the planet, if today is August 12th or an earlier date, you can buy one right now.
If today is some date after August 12th, like the 13th, I don't know, maybe if you're in New Zealand, you can get it or something.
But just anyway, August 12th, that's your last chance.
Yeah.
And number one, we really encourage you to get this, not only to support John, but also it's a really good yellow shirt.
I mean, there are other colors, but yellow is the canonical color.
It's the one you probably should get.
And there aren't that many good yellow shirts.
And this is one of them.
It's gold.
It's not yellow.
It's gold.
It's a good yellow, like my Rivian.
Anyway.
Well, remains to be seen.
That's true.
It's a huge risk.
And secondly, speaking of cars and what we just talked about, wouldn't it be amazing if people who were walking had turn signals?
That would be nice.
You could do hand signals.
You know, they make you do that on a driver test.
Like if your turn signals don't work, you have to.
Yeah, you put it out the window and put it down for left and up for right.
So you can do the same thing while you're walking.
As long as you don't poke somebody next to you, it'll work just fine.
Well, bikists are supposed to use those, but I've never seen one actually use them.
I do it when I'm on bicycles.
I see people do it all the time.
I've literally never once seen it being used.
Well, we need to stop before we get a ton of feedback.
I believe Marco said down for left.
Isn't it straight out for left and then a L shape for right?
Down is stop.
Correct.
And up is right.
Oh.
Until you fail your driving test, Marco.
Sorry, that new car that you ordered is going to be useless to you now.
Yes, indeed.
And I mean, I love you bikists, but you are vocal.
Whether you're a majority or a minority, you are very vocal.
And we've already covered it.
It's covered.
We got it.
I mean, look, I love bikists.
I am frequently, you know, kind of amateur bikist here when they're in a place with no cars, which is a very different experience than being a bikist in a city.
But I have never once seen a bikist use a hand signal or stop at a stop sign.
You've never seen them use a hand signal?
I don't know.
Maybe you didn't spend enough time in the city.
You've seen it all the time around here.
What about, how about yelling on your left as they come whizzing past you?
That we do here, actually, because, you know, here, like, you know, you're kind of sharing these wide sidewalk road kind of things.
You're sharing them between pedestrians and bikers.
And so the bikers are expected to go on the left, ding a bell and say on your left.
And then the people wander around because they've never heard it before.
And, you know, you got to slam on your brakes.
It's a whole thing.
Bikest is definitely a very classic Marco-ism, but it does kind of sound like people who are prejudiced against bikes.
You're such a bikest, Marco.
Oh, my word.
All right, let's move right along.
All right, so I have some quick follow-up with regard to my beloved Mophie 3-in-1 Charger.
I don't remember when I first started talking about this, but I think it was on the show a while back.
Yeah.
mophie makes a three-in-one charger that's it's a trial it's designed for travel but i mean you don't have to use it that way it's a thing it folds up on you know on top of itself like a trifold wallet like if you're one of those lunatics like i think john that uses a trifold wallet and um and so there's one spot for your airpods there's one spot that has a magsafe compatible pad i don't think it's actually strictly speaking magsafe but you know what i mean
And then there's a, I think, natural flavors.
Yeah, right.
And then there's a first party pasteurized cheese product.
And then there's a first party.
There's a first party flip up Apple Watch charger.
And it charges or it plugs in via USB-C.
It comes a little carrying case.
Genuinely, I really, really, really like this thing.
They are heinously expensive, but I really like them.
Well, it turns out they're not perfect because back in July, MacRumors reported, and a lot of people wrote to me about it.
MacRumors writes, beginning in late June, users in Apple's discussions community began pointing out an issue where an iPhone, Apple Watch, or AirPods placed on the charger would fail to get a consistent charge.
The devices would constantly ping as they disconnected and reconnected to the charging source.
Now,
I have generally had pretty good luck with the two that I have, although I will say that I've gotten in the habit of unplugging them and then plugging them back in like once a day just to kind of reset everything because there's apparently some amounts of smarts inside these little devices.
This is a classic Casey move, by the way.
That's true.
That's very true.
Using a computer with bad RAM, using a product that has to unplug and replug every day.
Well, you are right, but the thing is— Did you try taking the third-party RAM out of the Mophie Charger?
You know, I should have done that.
You're right.
I should have done that.
But anyway, the reason I love these things so much is because my GoPack, which was like 80 gazillion cables and has been shrunken down to basically two of these, a couple HDMI cables and very little else, and that juice was worth the squeeze to me, even having to disconnect them once a day.
Well, as of just a week or two ago as we record, Zag, Z-A-G-G, which is the website, zag.com, it's the company that apparently owns Mophie, they have acknowledged the problem and they have come up with a firmware update kit, which is a little dongle that you plug into the device and then you plug the standard charging cable into the dongle.
You hit the one and only button on the dongle, it flash, flash, flash, flash, flash, flash, and then it flashes the firmware inside the 3-in-1 charger.
And allegedly makes everything perfect again.
And so I've tried this on both of mine.
And then for one night, I used my travel setup here at home.
And it all worked no problem.
And when we were traveling last week, which is why the schedule was a little wonky, when we were traveling last week and we were using these things, I definitely noticed, for uninteresting reasons, I have a push notification come to myself when I go to sleep.
I'm very weird about knowing when I'm sleeping and when I'm not.
It's a secret Casey weird thing.
A secret weird thing Casey does.
So anyways, so I would notice after waking up that at like 2.30 in the morning, oh, you just plugged in your charger, which is my cue that I went to sleep.
Oh, you just started charging.
You just started charging.
You just started charging.
And none of that happened overnight after I'd flashed the firmware.
So I like to think all is well.
Now, if you're interested in one of these things, go to zag.com.
They do sell them at Apple Retail, but go to zag.com and
they often have deals on these things.
And if they don't have a deal right now, if you sign up for like their mailing list and then immediately cancel it afterwards, they give you something like a 20% off coupon, which if you're talking about 150 freaking dollars, that's a great coupon.
So definitely don't pay the $150 that I did.
Definitely don't do it twice over like I did because I'm a dummy.
But now I can say without reservation again that these things are real nice and you should check it out.
See, this is one thing where you have to be careful with power equipment that you buy.
Anything involving converting large or small amounts of power, being plugged in constantly in your house when you aren't home, you have to really be careful what you buy.
Because Mophie is one of the higher-end brands here.
And I can tell you, I have had such mixed luck with all sorts of different charger bricks and charger equipment from different brands, including brands everyone loves, like Anker.
You know, everyone loves Anker.
And they are among the better ones.
But I've still had problems with their gear, just like almost everyone else.
Honestly, the only brand I think I've never had a problem with their power adapters is Apple.
Yeah.
And, you know, as you get older, maybe you get a little more conservative in some of these things.
There are certain things in my house that remain plugged in all the time, even when I'm not here.
I lean more towards using Apple power adapters for those kind of things.
Because...
I just don't want to risk it with somebody else's.
And Apple standards for that kind of stuff, for safety, for fire risk, they're super high standards.
And not everyone in the business has them.
And the more complicated the product is, you know, when you have something like a 3-in-1 G-based charging mat, that's a complicated product.
So...
The more complicated it is, the larger the risks are.
So this is one area like, you know, there's when you go all the way to the bargain basement, like I always say when as you know, I'm a fan of buying refurbished Apple devices on Amazon or whatever for cheap whenever I need test devices.
And they always come with some like total no name USB cable and brick.
I always throw those right in the garbage because first of all, I don't trust them.
Like, you know, the amount of hacks that are out there that are like USB based zero day exploits.
Like I don't want to even risk it with some rando cable from God knows where that came in a refurb box.
But also those power bricks,
That's not worth possibly burning my house down to use this weird no name power brick.
So like this again, like use stuff from good brands when it comes to things like this.
And even the good brands can get it wrong sometimes.
So, you know, be it's it's worth a little bit of thought and a little bit of caution with a lot of these things.
I actually have a related story about this.
I have a fire hazard in my house right now.
Well, actually, it's outside my house because it's a fire hazard.
So as we're traveling last week, we use, I genuinely don't remember what models they are, but they're like 10-year-old iPhones as water noises.
We use an app.
I think it's called Sleep Pillow or something like that.
I forget what it's called, but we use an app.
Kids have had this since they were babies.
It just plays a little like rain noise and it helps them tune everything else out.
And it's just kind of static white noise, which we're going to talk about this more later.
White noise that they go to sleep to.
Well, I noticed that one of the phones that we use for this, which is old enough to have a home button, but it's bigger than the 5 series.
So it must have been like a 6 maybe.
Anyways, it was in a very, very cheap, you know, like silicone case or whatever.
But it was like poking out of the case.
And I thought, oh, that's weird.
So I tried to put the case back on it.
But I just ended up squishing the phone a little bit.
I'm like, oh, that's not good.
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
This is a poofy battery, isn't it?
And sure enough, that battery is poofing.
Did you install third-party RAM in that phone, Casey?
Be honest.
I did not.
I did not in this one.
I promise I did not put third-party RAM in this one.
All the other iPhones I put third-party RAM in, not this one.
Uh, but anyway, so yeah, I was like, oh, that's not good.
And so here we are in an Airbnb.
So I immediately placed the phone outside of the Airbnb, like on the, on the grass or rocks or whatever in front of it.
And the thing is seriously, as we, as I sit right now, it is sitting on our driveway in front of the house.
It's already been rained on twice.
Cause I keep forgetting to bring it out of the rain.
Not that I'm going to like try to, I'm not going to try to like, you know, use it anymore, but, um, I need to bring it to Apple or someone to recycle.
But what is the official, it's not a poofy battery.
What's the term for her exploding battery?
No.
expanded maybe who knows bulging bulging yes thank you bulging battery samsung oh sick burn uh but anyways uh yeah it's it's gotten real bad like it was just a teeny teeny little bit at first and now it's real bad so probably tomorrow i'm going to take it to the local apple store and be like please make this go go away because it is scaring me swollen battery bulging swollen battery
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John, you want to tell us about your secret to cropping photos appropriately in the aspect ratio you prefer?
Last episode, I complained about having to click a button 16,000 times because the Apple Photos app on the Mac won't remember that I always want to crop my photos to the original aspect ratio.
I would say, by the way, complained is putting it lightly.
Yeah, well, you know, it's so accurate.
And then we started getting feedback from the show once it was published.
And I was puzzled because I was like, oh, one person must not have heard that part of the show.
And then more feedback came.
And I'm like, OK, maybe it wasn't in the final episode, but it was just in the bootleg.
Then I listened to the bootleg and it wasn't there either.
This is on me.
I could swear that I talked about this on the show and I could not figure out why my memories sound like I must be getting old until eventually the Rectives episode came out.
And I said, oh, that's what it is.
I talked about it on Rectifs, which I had recorded one day before we recorded that ATP, but which gets released after because of the pre-taped call and show nature of Rectifs.
Anyway, I misremembered.
I thought I had talked about this on ATP when really I talked about it on my other podcast the day before.
What am I talking about?
Everybody wrote in to tell me.
Did you know that you can hold down the shift key when cropping to maintain the same aspect ratio?
Yes, I know that.
And I got told it a lot.
That's on me.
I thought I had talked about it in the show and I didn't.
Although a couple of people when they're writing it about it, they would say throw in some caveats.
They would say, oh, you can hold down shift, but it's kind of annoying to use.
Like a lot of people said, you know, I understand why you want the features is kind of annoying to use.
Well, setting aside its annoyingness, which we'll get to in a second.
This doesn't solve the problem for me.
I've known that you can hold down shift to resize, and by the way, you can do option to resize from the center as well.
But that's weird to do, especially if you're doing it on a trackpad on a laptop on vacation.
It's more awkward than just being able to grab the corner and move it.
You have to do the modifier.
And the thing that makes it slightly more awkward, even than just having to hold down things at the same time, is that...
photos implements it such that once you start the drag of the corner of the thing Your chance to hit the shift key has passed You can't hit the shift key during the drag like you can and pretty much any modern Mac app that does this And that gets the next point which is the reason I knew about it And the reason I think most people know about it is it's a convention
in the the world of mac software lots of people cited photoshop uh as sort of like the you know oh i i know this because i use photoshop and uh you might not know it because you just use photos but it's a convention made by photoshop um it's actually way farther back now like every every user interface platform but especially apple ones have a certain culture that's part of them and
And a lot of that culture is set down really early and then just passed on through generations and generations of software developers and users.
And, you know, people, lots of people probably think, oh, the shift to constrain, you know, drawing or selecting that comes from Photoshop because that's the most recent thing that they remember.
And it's very popular.
This feature of holding on shift to constrain either drawing or selection actually dates back to the original Macintosh in 1984, which I believe shipped in the box with Mac paint, Mac paint 1.0.
and if you were drawing a something with the rectangle tool for example in mac paint and you held down the shift key and then you dragged it out what you would get is a square because it would constrain it to be you know a square aspect ratio instead of just a loosey-goosey freeform rectangle uh that version of mac paint and the one that came out in 1985 also required you to hold down the shift key before you click the mouse button because if you waited until after you click the mouse button holding down shift did nothing
Mac Paint 2.0 in 1988 changed that and made it so that when you were drawing the rectangle you could hold down shift and it would be a square and let go of shift and it would not be a square all the while holding the mouse button down.
And in fact Mac Draw in 1985 also did the same thing.
So this convention of shift to constrain and the innovation of realizing that maybe people forgot to hit the shift key so you should let them toggle it while the drag is in motion
dates back to 1985 on the Mac.
And it is pervasive everywhere.
If you don't know about this, if you're a new Mac user, if you don't use a lot of drawing programs, pick anything that lets you drag out a rectangular shape and try the shift key to constrain proportions, the option key to resize from center.
And they're also often the other modifiers to other interesting things.
Try them out.
So anyway, that's a little background on constrained dragging.
And as for the photos thing I was asking for, I phrased it as remember that I want this.
And a lot of people interpreted that to mean like, oh, just remember the last thing you clicked on and do that for all things going forward.
The proper way to do this would be to have a setting, you know, in the preferences or settings or whatever the hell we're called now.
In photos that says, hey, when we first bring up the crop tool on a photo that you've never edited before, how would you like the aspect ratio constrained?
And the choices would be, you know, all the choices that are there, freeform, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And you could also have a choice that says, do nothing and accept the existing ratio.
Which brings me to this next bit of feedback, something I didn't know about photos previously.
Photos on iOS, but also photos on Mac.
This is from Jack Brown.
He says, on iOS, if you choose a viewfinder aspect ratio other than 4x3, the new ratio is kept as the default when cropping those photos.
With Freeform still the default 4x3 shot.
So first of all,
I knew this was there vaguely, vague memory in the distant past.
Like, I knew where to find this once he said this.
But I don't know if most people change this.
If you go to the camera app on your iPhone and look for a upwards-facing chevron at the top middle of the screen, tap that, and then it reveals, like, the toolbar of items.
Then the second circle from the right in the toolbar...
uh, says like four by three or something similar in it, four colon three or whatever, tap that and pick an aspect ratio.
And it changes, you know, the viewfinder access ratio, basically like what proportion is the image on my phone screen when I'm moving it around, trying to frame the shot I'm going to take.
So if you pick anything other than four by three and you take that picture, then if you open that picture in photos on the phone or photos on the Mac and presumably the iPad as well, it will, it won't be free form.
It will be that the aspect ratio of the viewfinder.
which is really weird.
I guess it considers it like, oh, you've kind of already cropped it because it takes the whole picture.
Like if you put it on square, if you put it on one by one or one colon one, it will take a square photo.
But when you open that photo in photos on the Mac, you'll see that it actually took a, you know, normal rectangular photo, but it's just cropped to the square thing.
That doesn't help me at all either, but it just goes to show that this is a more complicated situation than you might think.
Because if you said, oh, force it to original all the time and you opened one of those photos that was shot in square, some interpretation of the idea of original could mean like,
Like, oh, but the photo was originally 4x3 and you cropped it to square with a viewfinder, so original should be 4x3 and not square.
And by cropping, now all of a sudden you've screwed up.
Anyway, I would trust the people who implement this feature to do something vaguely intelligent about it.
For example, saying, hey, if there's no existing crop, stick to original.
But if there's an existing crop like square, stick to that one.
Not too hard to implement.
Probably come in photos in about 5 to 10 years.
And do you want to tell me about the crop macro that you have been shown, discovered, created?
I'm not sure the lineage here.
Yeah, so this is Jason.
Jason Snelli heard our episode last week and was like, you know what?
I can solve this problem using computers and the solution to the problem.
So if photos was scriptable or shortcutable or whatever we call modern and Mac applications that can be automated with using some, you know, Apple technology like Apple Script or Shortcuts,
You could make it so that every time you go to crop a photo, it automatically selects original for you.
Photos is not particularly scriptable, but computers can do things.
And so Jason Snell used his computer to do a thing.
He used a program called Keyboard Maestro, which we will link in the show notes, which is a tool that says even if your app is not automatable, we will find a way to automate it.
And how does it do it?
Through the magic of screen scraping.
That's right.
Jason has made a Keyboard Maestro action that does a series of steps.
and looks for the part of the photos UI by using a bitmap.
To build this, you take a screenshot and say, see this part on the sidebar where it says original?
I want you to click there.
And so Keyboard Maestro looks for a region of the screen that is roughly like that screenshot with some fuzziness, and will click on the thing for you.
So I have it bound to Command-Shift-C.
And so instead of hitting C to crop, I can hit Command-Shift-C.
which will then basically hit the C key for me, wait for the sidebar to appear, look for the word original, and click on it.
Very silly.
Not a great solution.
Requires owning Keyboard Maestro and keeping it running all the time.
Keyboard Maestro is amazing because it can do things like this when nothing else can help you, when your app is not scriptable.
I'm trying to do an A-Team thing, but I don't know the original words well enough to parody it well.
But just Google for the A-Team intro and you'll see it.
so thank you jason for that we will link that action in the show notes so if you want to go buy keyboard maestro you can use jason's thing i renamed his action i renamed it crop aspect original because that's what goes through my goes through my head all 16 000 times i do it crop aspect original crop aspect original crop aspect original crop anyway that's what it's called so check it out um and it binds to command shift c but only when photos is the front most application so you don't have to worry about stealing that keyboard combo from your entire system
Excellent.
And then since the photos problems never end, I think it was two episodes ago you were talking about how you really, really wanted to, or maybe it was the same episode.
It's the same episode because it was the two things I wanted to change in photos for this year.
Oh, there you go.
Okay.
So you were saying how you really, really, really wanted to be able to kick off a detect faces run, if you will.
Well, a friend of the show, Guy Rambeau, wrote in to say, I did some quick spelunking and found two potential workarounds for the photos analysis issue John was reporting.
Apple's implementation seems to rely on Duet Activity Scheduler, a daemon that manages background execution.
There's an API to force a given activity to start immediately, but in order to invoke it, one would have to disable SIP, what is it, System Integrity Protection, in order to attach LLDB to DASD, the Duet Activity Scheduler daemon, and call some Objective-C method.
However, I also found a defaults flag that disables this intelligent scheduling, which we will put in the show notes.
That doesn't guarantee analysis will start right away, though, as the daemon may still run some internal heuristics before it decides to actually start the analysis.
There are probably more defaults tags that could be tweaked in LLDB or launch control shenanigans that could be done.
But that's about all the time I have for today.
And Guy also had a link that we'll put in the show notes for more about the scheduling system.
And this is Running XPC Activities on Demand by Bryce Paukin.
And we'll put that in the show notes too.
Yeah, so this is obviously going above and beyond, like disabling system integrity protection and attaching a debugger to the running instance of your program, hopping into that memory space and just calling a method that you found by looking at symbols.
All to try to kick off, you know, basically it's the equivalent of the button that says, do the analysis now, please.
But of course, that is still mediated, as Guy says, by, you know, the system itself could have some sort of rules that says, oh, I'm not going to run quite yet or whatever.
this is really something that apple needs to solve obviously there's no well so far it doesn't seem like there's no really easy way to do this i wouldn't want to disable the duet scheduling thing because i don't know like i i get that stops using the intelligent scheduler but then what replaces it is it any kind of scheduler is it just unscheduled entirely like debugging this is hard enough without messing with things so i appreciate the uh
the digging into this, but I would be afraid, too afraid to do any of these things because once you've done this, I'd always be wondering, have I screwed up my photo system in some way that now all the advice I see online doesn't apply to me because I messed it up and I don't know how to undo it.
I'm not as daring as he is.
Hmm.
And then can you explain to me, I'm asking not only to prompt the next section of the show, but I'm genuinely curious.
Can you explain to me how non-destructive photo editing works for photos?
Because I don't think I understand this.
So this is something Marco brought up.
I was like, why not use another app to do all your cropping?
And I was like, well, you know, when you do the cropping in photos, it's non-destructive.
Whereas if I was to use some other app to crop, even if that app itself was non-destructive, then I have the problem of, okay, now you've done your cropping.
How do you get those now cropped photos into photos while preserving the non-destructive crops?
So that's tricky.
But as I said on the show, I do edit things with external editors within Photos.
Photos has like an editing system where when you're in edit mode, you can hit the little three dots in a circle menu, very clearly labeled, very easy to find.
It's kind of like the little eyes in a circle that Apple loves these days.
And it will say edit in and it will list any of the apps that can be editors for Photos.
So edit in Pixelmator, edit in, what is the other one that I use?
Raw Power, right?
those editors that work with photos most of them all the ones that i tried but i don't know if it's all of them you'll go to edit them and it will pop up a ui that is owned and controlled by that app and you can use that app's tools to do things for example i use pixelmater pro to do like a content aware fill kind of thing to like erase people and expand the background because it works way better than anything in the photos app and after you've done all those changes you say okay i did my changes and you click basically save and
in that ui that popped up most of them will say hey do you want me to preserve these edits in a non-destructive way when i go back to photos or do you want me to bake them in sort of and i always say preserve the edits because that when you go back to photos you'll see the edit that you made like oh you erased a person and you see that in the picture but photo is still still maintains the original so you can always say you know what revert to original and there's your original photo with those edits gone from it
Um, so you can do that.
You could also do that for cropping, but that little three dots open an external editor is a pretty slow process because you basically have to launch the other little miniature version of the other program.
I don't know if it's a plugin or a bundle.
I don't know how it works probably through XPC or something, but it's not as fast as just hitting C to crop because you got to hit return to edit and then
probably use Keyboard Maestro to assign a keyboard command to edit in Pixelmator Pro because there's no keyboard shortcut assigned to it.
Anyway, it would be slow and extremely clunky.
And when you're trying to whip through a thousand photos, the last thing you want to do is be waiting for your thing to launch an app and then quit out of it and save and all this other stuff.
So I do use those editors and we'll put links to a whole bunch in the show notes.
There are a lot of ones that people recommended.
I think we'll probably link to Pixelmator Pro, Photomator, which I think is like a cut down version of that.
That's mostly for editing photos, Darkroom, Lightroom, etc.
A lot of the apps like Raw Power and I think Photomator take advantage of the fact that Apple lets third party apps access the photos photo library.
Like you could just use, for example, raw power and never touch Apple photos because it sees your Apple photo, your iCloud photo library.
Like it can read that.
It can read and write that.
You don't need to use photos at all.
It's kind of like music where they have like third party apps that can read your music library on the phone or apps that read and write your calendar on your phone.
Like there's one calendar that's run by the system, but you can use third party apps to get that data.
The same is actually true of photos.
So a lot of these apps, if you like them, you can just use them and not use photos.
But I do like a lot of the features and photos like I do my photo books there and I have albums and the shared albums they use and all that other stuff.
So I will probably continue to use photos while branching out to non-destructive apps to do fancy editing operations.
But for cropping, I really don't want to have to leave photos for that.
I just want it to work better there.
That makes sense.
And we'll put a bunch of links to photos that we believe, or excuse me, apps that we believe support this in the show notes.
There'll be a bunch of apps.
Or apps that you could use as alternatives.
Like a lot of people are recommending Lightroom and Lightroom Classic as just like, hey, just stop using photos and do all your photos in Lightroom.
So we'll put links to those in there as well.
Like,
I think going totally out of the Apple ecosystem is definitely not what I want to do at this point with 170,000 photos.
But that is more of a lift.
But these apps that don't ask you to leave but just say, hey, you can use this other app instead of or in addition to photos, that's actually pretty neat.
And then, Marco, if you wouldn't mind in the future dropping in We Are the Champions on my behalf right here, please, while we discuss how very right I am about how the one true way to be in your home is to have some sort of audio playing in the background.
Wait a second.
I'm supposed to be collecting the being right points here because the last episode when we talked about this, we were like, my question was, what do you think the breakdown of people in the world is?
Do you think more people are like Casey or more people are like me?
And I said, well, you know, based on what we have on the show here, like what percentage do we think?
And we all threw out numbers.
And I believe I said 70-30.
I said 70-30 or maybe even 75-25.
But I'm going to say because I said 70-30 first, that that was my, you know, my marker.
And what did it come out to be, Casey?
It was 70-30.
So basically you're claiming you're right even though you're wrong.
Got it.
Well, no, because I was right about predicting what the ratios were.
I understand what you're saying.
I just don't want to give you the win on this.
Well, it was actually 6931, so.
Nice.
Either way, I am pleased to see that most of the world agrees with me that you need to have something.
You've got to have something playing my word.
You have to have something back.
Silence is evil, man.
No good.
So this was the tricky thing about the survey, and I waited a while to post it up because I was trying to figure out how to phrase it.
I think I mostly did okay, although there are some... I thought you did.
There were some holes that... You can tell you did okay if people don't have tons of questions.
One of the things that I... So here, let me read the question.
It's too late now.
The survey's closed, and about 4,500 people answered it.
So, although the numbers stopped changing after, like, 500 people answered it, see previous episodes where we discussed this.
Anyway, the question was...
When you are home alone or otherwise not worried about bothering anyone else, do you prefer to have some kind of audio playing?
And then in parentheses, this audio can be anything, a TV, the radio, music, audiobooks, podcasts, whatever.
The whatever tries to cover all my bases there, but I still had people say, does white noise count?
And I should have included that because enough people said, I feel like white noise falls under the category of whatever.
And I kept saying audio.
White noise is audio.
I mean, but maybe people have questions about it.
The second thing people asked, and I'm not quite sure how I would have clarified this.
They said, do headphones count?
And my answer is yes.
Yes, headphones count.
Like it doesn't have to be in the air because that would fall into the category of are not worried about bothering other people.
Because if you've got headphones in and they're not open air headphones, like Marcos obnoxious things, you don't have to worry about bothering other people.
Because the question, the reason I wanted to say home alone or not worried about bothering people, because that's such a confounding factor because it's like, well, I prefer to have X playing.
But when the house is full of people, either it's too noisy or I wouldn't want to be, I wouldn't want to annoy them or we can't agree on what to play.
Or, you know, some people find it distracting even though I don't or whatever.
So just eliminating all that as a variable and say, let's say you're in a scenario where you don't have to worry about other people because they don't care or you have headphones or you're the only one home.
do you prefer to have audio playing?
And it was 70%, roughly 70% yes, 30% no.
Obviously, the people who follow me on Mastodon are not a random sample of the population, but, you know, there you have it.
I just would like to repeat that I am the champion.
You're like a lonely dog.
Wow!
You need to hear those human voices.
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All right, anything going on this week?
I released a new app.
Oh, wait, that was you.
No, no, that was me, wasn't it?
Let me check my notes for a second.
No, that was me.
That was me that did that.
I did that.
That was me.
Yeah, so now is the time.
If you were or are an ATP member and were or are on the call sheet test flight, well, be gone with you.
You need to go to the app store.
This is Casey's way of saying thank you.
No, actually, I genuinely do have to talk about that in a minute because there's a lot to be said about that.
But anyway, but Call Sheet is out.
It came out Monday, asterisk, and it's been out.
What is Call Sheet, Casey?
Call Sheet is, thank you.
You know, usually I'm the one prompting you knuckleheads to do this.
This could be the first episode someone listens to.
They're like, what the hell is Call Sheet?
No, you're right.
No, no, no.
I agree with you.
I'm just saying usually I'm good about this.
And when it's me, I forget.
Anyways, Call Sheet is an app for iPhone and iPad that lets you look up movies, cast members, crew members, TV shows, and trivia information about them.
And it does it in a super fast, super user-friendly way.
It is free to try.
Then you have to subscribe after 20 searches.
You get a one-week free trial on your subscription.
The cost is $1 per month in the US or $9 per year.
And you can optionally pay more if you so choose.
I'll describe that in a minute.
But anyways, it's what I've been working on for the last six months.
And I'm really proud of it.
I think it's pretty darn good.
And I'm excited to finally have it out and in the wild.
So that is what it is.
And yeah, so I actually hit the go button on this very, very, very quietly on Saturday.
because I was finally back from our Pennsylvania vacation, and I wanted to make sure that at least one person, that would be me, tried the in-app purchase and ensured that it worked and didn't just bomb miserably.
Because on Saturday, you know, I might still have the time to do an expedited review on Sunday, potentially, or just say to the people who I knew were going to talk about it in the press, oh my gosh, just kidding.
But thankfully, the in-app purchase code seemed to work, knock on wood.
And so on Monday at 9 a.m., I let everyone know that it was out.
It was very funny, actually, because, you know, I said on Mastodon, oh, it's coming tomorrow, I said on Sunday.
And a lot of people did exactly what I expected and went and searched for it anyway and found it.
started using it which was fine there's nothing wrong with that but i think everyone kind of freaked out a little bit on my behalf thinking that was an accident and it wasn't i knew exactly what was going on but i mean and for the most part like people who haven't released an app on the app store there's no other way to do it like there is no way to say it's going to be out at nine and then click a button and everyone sees it at nine that's not
possible due to cash propagation and store propagation so you have to do everything every app you've ever seen released on the app store has done this where it launches and it doesn't show up in search for a while and it doesn't show up in Australia for a while like it just propagates across the world
But they haven't announced it yet.
And then at some date, like on a Monday or a Tuesday at 9 a.m., it quote unquote launches.
Right.
But it's been on the store for a while.
You're just waiting for it to spread to everywhere so that on Monday at nine, if anybody anywhere in the world searches for call sheet, hopefully, fingers crossed, they'll find it.
Although I have to say two days to get into App Store search may not be sufficient in some cases because that search is so bad and so slow.
It takes so long for things to get into it.
Yeah, that's exactly it.
And there is a mechanism, you know, before everyone writes in, there is a mechanism that you can tell the App Store, I would like it to be live at such and such a time and such and such a place.
But the problem with that is you have to decide that at submission time.
Or I believe that to be true.
I might be lying to you accidentally, but I believe that's true.
Yeah, you can hold for a developer, you know, isn't there like...
Hold for developer release is what I did.
If you hold for developer release and you hit go, I think the going is a little bit faster.
But the problem is with the App Store is that it's usually pretty timely.
for almost everyone but that's a lot of does it work for the search if it's a brand new app though that's what i'd be worried about and that's the thing like there's a lot of squishiness in that there's a lot of usually's and a lot of probably's and so if you want to launch an app and make a big splash and you've timed press and stuff like that you don't want to take those risks so it is better usually to like hit the button the night before and then you know if people find it early good go good for them that's that's great but you know it doesn't really matter it
And it's much better to have, you know, when you're going to announce it and if there's going to be any press or any yelling about it on social media or anything, it's better that every single person who goes to find it will find it.
So you don't want to take any risks with it's not yet showing up in New Zealand or it's not yet showing up in search.
You don't want to take any of those risks.
You want any press, any buzz you generate, you want someone who's searching for it to find it no matter what.
So...
Usually you don't need to put it that far ahead of time, but the smart people all do.
And also for a brand new app that has never been on the store, that's the worst case scenario for the search index.
If you're launching version 2.0 and you haven't renamed your app, you're probably good.
Like everything will probably work out.
But for an app that has never been on the store and has never appeared in search, you really want to get that out there because we have no visibility into or control over when things appear in search, which you would think it doesn't appear in a search as soon as it's on the store.
No, absolutely not.
Absolutely not.
Then sometimes, you know, maybe Americans can search for it, but people in the UK can't or vice versa.
It's just a mess.
So, so yeah, so I probably, I had actually intended on doing all this on Sunday, but I had gotten home from our trip on Saturday and I was champing at the bit to like, just make sure this is all functional, good, it works, et cetera.
So.
I'd done it on Saturday quietly.
And then, like I said, you know, a bunch of people found it and that was fine.
They reported it into me, which was lovely.
And I appreciate that.
But I didn't want to, I replied to as many as I could, but I didn't want to like publicly say, don't worry, it's there, but don't tell anyone.
Cause obviously then everyone will go looking for it.
And I wanted the big press push, blah, blah, blah.
So anyway, so I appreciate all of you who are looking out for me, but it was deliberate.
I promise.
So yeah, so the press was far and away the best press response I've gotten from anything I've done.
I am extremely, extremely thankful for all the press I've gotten.
It has been extremely kind.
I was bracing for impact from a couple of spots, particularly on Mac Stories, because I know how much John and Federico love their iPads.
And I was bracing for impact on the iPad support and call sheet, admittedly being pretty bad.
I was going to ask about that because I don't think I've actually even tried it on the iPad.
What is it like?
Neither have I. No, just kidding.
Barely.
Wait, it runs on the iPad?
Yeah, it turns out.
The reason I bring this up is because I've wanted the app on my Mac several times.
I'm like, I should just run the iPad version of it, which then I have two things.
A, I can't do that because I have an Intel Mac.
And B, I was like...
Did Casey even allow it to be run on the Mac?
Well, we should talk about that.
I will probably forget, so try to keep me honest, but we should talk about that later.
But no, it is on the iPad, but I have no iPad-specific affordances.
I have done nothing to it specific for the iPad, and it's not particularly great.
Is it set to allow it to be run on Mac?
it was on test flight it is not in the app store and i'm not well so so here's the thinking on that and i'm i'm being convinced that i i would that my thinking is wrong i mean you could write a mac app if you want but i'm just saying checkbox is easier well that's the thing so when on test flight i was like who cares it's test flight everyone knows it's garbage
But when it was in the App Store, I thought, well, I don't think – given that the iPad experience is pretty subpar, to put it mildly, I didn't think I wanted to also introduce a subpar Mac app because it just seemed like it was too much subpar stuff.
And I've literally never run it on the Mac.
I know it can be done.
I have heard people that were doing it on TestFlight, but I didn't desire to – or I didn't have the time, really, before I wanted to launch –
to do any testing for iPad or for the Mac.
And so my thought was the iPad was bad enough, but I think it's required.
I'll let it go on iPad.
But on the Mac, it just seemed like that was not wise.
And enough people have written to basically say, dude, I'll take it.
I don't care that I think for the next release, I will probably turn on the Mac version, but I'm interested if either of you have opinions or feedback one way or the other.
I mean, I would work on the iPad version a little bit.
Oh, definitely.
Before worrying about turning on the Mac.
Like the reason I think you didn't see a lot of pushback about this in reviews is because it's clearly like the phone is where everyone's going to use it.
Like you're on the couch.
You've got your phone.
You don't have your Mac with you.
Probably you probably don't have your iPad.
Like the phone is the right platform for this.
Like so I don't I don't think the lack of an iPad version is that or not the lack of an iPad.
I don't think a subpar iPad version really matters that much at all, especially for 1.0.
But I would say, you know, eventually when you get around to it, shore up the iPad version.
And then once the iPad version is not crappy, you know, decide what you want.
The reason people don't put it on the Mac is because they're like, oh, but if we put it on the Mac, what if someday we want to make money for them by making a Mac version?
If you know you're not going to do that, just put it on the Mac.
No, that I don't think I care about.
Remind me of this, but I don't think I care about that.
So for whatever it's worth, my podcast app, which is not really something that many people want on their iPads or their Macs.
Oh, I use it on the Mac all the time.
All right.
For whatever it's worth, right now, my Mac use and my iPad use are roughly tied.
The iPad is slightly ahead, but not by much.
They're about the same in terms of percentage of use across all overcasts right now.
So that says something.
I will say supporting the Mac in that way, in the iPad compatibility mode, it comes with a few little weird caveats for apps that have certain features.
Like audio apps, for instance.
AirPlay doesn't work.
I don't know why.
It just says it's unavailable all the time.
Cool.
Yeah.
There's occasionally some weird bugs where like some, like on the Mac version, it will crash if you use this one API and there's no way to know that until you do it or something like that.
Is Casey's video player not going to work?
I should look.
I should definitely look into that.
Yeah.
But for the most part, I think what your app is doing, you know, it's pretty much showing information and, you know, and lists and images and stuff like that.
Like that should be fine.
I can't off the top of my head come up with any like major problem you've run into.
But but it is, you know, once you go onto a platform, like, you know, whether it's even if it's just leaving that thing on on the Mac.
you will start getting reviews from people who are using it that way.
So you've got to think about, like, am I running a big risk here?
And then once you do it, you can't really take it away without angering a bunch of people.
So go into it carefully.
Like, I thought when I was going into it, I thought, this is great.
I don't have to do anything.
This will cost me nothing.
There will be no downside.
It just runs, and it's fine.
And that's almost the case, but not quite.
People do have expectations.
They have feature requests.
Whenever there is a bug or a shortcoming, they will either email me about it or leave a mediocre review saying, why does an AirPlay work on the Mac or whatever?
So you will run into occasional downsides of it, but...
Overall, I would say it is worth doing.
Once you have your iPad app situated, just check the box and let it run on the Mac too.
Yeah, fair enough.
But anyway, so yeah, press has been incredible.
It was covered at Mac Stories.
I did an interview.
I keep forgetting to look up when it was, but it was a month or two ago.
I did an interview with D. Griffin Jones at Cult of Mac, which I really enjoyed.
We talked for like 90 minutes or something like that.
And then it was cut down in a good way to about 30 minutes.
And that's a video interview.
So if you want to see me talking at my normal podcasting desk with my normal podcasting setup, if memory serves, however, you can actually watch me talk and gesture and articulate with my arms and so on and so forth.
Is it your normal podcasting setup?
Is the closet door open or closed?
No, that's true.
In this one, I believe the closet door was closed, but it is currently open.
It would have had terrible audio.
Marco's eagle ears, or whatever, not eagle ears.
You know what I'm saying.
Marco's bat ears would detect it.
Marco's tiny holes in the side of his head that look like the ears of an eagle.
Something like that.
Anyways, he would have noticed if I had closed the closet door.
But yeah, so there's a video interview there.
Chance Miller at 95Mac, our friend Stephen Hackett at 5.5 Pixels.
And then much to my surprise, Sarah Perez at TechCrunch reached out.
So I was on TechCrunch, which is extremely cool.
And then our mutual friend John Gruber at Daring Fireball wrote it up, which I was very, very flattered to see his link post about it.
Our friend Jason Snell.
And then somebody pointed out to me that Florian Innocente at iGeneration, which is a French blog, apparently, that wrote it up this morning.
So I got a lot of good press on it, and I'm really, really pleased with that.
The response seems to be pretty, pretty good.
A lot of people seem really happy with it.
There were some curmudgeons that were yelling at me about how I'm offering software for rent, which is exactly what I expected and was frustrating.
But, you know, here we are.
If only there were some podcasts.
episodes they could listen to where you talked about this if only i mean that's that's the thing about you know so i know i everyone you're always you know you're going to get those things because first of all if your app is not uh free flat out for everyone forever there's always going to be complaints but especially with subscriptions because you've got people who are tired of them they don't want to keep paying for something on a regular basis and they're going to complain and that's fine but in this case in the case of this app i think most of the complainers
If you were to explain to them the reasoning, which is, look, I'm building this on a third party API and though that API is free right now, that could change.
And if it changes, I could be on the hook for a lot of money.
See these recent examples in the press that you may have seen.
Like it's not just a hypothetical theory, even though it was hypothetical, it's just smart and defensive business.
But it's not so hypothetical these days.
So I feel like if you explain that, they'd be like, oh, I didn't realize your app used an API or I didn't realize your app used an API and it was free, but it may charge in the future.
Of course, there will still be some people say, well, it's free now, so you should make it free.
You know, like, you know, you're not going to get everything.
No, the reality is like you've you've already spent too many words on these people.
Yeah, exactly.
Just ignore them and move on.
I'm not saying that you don't need to answer every single one of these people, but if you were to.
No, you have to answer effectively none.
Because look, the reality is anything you put out there that people want that is not free, you'll get some complaints.
And there are a lot.
Look, every time we talk about this, we will hear from a handful of people who are like, I don't like subscription apps because of super strongly held belief XYZ.
And look, that's you can you can hold those positions and that's fine.
The reality is this is where software has gone, not even is going like has gone like it's over.
The transition is over.
We are here in a subscription priced world for almost everything.
No matter, you know, anything you're going to use is going to have some form of this, whether it is making money from you constantly via ads and tracking BS or making money from you constantly via a subscription plan.
But in some form, everything has gone this direction.
And so, look, you are now like by having a subscription priced app.
You are now in the mainstream.
This is not a fringe thing.
This is not a risk you were taking.
This is the mainstream.
And everyone who is on the other side who is yelling, their numbers are dwindling.
And frankly, they're not going to be your customers anyway.
So you're better off serving the people who are going to be your customers as best as you can.
And those people can find apps that are pay once or whatever.
Like, you know, I think the affinity apps have made a big deal about not being not requiring a subscription like Photoshop does.
And I think that's worked for them.
They're sort of in the old model where, you know, you buy new versions and they cost you a certain money.
And I have a bunch of the affinity apps and they're part of that.
That is what attracted me to it.
So for the people who don't want to pay subscriptions, there are still places you can go.
But.
In the same way that Casey's choices don't dictate the choices of everybody else's, your preferences as a consumer also don't dictate the choices of every software developer.
So you can say you're not going to buy it and then don't buy it.
Done and done.
There are still some things you can buy without a subscription, but the people who are willing to pay a subscription have different choices than you do.
Some people might not want to pay hundreds of dollars up front, but they just want to rent Illustrator for one month for 20 bucks or something.
I don't even know if you can still do that because Adobe's weird, but...
Yeah, it's a complicated world of software pricing and it has changed a lot.
So if people are in the mindset that this is like Marco was getting at alluding to that, this is an aberration and a new bad thing that will eventually go away.
It's, it's not really like, you know, Microsoft Office is subscription, Photoshop is subscription, tons of iOS apps are subscription.
uh the only things that aren't are either things that are sort of intentionally reactions to that so affinity not being subscription is sort of a competitive differentiator against one of the main competitors which is photoshop and what other other adobe apps there are or there are apps like mine that are you know dinky little things that aren't a big deal you pay five dollars for my apps once and apparently you get free upgrades forever and ever so uh and until i decide to start trying to get a subscription so buy yours now
Indeed, yeah.
And a handful of people were like, well, what about a one-time purchase, even if it's way, way, way expensive?
And the handful of people that I did answer who were the ones that were not jerks and clearly seemed to be willing to have at least a modicum of a conversation about it, I totally understand their point.
As a user, I'm not in love with subscriptions either.
I'm kind of tired of them too, but I had to take off the user hat and put on the business hat.
And I don't think that there's any way I could offer this app other than subscription, see the two or three episodes of this very program where we discussed it.
And, you know, people would say, well, what about like a really, really expensive one-time purchase?
And, you know, as soon as I said to them, look, I don't want to end up in a Twitter or Reddit scenario.
Pretty much everyone was, oh, okay.
Yep.
Okay.
I get it.
And not everyone bought it, but, you know, at least now I have prior art to point to, you know?
You could also give a timestamp link to the episodes where we talked about it.
Although speaking of software costs, when I was looking up the differences in MacPaint 1.0 and 2.0 and everything, I had occasion to, because I was looking at the pages with the version history, had occasion to see the price again.
And in 2023 dollars, the combination, you can get MacPaint and MacWrite in a single box, that was $553 for those two programs.
Oh.
Oh.
And so here's the thing.
It's like, yeah, but you only had to pay that once.
I would pay it once to get the best word processor for the Mac and the best paint program, like the only word processor and paint program because the Mac was just out in 1984.
If you paid that $553 in 1984, guess what?
2.0 came out in 1988, four years later.
And it cost even more just for Mac Paint.
So it's like, you know, I'll pay that money.
I'll never need to pay it again.
The old model was they would charge you huge amounts for software.
you could use it as long as you wanted and you quote unquote never needed to upgrade but practically speaking you'd eventually get a new mac and eventually the operating system would be upgraded and eventually the old version of mac paint that you got wouldn't even run on the the new mac on the new version of uh mac operating system that you had and then you'd quote unquote have to buy mac paint 2.0 because mac paint 1.0 1.5 like stop running and mac paint's a bad example because it ran for a long time although i did find out that mac paint 1.0 broke really fast because i'm using like uh you know what is it
infinitemac.org uh those various websites to run emulators and plus mini vmac on my local mac to double check all this stuff um and mac paint 1.0 does not like to run on operating systems and simulated macs that are much newer than like the 128 or the 512 right very quickly one point version 1.5 came out in 1985 and that one had more legs so anyway
The old model had its problems too, but people like what they like.
And so seek out software that offers the pricing model that you prefer, but know that the landscape is changing and you may be hopping from island to island as the water rises around you.
Yeah.
Indeed.
I would say also, Casey, when you talk about the price, this is both – I saw a little bit of this in your blog post or even in the app UI.
You are very kind of apologetic about the price.
You're very careful to introduce people to it.
And maybe that's a better approach than my approach.
But the way you approach the price when you're talking about it is along the lines of –
Here's the app.
You can use it for free for a little while, but after that you have to pay.
That but there, that shift in attitude suggests that this is a downside.
And I would suggest just reframe it.
You can use it for free and then you have to pay.
Change the but to an and.
No, it's a fair point.
It's a fair point.
Well, I mean, I would flip it around entirely and say the app is X dollars for Y and Y dollars for X, but it also includes a week free trial plus 20 free searches.
Yeah, that's even better.
Make the butt be like the, you know, here's the app, here's as much it costs.
Oh, and if you don't want to pay that, don't worry.
There's a way for you.
And by the way, I know we talk so much about pricing and I hadn't kept track of what you had decided.
I like this set of things.
I like $1 a month.
It's really simple.
I like $9 a year.
And I like one week free trial, obviously.
So I think that I think eventually through all this hemming and hawing, we came up with what I think is a pretty good pricing structure that has all like it has everything that people want the 20 free searches.
You don't have to start a trial to use them.
You don't have to like you don't have to make any decision.
You just get them right.
And you're trying to be friendly with the searches and then having the trial.
If you decide to do it with enough time to decide whether you want this happen in the pricing, I think is totally fair, especially especially if you have used the IMDB app to try to do this task.
And if you have if you have, you know, a dollar a month lying around for this task, if this is worth a dollar a month to you, you will throw that money in a second to not have to use the IMDb app.
Like when I was trying to, like, you know, post, I was going to say tweet, but whatever, post about it on the various social media networks on launch day.
I launched the IMDb app again just to remind myself what it was like and took a bunch of screenshot of the various interesting.
interstitials that it threw in my face i'm like does it want me to sign up for a streaming service because it threw like netflix logos in my face i'm like what the hell is this and i went back and looked at the screenshot and it's like it's not that evil what it was trying to say is hey uh you can tell the imdb app which streaming services you subscribe to so it knows like just like you can adjust watch which is integrated with casey's app so it knows which ones to recommend to you
I'm like, okay, that's a good feature, IMDB app.
What's not good is when I launch the app, when I want to look something up, to throw a full screen thing in my face telling me that feature exists.
That I don't like because at that point I'm so angry I just want to get to the search box so I can type something that I dismiss without reading it anyway.
yeah so yeah so anyway just own your pricing as like here's the app and this is what it costs like that's it like look that's what apple does apple when apple introduces a new billion dollar thing they come out and say here's here's this good thing and here's what it costs
That's it.
Well, Apple gets to say starts at.
Oh, you can say that too, Casey.
You can say it starts at $1 a month.
That's true.
No, it starts at whatever.
No, it starts at like, you know, 80 cents a month or whatever, right?
Whatever.
When you divide out.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's what everyone else does.
Well, you can do the starts at.
You can say if you want the blacked out logo, though, it's another $1,500.
Good grief.
It's Porsche option pricing.
Yeah, that's Porsche for sure.
But yeah, it's funny you bring up all this pricing stuff too because one of the – there were a handful of misses I think on my part.
None of them so far seem to be too dramatic or catastrophic.
But one of the misses on my part –
is when I was setting up the pricing for the four different IAPs, I said to Apple, you know, here's the price I want.
Compute the equivalent across the planet.
And they said, sure, we're happy to do that.
And there were four countries that I've become aware of so far that I'm aware of so far.
I'm trying to figure out if I can find them real quick, maybe not.
But there were four countries.
Sweden was one of them.
I want to say Japan was another, where apparently the...
yearly cost was either the exact same or more than the monthly cost.
It was Sweden, Japan, Vietnam, and Canada, surprisingly.
I need to look into this, but I don't know how this happened.
Like, it was not deliberate.
That's weird.
Right?
And maybe it was user error.
Darned if I know how.
But it could have been.
So I think it makes sense to me because here's the thing.
I don't know exactly how this works, but I do know that pricing is abstracted where you pick like, what are they called, tiers or something?
A tier, yeah.
But you can customize for subscriptions.
You can customize it per region or per country.
Right.
So you can, but most people don't because they don't want to have to do exchange rates in their head.
And if you pick a tier, Apple adjusts them for you as the currency fluctuates at some interval.
I don't know what they do.
Occasionally they send an email that tells me they're adjusting things and like whatever.
Yep.
The thing is, the tier for your yearly, like that's a different number.
You're picking the U.S.
dollars number, and that maps to all sorts of weird numbers across the world.
And I think that big number maps differently than the smaller monthly number.
Like it's not a linear thing, like because they want to hit.
I don't know how they do it, but I think they like sort of bin them into these little buckets.
And I think your small monthly number ends up in like a bucket that's less than.
the US bucket but then your big number ends up in a bucket that's greater and then you end up the math doesn't end up working like that's that's difficult to do but like Marco said you can actually go in there and just fix it manually but yeah which I plan to do I just haven't had the chance yet as someone in the chat room said foreign exchange headwinds going back to our analyst discussion earlier
yeah that's exactly right using this you can make money but yeah no i've been really really pleased with the response um sales it's pretty early to tell especially since everyone who has bought is in a one-week free trial oh no you won't know for a week right exactly um i i'm looking at app store connect i've never done a subscription app before and looking at app store connect sales seem okay they don't seem you know stellar but you get to see that they started the trial though right
It seems that way, yes.
Again, I've never looked at App Store Connect for subscription stuff, but it seems that I am getting a vague notion for how many people have started the trial.
And I'm not displeased with the numbers I'm seeing, but especially given that the press was really complimentary and I was very thankful for it, it is not as good as I would have hoped.
So we'll see.
Well, keep in mind, many of the people haven't hit their free limit yet.
Yeah, that's true.
Like, you know, a lot of people will download this app and then, you know, they might not have any questions about people in movie and TV shows right that second.
You got to wait for a couch incident.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Like this, I think it's going to be kind of a slow burn here, you know, because you have to first wait for people to have couch incidents where they all of us.
Oh, I can look it up in this new app I downloaded the other day.
And they have to remember that they got the new app.
Right, and remember what it's called and find it on their phone.
And so what you're going to do here, you're going to build patterns of usage.
And so I think it's going to have a surprisingly gradual build.
But the good thing is once somebody is in the habit of going to call sheet for this information, not IMDb, not the web, once you build that habit –
That's habits very unlikely to change over time.
So it is going to, I think, be a slow buildup to get people in.
But then I think they're going to stick around for a long time.
So I think you're going to be in a good spot, but it might not be visible like this week.
But maybe, you know, maybe like in a month after people have had more time to, you know, have catch incidents and actually use it and then surpass their free try or their free limits.
Then maybe you'll start to see like, oh, now it's actually, you know, this is decent numbers.
Yeah, and Mike and I talked about this on Analog.
We recorded yesterday, but in, as I think Mike called it, the ATP time warp or something like that, which is accurate, that episode won't be out until Sunday.
We'll put a link in the show notes with a note that it's, you know, going to 404 for a while.
But anyways, we talked about this a bit, and I think something that occurred to me when I was talking to Mike, if memory serves, is that I've been programmed for all my other apps and for years of following people like Marco, you know, pre-subscription time.
I've been programmed that the way the app store works is you make all your money in the first, you know, three days or week or what have you, and then you make nothing after that.
And so I think part of my kind of more morose or forlorn point of view right now is because I'm still like that's so internalized and I'm trying to break my brain away from that.
And I think you're right, Marco.
I think there's a lot to be said for this being a much slower burn.
It's certainly compared to my other apps and maybe just in general because of the nature of this app.
but it's hard for me to remember that.
And so if this is a slow burn, then I'm actually sitting pretty good right now.
But if I'm judging it by, you know, the immense cliff in the good way and then the cliff in the bad way, then it's okay.
It's not bad, but it's not great either.
But it's certainly done better than the prior two apps, which is good and not a terribly high bar, but good nonetheless.
And, you know, all told,
I think I did a bad job of verbalizing this on analog and Mike very justifiably called me out on it.
But I am really proud of this.
Like, I don't think the app is perfect, but I think it's a pretty damn good app.
And there's plenty of places that I'd like to improve it.
My issues, geez, how many GitHub issues do I have right now?
I have 45 GitHub issues, almost all of which are enhancements.
There are some bugs for sure, but almost all of those are enhancements I'm planning.
And so I have plenty of work that I'd like to do on this app.
And I really think that it's a good app that I think is well-considered.
I think it's in a pretty good spot.
Again, not perfect, but it's a pretty damn good spot.
And I'm really proud of it.
And I really think that if you, a listener, give it a shot, you will probably like it too.
You know, I've had a lot of people write on Mastodon in various amounts of rudeness to say, oh, I wanted nothing to do with this app.
It was a total waste of my time.
And then I tried it and it turns out it's great.
And I totally just subscribed.
Yeah.
It's like, well, thank you.
Thanks.
But, you know, thank you for that backhanded compliment.
But no, I genuinely think that it's a really good app that will serve more people than you would expect.
You know, I think if you're kind of sitting on the fence or just, you know, snubbing your nose at this and saying, oh, this isn't for me, give it a shot.
It doesn't hurt.
You don't have to even sign up.
There's no subscription required until after your first 20 searches.
And in fact,
One of my favorite pieces of feedback that I got were a handful of people saying, oh my God, I installed the app and then it ran.
There were no prompts.
There's no permissions.
There's no nothing.
It's just, here's the app.
You know, there's no, what about Bluetooth?
What about local network?
What about this?
What about location services?
What about this?
What about that?
Well, let's do a 17-step onboarding.
Why not?
Turn
on notifications please i'm amazed at the number of apps that beg me to turn on notifications like what will you ever want to notify me oh god no quick and quick aside on this by the way um so just a very you know obscure follow-up uh fuji has a new fuji film has a new app for their cameras they like redid the whole app and it's compatible with with the ones i got so i downloaded the app and set it up
The Fujifilm app will not let you progress and use the app's core functionality.
And it's stuff like pulling pictures off the camera, using a remote shutter to remotely display the camera's display so you can use the phone as a shutter.
Basic camera app stuff.
It will not let you do those things until you allow full-time, including background, always location access to it.
What?
No.
And it says, oh, you have to, you know, we need this so we can geotag your photos automatically.
But it will, like, the, like, you know, Ubi screen, the out-of-box experience, like, in Microsoft terms, like, the setup screen process going through there.
you cannot access the app until you grant it full, always background location access.
How that got through app review, I have no idea.
Because they were distracted by Disney and Pixar, duh.
Yeah, they were too busy looking at your screenshots.
Anyway, but like, that's, you know...
Again, when you look around the app ecosystem, that's every app.
Every single app.
I mean, it's not usually that egregious.
And again, Apple, for the love of God, reject that app.
That's your job at the App Store.
Why do they have to give full-time background location access always...
For an app that is supposed to be about getting pictures off your camera and showing a live shutter, that's ridiculous.
And that is a failure of app review at the highest level.
That's so egregious.
But anyway, sorry.
But the thing is when customers are complimenting your app for not having all that BS, it's because the rest of the app ecosystem is that bad now.
There is so much garbage.
There is so much harassment of users for constant permissions to creepy private stuff that the app really doesn't need or at least really shouldn't be asking for yet.
That is such a thing now.
It's so just ubiquitous that your app really does stand out if you just respect people and don't barrage them with permission dialogues and first launch.
That does make you stand out, and that's a very good thing.
But yeah, honestly, you know, I think, number one, I think this is absolutely the best app you've made yet.
Number two, I think it is by far the most likely to succeed long term because it has the broadest market.
Definitely.
Your previous apps have been like a little more specialized for, you know, so if you have this particular need, you know, this app, a lot of people need this app and a lot of people could benefit from it.
So I think if you keep the marketing up, and by the way, you
The press that you got is great.
First of all, that's wonderful.
But the biggest marketing channel you have is this show.
Not in terms of raw audience.
The combined audiences of all those press outlets is larger than our show's audience.
But...
The rate of conversion that you get from a press article about your app to downloads of your app is not nearly as high as you would think.
I've been doing this a long time.
It's wonderful getting press.
There's a lot of benefits to it besides immediate downloads, but the immediate download number is never that great.
It's never what you think it'll be from press, even from big press.
That's just the reality of the market.
But
You're building here.
You're building long-term.
You're building, like, word-of-mouth advertising.
You're building, you know, over-the-shoulder kind of advertising, experiential advertising.
Like, that's what you're going to build over time with this app because people are going to download it, maybe remember to use it, maybe then actually use it, and they're going to be like, oh, that's fast.
Yeah.
That was nice.
And then like next time they have a couching syndrome where they need to know who that guy is, they're going to go back to that app maybe.
And over time, you're going to build that habit with them.
And that's going to be how this app succeeds.
And I really do think, I mean, look, I don't know what your expectations are, but I really do think this is going to succeed.
Unless you have totally unreasonable expectations, I think this will do well over time.
It just might take a little bit to get there.
Well, and it's funny you bring that up.
I actually just today did something I've never done before.
Spoiler alert.
I have purchased some podcast advertisements.
So I know a guy who knows a lady.
And so I was able to purchase a couple of spots on the Incomparable.
I don't know exactly when they're running.
And a couple of spots on downstream, because my thought process is downstream is industry people and people who really care about streaming media and stuff like that.
And the incomparable is pop culture.
And so although I think that the incomparable probably has a fair bit of crossover with this audience,
I thought it doesn't have, you know, a hundred percent crossover and I'm willing to throw a little bit of money at it.
And then downstream, I think probably has considerably less crossover with our audience and is more likely to have an audience outside of my own.
You know what I mean?
That was very clunky the way I described that, but hopefully that makes sense.
And so there's going to be a couple of spots, I believe, this month on both shows.
And we're going to see how that goes.
And I have no idea if it's going to work.
I've never advertised any of my apps before.
And so I'm going to give it a shot.
And, you know, I also reached out to the Maximum Fun people to see if it's as hilariously unaffordable as I expect to sponsor the Flophouse.
They have not gotten back to me yet, but I suspect it will be a gazillion dollars or maybe seven gazillion dollars, which I will not spend.
But it can't hurt to ask the question.
So I'm trying new avenues.
And, you know, something that occurred to me as we were recording Analog, which, Marco, you just said the exact same thing.
The addressable market for this app is arguably anyone who watches television or movies, which is basically everybody.
It's hard to capture that market, but you can be reasonably sure that whatever marketing and reputation you build is...
But that part of the funnel is not going to be your limiting factor.
Like, you can love my app.
Someone can go around their whole family and say, oh, my God, you've got to try Overcast.
And most of their family is going to be like, what are you talking about?
I use the podcast app or what's a podcast?
So it's a much narrower appeal.
Your app, CallSheet has significantly more appeal in that area.
Any random person around someone who's using it, if they like it enough to mention it, or if the person oversees it, or if whoever says...
oh who's that guy it's oh it's that one guy and they look it up like you know they're they're probably in a conversation with someone else or the someone else on the couch next to them so that's why i i think you're gonna do well you know over time it's gonna take a while to get there i would also suggest um you know in terms of like maximizing your ad spend um app store search ads are probably better than podcast ads for what you're looking at
Yeah, I actually need to talk to you about that.
Yeah.
So first of all, when you go sign up for App Store search ads, do the advanced.
Don't do the basic.
Because the problem is, the advanced is the kind that used to be the only kind.
I very briefly tried to use basic.
And when I saw what it took away, like what kind of controls it took away, I backed right out.
Because...
I have enough experience with advanced to see like with advanced, you can see every single keyword and phrase and stuff that it thinks your app is relevant to that it'll match it to.
And you kind of have to babysit it because like, you know, for, you know, for my, my LLC, which we'll get to in a little while.
Actually, my LLC name for overcast is overcast radio LLC.
This was stupid.
The reason why is that New York already had an overcast LLC when I went to register.
So I had to like add some other word to it.
And I when I was when I was in that stage of the app development, which was very, very, very early on, I briefly had the idea.
What if I you know, what if one of the features of the app would be like it could play podcasts like radio?
And of course, everyone else has done this since then.
And it doesn't work.
And nobody actually wants that.
But, you know, it's like, oh, what if you could just play, you know, put on a station, it would just play it.
So I briefly thought, how about I call it Overcast Radio to make it forward-looking?
It isn't just about podcasts.
It's going to replace radio.
So my company name is Overcast Radio LLC, and I don't know how the hell to change it.
So what I really should do is call it Overcast Podcast App LLC because that's how App Store Search works, and I keep meaning to change it to that, and I just haven't yet for whatever reason.
I don't even know if Apple will let me change it.
As far as I know, they won't, but I think maybe if you email them, who knows?
Anyway, because my name is Overcast Radio LLC...
Even though my app does not mention radio anywhere in the text, anywhere in the title, anywhere in the keywords.
It doesn't mention radio anywhere else.
But because that keyword is in the company name, Overcast gets matched by search ads to radio type searches, radio ads.
Oh, goodness.
And, you know, police radio scanners.
This is way off what I'm going for, you know.
So, you know, the problem is when you do the App Store basic search ads,
You lose a lot of the controls that allow you to tell them not that, not that, not that, not that because their search is really dumb and their matching algorithms are really rudimentary and really very stupid.
So to maximize your effectiveness of your dollars of search ads –
you have to tell it what not to match you to.
And you have to go in there periodically and say, oh, I spent 45 cents matching to free police scanner.
Like, okay, let me X that out so I don't get more of those in the future.
I'm not going to spend my money there.
So...
So that's why I recommend doing the advanced so that you actually get those controls because you will need them if you really want to maximize how your money is spent.
But the good thing about App Store search ads is that you can see then how much you're actually spending to acquire people.
It actually tells you that.
So that helps you make – first of all, it helps you know how much to spend on ads.
But then that also helps you – it helps you see your return.
And then it helps you kind of figure out, you know, if you need to make a future pricing decision or future product decisions, like you can figure out like, well, what does it cost me to acquire a user and to keep that user over time?
So that's why I recommend App Store Search ads.
With podcast ads, and I say this as somebody who makes a lot of my living from podcast ads, although decreasingly so, but, you know, rapidly decreasingly so, but
Anyway, please, adf.fm slash join.
Whore slash sponsor.
Either one is fine.
Yeah, right.
Let's be honest.
Slash join is better at this point, I think.
But anyway, podcast ads, when you have a smaller budget, it's much harder to have the impact that you want because a lot of spoken ads like this, like most forms of advertising, depends on repetition for it to really stick in people's minds.
So if you only have the budget to buy one podcast ad, don't buy a podcast ad.
Like, you might get some return, but it's not going to be nearly as much as if you bought, like, four podcast ads, like, you know, every week for four weeks.
Like, that's a much more effective marketing plan than just buying one and have it be one-off and that's it.
Because people won't remember it nearly as well.
But, you know, so I would – and also with podcast ads, again, because of things that are actually very good about the podcast medium, it's really hard to know the direct response rate of those ads for an app.
You know, the reason why podcast ads say, hey, go to whatever slash ATP, use coupon code ATP for 10% off your first purchase is so that way the sponsor knows how many people heard the ad and how many new customers they got through that ad.
It's direct response advertising.
That's why this has been so popular with podcasts over time, because they can then attribute they can say, well, it turns out, you know, the ATP does really well for something like Squarespace.
So they're willing to spend more money with us.
and they still have to do the guesswork of all the people who went and didn't use the link or didn't type in the code or forgot there was a code or didn't go to the landing page so it's not you know the it's not the the perfect knowledge that you know search app store search ads have right yeah but it's at least closer it's very hard to do that for an app like you can you can make a custom link and have it at a tag like but no one does that no one remembers those links it's yeah it's not that that's that's going to be above your pay grade for this app um
So really what you should do here is the most money that you spend acquiring people should probably be with App Store Search Ads or at least the first money you spend.
Well, I mean, you know, whatever you've already committed to, fine.
I'm not saying back out, but I am saying definitely start buying search ads now because you'll have data in a day of how much you're spending and what you're being matched to, what keywords you're being matched to.
And you'll be able to see, you know, you'll be and you'll be to adjust very quickly.
Like, all right, well, this bid, you know, I got to raise this bid to 50 cents or whatever for this keyword or or I'm not getting shown enough.
And when I when I when I'm buying IMDB, I'm not being shown enough there.
So I need to either increase my bid or bid on something else.
You know, you can start getting those getting that data very quickly in a pretty tight feedback loop.
Then you can finally see like, you know, if it turns out that you end up making, you know, like whatever whatever percentage of your downloads result in that, you know, five or ten dollar value somebody might have for you, you know, as long as they stay subscribed.
which could be actually much higher than that over time.
But suppose you're like, all right, well, 5% of downloads result in a purchase.
I don't know what your number is going to be there.
I don't know if that's high or low.
I have no idea because that varies a lot per app and what the offering is.
then you can go and say, all right, well, if it only costs me 50 cents or 5 cents or 1 cent to acquire a user, okay, now I have numbers I can work with.
You can start doing the math and figuring out what works for you.
So buy App Store Search Ads.
Yeah, it's on the to-do list.
I was clicking around as you were talking, and I went and landed on searchads.apple.com, and I'm not reading because I'm trying to listen to you, but I found a Start Now button, and I clicked it, and then the piehole said, no, you can't do that because it thought it was an advertising domain.
It's filled with ads.
It is.
Yes.
That's where all the ads live.
I'm going to need to approve that domain, which I thought was kind of funny.
There's still no search ads in the Mac App Store, right?
uh i don't think so i mean when's the last time i've looked at the mac yeah i was gonna say the problem is there's no users in the mac app store yeah i know i i know we talked about when apple came out with this like you could buy searches against your competitors apps and stuff like that and it would show you at the bottom remember that whole thing i i i don't think like i don't think there's search ads on the mac app store but there i know this from searching for my own apps when i search for my own apps on the mac app store other people other competing apps come up so they must be putting my app name in their keywords
Oh, totally.
I don't think you're supposed to do, but I don't actually know.
When the App Store first launched, like in the early days, you were not officially, you were not allowed to put other apps names in your keywords field because the keywords field in App Store Connect is not shown to the public.
yeah apple uses it in search indexing and i think they've used it less over time as people have spammed the crap out of it but again apple search algorithms are really dumb and really rudimentary so they do still use that kind of stuff as far as i can tell and everyone started putting their competitors names in in their keywords field everyone did that
And you could complain and you could say, look, they're not supposed to be doing this or it's my trademark or whatever.
You could do all that.
And mostly your complaints would be ignored because the app store is not policed nearly as much as we often want it to be in the ways we want it to be.
And this is one of those ways.
Anything that's considered like app store optimization is
uh you can kind of it's kind of the wild west and and you you can kind of do whatever you want and apple mostly won't have a problem with it uh because everyone else is doing it too and and worse including apple itself in many cases um so you know you you might have to do some of that stuff you know depending on on you know what what you're being matched with and everything or you know what you're how you're ranking you might have to start doing some of those things that are a little bit icky sounding to a pure mind um but the app store does that to you over time
I mean, look, I even converted to like the screenshots that like show different shaped iPhones in them and they're like, rather than just being screenshots, I even converted to that recently.
Like it's, there's just, there are certain things that like you don't want to do.
And then eventually like, you know, the title of my app was overcast colon podcast player for a long time, you know, until they added that subtitle field, which no one uses and they still make their app called something, whatever colon keyword spam.
Um, yeah, that's, that's just the app store.
You've got to go full Amazon product name for your app.
Yeah, exactly.
Overcast, podcast player, audio, sound.
It's so hard to come up with those titles.
Do you think you can come up with them?
Free podcast, not police radio.
I will say, I don't put my competitors' names in my keywords field.
My keywords field is like, you know,
podcast podcatcher free podcast free download is like that kind of stuff um i do however bid on their names in apps in app store search ads uh because a there's nothing wrong with that b they do it to me um and c it's that's expressly allowed by apple like phil schiller expressly said we want p or we want to be we want people to do this
um and i think when you are buying yours you should absolutely bid on imdb as your top bid like and it'll it tells you when you when you type in a keyword into the app store uh in the search ads buying thing it'll tell you like these little like colored bars that kind of indicate roughly how popular that is and then roughly like how strong your bid will be against other people's bids um and my bids are almost all in the red it's like your bids are weak don't even bother but i put them in anyway and then i get i get downloads you know
So someone's clicking on them and I'm winning some of those auctions.
And that's not because I'm super cheap.
It's because it's literally like to get it in the green for some of my keywords, it would be like $5 per tap.
Like absurd amounts of money that I could never justify.
But anyway, buy search ads and be aggressive with what you bid on, the keywords you bid on, all that stuff.
Be aggressive, be totally blatant, bid right against your competitors and see how it does.
Yeah, that is the plan.
Again, I've never done any advertising, much less App Store search ads or anything like that.
But it is absolutely the plan.
And I will probably be needling you with questions about this over the next few days.
But to go back quite a bit, I keep dancing around this, but I wanted to make this point, which I think I talked about on Analog as well.
But when I had the idea of tying access to the test flight to membership...
To be completely forthright, the only goal I had in doing that was juicing our member numbers.
Like, I really thought it was a win-win, right?
I'm giving the members something that they wouldn't have otherwise, and they're giving me money I wouldn't have otherwise.
And so I thought everyone's happy, right?
And that was really the only purpose in having the members have access to the test flight.
Well, as it turns out, having a test flight that had quite a few more people on it than would otherwise have been there was really great.
And I really owe the members that use the test flight...
debt of gratitude because i really think the app is better for having been used by way more people than would otherwise have used it because i think my my group you can have different groups of people in app store connect and my friends and family group is something to the order of 50 to 100 people i forget exactly how many are in there right now
But the members test flight was quite a bit more than that.
And that really, really helped make this app better.
And one of the very obvious ways is there were international people.
And granted, I had a handful of people from other countries in my friends and family list.
But there were way more in way more countries on the members test flight.
And they came up with legitimate problems or tweaks or things that I should change.
And
I do think the app is far, far better for it.
So if you are a member, whether or not you joined for the test flight, I really appreciate you using the app via test flight.
And I appreciate those of you who did report feedback.
I appreciate those who maybe reported feedback and never heard anything back from me because there was a lot of it, but it did make the app better.
And I read all of it.
And I'm really, really thankful for all of you members that took the time to do any of these things because I genuinely think the app is better for it.
So with that said, I think it was a build or two ago, I did expire all the old builds and test flights.
So I think I might have left the most recent one, I don't recall, but I expired either all of them or all but the most recent one for the members test flight.
Now, to the best of my knowledge, that means you cannot install it again.
But if it's already installed, you're clear to use it for up to 90 days from when the build was posted.
And so I'm thinking to myself, oh, God, here we are again with slow burn.
You know, I had a week delay from free trials.
Now I've got three months delay from all of the test flight people, many of whom I'm assuming will wait until they can't use the app anymore in order to switch over to the paid one.
But it turns out, and Marco is the king of this, I am but the court jester by comparison, but it turns out procrastination wins the day.
And let me tell you why.
It turns out that when I was working on it, on the test flight builds, I really, really wanted to add some sort of detection that, oh, if you're in test flight, you get the whole thing for free.
For a while there, I had a way in which you could go into settings and insta-buy the app.
You didn't have to go through the whole flow.
And the reason I wanted to do all these things is because the way TestFlight works is it deliberately shortens the real-world time that a subscription takes.
So if you have a year subscription, it takes a day or a month or a week.
I forget exactly how long it is.
It doesn't really matter.
But what I got from TestFlight users was constant questions, and I don't blame them because I would ask the same thing.
Dude, why do I have to buy it every single day?
And you can't face ID.
You have to enter your damn password.
It's such a pain in the hindquarters.
Why do I have to do this every day?
This sucks.
Well, yeah, it does, but I've got other bigger fish to fry.
I'm genuinely sorry that it's a pain in the butt, but I got other things to worry about right now.
I'm sorry.
I can't do anything about it.
Well, I had a bunch of people write to me and say, oh, thank God I don't have to do the stupid nag every single day.
So my negligence and my procrastination has saved the day.
And so a lot of test flight users have been kind enough to purchase the full bore version of the app just so they don't have to repurchase it every day.
So thank you to all of you.
And I'm sorry for you being nagged, except I'm not sorry.
So sorry, not sorry.
Does anybody know why you can't do face ID?
I'm very familiar with this phenomenon, but I assumed someone else has reported this, right?
Because it's ridiculous.
Is there any kind of reasoning there?
Or is it just like, oh, it's always been that way.
Sorry about it.
So the whole way that the sandbox purchasing environment works...
over time has always been really hacky and it used to be a lot worse like it used to be that sometimes you would get into a state where your sandbox environment purchase on your phone would like not be able to complete a purchase and it would put up the box that like the random system modal alert every so often saying you know
You've got to enter your password to complete this purchase or whatever, and it would say environment sandbox in brackets, and it would pop that up.
It would ruin a phone.
You would have to reformat and restore your phone to get to have this stop.
It was awful.
So the current system is a lot less bad, but it's still very bad.
It's still based on a pile of hacks, I think.
That's kind of how it feels.
So what I usually recommend is...
don't do any test flight purchase testing.
Like I usually recommend for test flight builds, disable all purchasing because it is just, it's not worth the many, many hassles about it.
Like do all your purchase testing internally.
And then when you give it a tester, just have a flag that just like makes everything free or blocks out the purchase screen or whatever.
Yeah.
And like I said, for a long time, when I wasn't actively testing my very late in my build process rejiggered purchase flow, I just had a button in settings that you could go into and instantly buy the app.
It wouldn't ask you for the, you know, it would fake it on my end.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
And I will probably put that back for the handful of people who are listening that do have the test flight still.
But for ATP members, you know, you're going to have to buy the app.
Sorry.
But yeah, so it was a royal pain in the butt for test flight users.
And now that pain in the butt is now the stick, or maybe it's the carrot, depending on how you look at it, that is compelling people to go ahead and buy the paid version, which is pretty great.
But genuinely, I wanted to thank all the ATP members one more time.
It really did make the app better.
And thank you for that.
Yeah.
And congrats on the launch.
This is a really big deal.
You put a lot of work into it.
It shows.
And it looks like it's going to be successful.
I think it's going to be very successful.
Hey, everyone out there, go buy the app.
Make me right.
Yes, please.
Yeah.
I think it's going to work.
I really do.
I sure hope so, and I appreciate it.
And also, I want to say that the... I don't know what your original plan was or whatever, but I'm glad that you took the time you did to pick this set of features for 1.0, because you could have launched before this.
Like, there are features that are in this that didn't necessarily need to be there, but I think the set that you landed on as the 1.0 set is...
it's generous like it is it didn't have to have this many features but because it does it's really it's really a fleshed out 1.0 it's not like a 1.0 it's not like a skateboard as they would say or an mvp or whatever it is skateboard people say that what yeah you'd be glad you don't know about the business knowledge is talking about like uh minimum viable product is not like a pile of wheels or whatever it's a it's not a car either it's a skateboard because it rolls it's got four wheels it's got a thing you can stand on anyway just it's crappy business but the point is
that's bad i think this 1.0 has a good kind of like the pricing it has a good set of features not every feature you could possibly imagine but you could have launched with less than it would have been quote unquote okay uh and you could have waited you know another six more months and be way more full feature but the set of features in here now definitely covers like most of the common needs that people want
with a couple extra things thrown in there.
So I'm glad that you waited as long as you did because it seemed like you were kind of anxious to launch this like months ago.
And I was like, oh, I think you probably need some more features.
But I think you did the right thing, took your time, added those features in.
As it turns out, as you implemented them, they didn't take that long to add.
And they add so much value to the app, like being able to look it up on Just Watch, you know, or even the little thing we were talking about before of showing the popover of what time the movie would end, which maybe shouldn't be a popover, but still like stuff like that.
That's in your 1.0.
That's in your very first version, right?
And you already have that big list of things that you want to add.
So I think you picked a good feature set for 1.0.
Yeah, I appreciate that.
And, you know, as I do this more and more, I'm no underscore, but I am getting better at it.
And I feel like I'm getting better at it, which is great.
You know, you never want to be bored in your job and you never want to feel like you're not improving.
And I feel like I'm improving.
I got a long way to go, but I feel like I'm improving.
You only got, what, like 63 more apps to catch up on the underscore?
Something like that.
Yeah, I'm sure it'll be any day now.
Very quickly, a couple of other notes.
First of all, if you are looking to purchase the app or subscribe, I should say, one of the things I did, which I didn't know if Apple was going to complain about it, but surprisingly, they said not a peep.
If you are going through the purchase flow...
The first screen you see says, oh, you can do it monthly or you can do it yearly.
And under the two options you can choose between, there's text that says more purchase options.
If you like the work that I do, if you like me, if you think I'm a kind of okay guy, you can hit more purchase options.
And in there is a quasi tip jar sort of thing, but it's a subscription tip jar.
So...
What that means is for instead of paying $9 a year, you can pay $20 a year or your local equivalent or $50 a year.
You get no perks other than my undying love.
But that is it.
That is all you get.
I am not expecting anyone to do that.
Some people seem to have done that.
And I am extremely thankful for all of you that have.
But you can elect to do that.
And I'm pretty sure you can go in and manage your subscription and change to it during your free trial if you fancy doing that.
So something to look for.
Very quickly, since this is a nerd podcast, I put this at the bottom of my blog post, but a few things that I think are kind of funny.
Total commits in GitHub, 727.
The first commit was the 30th of January, 2023.
The build for the App Store was done on the 27th of July, which is 178 days or about six months between the two.
according to clock on the command line 14 232 lines of swift 673 lines of text or xml or markdown for a total of just shy of 15 000 lines of code 102 beta builds and the first screenshot which we will link to in the show notes is hilariously basic and that i took on the 3rd of february and you can see it has come a long way baby because it is
Not at all.
I think your app is a good advertisement for SwiftUI because one of my Mac apps, Switch Glass, has almost the same number of lines of Swift code as yours and substantially fewer features and less UI.
And where is all that code?
It's not in the SwiftUI view, although my SwiftUI view is fairly girthy, as the kids would say.
I do.
I don't like the slang.
It's the kids.
Anyway.
it's all the stupid app kit code because when you do anything with app kit and ui you know you're making all these outlets and actions and it's so barbaric like and you know not declarative right so the fact that you have that many screens and that many features and like networking code and all sorts of other stuff that my app doesn't have and we're within a couple thousand like i think i'm like 12 or 13 000 lines of swift and you're at 14 uh you're a great advertisement for swift ui
Indeed.
So yeah, I think that's all I have for now.
I appreciate you talking to me about it.
If you want to check it out, you know, there will be links in the show notes.
Don't you worry, but you can go to www.caseless.com slash call sheet.
And that is my blog post.
And if you click the title of that blog post, it will push you over to the app store.
I'd love for you to check it out.
Even if you don't think it's for you, like I was saying earlier, even if you don't think it's for you, that's okay.
Check it out.
What's going to hurt?
It's free.
You don't have to subscribe.
There's no harm done.
Go ahead and check it out.
I think you'll like it.
You didn't get a .app domain?
Oh, actually, it's funny you bring that up.
Maybe we can talk about this in the after show, but I did get callsheetapp.com and there was all sorts of agita earlier today trying to figure out how to do redirects with that, which is uninteresting.
That's not a .app domain.
No, it's not because I have callsheets.app, but callsheet.app is not available.
Oh, really?
That's a bummer.
Yeah, so what are you going to do?
the reality is the domain name for your app really does not matter at all i know but it's just a fun thing to do when you make an app like it could literally be like you know call sheet dot butt and it would be fine like you'd still it wouldn't matter at all get dropbox.com
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Oh.
All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
Nate Silva writes, Casey, congratulations on publishing Call Sheet and the well-deserved great reviews you're getting.
Thank you so much.
I've noticed that Call Sheet is published by Limitless LLC.
Is there a reason you chose to use an LLC?
Is it something you would recommend for other developers?
So I'm going to take a stab at this.
I am not a lawyer.
I have only been doing this for a handful of years, not nearly as long as Marco.
Marco is probably the right person to listen to, but I've got the floor.
So here we go.
And LLC here in America is is a limited liability corporation, I believe.
And basically what that means, something like that.
Basically, what that means is for the purposes of legal liability, I, Casey List, have some amount of protections.
And as long as I keep my finances separate, the company finances separate from my finances, the worst thing that can happen, I am not a lawyer, I am not a lawyer, I am not a lawyer, the worst thing that can happen is the company's finances could be drained, but I personally will not lose all of my money if something bad happens because of the work that I do.
And so, yes, it is something I recommend in Virginia.
It was extremely easy to set up an LLC.
It was extremely cheap and extremely straightforward.
I was able to do it all by myself.
I definitely recommend it.
Marco, can you add the color commentary and or clarifications to that, please?
Yeah, that's the gist of my understanding as well.
Again, none of us are lawyers or accountants, so take this with a grain of salt.
It's worth consulting with a lawyer and an accountant when making this decision.
However, at least in the U.S., in most states, in possibly all states, it is a state construct, so check with your state with specifics of it, but at least in New York,
Having an LLC is fairly easy and inexpensive.
So what it takes to have one is you got to register it and you got to fill out a form every couple of years to basically renew its registration.
Every couple of years?
I was going to ask you, for both of your states, what is the burden?
And for Massachusetts, it's annual and substantial.
I think it's like $25 every two years in New York.
It's not much.
What?
I got to move to New York.
Right?
No, the taxes will kill you.
Don't worry.
Massachusetts doesn't have a lot of taxes.
Yeah, they get it in other ways.
Don't worry about that.
But yeah, so it depends on the state.
But it is something like $25 every two years.
It's something like that in New York.
What about you, Casey?
For me, I am almost sure it is $50 every single year.
What?
What do you pay?
More.
Why is this a state secret?
Just to have an LLC?
Yes.
Are you going through one of those scam services that does it for you?
I am going through a scam service, but even accounting for the 500% markup, it's more.
Oh, God.
Well, anyway, all you have to do here is you have to register it.
It's good to have either a lawyer or an accountant file a paperwork for you the first time just so you don't mess anything up.
But in most states, this is a fairly simple thing.
And then you go to your bank.
Once you have the forms from the state, you go to your bank and say, I need a bank account for this, please.
And then you just have every transaction that is for the company go through that bank account.
And then when you want to take money out to pay yourself, you take it out of that bank account and put it in your personal bank account.
And that's about all you really have to do.
But never, never cross the beams, the streams, the beams, whatever.
Yes, oh, definitely not.
You never purchase anything for personal use from that account.
That account has its own debit card or credit card.
You buy things on that that are for the business.
Only buy things for the business on that.
Keep everything nice and separate.
And then by doing that,
What Casey said, you have a pretty large amount of limited liability.
That's what the LL stands for in the sense that if somebody wants to sue Overcast, they don't get to take my house.
They can take Overcast's assets in the worst case, but they wouldn't get to take all of my personal assets.
It's a way to cover your butt in a fairly easy way.
As long as you follow the relatively simple rules of operating it separately from your other stuff, it isn't hard to operate an LLC or expensive if you're not in Massachusetts.
Anything that's going to be an app that's going to be possibly making real money, I would suggest having an LLC.
The second thing is...
If you think your app might someday be sold to somebody else, it is much better to have it be on a separate Apple ID than your personal Apple ID.
Because Apple has since devised some weird app transfer wizard things.
They've had limitations.
I don't know if this is still the case, but previously, if your app had ever used iCloud or any iCloud-based service, it could not be transferred using this mechanism.
But anyway, it's awkward, and it's a lot easier if someone's going to buy your app.
It's a lot easier to say, you're buying the LLC and its assets, and here's the Apple ID for that LLC.
It's a whole different developer account, a whole different Apple ID, totally separate from your other stuff.
Again, it's part of the reason you make these separations if you're going to make an app that might make real money and that might be sold someday or whatever.
It's to make those outcomes easier and to limit the risk to your personal stuff of the business stuff seeping in too much.
An LLC is generally the first step of that, and it makes all that stuff a lot easier.
Goodness, these fees in Massachusetts, which John has put in the chat, they're kind of a lot.
They're very high.
And the burden, it's onerous.
Like to fill out the paperwork yourself is like annoying and you'd be afraid you screwed up, which is why you pay for these companies.
There are companies that will do it for you, right, for some fee on top of this.
So I pay even more on top to not to deal with it.
Look at the fee structure.
Like there's stuff you have to do every year and everything costs like hundreds of dollars.
$500 to register an LLC?
Is that right?
And forget about the one-time cost.
The recurring annual cost just to maintain the LLC, a basic LLC, is just very... Anyway, there's a reason the nickname for my state for those people who don't live in the U.S.
is Taxachusetts.
Wow.
That's ridiculous.
This is ridiculous.
Holy jamola.
Should have incorporated in Delaware, I guess.
Right?
Goodness.
Anyway, in the grand scheme of things, it's a drop in the bucket.
And I just, you know, consider it a cost of doing business and, you know.
There it goes.
But anyway, just to chime in for the LLC, yes, I do have an LLC, and I don't understand all the things that it's supposedly doing for me, but my understanding is just like the two of you said, is like, if someone uses my application switcher and it burns down their house and they sue me for millions of dollars, even if they win, all they can get is all the assets of hypercritical LLC.
And those assets, let me tell you, are not substantial.
So...
So they cannot take my house.
They cannot take all the money from all my savings accounts and the money that my kids are going to use to go to college or anything like that.
They can only take the very meager assets of my LLC, which is not worth suing me over, so don't bother.
Yeah.
And from what I understand, it's basically like however much is in the checking account of that LLC.
You know, it's like it's not they can't take like, you know, all past earnings that it ever had.
Like, you know, it's just it's whatever you keep in the you know, whatever money you keep in the business, which is usually not a ton of money for most people.
That's one thing I did save money on.
So I got a separate bank account for the business and a separate, you know, debit card for the business and a separate credit card for the business.
And it's all registered to the business.
You know, it's like, oh, it's a business.
And I found one that's a bank that's local to me that has no fees for anything.
It's like as long as you have under like, you know, 500 transactions a month, I'm like, don't worry.
Yeah.
you know i i get a transaction from apple what do they pay like monthly right or i forget yeah once a month from apple one big deposit i got one from apple and then like you know that's basically it right and so i i have i have checks but everything is no fees like i just have a minimum balance that i have to keep which is very low and i pay zero dollars for this account in exchange for having a credit card that i use for business expenses and a debit card and checks that i never use although occasionally i have had to do like voided checks or whatever for things
But, you know, that's that's the easy stuff to get.
But the trick is to get all that and not have it have your name on it or not to be right.
You know, you have to have it.
You have to have a legal entity that it can be in the name of.
And mine is hypercritical LLC.
Yep.
And then the final note, at least here in America, for tax purposes, it's different depending on the flavor of your LLC.
But mine, shoot, I forget what it's called.
But mine basically pass through.
Yes, thank you.
Mine does not exist for tax purposes.
It's only for legal liability purposes.
So my taxes and anything that Limitless LLC makes is effectively Casey List money from a tax perspective.
It's only from the legal liability perspective that this is a thing.
And we can do that because we don't have any employees.
We're not going to say we're not real businesses because we are, but we're intentionally like it's a pass through for tax purposes.
It makes doing our taxes easier.
Even though both Casey and I have accountants do our taxes, if you have a company and you want to have multiple partners and employees and salary and having to deal with healthcare for your employees, like a quote-unquote real business, accounting and taxes get way, way more complicated.
Whereas if you know you have basically a single employee company that's just you, the LLC will give you legal protection while not overcomplicating
your accounting or your taxes.
And obviously that stops working if you want to have a company with multiple employees and everything or whatever.
But if you're still in this sort of easy mode where you're not planning on doing that, having a pass through simplifies things greatly.
Yep.
Yeah.
Jan Ohanyemi, I'm so sorry, writes, with all that empty space on the Mac Pro, would it be feasible for Apple to just slap a huge heatsink on the processor and overclock it by 30 or 40% over the standard Ultra?
That way there would be a performance difference between the studio and the Pro.
Call it the Ultra Turbo.
You put a turbo button on the front.
You just press it and your computer goes faster.
Oh, those were the days.
So I'm assuming the person who wrote this doesn't have a lot of experience overclocking PCs, but overclocking in general, it's not as simple as like, well, if you turn up the clock speed, it'll produce more heat and then you just have to get rid of that heat.
Although...
That alone is much harder than you would think because it's not like, oh, we can get rid of as much heat as we want.
We'll just put a bigger heat sink on there.
The problem, especially with modern CPUs, is that heat is concentrated in a tiny little area.
So no matter how big a heat sink you put on it, all the heat is emanating from this tiny little rectangle.
And it has to spread from that rectangle quickly elsewhere to get the hell out of there before it can get to your big giant heat sink or fan or whatever evaporative cooler or whatever, right?
In all fairness, the Ultra is a pretty large rectangle.
Well, I mean, compared to the size of like a heat sink that's like eight inches on a side or something, right?
Or some kind of evaporative cooler or even a water cooler.
Like getting the heat out of that little tiny area is the difficult part.
But anyway, heat is not your big problem here because we do have things that can get that heat out of there pretty quickly.
Your real problem is how fast can the chip go before it stops working?
And 30% to 40% overclocking is ambitious.
Yeah.
Because the faster you make it go, you have a bunch of problems.
One is how fast can your transistors actually switch?
Because transistors don't instantly change from one state to another.
They have some sort of transition time.
Yeah.
You have to make sure all of your transistors involved in your CPU or GPU or whatever can switch as fast as you want them to switch successfully getting from one state to the other.
The second thing is you need signals to be able to propagate from point A on the chip to point B on the chip.
And yes, it's a very small area like postage stamp size or whatever.
But at the speeds we're talking about, multiple gigahertz, there is actually transit time for signals to travel.
And if you clock it too high, by the time the next clock comes, the signal hasn't propagated from where it needed to, from where it started to where it needs to get to by the next clock cycle.
And then your CPU doesn't work.
There's all sorts of things that will literally stop the thing from functioning correctly.
if you clock it too high.
And that percentage is not 30 to 40% most of the time.
You can get lucky, because some people, if you get, this is why overclockers are looking like, you know, CPUs that are quote unquote good for overclocking, where they're manufactured in such a way that the defect rate is low, and that you know there's actually a lot of headroom.
That's where they do things like, you know, cool it with liquid nitrogen, because they're like, in this case, cooling really is our limiting factor, so we'll cool the thing with liquid nitrogen, which is, you know, a silly stunt or whatever, and then see how fast it will go.
And even being cool with liquid nitrogen, you can't make it go like 800% faster or whatever because eventually it just stops working.
But what you're looking for is a chip where, let's say, you're either not on the bleeding edge, which Apple usually is, especially with the upcoming three nanometer stuff or whatever.
It's a design that has sort of all the bugs worked out of it because it all takes is one dark corner of your chip to be a little bit iffy.
And if that part of the chip can't, you know, the transistors there are a little bit wonky because the masking was all kind of screwed up and it works fine.
But it only works at the at the bin to clock speed plus like two percent.
The rest of the chip has, you know, five or ten percent headroom.
But because that part of the chip doesn't, your whole thing doesn't work.
So it would be cool.
They could probably overclock it a little bit and extract some extra heat.
But.
30 to 40 percent is probably not realistic especially when we moved three nanometer and apple is the very first customer in the world to be using these chips from tsmc also like when you think about the market of the mac pro um and by that i mean the mac studio pci breakout box um it seems like you know if you could actually you know whatever the whatever the number would be that they could actually achieve reliably for the overclock would probably be maybe more on the order of like 10 or 15 percent
And I don't think the buyers of this machine would be willing to buy something that might be like a little bit very slightly less reliable than the regular version of the chip.
You know, because overclocking, the problem is like it's kind of a risk game.
You roll the dice like you see how can I push it a little bit higher?
And then you run, you know, some like massive stress test thing to see, like put as much stress in the CPU as possible.
Like, does it crash?
Does it keep running?
Like, let's see.
And can you push a little bit higher?
And maybe you got to raise the voltage a little bit.
And, you know, and what you typically end up with is having to have rapidly rising power and heat.
to get relatively decreasing gains after that point.
That's another good point, by the way.
As you increase clock speed, the heat output does not increase linearly.
It's like a square.
It's like a square of the... So if you increase the clock speed by... I can't do the math in my head, but if you double the clock speed, you are way more than doubling the heat generated.
Yeah, you need way more cooling, not just a little bit.
You don't just need 10% more cooling.
You need three times the cooling.
And if you see what does the parabola look like, the parabola graph you must have done in school with an exponent of two, the slope goes up real, real fast.
So it doesn't take long before you're saying, I am now producing infinite heat.
Exactly.
It becomes unfeasible way faster than you think, which is why people use liquid nitrogen.
You're like, they're using liquid nitrogen.
That must be overclocked by 8,000%.
No, it's like 150%.
And typically, like John was saying, what chips people look for when overclocking, usually you're looking for some kind of Intel or AMD, whatever, where they sell a pretty wide range of chips, of speeds, of clock speeds, within a certain family of chips.
And maybe you buy one of the lower-clocked ones, assuming you could probably push it higher.
And that's not how Apple...
sells the the you know apple silicon cpus there are no clock speed options it's just one it's like here we made this one we've designed the entire chip to work at this one ideal speed range and that's the one everyone gets that you know you can't pay more to get the next to get like the faster one it's just you have this one chip and
And so I would imagine there actually might not be as much headroom as you think in the sense that like they've they've they've set these parameters for for good reasons.
They if they could push a bunch of them higher, they probably would.
But they're not.
And there's probably good reasons for that.
Also, these are massive chips.
When you're looking at the Ultra, or even just the M1 Max, but especially the Ultra, this is such a large chip.
I haven't overclocked in a very long time, so all my knowledge could be super outdated and not relevant to modern chips, but I would expect with that much...
chip with that much surface area with that many transistors, I would expect that as you push things past their spec, the likelihood of you having a problem I think would be higher than the old days where you were overclocking this little tiny Celeron thing.
I would guess that these massive multi-core all-on-one giant die kind of chips that Apple's making here, I would guess you actually don't have the headroom that you think you do.
Yeah, I think the overclocking is a little bit trickier because keep in mind that with modern chips, but especially modern SOC system on a chip like we have now, there's multiple clock speeds going on.
The GPU is not running at the same clock as the CPU and all of them are on some kind of clock speed curve in response to heat.
So heat is a factor and having better cooling can let you stay at higher clock speeds for longer.
But different parts of the chips are running at different clock speeds anyway.
And unlike the situation where you don't have an SOC, like a thing common in PC overclocking or whatever, is to choose like your memory speed independently from your CPU speed when you're overclocking.
I don't think you have that kind of flexibility with an SOC because the RAM is right there on the package.
And I'm not sure if you could...
overclock the GPU, but underclock the CPU, but increase the speed of the RAM.
I don't, I don't actually know the mechanisms you'd have to use to overclock this, but to your point about Apple picking the speed, like whenever they bin these, whenever they say these chips will run at this speed and these chips have a broken GPU core.
So the cheaper ones are wherever they do all this binning.
Apple could choose to say, we're going to put only the ones that can run 10% faster in the Mac Pro, but it would be even more expensive because every time they do that, they say, okay, only the very best ones go in the Mac Pro.
Guess how many of the very best ones there are?
Way, way fewer.
It's not like, and the Mac Pro already costs so much money.
So you think, okay, we would just cost 10% more to get 10% more clock speed.
No.
again because like your yields like how many of this you build them all and you think they have to pick some number it's like okay 80 pass the bar for mac studio use how many pass the bar for 10 more than that okay one percent and now figure out how much you have to charge for that one it's like okay 80 of our chips are suitable in the mac studio one percent of our chips are suitable for the mac pro granted it's good that the mac pro doesn't sell many so maybe they could still make it work but like
The more you bin it, the more you say, I will reject any SOC unless it can run at X gigahertz.
And you find out, OK, that's like one in 10,000.
Now it becomes way more expensive to put that in something because you have to manufacture 10,000 of those chips just to get one of those.
So, yeah, overclocking is a fun thing to do as a hobby on PCs.
And I think Apple probably has a little bit of thermal headroom to push it on the Mac Pro and still stay within a reliability envelope.
But they have chosen not to mostly because like it's just one more one more thing to make the Mac Pro expensive.
Like it's not that big of a benefit.
It would be single digit percentage if that.
And now you're making an already expensive machine even more expensive and rare.
Even if you could qualify it and say it passes all of our reliability things, we've tested it the same way as everything else, and this one can go 5% faster, it's probably not worth it.
What you want from the Mac Pro, as we've said before, is twice as many cores that is way more valuable than the same number of cores but 5% faster.
Even I was just thinking, too, like even another big reason for them not to offer that kind of thing is it would also then kind of dilute the Mac Studio, which they probably sell a whole lot more of.
And if you think like, you know, right now they have these great.
Well, they have these names.
They have these compact names for these chips.
Yeah.
M1 Pro, M1 Max, M1 Ultra, M2.
They have these nice, short, compact names.
They're very simple.
They're reasonably easy for people to understand.
If they start adding variants, like, oh, this is the M2 Max Turbo.
Like the iPhone Pro Max, it's just confusing.
Yeah, I know, right?
It's not a perfect, you know, system that we have now.
But, you know, the more variations they add, it'll start to seem, first of all, it'll be more confusing and people won't necessarily know what they're buying or why they should buy it.
But also then, like, imagine if, like, might that actually hurt the Mac Studio in the sense that the Mac Studio would then have the reputation of like, well, yeah, it says it has the M2 Ultra, but it's not like the really good M2 Ultra, you know?
It's intentionally underclocked.
right in that case right right kind of is but not by the way you think like it's not like the cooling in the ultra can absolutely handle that that soc in the m2 generation but yeah you could get a couple more percentage if you put a bigger cooler on it but that's like yeah it's just not that kind of distinction they would never get another name like the m2 turbo for five percent
Like the ultra is not a 5% difference from the max.
It's a big difference.
It's, it's literally two maxes in there.
So I don't think you get a new name for 5%.
Edward Corcoran writes, what text editor are all three of you using these days?
I've used TextMate for around a decade based on Marco's recommendation.
A few Mac OSs ago, TextMate started loading really slowly due to some checks on unsigned code.
Macromates can't fix the issue.
So I'm looking to switch to a new editor.
I also started using TextMate forever ago, I think because of Marco and also noticed it takes a freaking eternity to start.
I have no idea if this unsigned code thing is true or not.
I have no idea if Macromates can or can't fix it, but that at least explains, potentially explains why this thing has become just intolerably painful to use.
Yeah, by the way, thank you, Edward, for pointing this out.
I didn't know why TextMate launches so ungodly slowly.
I just assumed, you know, I have, you know, I usually have a bunch of Windows and it saves all those and restores them.
So I just figured like, oh, I guess for some reason this is taking a very long time.
I will say it hasn't been a problem for me because...
text mate is always running like i will hide it you know the command h i'll hide it if i'm not actively using it but it's always running so the only time i ever actually launch it is in the relatively infrequent case where i reboot my computer then i will then when it comes back up i'll have to launch it at some point and i do notice god it's taking forever to launch but then then it's launched and the problem is gone so i don't really i don't really have a problem that i need to move away from it very suddenly based on that but it is nice to know at least one possible reason why it's doing this
Indeed.
John, what is the correct answer?
So Casey, what are you using?
I still just use TextMate.
Well, the thing is, I only use TextMate for ephemeral quick things because I'm using Visual Studio Code for web development to the small degree I do any.
And I'm using Xcode for everything else.
So it's very unusual I'm in anything else to begin with.
Usually I just need like a place to drop something briefly.
But I use TextMate.
I just wait an eternity for it to open, which is not the rightest answer.
And I could use Visual Studio Code, but I perceive Visual Studio Code more like an IDE and less like a quick and dirty text editor.
And what I think I would like is some new or replacement quick and dirty text editor.
Yeah, like, and so I'm also, I'm all TextMate still.
Although, I mean, you know, I write most of my code in Xcode.
Like, I'm not, most of my code writing is not web development.
I very rarely need to do anything to my web code.
And thank God for that, because I hate it.
But...
But that's not TextMate's fault.
I just hate web programming these days and server work and stuff.
So I try to spend as much time as possible in Xcode.
Things that are more like note-based, I will usually just keep in Apple Notes.
So that takes that load off of my text editor.
And then sometimes things that I'm kind of working on an idea, oh, what if I do this, this, or this?
A lot of times that's happening in Solver because if there's numbers involved.
So a lot of other apps have kind of taken chunks out of my text editor role.
That being said, my general purpose text editor is still TextMate because, again, once it's launched, the performance is fine.
And I guess I can tolerate that.
A long time ago, I did a brief experiment.
I think this might have even been during the build and analyze days.
I did an experiment where I tried out whatever the two new-ish text editors at the time were that everybody was using.
I spent a little while with each one, a few days with each one or whatever, getting to know them.
And I came out of it thinking, yeah, these are fine.
If I had to switch away from TextMate, this would be fine.
And then I went back to TextMate, and I liked it better, and it fit me better.
It's not perfect.
It has a lot of problems.
It is very, very old and seems pretty unmaintained at this point.
But I still like it.
And what I came to after that experiment was once TextMate stops working for me for whatever reason, there's plenty of great options out there that I will gladly look at and try out and I'll switch to one of them.
But that time hasn't come yet.
So as long as you're willing to tolerate the long lunchtime of TextMate, if that's if that's still your favorite one, then there's not a lot of reason to move away from it right this second.
But, you know, if you if you like something more modern, you know, better than great, then switch by all means.
You know, we have lots of good options these days.
John?
So, I mean, the reason I put this question in Ask ATP is it's one of those ones we answer every few years just to check in.
And I think checking in, we're finding out that none of us have changed, myself included.
I started using BBEdit during its first public release.
I'm still using it.
I've written basically everything in my entire life in this app.
All my Mac OS X articles, all my development and work that I've done in my entire career as a web developer.
The exceptions are I use Xcode's editor for doing my Mac apps, mostly because Xcode's editor, it's integrated with the IDE.
So the debugger is integrated with it.
It knows about all the symbols and all the Swift UI things.
It's got autocomplete.
It looks up the help, you know, like...
That's why I use the Xcode editor.
I do still occasionally copy and paste either the entire contents of files or sections of text into BBEdit when my fingers become frustrated by something that I would like to do that my fingers know how to do in BBEdit.
Uh, but I don't know how to do an Xcode or it's awkward or weird or whatever.
I'm like, I don't want to bother clicking around that stupid find and replace interface for something complicated when I know I can get the sun in two seconds and BB edit.
And so I will occasionally pull text out, put it into BB edit, do a thing to it, bring it back.
Um, I use BB edit for tons of stuff.
Like I, I,
I realized this when I installed BBEdit on my wife's account or on my son's laptop or whatever, and I launched it on their account, and I realized, kind of like an Emacs user, and I'll get to that in a second, I realized I can't use BBEdit in its default mode anymore because I've spent literal decades
customizing it and i don't even know what like i'm like wait that's not a default keystroke like i can't tell anyone i'll do this in bb edit because for all i know i'm telling them to do a key combination that is not the default so i don't even know how to use default bb edit i'm like it looks weird it behaves weird my fingers do things and weird dialogues pop up i'm like what the hell i rebound that when did i rebind that in 1996 like it just anyway um
Uh, but I do have lots of customizations in BB edit and my fingers just know them.
The other tech, the only other text editor I've ever really used in my life is Emacs, which I started using on Unix systems in the nineties.
Uh, and it used to be the Mac OS 10 ship with Emacs.
I think they stopped shipping it and I install it, uh, because I don't want to use VI.
I'll use VI if I have to, but I don't like it.
So why would I ever use Emacs?
Uh,
I'm just used to using it to edit my .files, I guess, like from ages ago.
I could open my .files in bbedit.
I've got the bbedit command line.
In fact, it's alias to bb, right?
So I just say bb space whatever.
But I also have weird aliases that I made in 1993, like emal to edit my .alias file.
I know it's weird, but it's four characters long and my fingers type it before I can even think about it.
So emacs is really the only other editor that I actually use.
But bbedit,
write everything in there any important email i'm going to write it right in bb edit like uh writing uh just you know scratch pad writing metadata for my apps in the mac app store writing html writing all my weird pearl scripts just everything is in bb edit with the exception of mac development and a couple of weird command line things and bb edit is still maintained and launches fast and uh gets new features new versions all the time highly recommend it
yeah i think if first of all um i think vi is way better than emacs fight me and and it's it's actually sad the the author of vi just passed away vim the author of vim passed away not the author of vi that's okay that's true but what everyone calls vi is really vim um so that's that's what everyone's thinking of when they say vi does the mac even have vim installed i don't even know i believe it comes with it yeah i've never i've never had to install it i mean i always just type i always just type vi and get in and out as fast as i can so i don't really want to hang around in there
Anyway, I think if I were to be forced to move today, I think I would look at two alternatives right away.
Number one, I would absolutely look at BBEdit because it is by far... First of all, I think it's the only other really Mac-native great modern text editor that exists besides TextMate, which again is aging.
Anyway, it is the most Mac text editor I think out there.
And
then i would also check out visual studio code because everyone says like it's amazing for working with you know stuff like because the most common thing i'm doing in my non xcode non apple notes text editor it's usually php that's usually what i'm writing uh or at least a shell script but you know usually php and so something that could actually have some kind of like code you know reading integration autocomplete that kind of stuff i should probably be looking at that
in reality um but i've never used i've never used um vs code at all and i've only used bb edit very briefly so um i don't i can't really say for sure but that would be where i would look vs code is very full feature but it definitely does not feel like a mac app
yeah i'm looking at screenshots it looks horrendous like for what i'm looking for it it does not it's not it's not bad but it's different yeah that's the thing it's different it is electron but it's the only electron app i can think of that isn't a pile of garbage um and i i would never know it's electron except for the fact i mean i don't know if i'd want to throw like a you know a 500 megabyte log file on it like i routinely do to bb edit uh but
yeah i would expect it to crumble like bb edit you can put any you can throw anything at bb edit and it will it will read i know that so that's why i would go for that yeah and bb edit does it does have things where i can kind of make it cry when i try to soft wrap a log file that's you know seven million lines long like literally seven million it'll do it but it'll think for a second maybe your mac pro is too slow
Kind of like Marco was saying, I leave BBEdit running all the time.
It is just always running.
And knowing me, I end up having a lot of windows open in it because I just leave them open.
Another great thing that BBEdit does is if you quit BBEdit, it doesn't nag you about anything.
it doesn't say, oh, but wait, you've got unsaved changes and this is an untitled document and you've never saved it.
It just says, you want to quit?
Fine, I'll quit.
Yeah, peace out.
When you launch, everything is back exactly where it was, including all your untitled windows, all your edits.
It's just... So, like, why would I... I never quit it, but even when I reboot and I relaunch it, everything is back, including all my untitled windows and all my unsaved changes.
So, it's just constantly running.
If I need to dash off some text, it's there.
And this is a thing you can't transfer to other people.
It's kind of like weird Emacs people.
It's like...
Your experience with BB Edit is not going to be like mine because mine is just I have literal decades of finger muscle memory for these weird things that I do.
Like I do data processing in BB Edit.
I'll take a big file full of things, rattle off a bunch of regular expressions with my weird keystrokes, which honestly I couldn't even tell you what they are, but my fingers know what they are, which is like copy matching line sub-expressions into new document, sort lines in new document, unique lines, copy matching lines into new document.
It's kind of like using, remember, you don't remember this, but
Channel operations in Photoshop.
I know I've mentioned it several times in the show.
Before Photoshop had layers and Photoshop before version three, they didn't have layers.
So if you wanted to do anything, you would do an operation and the result of that operation would be a modified, basically a new window.
You can tell I loved it.
a new window containing a modified version of the thing.
So if you're like, I want to combine this image with this image using the multiply command, you could do that as a layer option now, right?
Instead, you would get a new window that has the multiplied version and you would just proliferate these windows.
Well, in BBEdit, I do data processing by selecting the contents of windows and running regular expressions about them.
And BBEdit has a feature that says, I'll do the thing that you asked and I'll either put the matching lines in the new window
matching sub expressions things that don't match the thing in a new window like and so you get a series of windows where you're sort of winnowing down and processing the data and then of course you can run scripts against them you can write a pearl script and run it with the menu command and i do i wrote pearl scripts to intelligently quote aware smart wrap things in the way that i want you just select a region hit a key combo that my fingers know but my mind doesn't that will do the thing that i want
That's not going to be your experience by using BBEdit.
That took me decades to build up, and that's why I can't use BBEdit in its default state anymore.
But it's worth it to me to not move from BBEdit because if I moved elsewhere, I would have to recreate all of that stuff.
It would be like recreating my .emax file elsewhere, although I don't have a giant .emax file.
It's a reasonable size.
My BPA setup is just too Byzantine.
And most text editors have most of the features, but not all of them.
And what you really need is an escape hatch, which is like, look, if the editor doesn't have this, can I just write something in Perl, in Python, in shell script, in Swift, in language of my choice and have it take text as input and replace the contents with this output?
Most text editors have a way to do that.
I have to re-implement all my things to work with the new text editor.
So yeah.
someday someday sorry rich but someday rich siegel is gonna die hopefully before me because he's older than me well i mean he's at least gonna retire at some point yeah or he could retire but i'm gonna i think death is the only thing that's gonna stop him from developing his application because he's very dedicated
he's very dedicated and and i thank him for it but someday uh the bb edit train will come to an end and like marco i'll have to pick a new text editor and at that day i'll probably be so old that i won't be able to recreate all my old setup and i'll just become i don't know what i'll become i'll just become like less capable on the computer it was like i remember when i could do this in bb edit but bb edit's gone now so all i could do is write a pearl script
So I'm looking up the links for the show notes and I look up, you know, the TextMate link, which is macromates.com.
And I went and I thought, you know, what does their blog have to say about any of this?
Is this really abandoned?
You know, because I feel like I haven't seen TextMate update in years.
The most recent blog post dated 22 of May 2020 begins as follows.
In episode 379 of ATP, both Marco Arman and John Syracuse described noticeable delays and stalls after upgrading to Mac OS 1015.
I've been struggling with this issue myself, and I found several system operations that can cause delays, which I will detail below, and then the author does.
So imagine my surprise as John is talking, and I look to see the most recent blog post on this website, and sure enough, it literally begins in episode 379 of ATP.
Yeah.
It's amazing.
I remember this now.
I had forgotten about this, but I did see this when the author wrote it.
I did see this back then, but yeah, I had forgotten today about this.
I have no recollection of this.
I don't either.
379 was May 21 of 2020.
And in the after show, we talked about life at home status updates because COVID.
I will say that, like, you know, like text, it really has not gotten a lot of love in many, many, many years, but it does still work.
Like, like whenever Rick Siegel hopefully retires, you know, BB edit is not going to instantly stop working.
Like in all likelihood, it will continue to work for years until some OS change breaks it, you know, on Apple side.
It'll work for two more major versions until some sandboxing thing breaks it.
I mean, and he's not he's not the sole developer, to be clear, but he is, you know, it's his baby.
And I do think that when he when he finally gives it up, I hope he finds it a new home.
But boy, talk about a legacy code base.
This is a code base that I mean, it's been substantially written many times over, but.
here be dragons no i i mean i would imagine like you know i i can't imagine anybody besides him you know taking on taking on that crown um and and that's but yeah and that's not really a reason not to use something like i feel like if you look at like i think the safest option would probably be vs code because that that seems to be i don't know i think
bb edit could out load bb it's been around for 30 years it's all the editors have come and gone it's competitive oh alpha is better that's that you can extend it using tickle and people are like what the hell is alpha what's tickle there have been so many competitor adam uh the you know the more recent i was thinking like what you might be using vs code adam uh text mate like those editors come they flare out people's interest they leave bb edit is still there it's it is the rock and eventually everything comes to an end but come on it's it i mean might as well be vi
I mean, although I think VI is a lot easier for other people to take on the mantle of, frankly, compared to something like BBEdit.
But still, I think you can look at this.
The way I look at it is I don't want to invest such a key part of my work habits.
I don't want to invest that into something that might not have a long life.
So you have to pick something that is likely to stick around for a long time.
And I think BB Edit is one of those topics.
I think that will stick around as long as Rick Siegel wants to be a programmer or is able to be a programmer.
I think it will stick around as long as possible.
And then for a few years, even after that.
But again, TextMate really has not been worked on much in recent years.
And it's still fine as well.
So I think these things have longer lives.
I don't know if it's fine.
I definitely got some Casey vibes with both of you saying yes.
yeah, it takes forever to launch, but once it gets running, it's okay.
Yeah, just you.
And the thing is, when you look at something that's made by a big company, that can go both ways.
If it's made by a big company and it's successful and it's core to their business interests in some way, then it's probably going to stick around for a while.
I don't think Microsoft is going to discontinue Excel and PowerPoint for quite a while.
I think those are pretty safe investments for your time.
Whereas VS Code, it seems like that's serving them pretty well.
I think that's probably the most likely to be long-lived out of all these options that I see in the market today.
But you're still at the whims of a company in whatever directions it might take.
If they have a leadership change or if they start having a bunch of bad quarters and they got to start making cuts or whatever, there's always risks of that in big companies too.
Yeah.
uh you know we'll see what happens with all this stuff but i i think i think either bb edit or vs code are both pretty safe options for a long time hopefully wow it looks like alpha made it to mac os 10 i didn't even realize that someone did alpha coco as a project to rewrite alpha for mac os 10 based on the coco framework i don't know how old this page is but uh yeah no one remembers alpha except for really old school bb edit users
The funny thing, too, is the ones that I tried when I was looking for a TextMate replacement, first of all, I can't remember either of their names.
One of them was Brown.
It's got to be Atom.
Atom had to be one of them.
A-T-O-M.
No, it wasn't out yet.
It was before that.
One of them, I think, began with an S, and it was really popular at the time, and all of its configuration... A sub-eat edit?
No.
That's way earlier.
And all of its configuration was in one giant text file that would open up in the editor, and it was a big pain in the butt.
Yeah, I think I know the editor talking about it.
I'm not sure you have the name right, but I know what
yeah it was cross-platform but it i think it was this was even pre-electron though um but yeah i tried that one and there was like a sublime sublime yeah that was yeah that's it yeah and there was like a there was a brown one that came out around the same time the zoom text editor i can't remember what it was this i mean this was probably around like 2010 and and i tried both of those and they were fine but now not like i never hear of anyone using those anymore so like the ones i tried like
10 or 15 years ago.
VS Code has kind of blotted out the sun for those type of editors because once you have Microsoft funding you, it's tough to compete with that as a small dev team.
And I never would have guessed at the time that these new ones I was trying out to replace TextMate, I never would have guessed TextMate would outlive them.
Or out-zombie them anyway.
Well, right.
Touche.
Wasn't...
the original VS Code?
I thought that was a fork of Atom, actually, if I'm not mistaken.
Yeah, I think VS Code is derived from that lineage in some way.
Either Atom or Sublime or something like that.
All those editors are kind of the same, but VS Code has definitely gone its own way and is now, you know,
incredibly full featured probably maybe a little bit too full featured yeah to a fault anyway yeah hopefully uh i'm i'm i'm gonna be it's driving me nuts what the name of the brown one was i got yeah well you'll figure it out i'm gonna be like to remember something more than the color
i'm gonna be like lying in bed tonight he's gonna be like oh espresso or whatever you know something like that like i can't maybe it was espresso is an editor it was a web editor you know it was i forget what it was derived no but it was native i think espresso is css edit become espresso i think maybe yeah that's why it's blocking my mind here but like css that it was amazing back in the day well i really i really got to figure out i got to like go back to my history uh you know i guess if it was built and analyzed i got to like find whatever find whatever episode it was so i can find the yeah it'll be in the show notes
yeah all right anyway i thought build and analyze fell off the internet didn't it uh i thought it did marco like a diligent person like me has a backup web archives all those pages right yeah i do have i do have a local uh yeah five by five yeah dan's taking a whole bunch of his stuff offline but yeah i have a backup of everything but that's right well and plus we can all agree uh as we close that emacs is indeed better than vi bye everybody
I do not agree to that.
Thank you very much.
V.I.
kicks butt.
Anyway, thank you so much to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Collide, and Green Chef.
And thank you to our members very much for supporting us directly.
You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
And we will talk to you next week.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
And if you're into Twitter, 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, USA Syracuse.
It's accidental, they didn't mean to.
I got to find this.
You're going to have to let it go.
Search for Sublime because wherever you find Sublime, you'll find the other one.
I doubt that word is common in show notes other than when you're talking about the editor.
So while Marco's looking for that, so we were traveling last week, as I had mentioned a couple of times on the show, and we were traveling just a couple of weeks before that, actually, when John and I were concurrently on separate beach vacations, separate but at the same time.
And when we were at our beach house, something happened that I was absolutely disgusted by and then forgot about it.
And then it happened again when we were at a Airbnb in Northeastern Pennsylvania.
And what had happened was I had, because I'm me, brought a travel router, as we talked about last episode, I believe, or maybe the episode before.
I had brought a travel Apple TV because I'm that kind of jerk.
I mean, a dork.
And I had plugged the travel router into the router that was at the place, both at the beach and at the Airbnb.
And I plugged the travel Apple TV into the TV, et cetera, et cetera.
And so on both of these TVs, which...
I forget what brand the TVs were.
I want to say it was like TCL or something, speaking of Tickle.
But they were both, you know, Roku-powered TVs.
You know, so they use all the Roku software to do it, to do all their stuff.
I have no control over these TVs.
You know, I didn't set them up.
You know, I believe that they were both designed to be on the Internet because the idea is if you're a guest in these Airbnbs or whatever, then you could watch, you know, Prime Video or what have you on the TV.
They're quote-unquote smart TVs, et cetera, et cetera.
Chocolat.
I am so happy for you, Marco.
I am so happy for you.
Breaking news.
That's it.
I did a blog post about it.
I would never come up with that.
Sorry.
It does make sense that it's brown.
Yes.
And the website's totally gone.
I guess it's dead.
Probably long dead.
Sorry.
That's right.
TextMate is over.
August 10th, 2012, Marco Armand declares.
Yeah, no, I remember it now, now that I see the spelling.
Yeah, that's a bummer.
All right, so on Martin TV.
No, no, it's fine.
I'm genuinely glad that you figured it out.
So I am watching TV using the Apple TV on these TCL or whatever Roku-powered TVs.
And as I'm watching, and I don't remember if I was watching something I'd seen before or something new, but one way or the other...
a little banner comes up in the bottom like 10th or maybe 5th of the screen.
And I wish I had taken a picture of it or a screenshot or what have you.
I didn't think of it at the time.
But it said something like, watch this episode from alternate providers.
What?
What?
As you're watching it already?
I am watching something on an Apple TV that I provided, but these TVs are creeping on the video I'm watching, scanning the video I'm watching, doing some sort of like fucking Shazam for video or something like that, and figuring out what I'm watching, and then are advertising to me, oh, you can watch this other places.
How gross is that?
That is so gross.
Not only is that so gross, but that's not even a very good sales proposition.
You're already watching it.
Why would you need to watch it somewhere else when you're already watching it?
Exactly.
It's so true.
Anyway, I want you to go elsewhere.
So I know you love to talk about TV.
This is a big thing in the television industry has been for many, many years.
And it is a trend that is only increasing.
And that trend is television companies realizing that they can't make money selling televisions.
They need to make money some other way.
And so some of these sort of pioneer brands that you've mentioned, like Vizio, TCL, Roku.
A lot of these brands used to make televisions, but now don't anymore.
Like Vizio doesn't make television hardware.
They used to.
Oh, is that true?
I didn't know that.
Yeah.
Now that someone else makes the hardware for them and they resell it.
But what is Vizio actually selling?
They're selling a software platform.
And what does a software platform do?
It watches what you're watching and sells that information to other people.
And that business turns out to be way more lucrative than selling television sets.
And the number of companies that are still willing to manufacture television sets has been shrinking and sort of a race to the bottom where the less premium, let's say, companies that make cheaper televisions that you would see at lower priced retailers –
They're still out there cranking them out, but there's a very dwindling number of companies that do that with names that you might not even recognize if you're not into the television space.
And they're resold often under other brand names, but those companies that are reselling them are just adding the, I'm going to say the spyware to the television sets.
And you'd be like, oh, that's bad.
I want to stay out of this market.
I'm going to buy a good TV.
Well, the latest developments are that even the quote unquote good television makers are like, oh,
i don't know if there's money in making better screens anymore lg have you heard of lg they make fancy oled televisions they're very popular they they're very highly regarded lg even is like i don't know about this whole trying to make the picture quality better thing it seems like a loser business can we stop making panels and instead do what vizio does and just spy on everybody and and sell software and sell the information that does that
And, like, Sony and these other high-end companies that want to sell $1,000 televisions, all of them are looking at Vizio and saying, like, LG Display, I think, has lost money for the past year.
Like, has not just not made enough profit, but have literally been losing money.
And Vizio, their profits are going up because they don't make those stinky televisions anymore.
They just make the spyware.
And that's a great business.
You also see the company that will give you a free television set as long as you agree to have underneath the television a long skinny display that shows ads like an ad banner.
What?
You get the TV for free but you have to basically see an ad banner and it's underneath it in a separate screen and if you cover that screen the television turns off or whatever.
This is where televisions are going, where it's like the lucrative business is spying on what everybody's watching and selling it, and only losers make screens.
And it's like, but somebody's got to make the screens.
And there's like a bunch of bargain-based manufacturers like, yeah, yeah, we turn out the cheapest television sets we can using whatever the most economically feasible technology is, which would be like...
A cheap LCD with terrible viewing angles and black levels.
Yeah, we'll make a million of those.
We'll make them in really big sizes.
We'll sell them to you at Super Bowl Sunday for $250 and we'll spy on everything you watch for the rest of your entire life.
And Sony's over here trying to make $4,000 television sets with Samsung displays in them and they're not making any money.
And Vizio is like, ha ha, you losers.
We just spy on everybody.
it's really got me worried because like having that be a market fine but having that market become the only market the only way you can buy kind of like how you can't buy a dumb tv now you can only buy smart ones soon i fear it will be you can only buy a television with a crappy screen that spies on you and that's literally your only choice so i'm like sony hold strong and we may have lost lg lg may be deciding yeah we're not going to try to make better screens anymore that business sucks and that will mean that
No more, you know, no more advancement in OLED technology from LG and it'll leave basically only Samsung in the entire world trying to make screens that have better picture year over year and selling those screens to Sony and itself.
It's depressing.
So, yeah, you have seen a glimpse of the future with that Roku.
I don't want it.
You know, that's not a new thing.
These things have always been spying on everything that you watch.
They're just now being more blatant about it.
Yeah, exactly.
And actually I have a corollary, uh, like ethical question for you.
So this Airbnb that I was staying in, uh, for a couple of nights last week, it was a little teeny tiny cottage off of Lake Juan Paul Pack.
It's, it, it was probably 600, 900 square feet or something like that.
It was, you know, two beds, one bath, a little teeny tiny kitchen and a little teeny tiny living area.
Well, in a closet was there like cable modem or what have you and an Eero, which I was like, oh, that's cool.
I'm happy to see that.
And for a fleeting moment, I thought rather than plug my travel router into the Eero, which is what I ended up doing,
And so I'm double natting, but that doesn't matter because nothing is inbound.
It's no big deal.
But, you know, it's not as direct as I would want it to be.
What I did was, or I considered unplugging the Eero and replacing it temporarily with my travel router.
Mm-hmm.
And the reason I didn't was because I noticed that they had a camera mounted on the external portion of the house to see the front door.
And I also noticed that their like mini split system, you know, the thing that John should be doing to his house, their mini split system had what appeared to be a Wi-Fi icon on it.
So it appeared that there is some sort of remote control or at least monitoring for the mini split.
And I had a feeling that if I unplug their router, you know, obviously the Wi-Fi network information is going to change.
And all of these things will die, and the Airbnb actual owners will probably poop themselves.
And so I didn't do it.
Did I make the ethically correct choice, or is it YOLO?
Who cares?
Unplug it if you want to.
You made the practically correct choice, because you know sometimes when you unplug the router that is actually connected to the ISP, the ISP is like, oh, I don't know what the hell this new router is.
Call our customer support line.
I know it's not like that in most places, but I would never risk that.
Because then you're without internet access and you have to admit to the people who you were renting the house from that you screwed it up.
That's right off breaking their cameras.
I don't want to A, be without internet and B, have to explain that I was messing around stuff.
That is totally fair.
But leaving that aside, let's assume, which I wouldn't be, but let's assume I could guarantee that the internet would come back.
is it still ethically questionable as long as you put it back as long as you can successfully put it back the way it was if you screw up your own internet when you're there that's your own problem but the problem arises because a you'll be without internet and b you will refuse to be without internet so then you will have to go crawling to the owner and say i screwed up your internet yeah fair that's why people lock these things in the shed outdoors yeah yeah exactly marco what's your ruling on this
I would say in any kind of rental situation, you're better off not messing with it.
That's not for you to mess with.
Do you feel like it was inappropriate for me to hang my travel router off of the Eero?
Or is that acceptable in your mind?
That, I think, is fine.
But I think as soon as you start attaching things to their network or modifying their network in such a way that you're running the risk of causing problems...
At that point, you become a thousand percent liable for anything that happens as a result.
And I think I wouldn't probably mess with it myself just because.
You would mess with it if it didn't work, though.
That's the thing.
It's like, okay, this Wi-Fi is so bad it might as well not even exist.
And then suddenly you're very willing to mess with it.
You're like, it's already broken.
I can't possibly make it work.
It already doesn't do the thing it's supposed to do.
So that's when you get in there and start trying to find where the router is and you find it locked in a shed and then you cry.
It would have to be so bad that I also couldn't use the built-in just, you know, LTE 5G connections on my phone.
So, like, I would rather just use my phone and tether to it with a laptop than deal with someone's bad Wi-Fi if my phone works well at all.
Now, if you're somewhere where you don't have reception, you know.
Of course.
Of course, we would all just love to use the phone, but then, of course, your vacation house is in a place with no signals, so that's not an option either.
Yeah, that becomes a problem then.
Look, you've got to do what you've got to do.
Internet connectivity is a basic need.
It's like, well, if the toilet's broken, you're not going to just not flush the toilet all weekend.
You'll make it work.
Similarly, yeah, if there is no internet connectivity, you're going to do what you've got to do as a nerd to make it work for you and your family.
Including finding neighbors with unprotected Wi-Fi, which I remember way back in the day when we were...
We were going to my Long Island vacations.
The houses didn't even have Wi-Fi, but some of the neighbors did and some of them didn't have passwords.
So we would sit like in the room closest to them or go in the backyard against the fence to get signal.
Yeah, got to do what you got to do.