Three-Burner Stove
Casey:
I'm so frustrated with this MixPre-3.
Casey:
I tried plugging it into different USB-C ports, because right now, and the way it's always been, is I go via the cal digit and then the cal digit to the computer.
Casey:
Then I tried going via the monitor.
Casey:
I tried going via the computer directly.
Casey:
And the behavior is that when I hit record on the MixPre-3, which is the interface that goes from XLR to USB, when I hit record on that, and this started a couple of months ago,
Casey:
Audio Hijack will be like, I'm sorry, what microphone?
Casey:
What MixPre-3?
Casey:
That doesn't exist anymore.
Casey:
And then if I hit stop on the MixPre-3, then everything's good again.
Casey:
And I just don't understand what's going on.
Casey:
And it very well could be user error.
Casey:
I'm not saying it's not user error, but for the life of me, I don't know what's happening.
Casey:
I even tried going old USB, so it was a USB-A to C, and I tried one of those cables just to see what if the USB-C port is funky some way, somehow, nothing.
Casey:
So I don't know what's going on.
Casey:
It's driving me bad.
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
You have such a setup there.
Marco:
So one of my formative computing experiences, one of my best friends growing up in high school, we had this group of friends and we would all build each other tower PCs and work on our PCs together and stuff like that.
Marco:
And one of my friends had a computer that just never really worked right.
Marco:
Like, there was always some weird, flaky, or not working thing.
Casey:
Now, hold on.
Casey:
Don't you put that bad energy on me, Ricky Bobby.
Casey:
This computer has been fine.
Casey:
I've had it for seven, eight months.
Casey:
I've had it since October.
Casey:
Probably.
Marco:
Part of the reason why my friend Ben's computer was always having problems, I think, and we certainly thought this at the time, was that he insisted on having a thousand different peripherals and carts in it.
Marco:
He had five hard drives.
Marco:
He had a thousand cards.
Marco:
So it was just this massive conglomeration of just tons of stuff.
Marco:
And theoretically, yes, the motherboard supported that many drives, but
Marco:
Yes, it had that many card slots, but we just know in practice with computers that the more stuff you add to a PC, the more likely you are that some weird little thing might go wrong sometimes.
Marco:
It just happens with complexity of a setup.
Marco:
Now, what you just said, Casey, was that you had something like five different ways you could have plugged this thing in.
Marco:
and including like a hub a monitor hub and by the way those monitors are not great monitors like there's all there's all sorts of like complexity in your setup the studio display come on it's not that well but it's connected to the same computer as two lg ultra fines uh plus a thunderbolt hub like so like there's all there's all sorts of stuff that like could introduce weirdnesses or unreliabilities because you have what sounds like a fairly complicated setup i
Casey:
I mean, I don't know, man.
Casey:
First of all, this worked for literally years.
Casey:
I mean, this is the same setup I've had since I left the iMac Pro.
Marco:
But literally, every time we start the call for the podcast, you're like, oh, wrong mic.
Marco:
Oh, something went wrong.
Marco:
It's not just my USB interface.
Marco:
There's always something wrong.
Casey:
That's true, but that's only been for the last couple of months.
Casey:
Up until then, it was rock solid.
John:
I can't believe you don't have your microphone directly connected to your computer.
John:
I can't believe you're going through anything.
John:
Monitor, hub, anything.
Casey:
Well, it's never been a problem before.
Casey:
And I tried again tonight.
Casey:
Still didn't matter.
Casey:
But it's been a problem for two months.
Casey:
Yeah, well.
Casey:
Anyway, that's not the actual pre-show.
Casey:
That's the bootleg special pre-show.
Marco:
That's the pre-show.
Marco:
That's the pre-show.
Marco:
That's it.
Casey:
All right, fine.
Casey:
Matt Rigby writes with regard to Marco's Rivian repair, here's an R1S dent and repair bill that's almost identical to Marco's on the Becky and Chris YouTube channel.
Casey:
And I did watch a couple of minutes of this.
Casey:
This appeared to be a, like, hey, here's what we think several months later about their Rivian.
Casey:
And they noted that apparently when you are in off-road mode, and I think, Marco, you might have said this as well.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Anyway, when you're in an off-road mode, the proximity sensors are turned off, which I both get and think is absolutely bonkers.
Casey:
I can make a strong argument either way.
Casey:
And they bumped into a tree not dissimilar from the way Marco did, and the repair bill was something like $40,000.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
No rap required.
John:
None of this slamming PDR.
John:
PDR can make it as perfect as can be.
John:
That's what they show in these videos.
John:
They all love showing the close-ups with the bright light shining on it so you can see that it's not just sort of okay.
John:
It's perfect.
Casey:
Good as new.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So it turns out, Marco, you didn't have to spend $40,000 of your insurance's money.
Casey:
You could have spent a lot less.
Marco:
in all fairness it was 20 but also yeah oh sorry my mistake it was what insurance told me to do that's it like i went to insurance i said hey here's my problem they said okay go to a body shop this is what they'll this is what they'll do like you know i figure at that point it's it's in their hands how they choose to do it yeah uh then marco was kind enough to share his uh final bill from the body shop privately with john and i we will not be sharing this publicly
Casey:
unless Marco's feeling particularly forthcoming, which I doubt.
Casey:
John, I presume, was the one who decided to go through with a fine-tooth comb and come up with a few figures.
Casey:
So John, can you take us through this, please?
John:
Sure.
John:
I asked last time, I wanted to know what the parts and labor breakdown was, and I got that breakdown.
John:
So parts was 39% of the total cost.
John:
And the top four most expensive parts on there were the RT Uniside Assembly Quarter Panel for $2,751.
John:
which is pretty good like that panel which we'll get to in a little bit uh that's a low price like i've seen tiny pieces of sheet metal on expensive cars cost four times that much so hey not so bad uh the bumper cover coming in at number two at 940 i don't know what that is but it sounds like too much for a bumper cover um rt tail lamp assembly 630 and finally rt quarter glass
John:
I didn't even know they would replace the choreograph.
John:
So maybe it doesn't, I guess it's part of the body panel.
John:
It doesn't come out and go back in like a windshield.
John:
They just have to break it or just, it gets chucked.
John:
But anyway, that was 537.
John:
So those are the top four things.
John:
And so parts was about 39%.
John:
So is RT not right?
John:
Isn't that right?
John:
Tail lamp assembly, right?
John:
Yeah, probably right.
John:
probably right i'm trying to i'm trying to expand the things i was confused by the fact that it's like uh you know rivian truck rt rt1 oh it could be i don't know you're you're right it's probably right and left i'm being silly um oh it is all caps which is weird anyway um yes those are all right right unicide uh assembly unicide what a word uh 53 labor so the majority of the cost was labor and then miscellaneous and taxes was eight percent
John:
So that's the breakdown.
John:
Surprisingly inexpensive parts, although there were a lot of them, a lot of labor, including I think part of that 53% labor was like $1,300 to calibrate everything after they reassembled it.
John:
It's a lot of money.
Casey:
It's a lot of money.
Casey:
And then, John, you provided just to really rub Marco's face in the pee stain that he left on the carpet to use the dogism.
Casey:
You included three different videos where they talk about the magic of PDR.
John:
You should never do that to a dog, first of all.
John:
And second of all, if you're wondering what Painless Denver Fair is like, I've provided three videos.
John:
Two of them are Rivian videos.
John:
One is a different vehicle, but the person explains the process with some terrible backing music behind it.
John:
Watching it be done, it does look like...
John:
It looks like it's impossible.
John:
It looks like a trick, but I assure you, you can just Google or search YouTube.
John:
There are so many of these videos.
John:
All of these people aren't scam artists.
John:
They're obviously good at what they do, and they're making YouTube videos of it.
John:
I'm sure it's difficult to find someone who's as good as these people on the channel, but they somehow managed to painstakingly restore these pieces of sheet metal to looking like new by hitting it with things and pulling it with things.
John:
It's fascinating.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then why don't we talk about that side panel?
Casey:
Because here's the thing.
Casey:
I genuinely am enthusiastic that there are entries into the automotive market 120, 150 years, whatever it's been since the car has really been a mass produced thing.
Casey:
It doesn't matter how many years, a long time.
Casey:
And Tesla started and showed us that, yes, some plucky upstart could make a car company and then have a Nazi turn out to be at the helm.
Casey:
But that's neither here nor there.
Casey:
But they weren't the greatest at putting cars together, certainly at first.
Casey:
Maybe they're a little better now.
Casey:
But they also made a lot of really weird choices.
Casey:
And it looks like Rivian is following right in their footsteps because what the hell?
John:
is this this is the r1s side panel we'll provide a link to the rivian forums website where someone posted this picture you can't tell from the picture whether this is actually a series of parts that are put together in the factory into one large part or whether it really is one large part presumably it's welded together from smaller pieces but the picture shows a whole bunch of these
John:
pieces of metal hanging in a factory.
John:
So this is clearly like a single thing that gets attached to the car.
John:
And presumably when Marco got his repair, this is what they had to remove from his car.
John:
And then they ordered one of these from the factory and put a new one on the car.
John:
And when you look at this and think about where his dent was and think about, this is the size of the piece that they have to replace.
John:
Think of all the things that attach to that piece, including the rear quarter window, the roof, both of the doors, all the rear bumper, like the whole nine yards.
John:
Uh, it,
John:
makes sense why it would cost so much.
John:
Now, again, I think it's a bargain to pay $2,700 for this piece of sheet metal because it's huge.
John:
So you're really getting your money's worth there, but yeah.
Marco:
Really makes the pro stand seem like a poor value.
John:
Exactly.
John:
There's at least three or four XDR stands inside in sheet metal in this thing.
John:
So yeah, check out the picture if you really want to see a visualization of what they had to remove and then replace and repaint on Marco's car.
Marco:
Yeah, it's basically disassembling the entire right half of the car.
Marco:
When you see the size of this piece and how much of the car it represents, it makes a lot more sense.
Marco:
Now, I think you can make a good argument, like, maybe this is a poor design.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
Talk about design for repairability.
Marco:
This is definitely not design for repairability at all.
Marco:
This is like...
Marco:
The total opposite.
Marco:
This is like, what is the least repairable design we can possibly make?
Marco:
Let's do that.
Marco:
And let's make it include one of the most commonly dented parts of a car.
Marco:
Great.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, I mean, I really wonder what the trade-off is there.
John:
Maybe it's faster to assemble.
John:
Maybe it's more sturdy because there are fewer joints.
John:
I have to think this is made from multiple pieces that are welded together in the factory.
John:
But still, I think this is the part that you buy.
John:
I don't think you can buy any other part.
John:
Like, if you just wanted, like, the back part, you can see...
John:
Certain parts of it are clearly just one piece of metal.
John:
Maybe like the roof and the other things are welded to it.
John:
But if this is the part they sell you, this is what you have to buy.
John:
It looks like the whole thing might just be like stamped out in this shape.
Casey:
Yeah, that's what I thought.
John:
It looks like one solid panel.
John:
That would be a huge stamping.
John:
I think it has to be multiple pieces.
John:
But either way, I've seen this.
John:
There's other Rivian videos you can see where someone will buy one of these pieces.
John:
In this case, it was like a pickup truck.
John:
and they'll cut a piece off of it.
John:
They'll buy the whole piece.
John:
You've got to buy the whole thing.
John:
Then they'll cut a piece off, and they'll cut the same-shaped piece off of their dented car and sort of fudge them back together.
John:
That gets back to what I was saying before about insurance companies want you to make it like new, right?
John:
In the end, it should look just like a new one.
John:
So you can't, you know, cut and paste pieces of pieces.
John:
And also, the insurance company doesn't want it to be reliant on the artistry of a craftsperson doing PDR because that is a highly skilled...
John:
thing and it's it's not i mean not that saying that that doing body work isn't highly skilled as well but it is it seems even more uh dependent on the expertise of the person than regular body work which is which i don't know i just maybe i'm wrong about this someone who does body work let me know is pdr actually harder or easier than regular body work or it's actually regular body work harder because you have to do all the filler and everything but either either way
John:
I kind of understand both sides of this, even, even this single piece, like we'll get to in a second.
John:
I think a lot of car manufacturers do this because you don't want to have your robots welding 800 different things on the assembly line.
John:
You want to just take the big one piece, put it on and weld it in five places and be done with it.
John:
Fewer squeaks and rattles, better structural integrity, better stiffness, fewer parts.
John:
Like it all makes sense until you get a tiny ding and then it makes far less sense.
Yeah.
Casey:
And then apparently it's not just Rivian.
Casey:
Blaine wrote in with regard to similar story.
Casey:
So Blaine writes, I was recently hit by a large lifted truck while in my 2019 Jaguar... Sorry, I was just in Britain.
Casey:
Jaguar F-Type.
Casey:
His bumper hit right where my door and rear quarter panel came together, denting them and then scraping along the side above my wheel well.
Casey:
Because the panels are aluminum and glued together for rigidity, cutting out the dented bit and patch wasn't an option, so both had to be fully replaced for a total cost of...
Casey:
$32,588.84.
Casey:
Holy crap.
John:
I have to think a lot of that is the increased cost of the panels.
John:
When I mentioned more expensive cars where the panels cost a lot more than the $2,700 that the whole side of Marco's car cost, Jaguar would be one of those examples of a brand where your body panels are going to cost more.
John:
And to be fair, this had, if you look at the size of this dent, it does span two big body panels.
John:
It's basically the whole side of the car.
John:
But yeah, it's not just Rivian.
John:
It's basically any modern car with like aluminum utibody instruction.
John:
I think the trend has been towards fewer and fewer pieces, towards fewer larger pieces, presumably because that's less expensive for manufacturing and increases stiffness and everything.
Marco:
Yep, at the expense of your insurance rates.
Marco:
Thanks to people like me.
Marco:
Sorry.
Casey:
Yep, thanks, Marco.
Casey:
uh all right so we got a fair bit of feedback with regard to i think it was an ask atp question about hey where should ev chargers the the ports on board the car where should they be and uh the answer according to a bunch of europeans in particular is the curbside so this is best exemplified by craig ritchie who writes when you were discussing optimum ev charge socket position you didn't discuss the possibility of charging when parked at the side of the road in a parallel parking position
Casey:
This may not be as much of a factor in the U.S.
Casey:
as it is in the U.K., but as we all move inevitably towards EVs, it is likely many will charge their cars outside their homes on the main road.
Casey:
And so there you go.
Marco:
Yeah, this is really interesting, because we had said the passenger side is the worst side, because it is true that when you are charging in your own garage or at a fast charger on a long highway trip—
Marco:
That is the less convenient side.
Marco:
But this was a really good point that, like, if you happen to have curbside charging and you park on the street, which is, I think, very unusual in most of the US, but is much more common in places that are more sensible, then it actually does make sense to have charging on the passenger side of the car because that is the side next to the curb.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Interesting option.
Marco:
I think it's still I think for US based vehicles for North American vehicles, I would say still driver side because there is just not anywhere near enough curbside available charging here in the US.
Marco:
It just doesn't exist here.
John:
Yeah.
John:
i've never seen it and i like this the idea of having curbside charging charging uh things like this we have a picture here that shows like a cord seemingly coming from a tree to charge an ev it's as fantastical in our country as protected bike lanes and like reliable uh train travel and stuff like we just do not have things that the rest of the world has and curbside charging
John:
It's definitely one of them.
John:
I'm sure it exists in the U.S., but so many people wrote in this must be so much more common elsewhere than it is here.
John:
I've literally never seen it in my life.
Marco:
Neither have I. I've driven an EV for a long time now and a lot of places on the eastern seaboard never seen this available anywhere.
John:
It makes sense in cities where people don't have parking, right?
John:
Like you don't have a garage or driveway.
John:
Like it makes total sense.
John:
We just like so many things that make total sense.
John:
We don't have it.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean it's one of the things that is hardest for EV adoption in a lot of places for a lot of people is what if you live in an apartment and you don't have a garage or you have to – you park on the street as your main parking spot.
Marco:
How do you charge your EV?
Marco:
It's a great question.
Marco:
It's a huge barrier to adoption for lots of people.
Marco:
It's a very important thing that we need to solve.
Marco:
but we have not even begun to solve it in the US.
Marco:
And it seems like nobody cares to.
Marco:
And it's the kind of thing that like culturally speaking in the US, I can't see us getting our act together to do this.
Marco:
I see it being a very much like, you know, this is my land, get off, you know, get off my land, you're not going to use my power kind of thing.
Marco:
Like there's all sorts of problems with that I think in practice with US culture that I think would make it very difficult for us to adopt it anytime soon.
John:
Like, you know, like protected bike lanes and streets made for people and not cars and all that good stuff.
John:
It only takes one, you know, high profile city to actually do this and to see the massive return on investment that they know they'll get from it based on every place else in the world that has ever done this and studied it.
John:
to be a story to say hey i visited city x the united states and you know what it was really pleasant and they had curbside charging and you could walk on the streets and not get run over and you know there was a lot fewer cars driving back and forth and mass transit like it just takes one or two examples to get the ball rolling hopefully we can get there eventually but we are very very far behind the rest of the world so
John:
fingers crossed there I don't think it's an impossibility like municipal municipal broadband is another great idea that's happened in a few places still hasn't quite caught on but some kind of city wide charging network probably run by some private company that takes all the profits and doesn't maintain the machines anyway we'll see what we can do on this topic also the one other person pointed out slash surmised that I was mentioning like Honda's have the gas filler on the driver's side the gas hole John it's called the gas hole yeah
John:
The notion that that filler is actually on the passenger side because Honda is a Japanese company and they do right hand drive and they just don't bother changing where the gas goes in when they sell it in America.
John:
So they move the steering wheel, but they don't move the gas filler.
John:
So I don't know if there's any truth to that, but it is interesting to think about.
John:
I'm pretty sure if you buy a Honda in Japan, the gas filler is still on the same size that it is on my car, but the steering wheel is not.
Casey:
Yeah, and so David Barber wrote in, I brought a Subaru Ascent a few years back, and I recall wondering why they would put the gas port on the passenger side.
Casey:
After a bit of digging around, it seems this is a safety feature.
Casey:
Say you run out of gas on a busy highway or road.
Casey:
If you pull off the road and return with a gas canister, you'll find yourself on the side of the car farthest from traffic.
Casey:
That's clever.
John:
Yeah, I'm not sure if that's the reason.
John:
It's definitely a consequence of the decision, but I'm not sure that running out of gas and having to go get a gas can is common enough to dictate the side of a car that the gas port is on.
John:
But who knows?
John:
Maybe that's where the trend started back when this was more common.
Marco:
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Casey:
Alright, so we have a series of reports, and we didn't record for two straight weeks because I was overseas, so apologies.
Casey:
But apparently, as per, what is this, the 28th of July, so just a few days ago as we record...
Casey:
Apple intelligence is reportedly delayed until iOS 18.1 in October.
Casey:
This is reading from Bloomberg.
Casey:
Apple Inc.
Casey:
's upcoming artificial intelligence features will arrive later than anticipated, missing the initial launch of its upcoming iPhone and iPad software overhauls, but giving the company more time to fix bugs.
Casey:
The AI features will arrive a
Casey:
Even when Apple Intelligence launches with iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, it will be missing some features.
Casey:
That includes some of the most significant changes to Siri, such as the ability to use on-device data to help find queries and for the system to use what is on a person's screen to provide context for answers.
Casey:
The company is planning to roll out its full set of Apple Intelligence features via multiple updates to iOS 18 across the end of 2024 through the first half of 2025.
John:
When I first saw this story, I was confused.
John:
I'm like, wait a second.
John:
Apple has always said that Apple intelligence features are going to be delayed.
John:
And in fact, I thought they were going to be delayed until iOS 18.4.
John:
So what is this story about?
John:
But from what I've been able to gather since then, I believe what it's saying is that the original plan was iOS 18 ships.
John:
Let's just use iOS 18 for this placeholder for all the other OSs.
John:
iOS 18 ships, and it comes with some of Apple intelligence.
John:
And then later in iOS 18.4 or whatever, you get the rest of it.
John:
And now it seems like a story is iOS 18 ships, you get none of Apple Intelligence.
John:
You wait for 18.1, you get some of Apple Intelligence, then you wait for 18.4 or whatever, and you get the rest of it.
John:
Which is not great, because Apple is going to be selling new phones, and it would be great if they could advertise, hey, buy an iPhone 16 and get the amazing new Apple Intelligence.
John:
But if the phone doesn't ship with that, and also that OS isn't out when you buy the phones on day one,
John:
Harder to make that ad, isn't it?
John:
So it's not great for Apple.
John:
But on the other hand, I'd much rather have them not ship the software if it's not done.
John:
It's not a big deal, but this probably will make the raw less dramatic.
John:
On the other other hand,
John:
Being able to launch the iPhone without the risk of Apple intelligence being terrible also simplifies matters.
John:
It's just like, you know what?
John:
The iPhone 16 is going to live or die on its own merits without worrying about some embarrassing high profile AI related flub that becomes a big story with the launch of the iPhone.
John:
We'll wait until 18.1 to have that happen.
Marco:
Honestly, that actually might be a really good reason in itself to not have it be too tied to the launch.
Marco:
As far as using Apple Intelligence to sell the iPhone 16 line, they have a whole year to promote the iPhone 16 line.
Marco:
And they're going to, you know, throughout the whole year, they use different marketing techniques to push the new phone or the current generation phone as they need to throughout the year.
Marco:
Not every, you know, massive big press thing is pulled out at the very beginning.
Marco:
And in part, it's because not everybody buys phones all at once at lunch day.
Marco:
Many people wait until certain, you know, payment plans are up or, you know, they're up for credits at their carrier or whatever.
Marco:
Also, they have supply constraints.
Marco:
You know, they can't necessarily, you know, in recent years, the iPhones have not been hard to get.
Marco:
But, you know, sometimes like if they if there's like a really hot new color, you know, that might that might be back ordered or whatever.
Marco:
Like so they do have to try to spread the love for the iPhone across more of a time span across hopefully the entire year.
Marco:
So I think you're right, John.
Marco:
I bet they really shouldn't probably bind these things together too closely in people's minds that Apple Intelligence is a feature of this new phone.
Marco:
They probably shouldn't do that, in part because it's not actually true.
Marco:
It's going to work on the 16 or the 15 Pro as well.
John:
Well, it's not true, but it's truer than it has ever been because Apple Intelligence literally only works on the new phones they're introducing and last year's Pro phone only, right?
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
so that is the narrowest it's ever been it is but like a lot of people buy the pro phones so it's not that narrow but it you know it is you're right it is the narrowest it's been but anyway i do think it's wise to not tie the fate of the iphone in people's mind pr wise with the launch of a bunch of llm based features that are going to be brand new and shipping around the same time so this makes total sense to like
Marco:
separate this by a few weeks like you know get get this out get the new phones out get all the reviews of the new phones with apple intelligence not on those phones and then later in the year start pushing this more heavily once once you can roll it out with reasonable scale and once you've ironed out the biggest of the problems and things like that so this makes total sense to me
John:
I think they will actually, when it comes time to pitch the Apple intelligence things for simplicity sake, just pitch it as a feature of the iPhone 16, because yes, we know that you can run it on the 15 pros or whatever, but that's such a complicated message to get across.
John:
Just say, you know, Apple intelligence on the new iPhone 16.
John:
It doesn't.
John:
say that it's only on the iphone 16 right but like you if you just keep saying apple intelligence on the iphone 16 as the tagline in your ad or whatever people will get the idea that oh i want one of those apple intelligence phones i think that's the iphone 16 which is true it is but also you know 15 pro yeah and i
John:
presumably they'll stop selling the 15 pro and pro max, right?
John:
Like they normally do with the pro phones.
John:
You won't even be able to buy them.
John:
So it'll be kind of true unless you're going to buy a used one.
John:
Anyway, I, every review will say, uh, in part of their minuses column, like, Oh, it's a shame that Apple and that isn't out, but they're all just going to say, well, we'll see how that turns out.
John:
Right.
John:
It's,
John:
it's obviously ideally apple intelligence would be 100 ready and it'll roll out all once and it would be amazing but that's not the world apple has been living in for the past many years even though they've been having quote-unquote annual os releases every wwdc it's like and here's the features that will be out on launch and here's the ones that will be there later this year or the spring you know like there's always some later stuff and
John:
At a certain point, it becomes kind of a farce to say they have annual releases, because it's like, well, this is the headline feature, and it's not going to be in the .0, and it's not even going to all be in the .1.
John:
It'll probably all be in the .4.
John:
All right.
John:
Anyway, I mean, it's not at a farce point now, because really there are major releases, and each new OS does bring a ton of things with them, but...
John:
It's getting to, like, when we talk about the OS's, it's not like, oh, on lunch date, we get to try all the new features.
John:
I was thinking about this for, like, future shows and topics.
John:
Like, when should we talk about feature X?
John:
It's like, when will that even be on our phones?
John:
When will it be in the betas?
John:
It's harder and harder to look at this as a annual giant bundle of goodies that drops on our head.
John:
It's a giant bundle of announcements that gets dropped on our head at WWDC, but the goodies trickle out over the year.
John:
And like I said, I would much rather have software be held back until it's ready.
John:
Uh, but it does get a little bit frustrating to announce it all at once, but then dole it out a little piece at a time, especially when it's, it's almost impossible to keep track of which pieces are being doled out at which time, especially with Apple intelligence, certain features that people think are Apple intelligence aren't actually Apple intelligence and which there's like been 50 stories about which features of Apple intelligence are in the 18.1 beta world.
John:
We'll be in 18.2, 18.4, and those stories will keep coming because it's confusing.
John:
It'll be great when we get over this hump and say, finally, all the features of Apple intelligence are out, and that'll happen probably around WWDC 2025.
John:
Have any of you tried the betas of anything with Apple Intelligence?
John:
Nope.
Casey:
I haven't tried any of the betas of literally anything this year.
Casey:
Not yet.
Casey:
Because I've been traveling and I didn't want to mess with it.
Marco:
I also have not tried any of the 18 betas because I was like, I'm doing this big overcast thing.
Marco:
I wanted to get that done and not...
Marco:
be distracted or sidetracked by beta stuff for this fall so I'm like you know what it's not that big of a year for most like you know API based things that we can actually use yet because like you know developers still can't do anything with Apple intelligence at all like there there is no API we can use even even for us to expose our app intents to the system that's not even being indexed yet by Apple intelligence like so there there is literally nothing for developers to do involving Apple intelligence at all
Marco:
So the, you know, the iOS 18 summer for developers is pretty light.
Marco:
It's, you know, make sure your icon works with the new icon theming stuff and not much else.
Marco:
Like, you know, maybe control center and find out what I know what broke.
Marco:
Yeah, but like it's not it's not that much.
Marco:
Also, we all know as developers that if anything breaks, we will know on WWDC Monday because our customers will install developer beta one on day one and then we'll tell us what's broken.
Marco:
So, yeah.
Marco:
So I have a good reason.
Marco:
And I think Casey had a good reason, too, because you don't want to travel internationally running a beta if you can help it.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And I have some more travel coming up in September, which I'm sure we'll talk about on the show, but not quite yet.
Casey:
And so because of that, I don't think I'm going to be running the betas, certainly not on my phone, maybe on my iPad.
Casey:
Typically, I'll crumble toward the end of the public beta cycle, even though I do have obviously access to the developer betas.
Casey:
Typically, I don't like messing with those in the last couple of years.
Casey:
And so maybe in the next, you know, one or two public releases, I'll put it on the iPad just to see.
Casey:
But no, I haven't I haven't messed with any of it.
Casey:
And honestly, I think maybe I'm just getting old and crusty.
Casey:
I don't getting I don't.
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
First of all, unnecessary.
Casey:
Second of all, accurate.
Marco:
I'm no better.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But anyway, no, I think it doesn't – living on the bleeding edge in that regard doesn't really rev my engine like it used to.
Casey:
But John, I think Marco and I haven't given you a chance to answer your own question.
Casey:
What's your situation?
John:
Well, I have actually installed the – so they split the beta.
John:
There's like the whatever it is, 18.0 betas and there's a beta train, 18.0 beta 4 or whatever they're on.
John:
Then there's also the 18.1 beta train.
John:
which is separate.
John:
So you could, they're releasing new ones in each of the trains at the same time.
John:
So on my Mac, which is running Mac OS 15, there's the 15.0 beta and then the 15.1 beta.
John:
And the 15.1 beta is the one that has some Apple intelligence stuff in it.
John:
So I installed the 15.1 beta, not on my real machine, but on an external drive and discovered that there's a wait list to try Apple intelligence stuff in all the OSs.
John:
You have to like click a button that says, join the wait list for Apple intelligence.
John:
And I clicked that button on my Mac and it seemed to do nothing.
John:
It didn't disable the button.
John:
It didn't tell me that I'm on the wait list.
John:
It literally did nothing.
John:
So I clicked it a few more times and then gave up.
Marco:
Wait, is it in the settings app?
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
There you go.
John:
anyway i did that i don't know if it did anything i hope i'm on a wait list if i'm not on a wait list who knows also there was someone else posted something that like uh some certain apple oh no it was code completion like the the apple intelligence powered code whatever thing in xcode does not work if you are running sequoia beta from an external drive like there's a tool tip to that effect that someone posted a screenshot of
John:
Boggles the mind.
John:
Anyway, I'm not installing Sequoia Beta on my main drive, so I will just, you know, continue to monitor the betas to see what's in there.
John:
But yeah.
John:
Oh, and by the way, the other thing that developers could be doing over the summer for the new OS releases is they could be doing SwiftStick stuff, which we talked about in a whole big interview show that you can listen to.
Casey:
All right, let's do some other topics.
Casey:
So I flew over to the UK on what day was that?
Casey:
It was Tuesday the 16th in the evening, you know, arrived midday the 17th.
Casey:
And it was two days later.
Casey:
So impeccable timing from me.
Casey:
Thank you very much.
Casey:
Two days later, we got the Y2K bug presented slightly differently and 24 years late.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
We were in the UK.
Casey:
I forget exactly what we were doing that day.
Casey:
But somebody asked if I was paying attention to the CrowdStrike thing.
Casey:
And I was like, I'm sorry, what?
Casey:
And the name rang a bell.
Casey:
And I couldn't figure out why until later that day I saw images of the Mercedes F1 team.
Casey:
which is sponsored in a part or no small part by CrowdStrike, I saw their pit wall setup, establishment, whatever, with a bunch of blue screens of death on it.
Casey:
I don't think this was a Photoshop.
Casey:
I think it was an actual photograph.
Casey:
But anyways, apparently most Windows machines owned by corporations, maybe that's an exaggeration, but a lot of them, were in a blue screen of death loop for a while and may still be for all we know.
Marco:
So first of all, I was laughing my butt off when I published this episode of our show last week when I had started it by saying, please, tech companies, don't make any big news while we're off.
Marco:
And then this happened.
John:
I'm sure CrowdStrike wishes that they listen to you.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
That's like one of the biggest computer stories that will probably be of the year.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It happens like right at, right as Casey's on vacation and we can't record a show.
Casey:
It's all my fault and I'm sorry.
Casey:
Uh, but anyway, so yeah.
Casey:
So reading from the verge on the 19th of July, thousands of windows machines are experiencing a blue screen of death issue at boot today, impacting banks, airlines, TV broadcasters, supermarkets, and many more businesses worldwide.
Casey:
A faulty update from cybersecurity provider.
Casey:
CrowdStrike is knocking affected PCs and servers offline, forcing them into a recovery boot loop.
Casey:
So machines can't start properly.
Casey:
Uh,
Casey:
The issue is not being caused by Microsoft, but by third-party CrowdStrike software that's widely used by many businesses worldwide for managing the security of Windows PCs and servers.
Casey:
So I'm going to jump a little bit ahead in our internal show notes.
Casey:
And there was another Verge blog post this time on the 23rd that talks about... Don't jump ahead.
John:
The order is intentional.
Marco:
So intentional.
Marco:
Well, but...
Marco:
How dare you question John's show notes?
Casey:
I would like to file under protest this order, but carry on, John.
Casey:
Tell us about Windows 3.1.
John:
I'll explain why the order for the bootleg people.
John:
The reason the order is because the next item leads into all the rest of the items with the apple angle.
John:
And once we go off into the apple angle, we'll never come back.
John:
So that's why I wanted to insert this fun item here.
Casey:
We don't even know what happened yet.
John:
I haven't even told the people what happened.
John:
The Verge summary covers the basics of it, right?
Casey:
I am doing this under protest.
Casey:
I would like to formally state it.
John:
All I'm saying is it wasn't an accident.
John:
It was thought out in this way.
Marco:
Your protest is noted.
Marco:
Please proceed.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
Alright, so I'm apparently needing to tell you next that Windows 3.1 saved Southwest Airlines butt.
Casey:
I don't remember what news broke first, whether it was how Southwest's entire infrastructure is apparently run on Windows 3.1.
Casey:
That's not a joke.
Casey:
32-year-old operating system.
Marco:
Doesn't Windows 3.1 predate Southwest as an airline?
Casey:
No, I don't think so, but I'm not confident I'm right about that.
John:
It might.
John:
I mean, you can run software that was released before you founded your business.
John:
Well, okay, yeah.
Casey:
Well, either way, 57 years ago as Air Southwest in 1967.
Casey:
So it was closer to the genesis of Southwest than it is today, Windows 3.1 was, or at least based on my mental math.
Casey:
So anyways, so yeah, apparently Southwest, which made news as well, separate from this, because the way Southwest works is you just get a boarding number, not a group, but a number, and you get in line based on your number, and you run to whatever seat you want, and that's your seat.
Casey:
There's no assigned seating.
Casey:
And they announced recently that they're going to start doing assigned seating, and all the Southwest nerds are very upset about it, which I thought was funny.
Casey:
But nevertheless...
Casey:
Reading from digitaltrends.com, nearly every flight in the U.S.
Casey:
is grounded right now following a CrowdStrike system update error that's affecting everything from travel to mobile ordering at Starbucks.
Casey:
But not Southwest Airlines flights.
Casey:
Southwest is still flying high, baby, unaffected by the outage that's plaguing the world today.
Casey:
And that's apparently because it's using Windows 3.1.
Casey:
Yes, Windows 3.1, an operating system that is 32 years old.
Casey:
Southwest, along with UPS and FedEx, haven't had any issues with the CrowdStrike outage.
Casey:
In response to CNN, Delta, American, Spirit, Frontier, United, and Allegiant, all said they were having issues.
Casey:
But Southwest told the outlet that its operations are going off without a hitch.
Casey:
Major portions of Southwest systems are reportedly built on Microsoft Windows 95 and Windows 3.1, which is something the company has come under fire for in the past several years.
Casey:
It should go without saying that Southwest needs to update its system.
Casey:
But in this case, the ancient operating system seems to be doing the airlines some favors.
John:
So when this thing happened, I was also away on vacation and I saw the story go by and I saw the Windows 3.1 thing.
John:
I was like, ha ha, that's funny.
John:
I absolutely did not think this was real.
John:
Because it's just it's such a typical joke of like Southwest being the weird backwards airline.
John:
They don't even get to pick your seat, although as Casey noted, they're changing this.
John:
They're winning three points.
John:
And I kept I'm like, I refuse to believe this.
John:
I kept falling.
John:
Can I find a more reputable source for this?
John:
It's not like an onion story that's been reprinted.
John:
As far as I can tell, this is a real thing.
John:
The Southwest Airlines is running Windows 2.1.
John:
Now we've all heard the stories of like, oh, eight inch floppy drives control the whole transit system for some subway system, right?
John:
Because they updated it, you know, sometime in the 70s or 80s and they haven't updated it since.
John:
Like those are all things that happen.
John:
But Southwest is a pretty big airline here in the U.S.
John:
And it just boggles my mind that there are people that they pay to keep their systems running.
John:
And what they're keeping running is something that runs on Windows 3.1 and Windows 95.
John:
And the reason this article says it goes about saying that they should update is they're like, hey, if it works, why would they change it?
John:
Because those operating systems have massive known security flaws in them and are generally less secure and less reliable than the things that they replace.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And yes, once in a blue moon, your butt's going to be saved because you're running something really old, but you're also much more vulnerable on a day-to-day basis to someone breaking in and destroying everything and stealing all your data and all that good stuff, which again also happens with modern software.
John:
But I would say in general, it's not a good idea to continue to run Windows 3.1 forever and ever and ever.
John:
It is not perfect.
John:
It is not like complete and flawless or anything like that.
John:
It is just a really old piece of software that is not getting any better ever.
John:
It's also not getting any worse, but it is probably getting harder to find systems that will run it.
John:
So I would suggest they change things.
John:
Assuming this story is real.
John:
Does anyone want to play Spets?
John:
Is this a real story?
John:
Does Hellbush run on Windows 3.1?
John:
Please say it's not real.
Marco:
I don't know.
Casey:
It wouldn't surprise me.
Casey:
I mean, I also was like, no way, but it wouldn't surprise me.
Marco:
And what does it mean to run it?
Marco:
Does that mean they have one computer somewhere with it?
John:
Yeah, does it have one computer that does their payroll?
Marco:
Yeah, that's very different from all of our systems.
Marco:
Can you even still buy hardware that runs Windows 3.0?
Marco:
Or is it all being run under emulation?
Marco:
There's so many questions.
John:
Or Windows 95 is the updated version.
John:
Who knows?
John:
Please don't send us all the stories about all the things that are running off floppy disks and tape drives and especially military stuff from government stuff.
John:
We all know that exists, but for a large, successful, well-known private company or commercial company anyway...
John:
It seems somehow less excusable than like a government thing or whatever, or some obscure, smaller obscure thing.
John:
Anyway, Southwest, get your act together.
John:
And as for the science seating versus not a science seating, I have no opinion.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I've only flown Southwest a couple of times and I...
Casey:
I think I didn't care for the unassigned seating in no small part because it's unfamiliar to me.
Casey:
You know, I'm not used to flying Southwest because I've only done it a couple of times and it just seemed odd.
Casey:
Plus then there's like people who are saving seats, but you're not really supposed to do that.
Casey:
And then you get into like all sorts of unnecessary confrontations about, you know, you can't save seats and blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
And I don't know.
Casey:
I don't think I care for it, but I do not have strong feelings about it.
John:
I already asked people not to send us things, and the chat room was filled with 747s running on floppy drives, the German Railway running on MS-DOS, New Jersey needing COBOL programmers to fix the unemployment system.
John:
We get it.
John:
We know they exist.
John:
It's just shocking that something as big as Southwest.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
What was it that Chuck E. Cheese was running on?
Casey:
It was running on floppy disks or something like that, or Palm Pilot or something?
John:
Yeah, the music show was all on floppy disks, too.
Marco:
Yeah, Palm Pilot.
Marco:
You're thinking of the IMAX Palm Pilots.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm conflating the two.
Casey:
You're right.
Casey:
You're right.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Anyway.
Marco:
Can you imagine like a worse programming job though?
Marco:
Like all these other ones running COBOL, running PalmPiles, like those are all kind of like, you know, COBOL, there was a lot of COBOL programmers at one point.
Marco:
So, you know, maybe some of them retired and, you know, want something, a little side project to do.
Marco:
PalmPile was like, you know, a fun thing people loved.
Marco:
Nobody loved Windows 3.1.
Marco:
I know that was my first operating system as a computer user.
Marco:
It was fine.
Marco:
No one loved it.
Marco:
Can you imagine today having to go work on a Windows 3.1 software package for your job?
Marco:
We need to go update this because, you know, it's still being used to run an airline, a big airline, apparently.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
That would be soul-crushing.
John:
Well, so now we have the real-time follow-up for the debunking story from Kotaku.
John:
No, Southwest Airlines isn't using Windows 3.1 in 2024.
John:
So my instincts seem to have been on the right track here.
John:
We will put the link in the show notes.
John:
That's probably for the best.
John:
Yeah, because I saw it in reputable publications.
John:
I'm like, this cannot be true.
John:
This has to be a made-up thing.
John:
But anyway, so we will put the Kotaku debunking link in there as well.
John:
Sorry for besmirching your good name, Southwest.
Yeah.
Casey:
In any case, all right, so going to The Verge again, this time on the 23rd of July.
Casey:
Inside the 78 minutes that took 10 millions of Windows machines.
Casey:
At 12.09 a.m.
Casey:
Eastern on July 19th, cybersecurity company CrowdStrike released a faulty update to the Falcon security software it sells to help companies prevent malware, ransomware, and other cyber threats from taking down their machines.
Casey:
Whoops.
Casey:
CrowdStrike's update was supposed to be like any other silent update, automatically providing the very latest protections for its customers in just a tiny file, just 40 kilobytes.
Casey:
That's distributed over the web.
Casey:
CrowdStrike issues these regularly without instant, and they're fairly common for security software, but this one was different.
Casey:
And I don't think we have anything in the show notes about this, but I thought it was funny that apparently like New Zealand and Australia started sounding the alarm because they got these updates first.
Casey:
And, you know, I think under the radar, certainly you've talked about this, Marco, and I think we've even talked about it here from time to time, that generally speaking, when you release software to a worldwide audience,
Casey:
it is common it's a like a good rule of thumb that you don't want to release it to everyone all at once obviously there's exceptions and gotchas and catches and whatnot but generally speaking you want to kind of dole it out in little bits and pieces and a few years ago apple started uh allowing developers like us to say yes i would like incremental release where i think they release it's like one percent then two percent then five percent or something along those lines it doesn't matter what the specifics are
Casey:
And that's what I always choose.
Casey:
Even when I'm completely confident that something's good to go, I always choose the incremental rollout because you never know.
Casey:
And apparently CrowdStrike did not do that.
Casey:
They just said, screw it, baby, we'll do it live.
Casey:
And they released this thing to everyone.
Casey:
And the people at the beginning of the day in New Zealand and Australia started saying, uh-oh, and it was already too late.
John:
As the sun races across the earth, destroying people's computers.
John:
We're going to get to it in a second from this Verge story about what can be done to prevent this.
John:
But like Casey, that is my number one take home point, which is anytime you're releasing software that's like on critical systems and that you are a critical part of this, and we'll get to the criticality part in a little bit.
John:
You do it incrementally.
John:
Casey's releasing an app that lets you look up stuff about movies and TV shows.
John:
He's doing it incrementally.
John:
No planes fail to take off if Casey messes up his app.
John:
And still, why would you not do it incrementally?
John:
This is just like basic software best practice.
John:
And I worked in healthcare, which was similarly critical.
John:
You'd never release to everybody all at once if you could possibly help it.
John:
Even if you do something incredibly primitive, but they have like a pool of guinea pigs who you pay money to be your guinea pigs.
John:
knowing that if there's any problem they're going to see it first and you give them like a discount on the thing that you're selling or something like but if you're something like crowd strike that's used like all over the globe and i forget what the percentage it was but it's a fairly high percentage you know not i think it was like maybe 15 20 or whatever but still it's a large number of machines no it's like one percent of windows pcs but it's a very important one percent
John:
I was actually, was it 1%?
John:
Anyway, whatever it is, it's millions of machines.
John:
And like, why would you not have a strategy?
John:
It's not like they're a new company that is just now coming on the scene and releasing software.
John:
Like this is their business.
John:
This is their main business, this security software.
John:
And their regular release procedure is push out to everybody all at once.
John:
I can understand having that ability because if there's some critical vulnerability and you need to get the fix out there ASAP, but I hope that one of the things they take away from this, and we'll put a link in the show notes to their preliminary post-incident review, so where they go over what they think happened.
John:
One of the internal takeaways is...
John:
We need to have a way to release our updates incrementally, not incrementally via the sun, by a time zones, but incrementally as in we release a percentage and then we monitor.
John:
That's the key thing.
John:
You have to releasing a little bit at a time is only works as well as your feedback loop.
John:
And that's the kind of the flaw in Apple system where you just like sit back there and wait to hear complaints from users or whatever.
John:
But ideally what you want is some kind of way to tell, has this update hosed our customers?
John:
right support call volume uh feedback email address like some kind of connection with your customers where you have like a monitoring thing you're always monitoring this what is our what is our incoming support volume uh what how many crash reports are we getting like this should be on a graph with thresholds and alerts right so you release to your tiny tiny little guinea pig pool and then you watch
John:
And then you release a little bit more, and then you watch.
John:
Like, just doing it incrementally and going home doesn't help you, because you'll just release to everybody without anyone watching, right?
John:
Oh, CrowdStrike.
John:
Anyway, sorry.
Marco:
And this also, like, can we talk yet about, like, what technically, like, the kind of update this was?
Marco:
Because to me, this is...
Marco:
this is fascinating like so it's you know running in kernel mode so that's like already you know and there's all these politics around you know kernel extensions and security companies with windows and everything but this is this is not this is a driver that runs in the windows kernel fully executable code in the windows kernel okay that's already like you know something that used to be commonplace in the computing business but it's very much not commonplace anymore for the for most applications and
Marco:
For lots of good reasons.
Marco:
And also, in the kernel, what these updates were, were not just data files.
Marco:
It was not like, the kernel driver wasn't like, alright, here's, what I'm going to load from this data file is a list of signatures of known bad malware binaries.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
What it was loading from those files was executable code.
Marco:
So all those updates, they basically seem to be making basically like an interpreter in the kernel.
Marco:
And they download these data files with, again, no staging environment, no slow rollout, seemingly not much production testing.
Marco:
They download these data files and then execute them.
Marco:
So you are directly sending code from an all-at-once, non-stage rollout directly into Windows machine's kernels to execute.
Marco:
So if there's any crash logic in there, it will crash the kernel, which will crash the machine and cause a reboot or a blue screen.
Marco:
That is bonkers to me.
Marco:
The fact that they even built the system at all, okay, that's risky enough.
Marco:
To have a system in the kernel that reads arbitrary executable code from outside the kernel and just runs it, that's already terrifying on a lot of levels.
Marco:
But then to also have it be these like quickly deployed, downloadable things.
Marco:
We're just going to deploy this code out there and just run it in the kernel and just go have fun.
Marco:
That is this.
Marco:
This was a powder keg just waiting to explode.
John:
Yeah, I don't know the specific technical details of their update mechanism, but I have worked with and built myself lots of systems that are like this.
John:
And the reason people do stuff like this is because you always want the ability to sort of...
John:
you know, fix the airplane while it's flying, right?
John:
You don't want to have to reboot.
John:
You don't want to have to restart anything.
John:
You want to be able to just say at any point, I can push this update in real time to the running system and it updates itself.
John:
And that leads you down the path of doing things like, okay, well, we'll just watch this directory for files.
John:
I'm going to file appears here.
John:
We'll load it and we'll shove it into, we'll interpret it and shove it into the memory image of the already running.
John:
Like I totally understand why they made a system like this.
John:
It's just that if you do make a system like this,
John:
You have to know what incredible risk you're taking and be, like, as conservative as you can possibly be to say, if there's anything even remotely strange about this, do not update it.
John:
Do validation on every single thing we can think of.
John:
And I think part of the problem is, you know, the thing was loading code and not validating anything about it and it was invalid or whatever.
John:
But, like, I understand kind of why they do this.
John:
But, yeah, the kernel mode thing is an issue.
John:
That's what this next part is about.
Yeah.
Casey:
All right, so reading from The Verge.
Casey:
Despite not being directly involved, Microsoft still controls Windows experience, and there is plenty of room for improvement in how Windows handles issues like this.
Casey:
If Windows determines that a driver is crashing the system at boot and forcing it into a recovery mode, Microsoft could build in more intelligent logic that allows the system to boot without the faulty driver after multiple boot failures.
John:
I think macOS does this, by the way.
John:
I think there is a system where if it boots multiple...
John:
I may be wrong, but like obviously people manually do this, but like I think there might be an automated one that's like, hey, we tried to load this driver and it crashed last time.
John:
So now we're not loading it or we're loading it in safe mode.
John:
And again, booting in safe mode is probably not the solution here because you probably still couldn't remotely update the machines without it.
John:
But that was part of the problem is that they're they're crashing on boot.
John:
And because they're crashing on boot, they never can get to a runnable state.
John:
So you can't push your update to them.
John:
Automatically, like people think of like companies running computers as just like a person running a computer, but that's not how it is.
John:
There are thousands upon thousands of computers and a very small number of humans who have to manage them from far away, often very far away.
John:
So nobody, like, there's not like you have physical access to these thousands of computers.
John:
Somebody does somewhere eventually, but there's not enough people out there to go and manually fix computers.
John:
That was why this was such a problem.
John:
It's like, well, so what?
John:
They made a boo-boo.
John:
Just push out the new version of the software.
John:
Well, you can't push software to a computer that hasn't booted.
John:
And none of these computers could boot.
John:
So someone had to physically go to them and physically, like, boot them into safe mode and repair them, and this is not something you can do remotely or whatever.
John:
So it was a big problem.
John:
So, you know, it's...
John:
It was a bad situation, but there is room for improvement here.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Well, on Microsoft's side, it's not Microsoft's fault.
John:
Microsoft didn't write the bad software, but Windows needs to defend itself against Windows.
John:
Bad software, because in the end, Microsoft took some of the blame for this, probably unfairly.
John:
Microsoft deserves some tiny part of the blame for making Windows not as resilient as it could be in this like in this basic way.
John:
Again, this is the verge, not some deep technical analysis.
John:
Like, hey, if you've tried to do something and it's failed a bunch of times, don't keep trying to do it.
Casey:
Continuing from The Verge, but the bigger change would be to lock down the Windows kernel access to prevent third-party drivers from crashing an entire PC.
Casey:
Ironically, Microsoft tried to do exactly this with Windows Vista, but was met with resistance from cybersecurity vendors and guess who?
Casey:
EU regulators.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Microsoft eventually backed down, allowing security vendors to access the kernel once again for security monitoring purposes.
John:
So this example of applying pressure, I'm going to mostly blame the virus vendors and not the EU.
John:
It's not like the EU said – there's a lot of people who are reporting this and saying, well, the EU told Microsoft that Microsoft, because you have access to the kernel, you have to give all third parties access to the kernel.
John:
Otherwise, it's not fair.
John:
Otherwise, you're giving yourself an advantage that they don't have, which –
John:
It's not a thing that they said, first of all.
John:
And second of all, it's mostly kind of silly because Microsoft writes the kernel.
John:
They write code in the kernel, and no, other people can't write code in the kernel.
John:
Now, Windows does have a kernel extension feature that is available to third parties, and also Microsoft itself can also write kernel extensions.
John:
But...
John:
It would be ridiculous.
John:
And again, I don't think this is the thing that you did to say that because you have kernel extensions, you must forever have kernel extensions because forbidding third parties from making kernel extensions doesn't stop the need for kernel extensions from Microsoft.
John:
Many things in Windows are implemented in the kernel.
John:
Some of those are packaged as drivers that come with the operating system.
John:
That is probably never going to go away.
John:
If a kernel exists, it makes sense to have parts of it modularized into a driver system, even if that system is not accessible to third parties.
John:
So the idea that you could say, well, either everybody gets to write the kernel extensions or nobody does, doesn't make any sense.
John:
Because the company that makes the operating system will almost certainly continue to need to make kernel extensions to its own kernel as part of making the operating system.
John:
But again, I think this, you know, throwing the EU under the bus here is part of the whole big regulatory thing.
John:
I'm sure they did complain to the European Commission, but the EU did not come to Microsoft and say, you are not allowed, like, issue a decree.
John:
If you're going to have kernel extensions in Windows, you must allow everyone access to it.
John:
What did happen is the virus makers said, hey, all our software uses kernel extensions.
John:
The virus makers?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Antivirus.
John:
Antivirus.
John:
There's a thin line there.
Marco:
There's a very, very thin line.
John:
Sometimes the malware is coming from inside the house.
John:
Uh-huh.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I think that they applied pressure kind of the same way that, like, Microsoft and Adobe applied pressure to Apple to say, hey...
John:
if you ship a new version of mac os that photoshop and office don't run on that doesn't include a good way to port our apps we're not going to support it and you're not going to have office and photoshop right i think mcafee and semantics said if you ship windows vista uh without our software's ability to run on it we're going to be super mad and you're not going to like it and microsoft's
John:
back down on that and that was windows vista was a while ago right so this is kind of older history but anyway i'm going to say that i don't blame any of this on the eu really although if the i'm not putting it past the eu to come up with a wrong-headed notion like that but i'm pretty sure that they didn't in this specific case
Casey:
All right, continuing from The Verge, Apple began locking down its macOS operating system in 2020 so that developers could no longer get access to the kernel.
Casey:
Quote, it was definitely the right decision by Apple to deprecate third-party kernel extensions, says Patrick Wardle, but the road to actually accomplishing that has been fraught with issues.
Casey:
Apple has had some kernel bugs or security tools running in user mode could still trigger a kernel panic, as Wardle says.
Casey:
Apple, quote, has also introduced some privilege execution vulnerabilities.
Casey:
Ooh, that's a mouthful.
Casey:
And there are still some other bugs that could allow security tools on Mac to be unloaded by malware.
John:
So in our neck of the woods, kernel extensions were a thing in Mac OS X for a very long time.
John:
It's how a lot of software installed its quote unquote drivers to work with, you know, hardware peripherals and other random stuff.
John:
And in 2020, Apple said, you know what?
John:
Kernel extensions are going away.
John:
over the course of several years in cooperation with our vendors that have things based on kernel extensions.
John:
And the vendors would say, but our software needs a kernel extension to do its job.
John:
How are we supposed to ship our software?
John:
We literally, we need kernel extensions.
John:
And Apple's answer was, whatever things you need to do, we will provide a way to do in user space, as in in a process that is separate from the kernel.
John:
So that if your code crashes, it's not inside the kernel and the kernel keeps running and the operating system stays up.
John:
And bit by bit, piece by piece, Apple has been rolling out user space versions of things that used to require kernel extensions.
John:
And what Patrick is saying here is sometimes Apple rolls out those things and they're bad and they have bugs.
John:
And still you can end up crashing the kernel because there's something on the kernel talking to the user space thing.
John:
And if the thing in the kernel that Apple wrote has a bug in it, it can take down the kernel.
John:
It's a long, slow, painful process.
John:
Third parties don't like it, especially third parties that have kernel extensions.
John:
They may say, you know, back when we had a kernel extension, we had really smart people on our team and they wrote a really good kernel extension and we debugged it over the course of 10 years and we think it's a bulletproof.
John:
And now our choice is to use this user space thing that Apple is offering that connects to Apple's own little thing in the kernel and their thing in the kernel sucks and has bugs and is brand new this year.
John:
This is a downgrade.
John:
So people are angry.
John:
But Apple is taking its lumps and causing disruption with its eyes on the prize of no more third-party code running inside the kernel.
John:
And that's, you know, we make the joke about courage with Phil Schiller and with the getting rid of the headphone port or whatever.
John:
But in some respects, it does take courage to essentially...
John:
Endure the pain and the justified anger of your developers if the goal is a future that is better for everybody involved.
John:
It's better for users, surely.
John:
It's better for Apple.
John:
And in the end, hopefully, it will also be better for third-party developers who don't have to write that super high-risk code that runs inside the kernel.
Casey:
yeah yeah it's it's a tough nut to crack right and everyone has both you know selfish and unselfish motivations for it so i don't know but apparently there is a official like we were saying an official api for this and there is even a wwdc video from 2020
Casey:
The API is Endpoint Security, and this is reading from Apple's developer site.
Casey:
Endpoint Security is an API for monitoring system events for potentially malicious activity.
Casey:
Your client registers with Endpoint Security to authorize pending events or receive notifications of events that have already occurred.
Casey:
These events include process executions, mounting file systems, forking processes, and raising signals.
Casey:
Develop your system extension with Endpoint Security and package that in an app that uses the system extensions framework to install and upgrade the extension from the user's
John:
Mac.
John:
So that's the equivalent of if CrowdStrike existed for macOS, it would use endpoint security, which is a user space API that connects to a thing that Apple wrote inside the kernel.
John:
And that's how every going forward, that's how every sort of anti-virus, anti-malware, anti-whatever thing made by third parties on macOS
John:
must use apple's endpoint security system which is new and has bugs and it's not as good as when you could write your own kernel extension but in the long run it's better to have in theory one vendor who's the vendor that makes the operating system writing the thing inside the kernel that everybody else all the third parties talk to and they're out there in user space so all those third parties if they crash they don't take down the operating system but if apple crashes that they do
John:
That's the theory behind it.
John:
Again, it's not always a smooth road to get there because people complain that the thing Apple wrote is not as good as the thing that they wrote before.
John:
And for a long time, they're going to be right about that.
John:
But the thing is, there's many third-party developers in just one Apple.
John:
And hopefully, eventually, Apple will iterate and iterate on its endpoint security thing and all the other stuff they have inside the kernel talking to those user space processes.
John:
And once it gets ironed out, that makes it better for everybody.
John:
antivirus program in every Mac user.
John:
You don't have to wait for every individual third party to get up to snuff or whatever.
Casey:
Finally, Microsoft does what you would expect.
Casey:
It calls for Windows changes and resilience after CrowdStrike.
Casey:
Reading from a new article on The Verge from the 26th,
Casey:
Microsoft wants to reopen the conversations about restricting kernel-level access inside Windows.
Casey:
Quote,
Casey:
Cable calls out a new VBS Enclaves feature that does not require kernel mode drivers to be tamper-resistant and Microsoft's Azure Attestation service as examples of recent security innovations.
Casey:
These examples use modern zero-trust approaches and show what can be done to encourage development practices that do not rely on kernel access.
Casey:
Says Cable.
Casey:
We will continue to develop these capabilities, harden our platform, and do even more to improve the resiliency of the Windows ecosystem, working openly and collaboratively with the broad security community.
John:
Yeah, so Microsoft is, you know, working on the same things that Apple has done, which is let's make user space equivalents of all the stuff that used to require kernel access.
John:
But they're apparently have not gotten to the point where Apple has a flat out forbidding kernel extensions or making it extremely, extremely difficult for them to load and requiring all sorts of hoops to jump through and all that other stuff.
John:
And a real time follow up.
John:
Someone in the chat room said that CrowdStrike does exist for the Mac.
John:
So there you go.
Casey:
And Linux too, I believe, actually.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So then, you know what?
Casey:
It's all good.
Casey:
All is well that ends well because CrowdStrike is taking care of their customers.
Casey:
They are doing what's right.
Casey:
They are offering them a $10 apology gift card on Uber Eats for the outing.
John:
i when i saw this i'm like this has to be fake like there's no way this is a real story this is just like the windows 3.1 thing this has to be joke but this is in tech crunch so i'm gonna get i'm gonna click on it again have they updated and say this is a joke i think this is real oh no as far as i know it's real because they have they have like first party sourcing so you know one one person said that they received it and so did somebody i think at tech crunch or whatever
John:
$10 gift certificate is not going to cut.
John:
We don't have the links in here, but I think Delta is suing them for a billion dollars or something.
John:
I should have put that link.
John:
I did have it somewhere in the notes.
John:
I just didn't get to it in time.
John:
But I think it's Delta Airlines.
John:
It's suing CrowdStrike.
John:
And I think that is actually interesting because as anyone who has used software for a long time knows, there's a thing called end-user license agreement and surely something that is equivalent in enterprise software sales.
John:
that usually says, in all caps somewhere, words to the effect, we don't guarantee this software does literally anything.
John:
We don't, like, whatever you think this software does, you're paying us money and we're saying we are not promising that it will do that thing at all, ever, under any circumstances.
Marco:
And furthermore, if we break your stuff, if we delete your data, if our software does anything to harm you, you agree it's not our fault because we couldn't possibly be held to the standard of making working software.
John:
Right.
John:
Now, again, I'm not a lawyer, and I know there are certain things that you cannot put in a contract and sign away all your rights or whatever.
John:
So the courts in our country will figure out whether Delta is owed billions of dollars from CrowdStrike or not.
John:
But I do have to say this is a fun test because, you know, normally these things don't get tested because we click through the end user license agreements because we're like, yada, yada, yada.
John:
It's something we can do about it anyway.
John:
What are we going to do?
John:
Sue Microsoft, sue Apple.
John:
Like we don't have that kind of money, right?
John:
But Delta Airlines does.
John:
So Delta Airlines versus CrowdStrike will be another interesting test of end user license agreements.
John:
Can CrowdStrike make...
John:
Delta Airlines agree that they pay X amount of dollars per year for essentially nothing, right?
John:
For saying, you know, we're giving you money and we're signing a contract that says in exchange, we expect nothing from your software.
John:
Whatever you're telling us it does, if it doesn't do that, we're saying that's okay.
John:
Because that's what all the end-user license agreements say.
John:
Because lawyers put it in there early on, and they got away with it, and we all just ignored it.
John:
And I'm sure there have been other tests that have tested EULAs.
John:
I don't know what the law precedents are or whatever, but this is a fairly high-profile one.
John:
So I think when this... I mean, I assume they'll just settle, so there'll probably no precedents set here.
John:
Because what's going to happen is Dell is just going to extract a bunch of money, and they'll settle out of court.
John:
Because...
John:
That's what they'll do.
John:
But it would be fun if it actually went to court and actually established some legal precedents.
John:
If someone, if a listener knows what established legal precedents on enforceability of EULAs is, please let us know.
John:
But I imagine a lot of these cases get settled because in the end, Delta just wants some money to make up for all the money that they lost.
John:
I saw a graph somewhere of like...
John:
uh takeoffs per minute per airline right and as you can imagine during crowd strike it went down but delta's graph was so much worse than everybody else's i don't know why it was so much worse maybe there's a lot of delta flights or whatever but it i mean there was a dip in the overall like global takeoffs per minute but delta was like plummeted to almost nothing it was terrible so good luck delta getting some money in that settlement
Marco:
The whole CrowdStrike thing here, I think the bigger story here is, first of all, that this company, I think, was doing things in a pretty reckless way.
Marco:
But second of all, you have to, as a company, as a computer, you really have to weigh the value of malware prevention software or malware defense software that
Marco:
against the malware like what like what what likely outcomes are they actually protecting you from and how can the malware itself go wrong the the anti-mail the anti-mail you did the same thing i did the anti-mail your malware software how can the antivirus software go wrong
Marco:
Yes, yes.
Marco:
Yeah, sure.
Marco:
That is what I meant.
Marco:
You're right.
Marco:
But when you look at what the anti-malware software has to do, it does a lot of the same things that malware has to do.
Marco:
It has to hook into your system at a very low level, which introduces tons of risks and possible instability and possible performance problems.
Marco:
If you look at what malware does...
Marco:
Malware hooks into your system at a very low level.
Marco:
It can potentially see all your data and potentially have problems with that.
Marco:
It can potentially cause instability of your system and performance problems and can rob your resources and can introduce weird risks.
Marco:
Well, anti-malware software does all of those things.
Marco:
All of them.
Marco:
So, granted, the anti-malware companies have very different incentives and they have, I think, a better track record of not actively trying to hurt people.
Marco:
But when you are trying to combat the risk of dealing with malware...
Marco:
You are trading a possible bad experience with a guaranteed bad experience.
Marco:
Like when you install into malware software, in a lot of ways, you are guaranteeing that you will have mediocre performance on certain levels.
Marco:
You're introducing more risks, more moving parts, more potential for instability and stuff like that.
Marco:
And so you have to have a really good reason.
Marco:
And you have to really choose that software very carefully.
Marco:
And I think what I hope the CrowdStrike problem... I hope a lot of learning goes on here.
John:
Well, the thing is, the motivation, the reason why you have to be very careful and decide what you're doing, companies have a very...
John:
strong motivation to buy the software because it's required for compliance reasons and they have a very strong reason to go with a company like CrowdStrike because CrowdStrike will sell you a thing that will cover all your compliance needs that they have gone through all the certifications and they can say whatever things you need to comply with if you buy and install CrowdStrike you will be compliant with all of them because we went through the certification procedures that
John:
That's what, like most enterprise software, that's what they're selling.
John:
You company, whether you want this or not, you have to have some solution to this.
John:
Are you going to roll your own and go through your own certification and deal with that?
John:
Or are you just going to install our product and we cover all the bases for you?
John:
And nowhere in that scenario is there any kind of consideration for the quality of that software.
John:
And on a smaller level, not on the big like blue screen of death and no one can get on their planes level.
John:
But on the small level, we've talked about this, like I've talked about it back in my jobby jobs of having what I called corporate malware installed on my laptop.
John:
Like you were saying, Marco, it makes the laptop worse.
John:
Not in a way that like it crashes and it blue screens and, you know, people are getting their stuff encrypted and asking for a ransom.
John:
It just makes every corporate laptop a little bit worse than it would be if it didn't have that installed.
John:
When the thing grinds over your whole system, this is even worse back in the days of hard drives, looking for whatever it's looking for, scanning every file that's run or causing weird bugs.
John:
It's just a tiny little tax that's paid by every person using a corporate laptop.
John:
And it's probably lesser a case for the servers and stuff like that because there's no human experiencing that.
John:
But the risk is still there of like, hey, what if the company that you paid all this money to get for your security compliance?
John:
What if they're not particularly careful?
John:
What if they do a bad job?
John:
You're not particularly monitoring them.
John:
That's what you're paying them for, so you don't have to worry about it.
John:
Now maybe lots of companies will be looking at other vendors, but CrowdStrike was a pretty popular one.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
There's been some rumors going around, and this one in particular with regard to forthcoming hardware is very unusual.
Casey:
They're talking about iPhone 17, not 16, but 17 slim rumors.
John:
iPhone 16?
John:
Who cares about iPhone 16?
John:
That's old news.
John:
we're talking about iphone 7 i think didn't we even talk now we talked about uh in overtime i think we talked about like making thinner laptops and stuff or making slimmer products yeah so even we were talking about yeah the hot rumors are all about iphone 17 forget about iphone 16 it's not even going to come with apple intelligence on launch iphone 17 is where it's at
John:
or so it seems so john can you tell us what's going on here so there's a bunch of stories about the iphone slim uh and related stories about the iphone ultra so here's an example headline ultra thin iphone 17 see what they did there to feature a19 chip shocking single rear camera semi-titanium frame and more
John:
This is from Ming-Chi Kuo.
John:
Shared a specification for a new ultra-thin iPhone 17 model rumored to launch next year.
John:
Kuo expects the device to be equipped with a 6.6-inch display with a current-sized dynamic island, a standard A19 chip rather than an A19 Pro, a single rear camera, and an Apple-designed 5G chip.
John:
He also expects the device to have a titanium aluminum frame, but with a lower percentage of titanium than those used for the 15 Pro.
John:
So this is the current or a recent mutation of the iPhone slim model.
John:
And the whole idea, you know, as the name says, it's an iPhone, but it's slim.
John:
So what do you, what sacrifices do you have to make to get it slim?
John:
Well, it's only going to have one camera.
John:
It doesn't have an 18 pro.
John:
It's rumored to have the Apple design 5g chip that they've been working on for years and years.
John:
iPhone 17 and 2026, this is the year for the 5g chip and it's going to come in an iPhone.
John:
Slim.
John:
And then there's also the rumor that the iPhone SE4 will also have the 5G chip, right?
John:
And Ming-Chi Kuo has a reasonable track record and sources and, you know, supply chain and stuff like that.
John:
So other than just vague rumors of an iPhone Slim or an ultra-thin phone or an iPhone Ultra,
John:
It's like, okay, some part suppliers think that this conglomeration of stuff equals a phone.
John:
And if it does, it's a weird one because there is no current phone that is known for being slim.
John:
There's no separate slim model.
John:
And this sounds like a strange device.
John:
It's not a pro model, but has a single rear camera.
John:
Apple hasn't done that in ages on any of the phones that are like...
Marco:
exclusive or expensive and presumably the slim would be see this i i love this rumor and i hope they do something really out there with this um i mean well you know for apple it's it's not gonna be that out there because it's apple but um this sounds like a lot of fun to me because if you look at you know what what the iphone line has been um it's been so good
Marco:
Good.
Marco:
But it's been so good in fairly predictable ways for a long time.
Marco:
We don't really get a lot of surprises in the iPhone line.
Marco:
We don't get a lot of seemingly high-risk experiments in the iPhone line.
Marco:
It's just a really good product line.
Marco:
They deliver every year with these wonderful, often incremental, sometimes bigger improvements.
Marco:
And it's just a really solid, all-around, predictable thing.
Marco:
I've been having the same phone, the same size and approximate weight class phone for years now, just as so many other iPhone customers have through multiple models here and there as various upgrades and replacements happen over the years.
Marco:
But you kind of feel like you get the same phone over and over again for quite some time.
Marco:
Something like this could make a lot of people change their pattern.
Marco:
It could be something new.
Marco:
It could be something different.
Marco:
And I think it's interesting.
Marco:
As you look around the smartphone industry, what most people are using is just like these standard kind of like...
Marco:
mid to high end you know boring but really great smartphones like we don't talk much about them anymore in terms of like oh what did they upgrade this year because you know it's a mature category we're all using them constantly every minute of the day they're they're the most important computers in our lives but they don't change that much in in ways that we really notice that often um
Marco:
Something like this, I think this has the potential to make a bunch of people make a different decision than what they've been making recently.
Marco:
This has the potential to be kind of like what the original MacBook Air was, hopefully better, but kind of like that.
Marco:
People were delighted by the MacBook Air because it was just so different from what they had used before.
Marco:
And it looked delightful.
Marco:
It felt even more delightful.
Marco:
And it was just cool, even though it had lower technical specs than similarly priced computers from the similar era.
Marco:
And so what I'm kind of hoping for this iPhone 17 slim rumor, whatever they end up calling it...
Marco:
It looks like it's trying to kind of maybe replace the plus phone in certain ways in the sense that like, all right, they have the pro phones.
Marco:
They get all the pro features, highest price, biggest cameras, biggest everything, you know, biggest screens.
Marco:
Then they have the less expensive iPhone 15, iPhone 14, like the non-pro phones that have been about the same size, near the same weight, a little bit lighter because they don't use steel or titanium.
Marco:
So it's been kind of similar but just cut down.
Marco:
And then they have the base iPhone 15 slash iPhone 14.
Marco:
then they have the plus which they launched about a year or two ago and the plus seems to not be selling because it's like all right we made the base phone bigger but nobody wants that really so they kind of had this like hold in the lineup they they did the mini for a while killed that they did the plus now for a while i think they're gonna kill it too it doesn't seem to be going you know what i'm gonna say about that i know i'm gonna say well you're probably gonna say they have tons they sell a ton of these things they can keep both but
John:
I'm going to say that every phone can't be your best-selling phone.
John:
Yes, right.
John:
Sometimes you have to sell a model.
John:
There's always going to be a model or two in last place.
John:
Anyway, yeah, the rumor is that this would be replacing the Plus.
John:
But you should buckle up because there's more coming that you may not be prepared for.
Marco:
Fair.
Marco:
But I think overall, though, I love...
Marco:
I love the idea that they're trying something that's much more different than the Plus versus the regular or the Plus versus the Pro Max.
Marco:
They're trying something that is much more different by all these rumors.
Marco:
And even if only some of this stuff ends up panning out, usually...
Marco:
iPhone hardware rumors from decent sources like Ming-Chi Kuo, usually those are pretty reliable.
Marco:
And so there is enough smoke around this fire that it does seem like maybe we don't know every detail yet, but it does seem like there is some kind of additional iPhone 17 model that is going to be very thin and have like kind of more hardware risks being taken, including some lower end components than the pro phones.
Marco:
And I think that is an interesting thing.
Marco:
Because like the direction the pro phones have gone, like I keep buying the pro phones, even though I actually don't use some of the most, you know, the proiest features of the pro phones.
Marco:
Because like, you know, what I want is stuff like I want the nicest screen.
Marco:
I want promotion.
Marco:
I want titanium and stuff like that.
Marco:
I want some of the Pro Camera Systems features, but there's a lot of the Pro Camera Systems features I don't use at all.
Marco:
Like anything involving ProRes or even much video shooting or stuff like that.
Marco:
There's all sorts of raw shooting.
Marco:
There's all sorts of Pro Camera stuff that I just don't use.
Marco:
And I think it's true of a lot of people who buy the Pro.
Marco:
People buy the Pro not because they want all the Pro features, but because it's the nicest.
John:
And it has the best cameras.
Marco:
Yeah, and the best cameras.
John:
I mean, even if you don't use the video features, it's the best still image camera.
John:
And even if you don't use RAW, it's making the best JPEGs, too, in theory, as well.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
That being said, having the multi-camera system has always been a bit of a crapshoot because what does it mean to have the best cameras versus is that...
Marco:
3X or 2X before or 5X now, is that camera that good?
Marco:
There are asterisks on it sometimes, but overall, yes, you're right.
Marco:
But I think it's interesting if they're going to make a new iPhone model that is going to be like...
Marco:
is physically and or visually very distinctive from the other ones even if it ends up having lower end specs in order to achieve that i think a lot of people would choose that you know partly because it'll be cool um and probably because it'll just be different and it'll be it'll be a novel thing for them you know you look around the rest of the cell phone business and everyone's making folding phones they're trying like other companies are trying to do like all right let's see what can we do that's going to shake up the smartphone market a little bit maybe get us some attention and some new sales
Marco:
folding phones have actually started to take off in certain markets.
Marco:
There's still a lot of challenges around them.
Marco:
There's a decent amount of shortcomings to them, and not every folding concept is a very good one.
Marco:
But there is some traction happening there.
Marco:
People are finding, oh, this...
Marco:
Kind of crazy hack actually does work and actually is good for certain things.
Marco:
I think this is Apple kind of taking their own version of a bet like that.
Marco:
This is them saying, all right, we're going to mix it up too.
Marco:
We're not convinced on a folding maybe yet or ever, but we're going to do an Apple way of taking a weird hardware risk.
Marco:
This sounds like that weird hardware risk, and I think it's going to be really fun.
John:
well we'll see so a few few things about what you said here so uh the first is for the uh like the cameras like well you know how good are all those cameras having all those cameras in the phone there are rumors that uh an upcoming phone i think maybe the 17 it was that all the cameras would be 48 megapixel on the back instead of just like the good camera being 48 megapixel the other ones being lesser there's also rumors i forget again i forget which year about uh
John:
mechanical aperture changing in the cameras on the back so an actual iris that expands and contracts mechanically inside the phone to get potentially real depth more real depth of field instead of the portrait mode type thing um for this particular rumor now this is here's another um
John:
Another iPhone slim dugout from the past.
John:
This is from May, and this is from The Information, which, again, usually has some good sources.
John:
It's saying, The Information Today reported that Apple plans to release an all-new high-end iPhone 17 model next year, and there was one detail worth singling out the rear camera could be relocated to the top center of the device.
John:
The report says the new iPhone 17 model will feature a major redesign akin to the iPhone 10 and a higher price tag than the Pro and the Max model.
John:
So this is a little bit older rumor, but the same type of thing.
John:
Top center phone.
John:
I've been complaining for years that they shouldn't put it in the corner or anywhere.
John:
It's ridiculous.
John:
And the earlier rumor was a single camera.
John:
To your point about the cameras that you use,
John:
one trade-off that apple could make is have one camera instead of three but make that camera two and a half times as expensive two and a half times as good you know maybe that's the one with the mechanical iris for aperture on it right have one really good camera instead of or one really really good camera instead of one really good camera and two meteor cameras or whatever um
John:
And as we say, like being in the Apple ecosystem, one of the sacrifices is you do not get the diversity that exists in the rest of the ecosystem.
John:
So there's Android phones of all shapes and sizes.
John:
But when you buy an Apple phone, you have a choice of whatever models Apple puts out.
John:
And they can't even be bothered to make a mini phone.
John:
let alone all the diversity of things they can make.
John:
So this would be another play for them to diversify their lineup now that they've undiversified it by getting off the mini train.
John:
Again, I think stopping the mini and stopping the plus are, I mean, you can't have every model in the world.
John:
Like the question is how much diversity is enough for Apple to have?
John:
I think...
John:
A mini and one other non-mini phone is probably near their limit.
John:
Right now, the rumor is they're going to have neither, but I guess the Plus would be replaced by this.
John:
So here's the rumored iPhone 17 lineup.
John:
This is from earlier in July.
John:
This is from Mac Rumors.
John:
Reports in recent months have converged in agreement that Apple wouldn't discontinue the Plus iPhone model in 2025 while introducing an all-new iPhone 17 Slim model that has an even more high-end option sitting above the 17 Pro Max, and we'll get to that in a second,
John:
In the lineup, the latest information from Ice Universe, that's the person's name apparently, shared yesterday on Weibo, corroborates this and claims that the alleged display sizes and price ones will be as follows.
John:
Plain old iPhone 17 with a 6.27 inch display for $800, 17 Pro for $1,100 with a 6.27 inch display and 12 gigs of RAM.
John:
iPhone 17 Pro Max with a 6.86 display for $1,200 and 12 gigs of RAM, and iPhone 17 Slim with a 6.65-inch display, $1,300, 8 gigs of RAM.
John:
So they're saying this Slim will be the most expensive phone
John:
won't have the most ram won't have the most cameras its screen won't be the biggest so the screen is like it's the screen is closer to the pro max size but it's bigger than the plain old pro and 17 size and only eight gigs of ram and then notably all four or all four iphone 17 models will apparently feature the ltpo display for the first time enabling pro motion across the whole line so isn't that great
John:
So that's the rumored iPhone 17 lineup.
John:
And you may be thinking, how does that make any sense?
John:
Well, it kind of makes some sense in like the MacBook Air thing.
John:
It was kind of expensive when it came out.
John:
It was actually less powerful than the ones that it replaced.
John:
But yeah, what are you getting for that extra money?
John:
You're getting the slimness.
John:
You're getting the coolness factor.
John:
That's the theory.
John:
But here I'm going to probably make Marco sad because some of the current thinking slash rumors are
John:
say the following, and we will link to the Max Tech video where he talks about this, and there's also a rack rumor story that we'll link to as well.
John:
The gist of it is that the new iPhone 17 Slim model is actually, drumroll please,
John:
The iPhone Fold, which was leaked years ago from multiple sources.
John:
But it's not going to be called the Fold, Max Tech says.
John:
It's going to be called the Ultra.
John:
And he says he thinks the reason everyone is calling it the iPhone Slim is because the device is significantly thinner than any other phone.
John:
That's the current state of this rumor, is that...
John:
You know what?
John:
This iPhone 17 Ultra, iPhone 17 Slim, it's thinner than all the other models, but it costs more than them.
John:
How do I square this circle?
John:
And also Apple is thinking about making a folding phone.
John:
The iPhone 17 Ultra Slim is the folding phone.
John:
It has to be thinner because when you fold it in half, it gets twice as thick.
John:
Apple has been working on a folding phone.
John:
Lots of other manufacturers have shipped them.
John:
Some rumors for years about Apple trying to solve the creasing problem with the screen and everything.
John:
The information, I'm not going to say corroborates this, but information had a story from last year, this time, saying that Apple is absolutely working on a folding phone.
John:
It's going to be like the Galaxy Z flip phones where it flips like goes down vertically or whatever.
John:
It has a code name of V68 inside the company and they do all the caveating or whatever.
John:
The information says Apple designers have struggled to come up with enough compelling features that would make consumers want one, especially given its high retail costs compared to non-foldable phones.
John:
So this is the sad ending of this room where Mark was like, I'm going to have a cool slim phone and it's going to be a different form factor and, you know, folding phones, whatever.
John:
But anyway, an iPhone slim will be cool.
John:
How are you going to feel if the iPhone slim is in fact the iPhone fold?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I mean, so, okay, it depends on how much of this rumor is accurate.
Marco:
So I think the biggest thing for me is that I have yet to see any good reason why a foldable phone should be the kind of flip phone style where it flips up like a Nintendo DS or like an old flip phone.
Marco:
Diagonal.
Marco:
You want diagonal like a sandwich?
Marco:
The main utility I've seen from foldable phones are the ones that unfold like a book into basically like a little square tablet.
Marco:
Those, I think, that makes a lot of sense because it's basically like having an iPad mini.
Marco:
Not quite that big, but it's like having a small iPad with you all the time.
Marco:
So if you want to do something that needs more screen space, like you're working on a document or something...
Marco:
There is, I think, substantial utility for that while keeping it still in the regular smartphone rectangular shape in your pocket.
Marco:
I don't think I would need something like that.
John:
Wait a second.
John:
Would you want a phone that folded that way that has a screen that you can use without unfolding it?
Marco:
So ideally, yes, but I don't know how that would be done necessarily by Apple.
John:
Android phones do this, and they do it both ways.
John:
I believe they have the ones where to use it at all, you've got to unfold it, and it becomes like a small tablet-sized thing.
John:
And there are also ones that say, actually, to use it, there's another screen, because, of course, then it has to be two screens, then the folding screen, and then the non-folding screen, which is a separate regular portrait orientation screen that you use when you don't unfold it.
John:
And obviously, that would make this thing even more expensive, given that this rumor here is that it's only going to be $3,200.
John:
I can't imagine that's what Apple is doing.
Marco:
That's the thing.
Marco:
If you look at the price of good folding phones, there is no way Apple's making one anytime soon for $1,300.
Marco:
It's just not going to happen.
Marco:
But if Apple's going to make a folding phone at some point...
Marco:
I really do think it makes a lot more sense to make it the opening book style folding rather than the old flip phone style folding.
Marco:
Because the flip phone style of folding, what you start with is a thick square, which doesn't fit very well into pockets anyway.
Marco:
And what you end up with after it unfolds is basically just a regular smartphone-sized screen, or maybe a slightly larger one, but it's not that much of a big screen.
Marco:
Whereas the book ones, at least you start out with something that's roughly the size of the phones we've already had for years, and when you open it up, it becomes almost a small tablet.
Marco:
That is way more utility than a flip-up phone.
Marco:
So I can't imagine Apple doing the flip up style.
Marco:
But anyway, all this is to say, I don't think these specs, I don't think the rumored specs of the iPhone 17 quote slim, I don't think these specs match up to a folding phone.
Marco:
The screen is not big enough and the price is too low.
John:
Yeah, I mean, prices obviously is the most difficult thing to get an accurate rumor about because that's not going to leak through the supply chain or whatever, right?
John:
So I'd take that with an even bigger grain of salt.
John:
I'm not up on the latest sales trends in folding phones, but my impression is the vertically folded ones are more popular than the ones that open up into books.
John:
Maybe I'm wrong about that, but that's my impression just from seeing reviews of Android phones and stuff.
John:
So...
John:
If Apple is making one, I believe, like, I mean, this is from the information from last year.
John:
The rumor was, was that it's like the Galaxy Z Flip, that it's a vertical folding phone.
John:
That's what Apple's working on.
John:
Doesn't mean they're not working on other folding phones.
John:
Doesn't mean there couldn't be other ones.
John:
But if I had to bet, I would say, if Apple makes a folding phone in the next few years, it will be vertically folding.
John:
And I agree with you about everything you said.
John:
It's like, well, what the heck is the point?
John:
All you've got it is, you know, you've made it smaller, but it also got thicker.
John:
And when you open it up, it's the size of a regular phone.
John:
Again, it's close to the size of the Macs, but it's not even bigger than the Mac.
John:
So it's not even like, oh, you're getting an even bigger screen.
John:
No, you're not.
John:
You're getting...
John:
A sub-Mac size screen, again, if these rumors are to be believed, in exchange for it being a little bit smaller in your pocket.
John:
But I think the vertical size change, as long as it doesn't get too much thicker, might actually make a difference.
John:
Especially for people who have clothing with pockets that are not sufficiently large for an actual phone.
John:
I mean, obviously, I have, you know...
John:
fairly big pockets on most of my pairs of clothing, but my shorts that I wear in the summer, some of them have bigger pockets than others.
John:
And even with a plain old 14 Pro, I notice when I wear the shorts that pockets are a little bit shallower.
John:
Does it have to be a little bit more aware that when I sit down to make sure my phone doesn't squirt out of the pocket or fall out of my pocket when I get up from sitting down or something like that?
John:
And my pockets are big.
John:
Like I'm not even like women's clothes that have fake pockets that aren't even real or real pockets that are like two inches deep or whatever.
John:
I'm not sure folding phones going to solve that.
John:
But for whatever reason, my impression is that the vertically folding ones are more popular in the market than the book open folding ones.
John:
And I think the book open folding ones.
John:
have to have a second screen on them because nobody wants to manually unfold something the size of a small tablet every time they want to do something with their phone there are use cases for that when you essentially i need to carry an ipad mini around with me but i don't want it to be that big in my pocket great folding one but i think there has to be a screen and once you're doing one gigantic folding screen plus a regular phone size screen that's like a three thousand dollar device from apple right so i find that less likely than a vertically folding one but
John:
At this point, I like the notion of all the rumors swirling together saying the slim, the ultra, the fold.
John:
These are not three separate products.
John:
It's one product, right?
John:
But on the other hand, I think I personally would be more excited by a plain old, non-folding, slim, one good camera.
John:
New form factor iPhone 17 called the Ultra.
John:
It doesn't fold at all.
John:
It's $1,300.
John:
That is the product that is the most exciting for me.
John:
That is more boring than a folding phone.
John:
And every story about the folding phone always has the caveat to say Apple might decide they can't do it.
John:
Apple's still working on decreasing.
John:
Apple's not sure they're going to ship anything like this.
John:
So I think these just might be getting combined together.
John:
I understand the logic.
John:
Slim, fold, slim, fold.
John:
See, if it folds, it's probably also slim when it's unfolded because when you fold it, it's going to get thicker.
John:
And then that's why, you know, I get it, but I'm just not quite sure.
John:
But all this is to say that the iPhone 17 lineup is currently shaping up to be a lot more interesting than the iPhone 16.
John:
not the iphone 16 is gonna be bad i'm gonna get one it's my year to get a new phone i'm sure it'll be great and everything but it's kind of i'm it suits me because i will be happy to for once have the final most refined iteration of the current stupid design with the gigantic three burner stove in the corner of the phone or whatever like i've been saying for years every time i you know i do that again the jason snell report card thing i say
John:
They can't go on with this.
John:
They can't keep making this thing that's supposed to, like, just look at the back of your phone.
John:
Once it passed the 50% mark, I'm like, that's not in the corner of the phone anymore.
John:
It's just a poorly centered thing on the back of your phone.
John:
Like, they need to find a way out of this.
John:
And one centrally mounted camera is a way out.
John:
I'm ready for a new big redesign, but I am happy to this year buy a 16 Pro, which will be the last, greatest, best refinement of this design we've had for how many years now?
John:
And then I'll let my wife figure out what she wants to do with the 17 Fold Slim or Ultra in 2025?
John:
Six?
John:
I don't know.
John:
When's the 17?
John:
Five.
John:
Five.
John:
Okay.
John:
Yeah.
John:
2025.
John:
Sorry.
Marco:
I think also what's two other interesting points here.
Marco:
Number one, a 17 Slim that, you know, by these rumors would, yes, not only be slim, it would probably also be a lot lighter.
Yeah.
Marco:
Because the way they would make it slim would be removing certain components, making the battery smaller, things like that.
Marco:
It would probably end up being a lighter weight phone by a noticeable amount.
Marco:
And I think that would be really nice to feel in the hand.
John:
Unless it had terrible battery life.
John:
Well, we'll see.
John:
And that's the risk of slim.
John:
You get rid of those cameras to make it slimmer.
John:
You get rid of a bunch of other stuff.
John:
take everything you can to make it slim you take out battery for sure and you and like the rumor is that having an a19 and not an a19 pro is it an effort to preserve that battery life so you don't put the hottest you know cpu in there you get the one that's like a step down i think they could do it like i think there is a place for that i mean i said the same thing about like i thought that the plus was the model they should have had their lineup just for like consistency and because some people buy it i think the mini should be in their lineup because some people want a small phone if they're getting rid of the plus
John:
Please bring the slim in and bring back the mini.
John:
I think that is a mini, a slim, a pro, a pro max and a regular.
John:
I think that is an adequate amount of diversity.
John:
Even the rumors don't say that.
John:
No rumors of the mini coming back.
John:
Sorry, mini folks.
Marco:
No, I think the slim is the mini.
Marco:
This is just like, all right, we're going to make a phone that is, you know, smaller in certain dimensions, but doesn't sacrifice the big screen that everyone actually wants and ends up buying.
Marco:
Right.
John:
Not the many people.
John:
The many people don't want the big screen.
Marco:
Yeah, but there weren't enough of them.
Marco:
And what's interesting about this too is like even... So a couple things.
Marco:
So number one, they're probably going to sell a smaller volume of this one.
Marco:
It makes more sense for Apple to say, all right, if we're going to have a smaller volume phone, we'll make it like more of a statement piece and we'll charge more money for it.
Marco:
So smaller volume, sure, but then we'll charge more for each one and we'll make up some of that difference.
Marco:
Secondly, this could enable them... You know, one of the things we talked about in the past a lot is like...
Marco:
For Apple to choose a component or a material or a technique in iPhone manufacturing, they're restricted to only choosing things that they can mass-produce in very large numbers because they just sell so many of the regular mainstream iPhones.
Marco:
maybe having this other model in the lineup can allow them to make more bold choices with things like materials or components that maybe they just can't get the volume.
Marco:
Maybe if they have some really good camera module,
Marco:
Maybe they can't make however many millions of iPhones they sell every year.
Marco:
Maybe they can't source that many millions of this camera, but they can put it in this model that they don't have to sell that many millions of because most of the ones they're going to sell are going to be the Pro phones and the regular phones.
Marco:
And then this model can have some crazy new component or it can have some, you know, material like this, like, you know, they're saying like a half titanium frame or whatever that means.
Marco:
Like, you know, they could do things like that that maybe they can't match produce for the volumes of the regular iPhone lines.
Marco:
Also, this allows them to take some risks.
Marco:
So if the market is telling them we want more and more cameras, but they can make this phone with just one and that saves them a bunch of other stuff and allows this to happen, this allows them to actually give people some different options.
Marco:
Again, for the first time, we don't have a lot of different options in the iPhone line.
Marco:
We have a small number of extremely similar options that make extremely similar tradeoffs.
Marco:
Again, this is something that's going to be a different set of trade-offs.
Marco:
That's very exciting.
Marco:
Honestly, I think I would love this phone.
Marco:
From what I'm seeing, from what the rumors are, I am tentatively very optimistic.
Marco:
I think I might actually really like this, and I really am looking forward to it.
John:
Keep in mind that it will be bigger than your plain old Pro in your hand.
John:
Again, it's closer to a Pro Max size when you're actually using it.
Marco:
Yeah, but I just redesigned my app to put all the controls at the bottom.
Marco:
I'm good.
Marco:
But again, it's offering lightness and thinness.
Marco:
That's really cool.
Marco:
And again, what if some of the ways they achieve that lightness and thinness are doing other things that seem bold or that might require feature removals or limits?
Marco:
So for instance, if you only have one camera, you're not shooting spatial video.
Marco:
That is an interesting trade-off at this point in Apple's history.
Marco:
We'll see how that goes.
Marco:
Spatial video, I think, has not taken off the way we expected it to, or the way they expected it to.
John:
Well, the iPhone 16s moved their cameras for it, so Apple hopes it's still a thing.
Marco:
Maybe.
Marco:
Well, they moved their cameras, and that will become possible.
Marco:
We don't know if that's why they moved their cameras.
John:
That's absolutely why they moved their cameras.
Marco:
100%.
Marco:
I think the giant plateau that only had two cameras diagonally set looked kind of bad.
John:
Well, that's the thing about it, by the way, the plain old iPhone 16.
John:
So what we're referring to is that the two cameras in the iPhone 16 are not on an angle.
John:
They're straight up and down from each other, which is better for spatial video.
John:
But I was looking at that and I was like, oh, and this will be back like, which one was it?
John:
Like the 10 or the 10?
John:
The 7, I think.
John:
Which one had two cameras vertically, or like the vertical lozenge?
John:
The 7 Plus.
John:
Are you sure that was vertical?
John:
Because the iPhone X was vertical.
John:
No, I think the 7 might have been horizontal.
John:
Anyway, there have been past cameras that have had essentially a long, thin lozenge with either one camera or two, right?
John:
Real-time follow-up, you're correct.
John:
On the 16, the...
John:
I was like, oh, the lozenge will be there.
John:
And that way the cases will just have to have a narrow slit for the cameras.
John:
But no, because the rumored pictures of the back of the 16 show that the flash thing is to the right of both of the cameras in the middle.
John:
So you're still going to need like a triangular opening or some kind of like vertical opening with a little notch cut out of it so that the flash can go out of the thing.
John:
So if you're thinking that the camera Mesa will be smaller because they just have two vertical cameras, think again, the flash is going to ruin it.
Marco:
Anyway, going back to the 17th Slim, I think this is a very, very fun-sounding option.
Marco:
I'm very excited for it.
Marco:
I think it could shake things up in a fun way.
Marco:
And I wonder, too, how will they achieve such thinness?
Marco:
Maybe the whole back of it isn't a sheet of glass.
Marco:
Maybe they found other ways to have radio transparency for the
Marco:
NFC Antenna maybe doesn't have one.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
There's all sorts of what-ifs that I think it'll just be a really interesting story.
Marco:
It'll be a really interesting product, and it will inject some delight into a market that is very nice.
Marco:
The iPhones have been very good, but we've been a little bit short on the newness and delight factors just because it's such a mature market.
Marco:
And so this could be really fun, and I'm looking forward to it.
John:
On the cameras, by the way, there are rumors lately that Apple is, for the first time in a while, going to be going with LG and Samsung in addition to Sony for camera sensors.
John:
It used to be basically all Sony for all their camera sensors in their phones for several years now, but...
John:
Pulling in LG and Samsung, I mean, A, it's just good business to have more than one source for a lot of your stuff.
John:
And B, it could lend credence to the idea that Apple is doing different things with cameras in different volumes for different phones instead of just, you know, Sony sourcing all of them and trying to reuse them across all of their things.
John:
The rumor about the phones with lots of cameras, the Pro phones, being all 48 megapixels is also kind of exciting.
John:
That doesn't mean that all the cameras are going to be equally good, because that's just probably not the way it's going to work.
John:
But it seems like they're getting closer.
John:
For too long, we've been like, the 1X camera is really good, and the 2X camera is there, and the wide angle also exists.
John:
And they improve them a little bit year after year, but the 1X camera seems to always just race ahead of them.
John:
I would love for those cameras to...
John:
come together again again i think the 15 the 16 rumor is that the 5x camera that casey's got on his giant phone is also going to be on on the pro phones the small pro phone as well so that's another thing that i'm looking forward to the camera that casey has tested out for me i'll be able to get that in a reasonable size phone in the 16 you're welcome
John:
16 is sounding like it's a good thing for me.
John:
And the 17, assuming it doesn't fold, sounds like it might be the phone for Marco.
Marco:
I mean, I wouldn't hold my breath on all three cameras being 48 megapixels actually delivering the quality upgrade that we want.
Marco:
I think what has held back those cameras to date has been smaller sensors and just optical realities of those focal lengths.
Marco:
I don't see either of those being massively different because those are also related.
Marco:
You can't fit a larger sensor behind certain optics of certain focal distances within a certain amount of thickness.
Marco:
So I think what's more likely – keep in mind when the iPhone 1X camera went from 12 to 48 megapixels –
Marco:
They did that with a bit of a trick on how the sub-pixels on the sensor were red, and the sensor size, I believe it increased a little bit in that year because it increased a little bit a lot of years, but the sensor did not get four times larger.
Marco:
So I think with that rumor, what is more likely to be the case is maybe the other two sensors grow a little bit in size, kind of incrementally, but the way they would achieve 48 megapixels would be the same method.
Marco:
It would be like the sub-pixel trick's
John:
Yeah, the pixel binning.
John:
Yeah, of course they would be.
John:
They're not going to be real 48 pixels.
John:
But the good thing is even with the bin pixels with the 1X camera, you can shoot in that 48 megapixel mode if you have sufficient light.
John:
And presumably that would become an option in the others.
John:
Like, I mean, the other thing holding back the other two cameras is cost.
John:
Like, they're not going to make all three cameras cost as much as the most expensive one.
John:
they're going to spend less i'm just saying like the gap is going to be there i would just like the gap to be narrowed and all the other cameras having the ability for example to do 48 megapixel raws that does occasionally come in handy if you're doing like an outdoor picture and you want to be like a landscape and you wanted to use the ultra wide the ultra wide looks kind of soft and smushy uh on a bright day i would love to be able to do the 48 megapixel unbind it's not again the optical realities are still there it's tiny tiny lenses tiny sensors but
John:
I'm willing to see what those trade-offs are like.
John:
I've kind of always been disappointed that the One X has just been moving farther away from the other cameras.
John:
Maybe the gap was narrowed by the 5X.
John:
I don't know, Casey.
John:
Do you feel like the 5X camera is closer to the One X camera than the old 3X was?
John:
Yeah, so there's the quality of the 1X that sets the bar on any given phone.
John:
And then the lesser camera is always worse than it.
John:
And it used to be like that the 3X camera was tons worse than the 1X.
John:
What is the gap between the 5X and the 1X in terms of quality?
Casey:
Anecdotally, I don't think it's that big.
Casey:
Well, unless you're talking like low light.
Casey:
But in just average everyday use, I don't think the gap is very big at all.
John:
Anyway, I'm looking forward to the gap being narrowed somewhat between those cameras.
John:
And I'm also intrigued by the idea of one really good camera with like a mechanical aperture in it.
John:
But at a certain point, I mean, that's why I think they should redesign the bumper.
John:
Think more about the bump.
John:
Like obviously they need more depth in there.
John:
a centralized bump maybe gives you more like look at the pixel phones they do essentially like a strip across the whole back in fact to the extent that the rumors about the 17 have been using photoshopped or very similar pictures to like the pixel phones with their strip that goes across and saying look it's the iphone 17 i'm like that's the google pixel you've just you know pasted on some apple cameras but like
John:
everybody sees the pixel like yeah if you just like it's a huge thing on the back of the camera it's thick but it goes from edge to edge you don't have to worry about the phone wobbling and just like just give into it we know that like you're most of the the huge amount of cost and space and this camera is being taken and this phone is being i just called it a camera and this phone is being taken up by the cameras don't pretend that you're hiding them in the corner you're not right so a centrally located one or a mesa that goes across the whole thing or something that's that's our dreams for the 17th
Casey:
Yeah, you know, I feel like this is what Marco was saying earlier, at least in part.
Casey:
But what I find appealing about the 17 and this hypothetical 17 slim, less folding, like, I don't know.
Casey:
I don't personally feel like I want a folding phone, but then Apple will make it and I'll say I must have it.
Marco:
Naturally.
Marco:
We're all going to buy it.
Marco:
Well, John will.
Marco:
Casey, you and I will buy it.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
I really like the idea of Apple having an additional phone, be it a slim or a wonky or a, you know, I don't know, throwing stuff against the wall, the iPhone 17 al dente, where it gives them permission to try crazy stuff.
Casey:
And
Casey:
iPhones are really really really great and I would argue have been for a long time but they're really really great and they're also really really kind of boring at this point and that's good boring because they're so great but
Casey:
But I would love for Apple to allow themselves to do like an iPhone 5C all over again, you know, or whatever the colorful plastic ones were.
Casey:
Granted, those were not that popular.
Casey:
I don't think anyone, or certainly the nerds didn't seem to like them for the most part.
Casey:
And this is where, you know, all the seven fans, there are the dozens of fans are writing us saying, oh, I loved it.
John:
I feel like there's been a lot of rehabilitation of the 5C.
John:
People look back on it fondly now.
John:
I'm almost fond of it when it was being released, but people look back on it.
John:
I think for the reason you're outlining is like, remember when Apple did fun things?
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
And so I feel like having a slim or whatever, I don't even care what it's called.
Casey:
I don't care how it looks.
John:
iPhone Air was suggested in the chat room, which I think is an obvious example that they probably won't use.
Casey:
Yeah, probably.
Casey:
I feel like having Apple give themselves a little slack to get a little crazy, I think would be super fun.
Casey:
And it would inject the kind of interest and fun into the iPhone that, like the political situation here in America, has gotten a lot more fun over the last week or two.
Casey:
um and so i am really excited at the idea of apple getting an additional phone where they can just you know loosen the belt and just kind of have fun and we'll see if that happens but and we'll see if it's it'll be folding if it'll be colorful it'll or what it might be if it'll just be a just absurdly thin but i would love for them to have some fun and let us have some fun along with them
Casey:
And that hasn't really happened in a meaningful way in a long time, especially with the top-of-the-line device.
Casey:
And maybe the state-of-the-art device is still the boring iPhone 17 Pro or whatever.
Casey:
But like we've said, maybe there's some interesting little tidbits and treats in the 17 Slim or whatever it ends up being.
Casey:
And I'm here for it.
Casey:
I'm excited about it.
John:
Well, you know, if the iPhone 17 Slim Sless Ultra is the most expensive iPhone, that probably dooms it not to have exciting colors.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, 1Password, Extended Access Manager, and Green Chef.
Marco:
Thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
One of the perks of being a member is you get our ATP Overtime segment.
Marco:
In every show, we do an extra bonus topic called ATP Overtime.
Marco:
This week's bonus is about AI and search.
Marco:
Reddit, Google, and Search GPT.
Marco:
A lot of good stuff happening there.
Marco:
So we're going to talk about that.
Marco:
Well, a lot of stuff happening there, at least.
Marco:
So we're going to talk about that in ATP Overtime.
Marco:
You can hear it by becoming a member, atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
Thanks for listening, everybody.
Marco:
And we'll talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Margo and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter...
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T Marco Arman S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Tech Podcast So long
Marco:
So, Casey, we've had a busy time in our apps' lives.
Marco:
I discussed on last show I was about to launch the Overcast rewrite, and here we are now, two weeks later, and it is launched, and it is out there.
Marco:
I've already issued three bug fix updates to it in the time since we last talked about it.
Marco:
And meanwhile, your app, Call Sheet, is about to hit its one-year anniversary, and I kind of wanted to go...
Marco:
kind of revisit you know what's been going on how how has call sheet gone um and i wanted to discuss briefly how the overcast launch has gone so far in our after show so you want to go first uh sure i certainly can i don't have too much to say at the moment because the renewals i i i don't watch um app store connect like
Casey:
I do look at it from time to time, but I'm not sitting in there like refreshing every five minutes to see what my retention rates look like or anything like that.
Casey:
So I haven't gone in and I haven't gone spelunking to try to get advanced warning or notice or enthusiasm about what my renewal situation looks like.
Casey:
It occurred to me, I think because I got my own renewal notice, and obviously, if you don't recall, I had put, I almost said overcast, I had put call sheet on the App Store a couple of days before its official release to do a few things that apparently CrowdStrike didn't want to do, like
Casey:
test and make sure that in-app purchase worked and your subscriptions work and so on and so forth.
Casey:
And so my renewal notice came before most and it was the, you know, hey, in a month you're going to renew.
Casey:
And this was like two or three, maybe in three or four weeks ago at this point.
Casey:
And so I got that renewal notice and I knew it was coming and I thought to myself, well, I probably need to start reminding people what they're getting for their money.
Casey:
And
Casey:
The more I think about it, the more I think I might have priced Callsheet a little too cheaply.
Casey:
And I'm not interested in having that conversation right now, but I'm happy to have that conversation another time.
Marco:
Isn't that interesting?
Marco:
I'm so surprised to hear that.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Well, anyways.
Marco:
As I sit here at $10 a year, trust me, I know.
Marco:
Right, right.
Casey:
So, again, we can have that conversation.
Casey:
I just don't think now is the time for it.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So with that said, even though I don't think it's a bad deal by any stretch of the imagination, I do also concurrently think I should remind people, hey, here's what you're getting for your money.
Casey:
And so a couple of weeks ago now, I put up a blog post, and I basically said, hey, renewals are coming.
Casey:
Here's...
Casey:
a list of literally all the release notes, summarized, but all the release notes from all the different versions I released in the past year.
Casey:
And there's a lot.
Casey:
And you know me, I'm not one to toot my own horn, really, ever.
Casey:
But there's a lot here.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
I really think in my heart that if you even vaguely enjoy Call Sheet, if you open it at least once every month, I think it's worth the money.
Casey:
I really, really do.
Casey:
And I hope that people who are getting these renewal notices for year subscriptions, and I mean, I also offer monthly subscriptions.
Casey:
So, you know, some people have renewed and some people have fallen off already.
Casey:
But for the year people, I really thought it would be a good idea to remind them
Casey:
hey, here's what you're getting.
Casey:
And that's what I did.
Casey:
And we'll see how it goes.
Casey:
If you haven't renewed yet, I encourage you to please allow it to happen.
Casey:
If you're feeling particularly generous, you can go into the app and into the in-app settings and where you manage your subscription.
Casey:
You can go in there and you can choose a different subscription.
Casey:
And if you want, once you tap the choose different subscription or choose new subscription button, you see the monthly and the yearly plans.
Casey:
But then there's a more purchase options bit of text.
Casey:
That's a button.
Casey:
that you can tap on, and you can choose to even up your subscription if you like.
Casey:
Or, I mean, you could also, you know, back it down if you wanted to.
Casey:
But we're not going to do that around here, right?
Casey:
So you could up your subscription to either $20 a year or $50 a year from the default $10, or excuse me, $9, actually.
Casey:
You don't have to do that, but hey, it would be really neat if you did.
Casey:
And so I'm hopeful that in the next, I don't know, two to four weeks, I'll get a, I mean, candidly, I hope I get a whole pile of money from Apple from people who have
Casey:
you know, renewed and re-upped.
Casey:
And that would be really great.
Casey:
And I have my fingers and toes crossed.
Casey:
I have no reason to believe that it's not going to go well, but this is my first rodeo when it comes to subscriptions.
Casey:
So I'm nervous about it and I'm hopeful.
Casey:
And so that's basically my story.
Casey:
I'm happy to, if you have questions, I'm happy to talk further about it.
Casey:
But if not, we can talk Overcast.
Marco:
I am a little curious, do you have the stats anywhere of how many people have told it not to renew?
Marco:
Because that's something that we now have, like StoreKit, Tube or whatever, at some point they changed that so that now you have that data available to you.
Marco:
Oh, I don't think I knew that.
Marco:
Yeah, you can tell if something is set not to renew now.
Casey:
Oh, right.
Casey:
I see your point.
Casey:
I see your point.
Marco:
I also use AppFigures to track my stuff.
Marco:
Do you use anything like AppFigures for tracking?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
No, I don't.
Casey:
I probably should.
John:
You should.
John:
AppFigures is really good despite the latest update being annoying.
Casey:
i probably should you know embrace that honestly i was talking to i think it was ben mccarthy about this and uh when they released uh i think it was ketchup um that they did subscriptions if i'm not mistaken um this ketchup is a really fun uh like pokedex sort of thing for pokemon players um we'll put a link in the show notes in any case uh i i believe it was ben that i was talking to that and they were wondering you know
Casey:
Would I roll my own when it comes to in-app purchasing and subscription and all that, or would I do it differently?
Casey:
And honestly, I don't regret rolling my own, but I think if I were to do it all over again, I would probably just use RevenueCat.
Casey:
And I think they are a former sponsor, to be completely honest.
Casey:
They are.
Casey:
And I genuinely sitting here right now, I don't know if they're a future sponsor, but they should be.
Casey:
I think if I were to do it all over again, I'd probably just do Revenue Cat because you get so much for free.
Casey:
And I think I've gotten for better and for... Well, it's not for free.
Marco:
Well, fair.
Casey:
It depends on how much you're earning, I suppose.
Casey:
At my level, I think it might be for free.
Casey:
I haven't looked at this in a while.
Casey:
But I...
Casey:
I think if I were to do it again and there's nothing stopping me from like adding it now, but it seems like a whole bunch of rework for not that much benefit.
Casey:
But if I were to launch a new app tomorrow, I'd probably start by at least looking into revenue cats pricing and seeing if I thought it was worth it.
Casey:
Um, because that gives you a lot more of this visibility than I have right now because I have to do it all myself.
Casey:
And I,
Casey:
And I see what you're saying about knowing if people are going to renew or not.
Casey:
And honestly, it never occurred to me to fire analytics entries about that.
Casey:
So no, it's going to be an adventure for all of us, but particularly me.
Marco:
I would say for whatever it's worth, maybe this will prevent them from becoming a future sponsor.
Marco:
I think with your needs and with StoreKit 2, I don't think you need revenue CAD.
Marco:
I think the in-app purchase handling of subscription stuff used to be a lot harder.
Marco:
It is a lot less hard now, especially if you're willing to not do server-side validation, which it depends.
Marco:
How much risk are you willing to take for somebody stealing your servers through some kind of weird jailbreak or whatever?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
For me, I have reduced that over time, like, you know, to the point where I think right now, I think I, with my rewrite, I have to double check the server side, but I think I'm actually not validating the receipts server side anymore.
Marco:
I'm still sending them to the server and the server saying, okay.
Marco:
But I'm not actually doing the validation because they changed, like, the signature mechanism a long time ago, and I just never updated to it.
Marco:
And, like, I would have to rewrite it.
Marco:
And, like, when I was trying to get my rewrite out the door, like, the last thing I needed to spend time on was validating an app purchase receipt on the server for something that doesn't cost me much money if somebody steals it.
Marco:
So, I'm like, I just said, all right, whatever.
Marco:
Just...
Marco:
Just say, okay, I'll trust the device validation enough.
Marco:
And so far that's been fine.
Marco:
And I think as long as you're willing to do that, which for most apps where you're just kind of getting features and not getting expensive resources necessarily, that's generally fine.
Marco:
So I think ultimately you could do this all yourself.
Marco:
You are doing it all yourself so far.
Marco:
And so I think you could do it again very easily yourself.
Marco:
Anyway, that being said...
Marco:
I will be very curious to hear how the renewals go.
Marco:
In my experience, renewal rates are actually very high for Overcast, but it's a different app.
Marco:
It's a different audience.
Marco:
My renewal rate is shockingly high.
Marco:
I don't have it in front of me, but when Apple did the small business program for developers where you pay 85% or you get 85.15 from the beginning, not just after one year renewals,
Marco:
that didn't change my income very much because I already have so many people who subscribed for more than a year to Overcast that my average rate I was paying was something more like 80-20 or whatever that was.
Marco:
Yeah, it was something like 80-20 instead of 85-15.
Marco:
So it was already pretty close to that, up from 70-30.
Marco:
So anyway.
Marco:
So yeah, so how do you feel about...
Marco:
how, how has a year of call sheet been like for you, like, you know, professionally, like how happy are you with it?
Marco:
How is, you know, how is it going like kind of momentum wise, not just money wise?
Casey:
Uh, well, yeah, I think it's gone better than I ever could have dreamed.
Casey:
You know, I, we've talked about it on and off over the last year.
Casey:
So, I mean, I'm happy to go on and talk about this for as long as you want, but in the interest of trying to be a little bit brief about it, um,
Casey:
I have a very big problem with call sheet, which is it's been well-received and well-regarded enough that it's hard to cling to my imposter syndrome.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
Marco:
Oh, what a problem, Casey.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
Obviously, I'm saying this with a big smile on my face, but it is kind of unusual.
Marco:
It's such a problem that people keep telling me that I'm good at my job.
Marco:
I know, right?
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
It's really difficult.
Casey:
Please, please weep for me.
Casey:
No, but I mean, all snark and kidding aside, it's been weird trying to not reinvent myself or reevaluate, but it's been weird and it's hard, honestly, if I'm being completely honest with you.
Casey:
It's hard for me to accept what evidence seems to indicate, which is that I'm not altogether dope, you know, and that I actually have put together something that's pretty great.
Casey:
It's not perfect, but it's pretty great.
Casey:
And, you know, I've been trying to...
Casey:
embrace that without letting it go to my head and it's cool to be mentioned in the same breath as overcast or any number of other highly regarded ios apps and it's a very unusual thing for me you know imagine if you will if you're a long-time listener it was 10 years ago now which
Casey:
You know, it's a long time, but it feels like it was just yesterday that everyone was making fun of fast text, injustifiably, and especially the icon, justifiably.
Casey:
And that was a long time ago and in a far cry from where I am today.
Casey:
But it turns out if you're persistent and stubborn and, you know, are willing to just keep trying and if you're willing to keep...
Casey:
failing to a degree, it turns out you can come out eventually with something pretty great.
Casey:
And that's where I've gotten.
Casey:
And it's been really hard and weird in the best possible way for me to accept that, hey, I'm actually pretty good at my job.
Casey:
And that's pretty awesome.
Casey:
And I've been really overjoyed by that.
Casey:
I mean, I probably shouldn't admit this publicly, but
Casey:
I'm very tired and I'm feeling a little sensitive in a happy way.
Casey:
Every once in a while, like maybe once a week, I'll search for overcast.
Casey:
I keep saying overcast.
Casey:
I'll search for call sheet in the app store just to see my little editor's choice badge because it is so lovely and wonderful and means so much to me.
Casey:
that i am one of a relatively small list of apps that has that badge and it just makes me really happy and and that's probably not something i should be saying out loud but here we are and we're amongst friends so it's okay um but i just i i'm really proud of that i really really really am and i'm super proud of my upgrade that i received and
Casey:
And it's just, it's, you know, you look around and you say, you know, and I think from the song it was meant in a not so great way, but you look around and in a good way you say, this is not my beautiful life.
Casey:
Like, how is this me?
Casey:
I was always the one everyone was making fun of.
Casey:
And now...
Casey:
I'm one of the ones that people are saying, hey, you do great work.
Casey:
And that's such an amazing professional and personal achievement that I'm so deeply thankful for.
Casey:
And again, I'm not trying to sit here and say that call sheet is perfect.
Casey:
It's not.
Casey:
I'm not trying to say that it's without problems.
Casey:
It's not.
Casey:
It has problems.
Casey:
But
Casey:
I really am proud of it, and I'm really overjoyed with the reception to it.
Casey:
And I really am optimistic, very optimistic, about how the next month or so will go when I start getting more feedback from Apple and eventually, hopefully, relatively speaking, a big fat check from Apple.
Casey:
So it's been great.
Casey:
I don't know if I've actually answered your question or not, but it's been really great, and I'm really thankful for it.
Marco:
no that's great i'm i'm honestly i'm very happy to hear that uh because it's it's a great app and you deserve all this success and happiness and some fighting against your massive imposter so so tell me about overcast though because the release happened i if i recall correctly we recorded our most recent episode right before release do i have that right after so it doesn't it doesn't it's something like that
Marco:
yeah so we recorded it I released it on July 16th and so this is kind of the first episode we're really recording like after it has been out and after the reception and all the bug fixes and everything else it has been a whirlwind but mostly a good one there is there are some exceptions to the goodness but I'll get well you know let's do the exceptions first I'll end on a good note there we go
Marco:
The exceptions are I'm getting a ton of negative reviews.
Marco:
Um, right now, like app figures does a helpful thing.
Marco:
If you go over to the ratings tab, uh, where you can graph lots of things, including your average rating over time and my average rating over time, like, you know, from before the update, it was 4.72.
Marco:
It is now 4.68.
Marco:
So it has dropped a tiny bit, but that's because I have like 65,000 total ratings.
Um,
Marco:
It also graphs some things for you that are more informative, such as average of new ratings.
Marco:
That's an interesting metric.
Marco:
What's the average among new ratings each day?
Marco:
That tells a very different picture.
Marco:
That, the average of new ratings from before the release, was in the high fours, like 4.7, 4.5.
Marco:
Now the average of new ratings is 1.9.
Marco:
So here's what's happening.
Marco:
That's undesirable.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
So what's happening is my customer sentiment is on fire.
Marco:
Now, I think overall the customer sentiment is not terrible for the rewrite, but the people who don't like it are being a lot louder than the people who do.
Marco:
So first of all, listeners, if you do like the rewrite, I would love to hear from you in the form of a star rating in the App Store to that effect.
Marco:
Please.
Marco:
But secondly, it is also an important feedback mechanism.
Marco:
In the rewrite, there have been some...
Marco:
some fires that I had to put out that justifiably made people upset.
Marco:
There have been a few bugs that I was able to iron out, including a release literally this morning that did some of the more important bug fixes, like playlist orderings being lost and stuff like that.
Marco:
There are a couple of big bug fixes in today's update.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
There's also design changes, and there's the big feature change of losing streaming.
Marco:
What was interesting so far is I thought losing streaming would cost me a lot more in user sentiment and negativity.
Marco:
What has actually cost me a lot more, certainly there are people out there who don't like that, and that's fine.
Marco:
I accept that.
Marco:
I knew losing streaming was an expensive thing to do.
Marco:
I hoped and I think so far still believe that it would be worth it because the amount of problems and technical complexity that it solves I think are worth taking a temporary hit in that area.
Marco:
what i was not expecting was that most of the problems people have with the new design are not about streaming they're about like just you know smaller little little things um like smaller behavioral changes some of which i've already fixed um like i i took out uh one tap play mode in the in the original release i have since re-added it because
Marco:
you would not believe how many people were very upset about that like that was a massive thing just you know just about how the episode cells respond to taps like that that was a huge thing for people um so i ended up putting that back most of the negativity now there's there's a little bit left of that's like you know people who hit a bug here and there for the most part that's mostly ironed out most of the
Marco:
Now, I use that term literally.
Marco:
I'm not saying design feedback because there are people who hate any design change.
Marco:
I accept that as part of doing a design change.
Marco:
That's what happens.
Marco:
You do a design change because you kind of have to just stay fresh over time.
Marco:
And whenever you do it, you're going to have people who hate it.
Marco:
And that's going to give you a bunch of one-star reviews.
Marco:
Okay, I accept that as a reality of doing business.
Marco:
But design bugs are things like this feature is not being found or people are misunderstanding this.
Marco:
And one of the like right now I am literally like my my head is like on fire with brainstorming ways to solve a massive design bug I have, which is people are not finding the sleep timer.
Marco:
hmm is there a little clock at the bottom i i never use it so i've never paid attention it was a little clock at the bottom oh okay now i moved i moved it into the audio settings panel like so the bottom now has you know airplane in the middle on the right is show notes info and on the left is like the like the kind of adjustments icon and that's where in that panel you have sleep timer and audio settings
Marco:
No one is finding it there.
Marco:
I've had so many people say, you took out the sleep timer.
Marco:
Where is the sleep timer?
Marco:
I have also had many people say they did find it, but they hate it being there.
Marco:
It's like that they have to now have one more tap to get to it, and they use it so often that's like a huge friction point.
Marco:
So I have to figure out...
Marco:
where to put that um that's i think that's going to be my next kind of you know larger update is going to be like tweak to the now playing layout i want to try to put the chapter list in where the info is like in the screen not as a sheet above the screen maybe also the audio settings maybe convert the buttons down below from three to five to put the sleep timer back and one other thing maybe a star who knows
John:
Oh, you're straight lines, Marco.
John:
You're straight lines.
John:
I know.
Marco:
I know.
John:
You're going to be an hourglass now.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
I mean, I was.
Marco:
That's, you know, for a long time.
Marco:
It's kind of the opposite of my actual body shape.
John:
What we're talking about is that he had aligned the items where, like, the progress bar is wide.
John:
Then the three buttons in the middle are a little bit narrower.
John:
Then the three buttons in the bottom are narrower still.
John:
And you could draw a straight line at an angle down both sides going from wide to narrow straight.
John:
But once he gets rid of the three items in the bottom and replaces it with four or maybe even five, the straight line is gone.
Marco:
And four would be tricky because much of that screen visually is centered.
Marco:
Like it's a very centered design heavy screen.
Marco:
And if I make it four, then the AirPlay source label, when it's not the built-in speaker, I will show the name of your headphones that are connected or whatever.
Marco:
And that would have a hard time being centered with four things down there.
Marco:
So it would probably go back to being five, which is what it was before.
Marco:
And one of them would be the sleep timer, and the other one would probably be the star.
Marco:
Or maybe a Marcus Blade thing.
Marco:
I haven't quite decided all that yet.
John:
You're going to get all the reviews like, yay, he finally brought back the sleep timer.
John:
It was never actually left.
Marco:
But that's a design bug.
Marco:
The reality is the design is not working if people are not finding this.
Marco:
That is a design bug I have to fix.
Marco:
Those are a little harder to fix than functionality bugs because you don't quite know.
Marco:
You could do some testing.
Marco:
You could do some surveys or whatever.
Marco:
But until it's really out there, you don't really get the full effect of how effective this thing is or isn't.
Marco:
um so i'm gonna have to you know look at stuff like that um but otherwise it has gone overall very well the trend of my ratings is indeed very concerning uh for for long-term health of my ratings that that is extremely concerning but with that exception and with the exception of the bugs i had to fix which are mostly and mostly most of the bugs are fixed now i think um
Marco:
it has overall gone very well in terms of having to rewrite a 10 year old app from scratch in a new language and new UI framework.
Marco:
I think it went very well.
Marco:
Uh, but there is still a lot of work to do, but it's mostly, it's mostly now getting down to like the more fun stuff, like, you know, re adding little details that, that, you know, didn't quite make the ship date or whatever else.
Marco:
But, uh,
Marco:
It has been quite a roller coaster.
Marco:
I am exhausted.
Marco:
I'm very glad I hit this release date.
Marco:
It was very important to me.
Marco:
I'm glad that it is done and out there now.
Marco:
It was this huge thing that's been hanging over me for a long time.
Marco:
And again, as I talked about two episodes ago...
Marco:
It really was getting to me personally and emotionally as a developer that I wasn't shipping this thing.
Marco:
It wasn't out there.
Marco:
I was falling behind, whatever else.
Marco:
So to have all of that behind me is just a massive deal to me.
Marco:
So now I just have to figure out how to make people hate it less.
Marco:
But again, I don't want to overstate the problem.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
I'm sure that the people who are leaving all the one star reviews, that doesn't seem to be the majority opinion, because if that was a majority opinion, I think there'd be a lot more of them.
Marco:
But so mathematically, I think I'm still OK.
Marco:
But I do want to try to figure out, like, how can I.
Marco:
how can I fix design changes here and there that are causing people paper cuts and see if I can improve that?
Marco:
But that's going to be a little bit longer of a process, probably over the span of weeks, not days, and maybe even longer, depending.
Casey:
So we'll see.
Casey:
I mean, from my perspective, from what I've seen, it seems like the response has been really, really, really good.
Casey:
And I'm not here to argue about...
Casey:
Whether or not the ratings have gone up or down or whatever, it would not at all surprise me if your ratings have plummeted because you have a wildly different user interface.
Casey:
And that isn't necessarily bad, but as you said earlier, it's different.
Casey:
And different when it comes to user interfaces for a lot of people is bad.
Casey:
Even if it's better, it's bad.
Casey:
And so it would not surprise me at all if you're taking a bath on ratings because that's one of the only ways that regular people feel like they have leverage over you.
Casey:
But in terms of what I've seen and the people I've spoken to about it, everyone seemed pretty universally enthusiastic.
Casey:
There's a couple of bugbears here and there.
Casey:
I had no idea how unbelievably offended people are by two-tap playback because I've seen some of these conversations go by in Slack.
Casey:
I don't get why it is such an immense burden, but oh my word, apparently it's an immense burden to tap twice instead of once to start a podcast.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I would have come to the same conclusion as you, that this is probably unnecessary and useless complexity to continue to have the two different ways of doing it.
Casey:
But here we are.
Casey:
But no, I feel like I had a couple of very frustrating bugs that...
Casey:
understandably since you had this deadline you didn't fix before release but they are i don't know if the uh playback when you do priority podcasts you know what i'm thinking of i forget how you describe it specifically but basically it would finish playback on a podcast and stop stop dead instead of continuing with the next one and you fix that bug certainly in the test flight beta is that released yet or no
Marco:
Oh, yeah, that was fixed on day two, I think, or day three.
Marco:
That was the biggest day one on fire bug was continuous play was not working with play next by priority.
Marco:
A couple of people reported that during the beta.
Marco:
And I couldn't find it.
Marco:
And it seemed like a weird edge case.
Marco:
I figured like, I can't find it yet.
Marco:
I need a bigger sample to really find this.
Marco:
And sure enough, I got one.
Marco:
But it was like, oh, this broke in a really big way for people.
Marco:
And it took me, I think it took me like two days to figure it out.
Marco:
But that was definitely like a showstopping, like must fix immediately kind of bug.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But I mean, once you got that squared away, that was good.
Casey:
And, you know, things are in different places, but you get used to it.
Casey:
Like, at first, I really didn't like not having the lateral swipe to look at show notes and stuff, but it's fine.
Casey:
Like, you just relearn the, I was going to say gesture, but that's a bit overloaded in this context.
Casey:
You relearn what you have to do in order to use the app.
Casey:
And
Casey:
That sounds bad.
Casey:
I think I'm coming across negatively.
Casey:
I don't mean to at all.
Casey:
It's fine.
Casey:
And the app is responsive.
Casey:
And it works well.
Casey:
And it lets you do what you need to do with it efficiently.
Casey:
So I think this is an update you should be proud of.
Casey:
And it certainly seems like...
Casey:
I know a lot of this is your hair being on fire because it's a new release and you're putting out fires and fixing bugs and blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
But I just get the vibe that you are far more productive in the code base today than you were yesterday.
Marco:
Oh, night and day.
Marco:
Night and day.
Casey:
And that's got to feel incredible.
Marco:
I've issued three updates in two weeks.
Marco:
I have never had this level of productivity with the code because it is all new, fresh code.
Marco:
It's better.
Marco:
It's just better code.
Marco:
I am 10 years better as a programmer writing this code as I was with the old structure of the old app.
Marco:
The languages have gotten better.
Marco:
The tools have gotten better.
Marco:
Everything has gotten better and more productive now.
Marco:
One thing that's interesting is my crash rate is way down.
Marco:
um because swift just doesn't crash as much when you write it correctly as you know old apps like and and i'm doing a lot less with concurrency in weird ways and so like that's you know like a lot less you know unsafe concurrency practice basically so like there's all sorts of ways like the new app really does not crash very much at all compared to the old app um and the old app wasn't crashing constantly or anything but it just it's better um
Marco:
I think for some people, the new app has been less reliable because they were hitting some of those bugs.
Marco:
I'm curious to see from today, now that I fixed the playlist reordering bug, at least the biggest one, and there was a minor progress loss bug that I also fixed in today's build.
Marco:
So I'm hoping to see... I think...
Marco:
more people out there will start to see the rewrite as being as solid as it is for me and my usage and i and i hope i hope they get that and appreciate that and and it works as well for them as it works for me but either way like if i have to fix something or tweak something or change something it is so much i mean look i added one tap playback in like an hour like it was so fast to add that back in
Marco:
like it's just it's so like working with Swift UI oh my god it's a delight like yeah it's a slow start but it is so easy to do stuff like like you know for instance one thing you know some people of course when you change the design the immediate feedback you get is give me an option to change it back yeah
Marco:
which is bananas right i get it i get it and so you know and so it's it helps to kind of like don't react immediately when people say that like give it a second see see how you and they feel after a bit of time you know but if for some reason i have to do things like you know give people a way to view playlists uh as a as a vertical list again instead of a horizontal list
Marco:
I can do that without a ton of work.
Marco:
It's some work.
Marco:
It's not nothing.
Marco:
It certainly creates some more conditions I have to test in the future.
Marco:
That's probably the biggest cost of it.
Marco:
But to have things like UI preferences there are very easy in SwiftUI compared to how they were before.
Marco:
So much easier.
Marco:
So that's the kind of value that I've built by having this new code base.
Marco:
I have created like easier opportunities to make the app better for people, to add more weird options.
Marco:
Like if I want to have, I probably won't do this, but like on the now playing screen, if I want to have a like prominent sleep timer mode where you can go set a setting and the sleep timer is always displayed in the bottom, like I can do that very easily now.
Marco:
I won't do that because that's a bad idea, but I can do things like that.
Marco:
For instance, one of the things people have requested since the beginning of Overcast is an on-screen volume control.
Marco:
The way the music app has an on-screen volume control, you have the big slider.
Marco:
I've never had one on Overcast because I've always thought it wasn't worth the screen space it took up.
Marco:
Well, now, if I want to have an option that most people won't want or need, and I won't want it to be on for most people, but if I want to have an option that adds, you know what, fine, have an on-screen volume control.
Marco:
I can do that now with very little work, and it probably won't break too much, if anything.
Marco:
And that kind of flexibility I just didn't have before with UIKit and with all my massive, complicated layout code and everything.
Marco:
I just didn't have any of that flexibility before, and now I do.
Marco:
So that's what I've built.
Marco:
I've built the ability to have not only a great, fast framework now, and what seems so far to be a much more reliable one, but also...
Marco:
to be able in the future to iterate more quickly and to give more people weird little options that I don't think should be the default, but I can add them for you.
Marco:
Like I can do so much more of that now and so much more easily.
Marco:
And I can actually iterate a lot to find the best design that's best in the first place that I don't even have to make options for.
Marco:
Like there's so much of that possibility now and that's what I was building towards and I'm finally here.
Casey:
That's awesome.
Casey:
I mean, I hear your concern about your ratings, and I get it.
Casey:
I absolutely get it, and it makes sense.
Casey:
But I feel like, overall, you sound like a coiled-up spring that has been released, you know, that you're feeling mostly at peace.
Casey:
And once you get through this phase of, screw that guy, he changed what I knew.
Casey:
It's different.
Casey:
I don't like it.
Casey:
And I think once you get through that,
Casey:
you're going to be in a real, real solid, real good place.
Casey:
And you certainly sound like you're much better for it.
Casey:
And I'm excited for you because I know this was a long, hard road and you've made it to the end.
Casey:
Or, well, maybe not the end, but you've made it to the next milestone, the next waypoint.
Casey:
And that's super great.
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
And to torture this metaphor further, it's like that highway was ending.
Marco:
Like I made it to the junction with the next highway because like the highway I was on, I'd reached the end and I couldn't keep going on that highway.
Marco:
Like I could not keep going with the old code base anymore.
Marco:
I just couldn't.
Marco:
It had no future.
Marco:
It barely had a present.
Marco:
And I couldn't work on it anymore.
Marco:
I couldn't maintain it anymore.
Marco:
I couldn't keep up with it.
Marco:
I couldn't add new features.
Marco:
I couldn't iterate the design.
Marco:
It had just grown too much and too complicated, and I couldn't keep up with it.
Marco:
And so there was no other option.
Marco:
There was no option to continue on that path.
Marco:
It was merely a question of how great or how acceptable can I make the new path to people?
Marco:
And that's going to be an ongoing process.
Marco:
I'm still working on it.
Marco:
I'm still open to ideas for changing things.
Marco:
I'm still going to tweak the design here and there.
Marco:
But we're not going back.
Marco:
We can't go back.
Marco:
There is no back to go to.
Marco:
This is the way.
John:
ready for my app update yeah wow you have one no i feel left out i do have two apps nobody buys them they're fine two dinky mac apps they do not have subscriptions i don't have any renewals people paid me five dollars four years ago and that's all the money i'm ever getting them from them uh there's no new sales uh although i did while you guys were on through that i did count up how many releases i've done how many releases for my two dinky apps do you think i've done total and how many years did you say
John:
uh four i'm gonna say maybe like 15 20 yeah i was gonna say 20 75 oh wow oh look at you 75 releases for that five dollars you paid me once back in 2020 you've gotten 75 really well 75 combined releases it's much more on one app than the other but anyway
John:
Yeah, no, I still like my apps.
John:
I use them every day.
John:
I'm glad they keep working.
John:
I still have to test.
John:
I did test build.
John:
I test one of them on Sequoia.
John:
I need to test build another one to see how they're doing.
John:
But I did make one of them strict concurrency compliant like earlier in the year.
John:
The other one I'll tackle eventually too.
John:
So I do continue to develop these and they exist.
Yeah.
John:
And my review activity is nothing.
John:
No reviews.
John:
So what does that mean my average is?
John:
Zero or five?
John:
I don't know.
Marco:
I mean, sometimes nothing is better than what you actually get.
John:
Yeah, no, I have a good average.
John:
I don't want to break the average with bad reviews.