No More Holes in My House
Marco:
So the masks that I have worn most of the time since the mask era began, you know, I've tried a few different ones.
Marco:
And I ordered back months ago, I got these masks from a company that makes fish and Grateful Dead themed merchandise.
Marco:
And
Marco:
and it's it doesn't say fish on it but it has the uh fishman donut pattern on it which is that pattern of like the the pinkish circles on the bluish background it's in my twitter background fisherman donut yeah but uh fishman uh spelled f-i-s-h-m-a-n uh it's the drummer john fish anyway so it's
Marco:
long story but um this is like a symbol of fish and it's not an obvious one for people who don't know it it's like it's a subtle thing that was not subtle but it's this thing that people who are not fish fans don't recognize as a fish thing it looks like measles right so anyway into the uh the germ uh theme so i got a mask featuring this pattern and yes it's just the same pattern as my twitter background if you want to look at it quickly we'll make it the chapter art for this uh chapter uh so anyway bloody cheerios yeah
Marco:
and it's it's a fish thing anyway i don't need to explain what it is you don't care but uh the point is it's a it's like a symbol of fishness and fish fandom that even many fish fans might not immediately notice it as such and so it's especially nerdy and only fish fans would know what it is no regular person would ever know what this is and
Marco:
I walked my dog every day.
Marco:
Even during the pandemic, I would still walk my dog.
Marco:
I would just be careful.
Marco:
I was in the suburbs away from people walking on the sidewalk.
Marco:
I'd cross the street if someone came the other way, etc.
Marco:
So I was careful, but I was still outdoors in public for months wearing this mask.
Marco:
And zero people back at home ever seemed to notice what it was, ever said anything about it.
Marco:
And over the course of a few months, I probably passed a few hundred people.
Marco:
Not a single person said a word.
Marco:
i come to the beach town day one i get two people saying hey nice mask and i'm having i'm now having people like as i'm walking my dog i'm now having people like just start talking to me about fish without even asking if that's what it is because they just know like i somebody i was i was you know petting some cute puppy today and and the owner was like so you catch the 89 show they aired last night
Marco:
like didn't even bring it up it's funny like this is i feel like like this is what normal people have with sports fandom that i've never had like the way like you can just wear like a hat for a sports team or something and you can walk down the street and strangers will be able to have small talk with you about that sports team that you both understand
Marco:
This is something about, like, normal society that I've never been able to participate in because I've never had anything about sports.
Marco:
Like, I don't have that in me.
Marco:
And so I always felt like this weird, like, outsider, like, no one likes the stuff I like.
Marco:
You know, being a nerd, that's part of life.
Marco:
But, you know, it's like no one likes the stuff I like.
Marco:
No one understands who I am.
Marco:
And around here, I'm walking around with my fish mask, and I get, it's like, fish fans seem to be nowhere.
Marco:
Like, when you're the guy who likes fish in the room, you have no support from almost any room that you're in, right?
Marco:
Hey, buddy.
Marco:
You gotta hang out on more college campuses.
Marco:
And, like, around here, it's like, they're everywhere.
Marco:
Like, my people are everywhere.
Marco:
It's amazing.
Marco:
Stoners, you mean?
Yeah.
Marco:
I don't know if that's it but I'm not even one of those I don't even know if that's it but there's some you know significant overlap between those groups for sure but no I think it's just like a certain kind of music nerd and for some reason I have none of them where I live the rest of the year and here it's just everybody it's amazing
John:
You should get the Moo Moo.
John:
Just go for it entirely.
John:
I agree.
John:
I would love to see that.
John:
Please.
John:
I can't believe the drummer for the band.
John:
Is that why the band is named P-H-I-S-H?
John:
Is it named after him or is it just a coincidence?
Marco:
It's named after him.
Marco:
His nickname is Fish.
Marco:
His last name is Fishman.
Marco:
But they spelled it P-H and he spells it F. I don't know why.
Casey:
I don't think I knew that.
John:
It's like Eddie Van Halen with a P-H.
John:
Van P-H-A-L-H-L-E-N.
John:
Eddie Van Phalen.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Why didn't you just use F-I-S-H?
John:
I don't know.
John:
Why is he wearing Mumu?
John:
I don't know.
John:
Why does it have red blood cells on it?
John:
I don't know.
John:
We've gone from measles to bloody Cheerios to red blood cells.
John:
It's been a journey, fellas.
Casey:
We're only just beginning.
Casey:
All right, so our first stretch goal was me taking over the pre-show audio, which as much as... No one's keeping track of these.
John:
are they?
John:
We'll just say these things and put out ridiculous numbers that we're never going to achieve and just make stuff up.
John:
Someday we're going to hit one of those numbers and someone's going to remind us and we're going to have to do it.
Casey:
That's fine.
Casey:
So the Fisherman... Fish Relief Fund?
Casey:
What did you call it?
Casey:
Fisherman Relief Fund?
Casey:
Fish Relief Fund?
Casey:
I can't even say it fast.
John:
Fisherman's Friend Fund.
John:
Fisherman's Friend Fund.
John:
That's the winter version.
John:
Yeah, right.
John:
We'll keep Marco and bad tasting cough drops forever.
Casey:
They do taste like garbage, but they do work.
Casey:
They do work.
Casey:
Anyway, we're going to cut this from the release show.
Casey:
Hi, future Marco.
Casey:
But I just wanted to thank everyone who has become a member because – wait, wait.
Casey:
What do you mean, oh, yeah?
Casey:
I wasn't even talking about the Hamilton part, you dick.
John:
Just everything you say, he was saying, oh, yeah.
Casey:
Everything that Casey says, just cut it right out.
Casey:
It will make so many people happy.
Casey:
No, I just wanted to say that we reached an undisclosed milestone in membership, and we will keep it undisclosed.
Casey:
But that meant a lot to all three of us, and that's very kind of everyone who has joined.
Casey:
No, this is this is going to go in the show.
Casey:
This is in the show.
Marco:
This is good.
Marco:
Our members are awesome.
Marco:
We had a lot of them now and it's really good.
Marco:
We're very happy.
Marco:
Thank you, everybody.
Marco:
You're being awesome and we're very happy and we're very thankful.
Marco:
And I'm still working on the bootleg feed.
Marco:
Haven't had a lot of time to work this week for unrelated reasons, but nothing horrible.
Marco:
Just, you know, life got busy.
Marco:
But yeah, we're getting there.
Casey:
But I just wanted to say thank you very much because we have been overjoyed and some of us, namely me, have been flabbergasted by the response and especially for not really getting a whole lot in return at the moment.
Casey:
And so it is incredibly kind of every single one of you.
Casey:
And we are deeply appreciative of it.
Casey:
So thank you.
Marco:
Also, thank you for proving me right when we first started.
Marco:
we first started talking about doing this you know we were trying to argue as we mentioned in the past like you know we we each had different uh bets on how many members we'd get and so far uh everyone is proving me right and not proving uh casey right and i think john you're still kind of in in uh contention right yeah no i think we've exceeded my expectations now too all right not by a lot but by a little bit
John:
We're still less than half of your optimistic number, though.
John:
That's fine.
John:
But, you know, by reverse price is right rules, I still win.
John:
So here we are.
John:
All right.
John:
Sure.
Casey:
Well, no, that's not true, right?
Casey:
Because you've guessed over the actual amount.
Casey:
So it's closest without going over.
Casey:
Oh, you said reverse.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
I missed that part.
John:
Yes.
Casey:
Sorry.
Marco:
Close without going under.
John:
It's double secret probation.
Casey:
What is that from?
Casey:
I know that.
Casey:
No, I know that.
Casey:
What is that from?
John:
You don't know that.
John:
Isn't it from?
Marco:
It's from Animal House.
John:
Hey, Marco gets a reference.
John:
What's going on?
John:
I've seen that.
John:
I've seen Animal House.
Wow.
John:
Marco saw a movie.
Casey:
I've seen it.
Casey:
I haven't seen it in years, but I've seen it.
Casey:
You had the college t-shirt.
Casey:
I actually don't remember liking Animal House very much, but it has been forever since I've seen it.
John:
No, it's probably not a good movie.
Casey:
Okay, moving on.
Casey:
Let's start with some follow-up.
Casey:
Hey, guess what?
Casey:
There's no target disc mode in our Macs, which I guess is a bummer, but to be honest, I think I've only used target disc mode like a couple of times in my life, so...
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Is this a bummer?
Casey:
Yeah, it's a bummer.
Marco:
I mean, look, target disk mode is one of those things that most Mac people never know is there, but the nerds know it's there.
Marco:
And it occasionally comes extremely in handy because what it does, for anyone who doesn't know, very quickly, what it basically does is it's been featured in Macs forever, and it allows you to boot up holding down T or option T or something.
Marco:
John can correct me.
Marco:
And basically, the Mac that you're booting up in target disk mode
Marco:
doesn't boot the OS.
Marco:
Instead, it basically turns itself into an external hard drive enclosure for the drives that are inside of it.
Marco:
And then you can connect a different Mac to it over various cables over the years.
Marco:
That's evolved as the ports have changed over time.
Marco:
The second computer can access the drives on the first computer as if they were connected just via an external enclosure.
Marco:
And so it's a way to boot a hosting computer into a just disk read mode.
Marco:
so that you can usually transfer its contents to a new computer.
Marco:
So it's great when you're changing, when you've got a new Mac, or your Mac is dying and you have to get stuff off of it and it can't boot all the way, or the screen is dead and you just want to get stuff off the disk or whatever.
Marco:
And it's a very useful troubleshooting and migration tool to be able to just read stuff over the cable directly.
Marco:
Now,
Marco:
In recent times, it is less necessary as you have migration assistant getting better, but it still serves a very nice role.
Marco:
And it's probably still more flexible than migration assistant because you don't have to be doing a migration to do it.
Marco:
If you have a dying laptop,
Marco:
you can put it in target disk mode and connect some other computer to it and just pull off whatever you want.
Marco:
It just shows up as a disk.
Marco:
And so it's certainly getting complicated over the years as things like full disk encryption have happened.
Marco:
And I would imagine the reason it's different on the ARM Macs is related to that somehow.
Marco:
It's related to the physical security of the data on the disk or something like that.
Marco:
I'm sure they've enhanced it even further, etc.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
They probably have good reason for changing it, but it's probably going to be slower and worse the way they're doing it over SMB instead.
Marco:
So I do mourn the loss of target disk mode.
Marco:
I don't use it often, but when I do use it, it's really nice to have.
John:
yeah like what i was saying it's the you can still do something like this but instead of exposing it as an external hard drive it exposes it as a server that speaks smb and you authenticate against it presumably using the credentials that are that belong to the mac that you're connecting to and you're doing everything over smb and smb is going to be slower and less feature rich than directly mounting the drive and i also assume the reason they're not doing it is because well first of all
John:
iOS devices don't have it, and the ARM Macs owe a lot hardware-wise to iOS devices.
John:
And second, there may be even more security when dealing with the internal storage in iOS devices than there is with Macs, and maybe this was just the path of least resistance.
John:
We'll see.
John:
Related to this, by the way, we didn't mention this last time when discussing Macs,
John:
how the startup process has changed on our max there's that session that we linked to last week that i think contains information but it's worth mentioning for people who didn't watch it uh marco mentioned not being able to remember like what key you hold down when you boot into different things command option pr the shift key hold down r oh no it's command r now it's very confusing
John:
Apple has unified all of that for the ARM Macs.
John:
You just hold down the power key, or I suppose the Touch ID key or whatever.
John:
We're going to talk about that later, I think.
John:
The unlabeled button.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The one button that's on your computer that's not a mouse button or keyboard thing.
John:
The power key.
John:
And that will apparently bring up a little miniature...
John:
interface that will allow you to select what you want to do instead of having to memorize all these weird key combos so more arcane knowledge will uh be uselessly stuck in people's heads forever uh and people will just need to know you have to hold down one key which is useful there's a bunch of stuff about the new max where they can boot more of the os like that's one of the apfs volume rolls you like a miniature os that has enough of the os to get something going uh
John:
including potentially like graphics acceleration and stuff.
John:
There's lots of the other modes that you used to be able to boot into like hardware diagnostic mode or even like recovery mode.
John:
A lot of the times it feels worse and slower because it loads limited graphic drivers or it's not a real GUI at all or it used to look like classic macOS for years even though you're running macOS 10.
John:
uh this is all going to improve matters by booting something closer to a full-fledged os where you can run actual stuff um so i welcome this unification although i'll also miss target disk mode because that was very handy and mostly the reason it was handy it was the speed like directly connecting a hard drive is always faster than connecting to a server especially back in the bad old days of uh
John:
Apple file, AFS, whatever.
John:
I can't even remember the acronym anymore.
John:
It's been so long.
John:
That's it.
Marco:
And just think all those websites that you have to like, whenever you can't remember the key combination and you have to search the internet for like Mac recovery key combo and you get these garbage websites that are filled with ads that all you're doing is digging for the one stupid three word combo in the middle that tells you what you actually need to know.
Marco:
What are all those sites going to do now?
Marco:
Apple's putting them out of business.
Yeah.
John:
You'll have to go to a website to find out where the power button is.
John:
Where is the power button in an iMac anyway?
Marco:
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Casey:
WidgetKit and third-party watch faces.
Casey:
What's going on here?
John:
I don't know how much we talked about WidgetKit, but it's that SwiftUI way to sort of serialize widgets into a bunch of instructions or SwiftUI so that they can run without your application running, and it's what's used automatically.
John:
to make the widgets in the sidebar in Big Sur, and it's very similar to the complications that run on watches.
John:
In all those cases, every complication in every widget doesn't have an associated app running constantly behind the scenes to power it, because that would be incredibly inefficient, especially on the watch.
John:
That's one of the things a widget kit does.
John:
And we also talked about third party watch faces, the ability to vend multiple complications on the new watchOS of the same type.
John:
You can basically fill the entire screen except for the little area that has the digital time with a bunch of content that essentially comes from third party apps.
John:
But it's not really a third party watch face.
John:
Well, a couple of people have noted that there is a private API called underscore clock hand rotation effect.
John:
in WidgetKit.
John:
Which doesn't necessarily mean that WidgetKit is intended to make third-party watch faces.
John:
You can imagine making a widget on your Mac that is itself an analog clock or doing some other kind of animation.
John:
that uses a clock hand style rotation effect, but it does show at least somebody was thinking about using widget kit to make something that looks like a clock.
John:
Uh, so, and it, and if Apple was going to make a third party watch face thing, it would probably work similar to complications.
John:
And that again, you wouldn't be allowed to have an app running on the CPU all the time, powering the watch face, because that would be very inefficient.
John:
There would have to be some very limited system, just like there is for complications for drawing your watch face.
John:
So yeah,
John:
If something's going to eventually mature into third-party watch faces, it could be a similar API to what they use for complications.
Marco:
Yeah, which to me is actually very promising.
Marco:
I've been going under the assumption for a while now that they're never going to actually allow custom watch faces.
Marco:
And I still think that's the most likely outcome.
Marco:
But I agree, John.
Marco:
I think if they're going to do it,
Marco:
this is clearly the way they're going to do it for power reasons.
Marco:
Like, okay, you can give us a SwiftUI archived view or whatever.
Marco:
How are these complications work?
Marco:
I don't know enough about SwiftUI yet to describe it better.
Marco:
But basically, you can do it with these rudimentary SwiftUI operations from this preset library of things that we allow clock faces to do.
Marco:
And those are all things that then the OS can do extremely efficiently without calling your code constantly at all.
Marco:
So that's probably how they would do it if they were to ever do it.
Casey:
John, tell me about unified memory architecture in a future ARM Mac Pro, if you please.
John:
There's not much new information about this.
John:
We talked a couple shows ago about how Apple was pushing the unified memory architecture as a way to turn a potential con into a pro by saying, well, you know.
John:
It's not that we don't support discrete GPUs, it's that our integrated GPUs are so amazing.
John:
And like I said, that's mostly true.
John:
Again, the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X both use quote-unquote integrated GPUs, and they're really powerful.
John:
So right up to the point where...
John:
you you know everything up to a real gaming pc you can do with an integrated gpu so if you're worried that oh my macbook pro won't have a discrete gpu anymore the graphics will be bad don't worry about that the only place you got to worry of course is the mac pro where it can have like four discrete gpus eight discrete gpus depending on how you pack them in there and that's just not gonna work integrate but anyway
John:
The unified memory architecture of sort of having the CPU and the GPU all show memory has advantages.
John:
They're closer to each other.
John:
It can be faster for a certain operation, so on and so forth.
John:
But of course, the disadvantage is that you're fighting for memory with the rest of the computer and dedicated GPU memory can have a much wider bus width and other advantages that...
John:
usually aren't true of the system memory.
John:
But related to this is a bunch of existing technologies that are used to mediate between the CPU and the GPU, trying to share, trying to coordinate with each other and share a pool of memory while also having dedicated memory for dedicated GPUs.
John:
One of them is called, this is a fun acronym, Cache Coherent Interconnect for Accelerators.
John:
which is ccix let's see cache coherent i get the cci for interconnect four accelerators is an x accelerator i don't know anyway and it's pronounced c6 if you thought mac os 10 was hard to pronounce c6
John:
This is not consumer-facing.
John:
No, no.
John:
But anyway, this is an existing standard for doing this type of thing.
John:
AMD GPUs also support what they call HSA, which allows the CPU and GPU to share memory while also having their own dedicated memory.
John:
Hussah!
John:
It's heterogeneous system architecture.
John:
There's a bunch of standards for doing this.
John:
Like, this is not unknown technology.
John:
And as we discussed last time, like...
John:
The easiest thing that Apple could do is just support external GPUs on our Macs.
John:
That's totally a thing they could do.
John:
Lots of rumors now, based on WWDC slides, not listing discrete GPU support are saying, oh, Apple's not going to do that.
John:
They're going to do everything integrated, which seems unlikely to me for the aforementioned reasons that you can't put eight giant...
John:
100 watt gpus inside a system on a chip it's too big um or that they're going to make their own apple's going to make its own external gpus which sure why not they're making they're going to make their own cell modems they're making their own system on a chip so they could make their own gpus if they wanted to still it seems the path of least resistance would be i'll just keep stick with amd and
John:
support them on only one model the big giant mac pro and on every other model you get a very very very fast quote-unquote integrated gpu which is another thing that apple emphasize in all their sessions like they have these advice in their documentation and in their talks like don't assume when the gpu is the integrated gpu that it's the slow one
John:
that's that's not true for the apple ones apple's integrated gpus are fast and this is like they're saying it mostly like from a programmer's perspective don't make assumptions about i think they have like this this attribute that says you know is low power or is gpu is low power and i think the apple ones return true and they're like yeah they're low power but they're also really fast so don't don't use low power as a proxy to mean slow uh
John:
anyway um i'm still very uh optimistic about the potential gpu performance on all of the r max the only one that's question mark is the mac pro and i think that's probably going to come much later in the transition so we look forward to seeing what apple has to offer there but in the meantime if you're worried uh don't be because it
John:
Well, I would say don't be because technologically speaking, Apple can absolutely put a GPU in all their laptops that will more than satisfy your needs, right?
John:
The iMac, maybe it's a question mark.
John:
But overall, Apple could choose to have wimpier GPUs just because they don't think that's an important area to spend die space.
John:
I just don't think they'll make that choice.
John:
But based on how good the GPUs are in the fanless iPad, I'm very optimistic about the GPUs in upcoming Macs.
Casey:
Tangentially related, a few hours ago, Rene Ritchie tweeted kind of out of nowhere.
Casey:
And maybe there was a kerfuffle about this and I just wasn't privy to it.
Casey:
But as far as I was, I could tell it was out of nowhere.
Casey:
And he writes from Apple, quote, over a decade ago, Apple partnered with Intel to design and develop Thunderbolt.
Casey:
And today our customers enjoy the speed and flexibility it brings to every Mac.
Casey:
We remain committed to the future of Thunderbolt and will support it in Macs with Apple Silicon, end quote.
Casey:
Which is good news.
John:
Yeah, that was a no-brainer.
John:
Like I said, Thunderbolt is now royalty-free.
John:
You don't need an Intel chip to do it.
John:
USB 4.0 is basically Thunderbolt 3.
John:
Intel is building it into their new CPUs.
John:
Everything is completely lined up for Apple to continue to support Thunderbolt.
John:
Thunderbolt 4, interestingly...
John:
um doesn't it doesn't get any faster which i just i just looked this up because i didn't know what the deal with thunderbolt 4 and usb 4 was i was confused and thinking usb 4 was thunderbolt 4 but no usb 4 is thunderbolt 3 not confusing at all i know thunderbolt 4 is just thunderbolt 3 everything the same speed but it supports like hubs with four ports and it has more stringent requirements for cables and other stuff like that so if you look for something with that's thunderbolt 4 you'll know you're getting a bunch of stuff that's optional in thunderbolt 3 um
John:
But yeah, there's no reason Apple can't support all of that.
John:
I mean, upcoming iPads could support quote-unquote USB 4, which is actually Thunderbolt 3.
John:
It's all lined up for Apple to be able to do that without including an Intel chip and built right into their system on a chip, so it'll be fine.
Casey:
Let's talk more about Apple Platform Unification and ARM Mac hardware.
John:
Upgrade already beat us to it, but I thought this was a good topic that tied into a previous discussion about Apple Platform Unification, which mostly was... We ended up going down a rabbit hole of APIs, ATP being ATP.
John:
But also, I was trying to talk about the overall experience of what it's going to be like to use that, what kind of applications will be available to you, and how...
John:
They all have to live together and work together and seem like a coherent whole and not seem like you're running like a bunch of VMs, right?
John:
That's all look like one thing.
John:
The flip side of that is, what does the hardware look like?
John:
We already talked about on the WWDC show that, you know, touch Macs are coming.
John:
All signs point to that.
John:
The first ARM Macs will have touchscreens.
John:
And if they don't, I think a lot of people will be very surprised because...
John:
Everything in Big Sur and all the APIs and all the other stuff points in that direction.
John:
And it just makes sense with Apple's line.
John:
But the episode of Upgrade 304 that we'll link in the show notes, Jason and Mike went through even more detail about the stuff that TouchMax did.
John:
touch max we should just call them that that our max might have i think jason also wrote an article about it i couldn't find the URL of that one but if we can find it we'll put that in the show notes too i thought it was worth kind of like summarizing here because i basically agree with everything they said but just to give all the listeners of this show a heads up what can you expect from the first our mac hardware aside from it having a touch screen that you will be confused about how to use because you haven't used anything except for a mac for a long time
John:
Did either of you two listen to the show or read any of those articles?
John:
Have you been spoiled?
John:
I have listened, but I have not read.
John:
I have not.
John:
All right, well, you should let Marco go.
John:
All right, Marco, describe the upcoming ARM Mac hardware, all the hardware features that it will have.
John:
Because I haven't read everything?
John:
Yeah, I just want to see if your opinions line up with theirs.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Well, besides the stuff that's been reported of things like changes to the boot process or whatever else, I'm guessing we're going to have really nice thin laptops.
Marco:
Probably at least the lowest end ones won't have fans.
Marco:
And I think we'll have incredible battery life.
Marco:
And I do think I agree that we're going to have touchscreens.
Casey:
I don't think that they're going to have touchscreens right away.
Casey:
I really don't.
Casey:
I concur that it will happen.
Casey:
I just don't think it'll happen immediately.
Marco:
I think the reason why they are bringing over iPhone apps from day one, I think there's two reasons.
Marco:
Number one is to give this new platform a vast amount of content, a vast amount of software from day one.
Marco:
But I also think that the reason why iPhone apps will work so seamlessly on the Mac is
Marco:
is because they will have touch screens.
Marco:
And if you don't have touch hardware, then you have a much larger chance that arbitrary iPhone apps just won't work as expected on Macs.
Marco:
And I don't think Apple would want that kind of customer experience.
John:
I mean, I hear you.
John:
You two are both you two are both thinking small.
John:
I mean, Marco's thinking small.
John:
I mean, granted, Marco didn't read the article, but like I was listening to them talk about it.
John:
I was like, I hope they talk about this.
John:
And then they did.
John:
And then I hope I talk about that.
John:
And then they did.
John:
I my visions of this hardware exactly match what they discussed with Casey.
John:
You seem like even though you've read all the stuff, you think if that stuff's coming, it's not going to be right out the door.
Casey:
Based on no facts whatsoever, I would suspect that what we see initially, like the very first ones at the end of the year, I think we'll have something novel about them, but I don't think it will be this masterpiece that Mike and Jason have envisioned.
Casey:
And I think that would mean something like, for example, maybe Face ID, which they spoke about, maybe Face ID would be in the Macs.
Casey:
I'm sorry, in the...
Casey:
laptops right when they're released.
Casey:
That would be something novel and interesting, but not altogether unreasonable.
Casey:
The one thing that I will say that really had an exploding head emoji when I heard them talk about it, which seems so obvious in retrospect, which means it's probably going to happen, is rounded screens in the same way that the iPad and the new iPhones have it.
Casey:
I never would have thought of that in a million years.
John:
It's because you don't watch WWDC sessions.
John:
That's why.
John:
Safe area insets.
John:
Mike's doing his homework.
John:
If you haven't watched the sessions, a bunch of Mac stuff has safe area insets now.
John:
And if you've done iOS development, you know what safe area insets mean.
John:
Guess what?
John:
Rounded corners are coming to Mac screens.
Casey:
Oh, no.
John:
I don't want that.
Casey:
I don't have a particularly negative opinion.
Casey:
In fact, I like the rounded screens on anything I'm using today.
Casey:
But it would be weird having that on a Mac.
Casey:
But I think my vision is that their first release...
Casey:
Which they've said would be this fall.
Casey:
And I'm envisioning it as being laptops, but maybe it wouldn't be.
Casey:
But I would envision laptops that may or may not have a wildly different industrial design, but I think will have something novel for sure.
Casey:
And again, Face ID is a great example, but maybe it'd be something different.
Casey:
But I don't think that there'll be a grand departure.
Casey:
Another possibility, although I don't think it would be the case, is maybe they look the same, but you can optionally include the cellular radio that Marco and I have been begging for for years.
Casey:
It's not earth-shatteringly different, but it's novel.
Casey:
And then I think sometime in 2021, if the world hasn't ended by then, then I think that's when they start to really unleash the crack and start doing really new, interesting and different.
Casey:
I would normally say novel, but I don't think I want to say that right now.
Casey:
New, interesting and different stuff.
Casey:
But John, I get the feeling you think they're going to come out of the gate fierce.
Casey:
So what do you think is happening?
Yeah.
John:
Well, just briefly on the rounded corner thing, I think I mentioned this in the last show, and Jason mentioned an upgrade as well.
John:
The original Mac had rounded corners.
John:
Not actual physical rounded corners on a CRT, but it would draw black pixels in the corners of the screen to black out that area, right?
John:
So it looked like it had rounded corners.
John:
So you're saying, I can't imagine rounded corners on a Mac.
Casey:
That's true.
John:
I actually had to look.
John:
I remember a couple years ago, I had to look and think, wait...
John:
are the corners round still rounded on the Mac?
John:
And I was shocked to learn that they were not.
John:
So then it's, I just assume they're rounded, but obviously the, the, the radius is going to be bigger.
John:
Presumably it's more like an eye, but if you want to know what the radius is going to look like, just take a big sir window and drag it down to the corner of your screen and see how that radius lines up.
John:
Imagine the screen match that perfectly.
John:
Like that's a good bet.
John:
Um, but yeah, no, I, I think, uh, first of all, there's always the possibility, as we said, several shows back that they do the Intel thing.
John:
It's like, look, if we want to get our Macs out the door ASAP, um,
John:
We should do as little redesign as possible and just take our existing cases and put ARM stuff inside them and ship them and they'll be boring in that way.
John:
Right.
John:
And I think the only reason they would do that is time constraints.
John:
Like this is how we can get them out the door the fastest.
John:
Right.
John:
This is the simple, easier first step.
John:
But.
John:
If they do that, which I really hope and think they won't, that's just a time-constrained step to what I think they're shooting for, which is a Mac with a touchscreen with rounded corners on it, with FaceTime, with Touch ID, with a cellular modem.
John:
Like all, like all the things they list and these articles, there's no reason we're not going to get all of them eventually.
John:
Like this is the new face of Mac hardware, right?
John:
Uh, it, and you know, it would match up perfectly with, uh, with the iPad, right?
John:
Oh, and one more iPad thing, promotion, right?
John:
Um,
John:
All the stuff that's available on the iPad, when a Mac is just a bigger and more powerful iPad, you get that stuff, quote-unquote, for free.
John:
You don't have to do any extra work for ProMotion.
John:
iPads already support it.
John:
Rounded corners, that's a bunch of OS and software changes.
John:
They're already committing to that.
John:
Touchscreens, you've got to move controls around.
John:
That's all there.
John:
Face ID, you know, support for things like the Apple Pencil.
John:
Remember, the DTK that we're not allowed to talk about, right?
John:
reports tell us that what's inside there is very much like an ipad right ipad already does all of these things it's like they would have to take it out for you not to get it right um now does that mean like what are they going to do for things like the pro display xdr that does not have rounded corners you can just you know you just do what the original mac did but just don't draw on those pixels right and you can have the same
John:
cohesive experience and maybe on the pro displays obviously individual applications can choose to draw over those areas and it wouldn't be like some hardware feature that's stopping you from doing it but like that i think is the you know apple platform unification is what makes when you look at a mac and an ipad next to each other in the beginning they looked and behaved very different and i think a year or two from now they're going to look and behave very similarly but
John:
They'll be able to run a lot of the same applications.
John:
Their aesthetic design will be similar.
John:
They will support all the same input methods.
John:
The Mac will be able to have more stuff going on at the same time and be able to have more RAM and more storage and more screen space, more of everything, but not different by nature, right?
John:
And most of the time when you're using an iPad, you'd be using the touchscreen, but it supports a trackpad and a keyboard.
John:
And most of the time you're using a Mac, you're using a mouse and a keyboard, but it also supports a touchscreen, right?
John:
uh there's that's that's the future of mac hardware like i don't see any reason for that not to be the future of mac hardware like i said i think it'd be harder for apple to not implement those features because they're already there i mean obviously you need os support and there's big hurdles to overcome and that could be another reason second reason that uh casey's idea of them being boring in the beginning could be true is one
John:
you know, stopgap hardware, but two, software support takes longer than they expected.
John:
You know, lots of times hardware is delayed at Apple because the software isn't ready.
John:
So integrating Face ID into macOS or integrating cell modem support into macOS may take longer and they won't bother shipping the hardware until it does.
John:
Hell, I can imagine a Mac laptop with a U1 chip in it.
John:
Why not?
John:
Like, you know, that's a Mac laptop that someone holds up to do AR stuff, right?
John:
Especially if it's a foldable convertible.
John:
That was funny.
John:
Mike and Jason were also talking about the ideas of convertible and convertible Macs that can fold over and be tablets or whatever.
John:
And I was reminded of what I think was the probably the first article I ever wrote for Macworld magazine back when it was a paper magazine.
John:
It was an article about just that.
John:
It was an article about a Mac.
John:
that was a laptop but you could fold it over on itself and then it would run ipad apps but it was intel right so it would run mac os on intel and and it would run ios uh apps also on intel just like they run in the simulator right because you know ios was already running on uh on intel so it's no problem having an intel machine that can run both turns out apple went the other direction and made both of them arm but
John:
i'm not i'm not willing to commit to the convertible yet although obviously i've had that idea for a long time but all of that other stuff all the input methods all the features all the aesthetics i feel like that's going to be the future of mac hardware especially
John:
on the laptop line things get fuzzier with the mac pro and the i mac but if you can envision an i mac as you know as we said in the last show a really really really big ipad with way more power uh it it makes perfect sense to me
Casey:
I do think that that is the eventual end.
Casey:
I'm less convinced that it's the near term.
Casey:
But if I'm Apple and if I'm worried about what people will think about this transition, like if I think I'm concerned that your average consumer is going to be scared off from buying a Mac because of this, which I don't think an average consumer would.
Casey:
I don't think anyone would.
Casey:
in that category really cares.
Casey:
But take it for a moment that they're worried that the average consumer is going to be pessimistic about this sort of thing.
Casey:
The easiest way to get your average consumer to get over that is to say, oh, well, look at this new hotness you can get.
Casey:
You can get touch, you can get face ID, you can get all of this stuff that you're familiar with from your iPad or your iPhone, and you can now have it on your Mac too.
Casey:
How amazing is that?
Casey:
And like I think I said on the
Casey:
WWDC episode, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
The number one way to get me, not that I really count in the grand scheme of things, but the number one way to get me to upgrade from this computer I bought a month ago is if there's some sweet new industrial design or some sweet new capability that I don't have now.
Casey:
I don't know if I would ditch the computer that I just bought
Casey:
strictly for a cellular modem, but if it had a cellular modem and if it had touch, even though I don't think I want touch, but everyone I know has done it, loves it.
Casey:
If it had touch, if it had, you know, face ID, all this put together, suddenly I'm going from a computer that I thought I was going to use for years to a computer that I used for like six months.
Casey:
Suddenly I'm on the Marco timetable of laptop upgrades.
John:
Remember the last time they did the transition from Intel, like whether it was a conscious strategy or not, one of the effects of them essentially leaving the Macs the same by just switching out the guts was the comforting factor.
John:
Oh, a Mac is still a Mac.
John:
It looks the same as it did because what was important at that time was our customers really like Macs.
John:
Don't rock the boat.
John:
They're going to be scaled by this transition.
John:
Sell them something that looks and behaves exactly like it did before and they would feel comfortable.
John:
They won't even know it's running Intel, right?
Yeah.
John:
But today, Apple's in a very different situation where most of Apple's customers don't care about the Mac.
John:
They don't own a Mac and they don't care about the Mac.
John:
They're the iPhone company, right?
John:
iPhones and maybe to a lesser extent iPads, right?
John:
So the way to make people comfortable with a new line of Macs is to make them more like phones and iPads.
John:
That's what people like.
John:
Apple, I don't think, is as worried about disturbing the Mac users.
John:
And then even on the Mac side of it, Apple is playing catch up here.
John:
pcs quote-unquote pcs have supported touchscreens for a very long time right microsoft microsoft itself has a big giant tablet computer that's a giant ipad like if if people you know it's for the people who are in the market for a mac they're aware that personal computers exist and they see what features they have windows hello the thing you know microsoft face id those things have been around for a long time people might use that at work even if they have a mac at home right so
John:
making the new line of max a more like ios devices and b catching up to the capabilities that pcs have had for years that's the you know quote-unquote safe bet here not to just keep them the same keep keeping them the same if it's done at all would be uh you know again for expedience and they just need to get them out the door they didn't have time to to send out the fancy ones but all those redesigns are more attractive to customers not less like there's there's no one who's going to be scared away by that
John:
yeah we'll see i'm extremely excited to see what late in this year brings and also scared because i don't want to spend another pile of money i don't really have the pile of money to spend at this point if they put out a small fanless laptop you know you're gonna buy it like you know you know you're gonna get it's gonna have face id and it's gonna have a touch screen and it's good the battery's gonna last forever and it's gonna be way faster than your doorbells and you're just gonna buy it and the excuse you're gonna make is oh well it's not replacing my big six inch i still love that one but i wanted to get this one for my little laptop and then you'll just use that little laptop for everything
Casey:
Well, I'm going to have a 12 and a 13-inch because remember I bought a 13, not a 16.
John:
Oh, that's right.
John:
Sorry.
John:
But yes, now you will – yeah.
John:
And it will be faster than your 13, which will be really sad for you.
Casey:
Yes, it will.
Casey:
I was just today doing some – I'm working on something new.
Casey:
We're hopefully going to talk about that in the post-show.
Casey:
But I was working on something new and I needed to plug in a physical device for reasons that are uninteresting.
Casey:
And I had power plugged into my laptop already.
Casey:
I was doing work on the laptop because I was doing it in Big Sur because it's new stuff.
Casey:
And I had power plugged in.
Casey:
And then I just grabbed a USB-C to lightning cable and just plugged it in as well.
Casey:
Did you know, gentlemen, how convenient it is to have more than one frigging port on a laptop?
Casey:
Oh, my goodness.
Casey:
It's amazing.
John:
That's the only part I'm not optimistic about, about our Macs, the port situation.
John:
Because iOS devices are not known for their proliferation of ports.
John:
Yeah, that's true.
John:
So I'm not sure.
John:
One more thing.
John:
And again, Jason already beat me to this.
John:
I don't remember if he mentioned on the show, but he definitely wrote an article about it for Macworld.
John:
Another factor in potential ARM Mac hardware is the touch bar.
John:
The touch bar, if you squint, can be viewed as a way to bring touch to the Mac without making touch Macs.
John:
And, you know, we're not big fans of it in the show.
John:
Some people hate it.
John:
Some people love it.
John:
But most people are indifferent to it, I feel like.
John:
When your whole screen is a touch screen, the touch bar makes far less sense for a bunch of reasons.
John:
i mean in all fairness it makes pretty little sense now but we still have it on everything yeah and again i think i'm on the same page with jason you can go two ways with this one get rid of it it's a great time to get rid of it the hardware is going to be amazing it's going to be distracting apple apple can save face by just being like look at all this amazing new stuff and the touch bar will go away and if they get asked about it they'll be like well the whole screen is touched now like it's a perfect pr answer where apple never has to admit that the touch bar never really caught on
John:
Or, you know, whatever.
John:
Right.
John:
And honestly, the things that you can do with the touch bar, you can do much more with an entire touchscreen.
John:
It's not quite the same because some of the stuff like, you know, while you're on the keyboard is harder to do, even if it's just up a little bit on the screen, but it's not quite the same.
John:
The second way they can go is really lean into the touch bar and have a touchscreen on your laptop and
John:
And then a much bigger touchable area above the keyboard, maybe twice or three times the height, sort of an extension of the screen, a second touchscreen.
John:
But that seems far less likely to me.
John:
You know, it's for one of the reasons that Jason cited.
John:
The way the touch bar works now is the little, you know, T, whatever, T1 or T2 chips drive drives the touch bar.
John:
And that's its own little separate arm computer.
John:
It runs its own little weird OS that it draws the touch bar and does all that stuff.
John:
Apple's not good.
John:
And that's how it's architected in macOS.
John:
Like this whole big, you know, second little computer running a thing and communicating to it.
John:
They would have to completely re-architect that because they're not going to put two ARM chips.
John:
inside the r max they're not going to have a big system on a chip and then a smaller system on a chip just around the touch bar like that would be an incredible waste of resources and power and everything to do that they would have if they wanted to run it they'd have to run it all off of one chip but that's an entirely different architecture nothing would be running bridge os anywhere it would be quite an investment and so i don't think they're going to make that investment to bring the touch bar over
John:
Unless they have plans to enhance the Touch Bar.
John:
They haven't really enhanced Touch Bar.
John:
Certainly have enhanced it hardware-wise.
John:
It's been more or less the same.
John:
And software-wise, you haven't heard much about it lately, right?
John:
So I feel like this is the perfect opportunity for Apple to ditch the Touch Bar and save face.
John:
I hope they don't double down on it and make a much bigger touch bar because I'm not a pretty cool fan of that.
John:
Or if they do, please just put some space between it and the keyboard so we don't accidentally hit the Siri button, please.
John:
Anyway, it just seems like it would be a waste of resources and space and power and just everything.
John:
And if these ARM Macs are, as I described, with all these features...
John:
There's so much cool new stuff that even the people who really love the touch bar, I think, will be placated by how much amazing stuff they get in return.
Marco:
Yeah, I think this also probably... First of all, I think I'm with you.
Marco:
I don't see them bringing it over if we do get touchscreen Macs.
Marco:
And if this is indeed where we're going, which I think is likely, it certainly does...
Marco:
give one possible justification for why the touch bar has not been touched really much at all since they launched it.
Marco:
It has almost changed zero ever since it was unveiled almost four years ago now.
Marco:
Almost nothing about it has changed or gotten better, including all the bugs that are still in it.
Casey:
That's patently untrue.
Casey:
It got better when it got smaller and we got the escape key.
Marco:
Fair enough.
Marco:
When they chopped a piece of it off.
Casey:
That was much better.
Marco:
But the actual functionality in and of the bar itself really has not changed in four years.
Marco:
And it is kind of, you know, for many reasons, baffling why they still ship it because it is so, you know, mixed, reviewed.
Marco:
And it's baffling that it's still required and everything.
Marco:
But, yeah, I think this does give them that chance to save phase and say, all right, well, look, the touch bar, you know, it wasn't a failure.
Marco:
It paved the way for touchscreen max.
Marco:
You know, just ignoring the iPad.
Marco:
But, you know, we'll let them have this one.
Marco:
You know, it paved the way for touchscreen max.
Marco:
And now the whole screen is a touchscreen max.
Marco:
and they just quietly just don't ever mention the Touch Bar again.
Marco:
That, I think, would make a lot of sense.
John:
I just did a search in the developer app.
John:
I don't think there were any Touch Bar sessions in this WWDC, and I think the earliest one I could find was from 2017, WWDC 2017.
John:
Apple did make a push for third-party developers to support the Touch Bar.
John:
Support the Touch Bar in your app.
John:
Here's how you use it.
John:
Here's how you can customize the controls based on what's going on in your app.
John:
And lots of apps did adopt that.
John:
It started Apple's apps, and they showed them off, and so on and so forth.
John:
But the evangelism surrounding the Touch Bar has really...
John:
slowed down so i mean it could slow down for a bunch of reasons one it could slow down because they're going to double down on and make a giant super duper touch bar but two it could be slowing down because it's just going to go away when the max go touch maybe the touch max will be like what was it the nintendo ds where the keyboard is a screen and the screen is a screen
John:
Yeah, we talked about that when we were in the depths of our keyboard despair, right?
John:
That, oh, they had a touch bar and just soon the whole keyboard is going to be glass and it's just going to be a dual screen situation.
John:
And it seems like they're not going that direction, unluckily.
John:
And they fixed the keyboard, right?
John:
i don't know like i i can picture in my head especially the laptops what these laptops look like like i just see them in my head i see them i see them like their shape and their size and they're just like their ipadness and all the features they have and the specs and then big surf it's right in there and you throw big syrup there and you run a bunch of ipad apps on it and it all it all comes together in my mind it's starting to really make sense the the iMac and stuff are a little a little bit different um
John:
I'm not entirely willing to believe that the first iMac out the door is going to be Surface Studio Pro, like the big drafting table thing.
John:
I don't think Apple's there yet.
John:
That would be quite a bold move for the first iMac out the gate.
John:
I think they could ship a more traditional iMac.
John:
without a touchscreen.
John:
Like, no touchscreen, big 27-inch iMac, new industrial design, but with Face ID, right?
John:
No cell modem, right?
John:
Like, the iMac is, I think, going to end up being the more conservative one out of these, unless they go full Surface Studio, which I would love, but I feel like that's more of an ask.
John:
Because laptops are their bread and butter, and I feel like that's where they're going to concentrate all their effort to wow us out of the gate.
John:
You know, look at this new line of laptops.
John:
They are amazing.
John:
They do things no Apple laptop has ever done, and they're faster than the Intel ones, and they have all these features.
John:
Like,
John:
That's such an easy sell.
John:
Trying to explain a drafting table iMac is harder, I think.
John:
Just ask Microsoft.
John:
For artists, sure, it makes perfect sense for them.
John:
But for everyone else, it's like, I'm not quite sure about that.
John:
And if it doesn't do that, if it doesn't fold down like that, having a touchscreen on an iMac is pointless.
John:
That really is ergonomically important.
John:
bad even though yes i know people still stab at the screen on their iMacs and their kids do too like i understand it makes as much quote unquote sense just because like every once in a while i want to dismiss a dialogue with my finger i get it i totally get it but a touchscreen of that size with you know that kind of digitizer resolution and refresh rate is quite an expense for just so you can dismiss a dialogue so i feel like until until and unless the iMac folds down like a drafting table it's not touchscreen time
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Casey:
So there have been some app review changes over the last, I don't know, month or so.
Casey:
And we were aware of this, but we've had so many other things to talk about that we haven't really had a chance to discuss it.
Casey:
And honestly, I haven't even really looked that much into it.
Casey:
So I'm going to need some help from you guys.
Casey:
But one of you, I think John, has put some very helpful things in the show notes.
Casey:
So I will kick off the conversation by reading.
Casey:
That, quote, two changes are coming to the app review process and will be implemented this summer.
Casey:
This is a quote from Apple.
Casey:
First, developers will not only be able to appeal decisions about whether an app violates a given guideline of the App Store review guidelines, but they will also have a mechanism to challenge the guideline itself.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
Second, for apps that are already on the App Store, bug fixes will no longer be delayed over guideline violations.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
Except for those related to legal issues.
Casey:
Developers will instead be able to address the issue in their next submission.
Casey:
This sounds good.
Casey:
I don't think I've said that about the App Store in a little while, but this sounds very good.
Casey:
Is this not very good?
John:
So the thing about App Store rules is that Apple is judge, jury, and executioner.
John:
When you make an appeal, I understand the process.
John:
Let me talk to your manager, essentially, is what you're asking.
John:
But the manager works for the same company as the other employee does.
John:
At any time, Apple can make any decision about anything, right?
John:
And we know things are enforced inconsistently and people have different experiences with seemingly similar problems at different times at the same time.
John:
Like it's all very arbitrary and confusing.
John:
So when they say we're going to have, you know, you have your appeal, but you can also challenge the guidelines.
Yeah.
John:
Well, how does that work?
John:
If you appeal and they say, no, actually, you are in violation of the guidelines, and you say, well, I think the guideline is dumb, then Apple say, well, that's the guideline.
John:
I mean, I don't understand the process by which an individual developer has any hope of changing Apple's mind about what a guideline could be.
John:
They were unsuccessful during the appeal for their app, but then somehow they're going to be successful.
John:
There's no jury.
John:
There's no judge.
John:
There's no impartial third party.
John:
You're always talking to the same person.
John:
It's like, oh, okay, well, argue with me in a different way.
John:
Apple does change its mind in response to developer feedback.
John:
This is a process that happens.
John:
The App Store rules have evolved over time, but I have a hard time being optimistic about these individual policy changes.
John:
Even the stuff about bug fixes no longer being delayed over guideline violations, that's another one of those things that's like a thing that annoys developers.
John:
We want to hear that that's not going to happen, but it's still going to happen, right?
John:
It's still going to sometimes, and even though they said it wouldn't, right?
John:
So I feel like what Apple's saying is we're going to do better, which good, great.
John:
I love for them to do better, and I think it's good for them to say that, and they're saying all the right things, but...
John:
It strikes me as a little bit theatrical to give new venues for you to talk to the same entity and keep pleading the same case and hearing them say, no, we disagree.
John:
I just I don't know.
Marco:
Maybe I'm going to pass the message today.
Marco:
I don't see how this works any other way.
Marco:
You're right.
Marco:
It's not like there is some kind of unbiased third-party arbitration board handling these complaints.
Marco:
Apple is not going to be very likely to
Marco:
override their own guidelines and and you know allow you or everyone an exception if you just make a good a good case for why it should be because apple has their own good case for why it should be and they're going to say well you believe you should be able to break this rule and we've decided you shouldn't be able to break this rule in addition we've decided the rule is valid like it it
Marco:
people reacted to this pretty positively when they discovered it, but I don't... I have a hard time envisioning before we actually get any actual outcomes here from people actually challenging the system, which apparently isn't even in place yet.
Marco:
It says it's being implemented later this summer.
Marco:
So who knows when people can actually start filing such challenges against the rules.
Marco:
But like...
Marco:
are we really going to get exceptions to the rules?
Marco:
And furthermore, is there a precedent here?
Marco:
If one developer gets them to make an exception for the rule, does that exception apply to all developers?
Marco:
No, of course not, right?
Marco:
So what this could do, if anybody actually gets...
Marco:
challenges approved to the to the rules it just makes the playing field less level for everybody else which we already know it's not really a level playing field because big companies and strategically important apps already get a softer hand applied to them for a lot of this stuff than um then like you know small indie apps do
Marco:
And as you mentioned so geniusly, John, the rules are kind of gerrymandered to allow exactly all the apps that Apple can't really afford not to have.
Marco:
And we can't.
Marco:
And they can't allow these things for everybody.
Marco:
Anyway, what this does is, best case scenario, it gives developers a way to get themselves advantages by bugging Apple a lot, basically, for a rule to be changed, possibly.
Marco:
And so that makes the playing field unlevel for everybody else.
Marco:
So I just, I don't know.
Marco:
We'll have to see how this works out in practice.
Marco:
It doesn't sound as good as what I think people want it to be.
John:
Yeah, I think there are... I mean, first of all, pulling back again, this is Apple saying, we are going to make changes to make your life better.
John:
So, like, forget about the details.
John:
Big picture-wise, this is a positive thing.
John:
Apple is trying to do something to make the App Store review process less annoying for developers.
John:
You give a thumbs up for that, but it's always difficult because there's only two parties here, and they do have their own interests, and this is Apple bending a little bit and saying...
John:
Okay, we have been holding the line, but we're going to change ourselves now.
John:
We're going to be nicer to you.
John:
Like the bug fix is not delayed over guideline violations, right?
John:
At least now when Apple says that publicly, when that happens to you, you can cite something that Apple said and say, hey, you're not supposed to be doing this.
John:
You said you weren't going to do this.
John:
And then they might say, oh, yeah, you're right.
John:
Okay, right.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I think what other people, when they go to challenge the guideline have said in defense of that guideline or whatever, it's all just a private thing that happens individually.
John:
I think from Apple's perspective, having, you know, can I speak to your supervisor?
John:
Can I speak to your supervisor, supervisor, having another level to go up?
John:
Again, it's kind of like going into a fast food restaurant with no shirt, no shoes and the person at the register saying, you know, it says no shirt, no shoes, no service.
John:
And you say, I demand to talk to your manager.
John:
The manor comes out and says, yeah, the sign says no shirt, no shoes, no service.
John:
i demand you talk to your manager and then that person's manager comes out yeah the sign says no shirt no shoes no service can i talk to the ceo and the ceo says yep that's our rule no shirt no shoes like you can keep asking again and again if they really believe that's the like you but but having those escalation paths is one more step that developers think they can take
John:
before running to the press, which as we know never helps, which brings us to hey.com.
Casey:
Nicely done.
John:
How do rules in the app store actually change in practice?
John:
Does it change because one developer yells about it?
John:
Well, maybe if they're Microsoft or Adobe or Netflix or Amazon, maybe that's how it happens.
John:
But really...
John:
Things in the App Store change when they become a big enough problem for Apple that it is in Apple's interest to change them.
John:
It's stopping a lot of apps from being put on the store.
John:
Or a bunch of developers have the same complaint, not just one of them.
John:
That's when things actually change.
John:
The only time an individual developer can change things is when that individual developer makes a lot of noise and makes a big press story.
John:
And then suddenly that one developer becomes a problem for Apple because Apple hates bad PR.
John:
Every company does.
John:
Who wants to see your company's name in a bunch of stories going around the web where you are put in a negative light?
John:
oh apple's at it again their app store reviews are hurting this developer the developer is the victim apple is the big baddie that's not a story that apple wants to see right and that's what i'm saying having another level to escalate put gives you one more step before people feel like we'll have no more recourse i had a thing i appealed they rejected it the only thing i can do is complain to the world about the injustice that has been visited upon me and
John:
i the developer the hero of this story i'm trying to do a thing and apple the villain tells me i cannot do the thing and apple is mean and let me tell the world about it right so the hey.com thing we don't want to rehash there's a couple shows ago where we talked about it you can look it up on the web over links in the show notes to see the whole big drama but when last we left it apple had sent a letter to uh the base camp folks and said here are some things you can do to make your app compliant one of the examples was you could consider a hey doc hey is an email app by the way
John:
hey you consider having the app function as marketed an email client that works with standard imap and pop email accounts where customers can optionally configure the hey email service right so that's one of the complaints was people download your app and it does nothing i forgot the exact quote but like you get the app and if you don't have a hey.com account the app doesn't do anything and of course you can't tell them it
John:
how to get a.com account in the app or you can't you can't actually give them an account in the app and you can't link them to the website all these stupid rules right so saying someone could download your email app think it's supposed to be an email app and get it and just be staring at and going i can't use this to read my email they said why don't you just make the hay app into an email app that you can you you can use with any pop or imap email server and that also happens to work with hay.com that would be a way you could put the app on the store
John:
So what Basecamp did in a genius PR move is they said, we just sent the Hey app 1.0.3 to the App Store.
John:
It introduces a new free option for the iOS app.
John:
Now users can sign up directly in-app for a free temporary randomized Hey.com email address that works for 14 days.
John:
So smart.
John:
You can get the app and you can, you can, you know, right in the app, you can do a thing, which is get a free thing for 14 days.
John:
There's no in-app purchase because you're not actually making a purchase.
John:
There's no, you know, you can do that all in the app.
John:
So now the app does function.
John:
If you want to see what Hay is like, you download this app, you do the thing, you get a random temporary email address that lasts for 14 days, right?
John:
The genius of it was announcing that to the world as part of their ongoing PR campaign to say, here are the mean things Apple's doing to us.
John:
And by the way, here's this giant web page listing other apps that do the exact same thing we're doing, but that got approved.
John:
And, you know, the whole sort of PR campaign that has essentially been won by Basecamp in this scenario.
John:
By pre-announcing that they have submitted 1.0.3 to the App Store and describing how it works, they're daring Apple, they were daring Apple, to reject them.
John:
Now, Apple did not say that this would be acceptable.
John:
They said, you can make it an iMapper pop client.
John:
And Basecamp said...
John:
We're doing this.
John:
And they didn't make it a pop an IMAP client.
John:
What they did was not one of the example things listed by Apple that Apple said, here are things you could do to your app to make it acceptable to us.
John:
Basecamp did none of those things.
John:
It doesn't mean that the thing they did also wasn't going to be acceptable because Apple didn't give an exhaustive list.
John:
They just said, for example, here are some things you can do.
John:
But Basecamp didn't do them.
John:
Basecamp did its own thing.
John:
The result was Apple approved a 1.0.3.
John:
So it's in the App Store.
John:
The beef has been settled.
John:
I would consider this a massive victory for Basecamp.
John:
They essentially bullied Apple in the public sphere into Apple doing what we all think is more or less the right thing, which is let them have their app.
John:
It's not the end of the world.
John:
It's going to be fine, right?
John:
There are other apps that work like this.
John:
The world doesn't end like this.
John:
And Apple correctly surmised this is not worth fighting.
John:
In reality, we don't, you know, hey, the hey app being on the App Store with this trial thing is not a big deal.
John:
No, it's not a pop and IMAP client, but...
John:
So, yeah.
John:
This is one of the ways that is not available to most people to change App Store rules.
John:
Make a big stink in the public about it.
John:
Be a well-known, beloved company like Basecamp.
John:
Be a loudmouth like DHH.
John:
Make noise and tell the world about what you think is unjust about what's happening to your application and
John:
And then fight with Apple in public.
John:
Apple did it too.
John:
Apple sent their response to apparently to other websites before they sent it to them.
John:
Like they said, we're going to respond to you, but we're also going to respond to a bunch of websites.
John:
And the websites got the response even before Basecamp did, right?
John:
But then Basecamp coming back and saying in public, we just submitted 1.0.3.
John:
And normally, the only people who know about this is Apple because who else sees our op submissions?
John:
But let me tell you, the public, what we just submitted to Apple so that you know later when they reject us that it's like, man, it was... I mean, it was a game of chicken, but it was perfectly lined up, you know, not by any grand plan, but just accidentally, right, to be right before WWDC when Apple wanted this story to go away.
John:
And again, honestly...
John:
The right thing to do was always just to let the Hey app be in.
John:
They followed Apple's existing not particularly nice rules as best they could, and their other apps do the same thing, and the world doesn't end.
John:
And someone who downloads the free Hey app and doesn't figure out how to use it can just delete it like...
John:
It would have been fine, but in the end, Basecamp won this.
John:
And would they have won a similar process if they had appealed?
John:
I mean, I think they did appeal the original thing, but if they had challenged the guideline itself, would they have been as successful as they were with a giant public blow before WWDC?
John:
I'm going to say no, because a one-on-one conversation with the challenge of the guideline committee, that's very easy for Apple to go, yeah, no, we think you should do something different, right?
John:
It's much harder for Apple to take that same stance when everything's out in public and someone's making a bunch of noise about it and there's a million stories all over and it's leading up to WWDC.
John:
Right.
John:
Right.
John:
Right.
John:
You know, when people find out, oh, Apple rejected this app and someone reads a story and say, that doesn't seem fair.
John:
I would like that app or I think that app should be accepted or it would be cool or whatever.
John:
If enough of those people get worked up from stories they see in the press, that influences Apple because users are stakeholders in this situation and they're the ones who buy Apple's products.
John:
So, you know, that's why I was mentioning like the court trials or whatever, usually public accounts.
John:
In this case, so we know there are no secret tribunals or whatever, but in this case, it's kind of important that this stuff happen in public because without that happening, users have no say in the process.
John:
It's just between Apple and developers, and Apple can stomp on developers much more easily in private than it can in public once the users know what's going on.
Casey:
Yeah, I thought it was extremely well executed by the Basecamp folks or the HEY folks, which, why is it all caps?
Casey:
I'm not in love with the name, but I can see why they did it, but all caps, come on.
Casey:
Anyways, it was so deftly and so well executed.
Casey:
And I think if my recollection serves me well, which it almost never does, I think Marco called this like move for move before this all shook out.
Casey:
And Marco had said, you had said that this is what's going to happen.
Casey:
And that's exactly what ended up playing out.
Casey:
I remember looking at this all happen in real time and being like, well, Marco nailed that one.
John:
Yeah, you could see as soon as they started making us think about it, you're like, well, Apple's not going to like this.
John:
They're going to want to make this go away.
John:
And they've done this a million times before.
John:
Like whenever there's a big stink, it's very easy for Apple to come up with a face-saving compromise to make the story go away and live to fight another day.
John:
And right before WWDC, they're very motivated to do that.
Marco:
And both companies were.
Marco:
In this case, both companies had taken very strong public stances.
Marco:
Both companies had a lot to lose by backing down to the other's demands.
Marco:
And so they found a way to not back down.
Marco:
They found a compromise that made it sound like both companies were really happy with the way everything went and both companies were getting exactly what they wanted.
Marco:
And the reality is probably both of them were gritting their teeth the whole time.
Marco:
But it doesn't matter.
Marco:
You know, it let them get out of that conflict without either side really giving giving ground on like the principles that they brought to the public as like, this is what we stand for, period.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And it's it helps that Apple's like when it was secret before it was out in public.
John:
Apple's reasons for rejecting the app were slightly different than the reasons when it became public.
John:
Apple's reasons always started shifting.
John:
That tends to happen.
John:
Why am I getting rejected?
John:
And you get a bunch of different reasons.
John:
So it's like, is the most recent reason I was given the real one?
John:
Or was the first one the real one?
John:
The remedies suggested seem not to address the reasons the thing was rejected in the first place.
John:
It's always so confusing.
John:
But by having those different answers, it allows Apple... Apple gave them enough room by giving them examples.
John:
And even though they didn't implement any of the examples, they implemented something similar.
John:
And so Apple can say, yeah, there you go.
John:
You changed your app and we let you in.
John:
Everybody wins.
John:
And honestly...
John:
base camp didn't really change their app they added one minor feature right which must have been a pain to implement but still like it's the app itself works the way it always did i think base camp considers the app to be the app for people who have already signed up and this whole thing that they had to add for the trial is only there to appease apple but really they just wanted their app to be for sale so success for them and apple like you'd have to know what apple's real reason for rejecting was to know how satisfied they are
John:
I can tell you Apple is not satisfied to have a big public fight and look like the villain and, you know, have this compromise.
John:
They would, you know, it would much rather be, you know, everybody loves them and they're, you know, they're coming from a position of strength and developers are clearly in the wrong.
John:
That's not what happened here, right?
John:
But if you knew in Apple's heart of hearts, if a corporation could be said to have one, what was the real objection here?
John:
Was it the fact that they don't get 30% of all, hey, subscriptions?
John:
Was it the fact that the app doesn't work when you download it?
John:
Like,
John:
Was it the fact that it doesn't work as a regular email client?
John:
Was it misleading to people in the store?
John:
If Apple's concerned about misleading apps in the App Store, I have some news for them about other apps they might want to look at before the Hey Email app.
John:
So they say a bunch of things.
John:
It's always so hard to help with the real rejection.
John:
So we don't know what the real objection was.
John:
We don't know how satisfied they are with the app as it exists.
John:
I feel like they just wanted it to go away and it's like, fine, you can have your app in the store.
John:
It makes me wonder how little could Basecamp have done and still gotten
John:
the app back into the store doing nothing is probably wouldn't have worked because apple would have said we're at an impasse you didn't change anything about your app but if they had changed literally anything about their app like we made the icon a different color now can we go in apple would be like okay no you changed your app it's a compromise
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Casey:
Jakob Rosen wrote, I will be upgrading my laptop to the new MacBook Pro in a few weeks, which honestly is probably like six weeks ago now, but sorry.
Casey:
I was curious, what are your methods and views on data migration?
Casey:
Do you guys tend to bluntly mirror everything over with Migration Assistant or rather do copy data over by hand, leaving potential trash and the needed junk behind?
Casey:
We've covered this a few times in the past, but it gets asked constantly, so it's worth covering again.
Casey:
As I've said a few times recently, I view...
Casey:
basically all of my computers with the exception of the Synology as ephemeral.
Casey:
And there's very little, if anything, on any of my computers that I am unwilling to lose at a moment's notice because everything is duplicated somewhere else.
Casey:
Like code is on GitHub.
Casey:
Pictures are on the Synology.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Bookmarks are in iCloud.
Casey:
All that stuff.
Casey:
My mail is in Gmail.
Casey:
All that stuff exists somewhere else.
Casey:
So
Casey:
The good side of that is that when I get a new Mac or if I want to reinstall an OS on a Mac or if I want to put a beta OS on a Mac, it's not really a big deal.
Casey:
There's not that much I have to copy.
Casey:
It's all coming over from other places.
Casey:
And if you can get to this life, which is not easy, I will be the first to tell you, and you oftentimes need like a multi-thousand-dollar NAS or hundreds of dollars in web services that you're paying for –
Casey:
like online storage each month.
Casey:
But if you can get there, it's amazing.
Casey:
And very quickly, I'm not going to belabor the point now, but two things that I can point you to that will be in the show notes.
Casey:
One, I wrote a post in 2016 about the sorts of things I do before getting rid of a Mac and when doing a new installation, like settings and things like that.
Casey:
But more recently, last year, at the end of last year, I wrote about Homebrew Bundle, which if you've used Ruby's Bundler, it's basically the same thing, but for Homebrew.
Casey:
And it can also do things like Mac App Store apps.
Casey:
It can do GUI apps.
Casey:
And it's basically just a way to just very, very quickly get all of your dependencies installed.
Casey:
And if you haven't tried this or played with this, I really, really recommend it.
Casey:
Marco, last I remember hearing, I thought you were a migration assistant person.
Casey:
Is that still the case?
Marco:
uh yes i am yeah i will occasionally like every few years i will start my laptop over um i almost never start my desktop over i think i've started my desktop over like twice ever in in mac land um but yeah i will occasionally start my laptop over with a clean install and everything but that's again that's that's rare that's not the common case otherwise i'm using migration assistant
Casey:
All right, John?
John:
I've been migration assistant for many, many years, and so far it hasn't steered me wrong.
John:
I haven't done a fresh one yet.
John:
in forever and yeah migration assistant's been working for me every time i do it i have trepidation because i never it's well last time it was 10 years but it's always so long between times that i do it i'm like did i do a migration system last time did i use ethernet did i try to do direct connect did i connect with firewire did i take out my hard drive and clone it to the other one like i all those other things go through my mind but in the end i usually just end up doing migration assistant i think for this one i did
John:
What did I do?
John:
Did I do a migration assistant with an external drive or with a time machine backup?
John:
I don't even remember.
John:
The point is, my Mac is the same everywhere.
John:
They're not ephemeral.
John:
It's a real lived-in place with stuff everywhere.
John:
So I bring the whole thing with me.
John:
I need all the stuff.
John:
This is only when I'm going from one Mac to another.
John:
When I do things like installing Big Sur and stuff, none of my stuff is there.
John:
That Big Sur isn't even signed into the same Apple ID.
John:
This is all...
John:
An abundance of caution from being a Mac OS X reviewer.
John:
Do not let beta OSes have any access to your real data.
John:
And I don't.
John:
That's why I have multiple Apple IDs.
John:
So there I have none of my stuff.
John:
I don't even like keeping my other drives mounted.
John:
I frantically unmount everything.
John:
As soon as I put it into Big Sur, I'm like, you don't see those disks.
John:
Ignore them.
John:
There's nothing there.
Casey:
I do have Big Sur signed into iCloud, which is risky.
Casey:
I will be the first to tell you that your approach is safer.
Casey:
But I also agree that I unmount.
Casey:
It always asks, well, do you want to mount Macintosh HD, which is my Catalina installation.
Casey:
No, no, no, you do not want to mount that.
Casey:
I do not want that.
John:
That should be a member stretch goal.
John:
Get Casey to rename his hard drive.
John:
I saw it with your Big Sur thing.
John:
Everything was called Macintosh HD, and it was called Macintosh HD Big Sur or something like that.
John:
Rename your hard drive.
John:
Give your computer some personality.
John:
I know it's ephemeral, but give it a name.
John:
What is your actual computer called in the sharing thing?
John:
What is your .local DNS name?
Casey:
I think it's Casey's iMac Pro.
Casey:
Casey's iMac Pro.
Casey:
Casey's iMac Pro.
Casey:
That's terrible.
Casey:
That's the worst.
John:
If you don't give it a name, we'll come up with a name for you.
John:
like you can have a theme like this naming your computers and like my suggestion is name your computer and name your boot hard drive the same as your computers you don't have to think of one name then and have it some themed on something that you like right and give it a custom icon if you can convince stupid apfs merge volume thing to accept your custom icon which is getting very difficult but i still do it
Casey:
Casey's MacBook Pro.
Casey:
That's the other one.
Casey:
Yeah, we'll put it on the list of stretch goals.
John:
No, it's not even a stretch goal.
John:
You just need to do that.
Casey:
Think about it for next week.
John:
I'm going to put it in follow-up.
John:
What has Casey named his computer?
Casey:
I'm not going to do it, Dad.
Casey:
I'm not going to do it.
Casey:
Frank Hertz writes, do you all run Ethernet and drill holes and do that sort of thing yourselves?
Casey:
Do you hire people?
Casey:
In order to have my office computer... Oh, my God.
Casey:
As I'm reading this, John is literally moving the dock around...
Casey:
And writing next week.
John:
It's in there for next week.
John:
What is Casey named his computer?
John:
I'll delete it later.
Casey:
I'll delete it later.
Casey:
Don't worry.
Casey:
And I'm not going to give Marco a good edit point because I think that's funny.
Casey:
So Frank continues, in order to have my office computers on Ethernet, I have had to stick with Coax Fios.
Casey:
So the Verizon router can be in there getting files from Coax.
Casey:
Ethernet from Fios Switch would need new cables everywhere.
Casey:
So I think basically what Frank is saying is he was living in my old world where...
Casey:
I had coax coming into my router and it had to be the Verizon router because of that.
Casey:
And then I had Ethernet to some degree away from there.
Casey:
So now I do have Ethernet coming in to my router.
Casey:
So I'm using an Eero because I genuinely do like it, although they did send this to me.
Casey:
But in terms of wiring the house, I have not done so.
Casey:
What I will say, however, is that, and we've talked about this in the past,
Casey:
you can get a Mocha bridge, which is basically a thing that goes either from Ethernet to coax or the other way, from coax to Ethernet.
Casey:
So I have two of these.
Casey:
I have one in the office and one downstairs in the entertainment center.
Casey:
And what that allows me to do is if you get fancy ones, and I was sent some by a very, very kind listener, if you get fancy ones, they can do near gigabit speeds.
Casey:
And so I tested like a week ago, coincidentally, I tested using fast.com
Casey:
what the speeds were downstairs.
Casey:
So this is Ethernet from the laptop to a hub or switch, I guess, actually, then from the switch to the Mocha bridge through coax to the office, Mocha bridge to Eero.
Casey:
And I was getting something like 650 ish megabits per second down when I have gigabit service.
Casey:
So it's not perfect, but it's a heck of a lot easier than wiring your whole darn house.
Casey:
So
Casey:
In a perfect world, I would have wired the house or had a house that was already pre-wired.
Casey:
But if you're too lazy like me and you don't need a whole bunch of drops, I would really consider looking into a pair of Mocha Bridges.
Casey:
It can work out quite well.
Casey:
John, you have an ancient home, and as you would like to describe it, it is always falling apart.
Casey:
So I assume you have Ethernet only in your office?
John:
So the bad thing about having an old house is I have no earthly idea how to run cables through these walls that are covered with horsehair plaster and, you know, lath and just filled with old newspapers and dead mice and like ridiculously large ancient dimensional lumber that honestly I don't want to drill through like it.
John:
Trying to run wire to someplace where it isn't is extremely difficult.
John:
The good thing about having an old house is there's lots of holes in it.
John:
So when it came time for me to run cables, my Ethernet cables, it just so happens that the main places I needed Ethernet cables, I already had existing fairly gaping holes in my ancient house between them.
John:
So someone, you know, the previous owner's
John:
had already drilled a gigantic hole presumably for coax cable to the television area from the basement you know the first floor television right right is right above the basement and that hole was huge and so it's yes it does have coax going through it to the television but it also has ethernet so i just i ran that myself just you know um basically all my wire running has been in the basement right the files comes in my basement and the basement is not
John:
It's half finished, but the finished part has a drop ceiling.
John:
Again, holes.
John:
And the rest of it is not finished.
John:
So I basically ran the Ethernet cable myself from the Fios thing.
John:
There's a router in there.
John:
My Synology is in the basement.
John:
And there's a whole bunch of stuff down there.
John:
And then from that big cluster of stuff, the Ethernet continues.
John:
One of them goes along my basement up to my television.
John:
Another one goes along my basement and into my computer room, which is just on the opposite side of a wall from the television.
John:
And there's a gaping hole there because it used to be like a three-season porch that they closed in, but they didn't close it in on the inside.
John:
So I have an easy place to get Ethernet into here.
John:
Those are the only places the Ethernet go to my house.
John:
They go to my television and they go to my computer room.
John:
Everyplace else is Wi-Fi.
John:
I would love to have Ethernet up in the second floor somewhere.
John:
But that's what Eero is for.
John:
And, you know, the only thing we use it up there for is like just sitting in bed looking at the iPad, which is plenty fast for that.
John:
And then I do actually have coax going to the second floor because the people who own the house before me ran coax everywhere, including to the kitchen.
John:
Remember in the 80s when it was cool to have cable TV in your kitchen?
John:
There is a coax cable in my kitchen behind my refrigerator, you know, hanging there just doing nothing because we don't have a television in the kitchen.
John:
yeah there's coax everywhere and by the way the technique for running coax back in the day was so the coax is in your basement oh you want it in your bedroom let's do this i'm going to drill a hole through the wall of your house to the outside i'm going to shove the coax through there and i'm going to bring it up to the second floor and i'm going to drill a hole from the outside of your house into your bedroom and i'm going to shove the coax in there and then i'm going to squirt some silicone caulk into two holes
Casey:
Let me remind you when I got my gigabit service done, I had told the guy, oh, you know, I'm really sorry, but the ONT is in the back of the house and my office is in the front right, you know, the opposite corner of the house, literally upstairs in the opposite corner.
Casey:
You know, I've scoped out, here's where I think you can go through the walls, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
And he listened.
Casey:
He said, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Casey:
He said, well, here's the thing.
Casey:
I'm not allowed to drill through any – I'm not allowed to do any sort of interior work whatsoever.
Casey:
So, sorry.
Casey:
I'm like, well, what are you going to do then?
Casey:
So, he takes like this three-foot drill bit and I think he was in my office and pushed that into the wall and drilled right outside.
Casey:
Just drilled all the way to the outside and ran Ethernet cable around like the bottom of the trim of our house from the back –
Casey:
left if you will from the back left corner all the way down and around to the right and then went all the way up to the second floor and then just like you said sprayed some silicone silicone in that case oh god bless I'm gonna get this right when I'm dead but anyways sprayed some of that stuff in there and called it a day and it's worked for a year and a half now so I can't really complain
John:
When we got our house resided, I got to fix all of the terrible cables that had been drilled out of, you know, when all the siding was off the house, I could finally fix it.
John:
So that's solid.
John:
I even, the only one that I could really entirely get rid of is the Fios because that comes from outside of the house.
John:
But I cleverly tuck that underneath the new siding.
John:
So there's no more holes in my house, which I'm glad about.
John:
But yeah, I would love to have Ethernet in more places.
John:
My suggestion is if you're trying to do this, you can run Ethernet yourself.
John:
Like it's a very thin, light cable.
John:
You can have these little clips that hold it on or whatever.
John:
But the difficult part is always getting through the walls.
John:
Don't try to do that yourself unless you're very handy because there's things in the walls that you don't want to hit with a drill like electrical wires and even worse probably if you survive the electrical wires, plumbing.
John:
uh yeah there's lots of terrible failure notes and here's the thing professional electricians obviously are way better at this than random people but professional electricians are not magicians depending on how your house is set up like there is no physical way to get wires from one place the other without drilling holes and things like that's how the wire gets there do you already have conduit in your walls right probably not and if you don't they're gonna have to drill holes like they're it's not magic and so if you want holes in your house and in your walls like no matter how carefully you fish things it's
John:
it's you know it's a difficult business so obviously if you're building your own house building conduits for all the wires so that you can string new wires in when the new fancy fiber optic stuff comes out in 20 years or whatever uh but if you're in your own house uh see if you can find weird little holes or little crevices or walls that you won't notice a wire along you can fairly you can get pretty far just with
John:
some you know tape and little clips and some wire that is colored in an inconspicuous way like a speaker wires i don't have any place to send speaker wires but i have like surround sound quote unquote i have 5.1 the speaker wire is all just out there i've just hidden it behind sofas or on on the mantle behind all the the photographs so you can't see it right there's lots of
John:
Lots of ways you can run cable and be less conspicuous.
John:
And in the end, eventually you just don't have to care that much, right?
John:
What I wouldn't suggest is just stringing it along your floor because you will trip over it forever and break everything and it will be terrible.
John:
Even if you try to tape it down, that won't work either.
John:
So don't do that.
John:
But right up until that point, get creative because having Ethernet in places is great.
Casey:
Marco, your approach is to just buy a house with it already in there, I assume?
Marco:
You can find one.
Marco:
No, my approach is like whenever I have access to inside the walls of my house, which is not very often, but it's like if you're doing a major renovation, then have them install wiring then because the walls are already open and accessible.
Marco:
Otherwise, what John said is pretty spot on.
Marco:
I think there's an important little lesson in the middle of this, which is like
Marco:
find an area where you can run cables quote for free.
Marco:
So a basement or attic usually is perfect for this because ethernet cables can be very long and still work fine and take advantage of that.
Marco:
You can do like, if you can get from the source room or whatever to either the attic or the basement or,
Marco:
then you can kind of run whatever because no one cares what it looks like there so you can just kind of run it like you know across the insulation beams in the attic or whatever or you know clip it to the ceiling with wire clips in the basement and then pop up wherever you want it to be and so that way you are like making holes or drilling through way less of the like pretty finished part of the house that's usually a very very easy way to do it or you know as you know the coax trick
Marco:
go outside for part of a run, wrap it around the house on the outside and go back in.
Marco:
If there's somewhere you can like discreetly hide that.
Marco:
Um, otherwise for actually doing like in wall work when, and actually if you want to do like a, a real like in wall professional job where you have ethernet jacks as part of the walls and, you know, go between rooms, that's definitely something to hire out to professionals.
Marco:
Uh, unless you are very handy with that kind of stuff yourself.
Marco:
But, um, it,
Marco:
finding those professionals is tricky.
Marco:
The good thing is that in recent years, um, a lot of the like custom nice house builders, uh, a lot of people demand like smart speakers in the walls and stuff like that.
Marco:
Sono systems run throughout the walls and everything.
Marco:
And so many more of the like installers and electricians and things like that, many more of them have developed the skill, uh, of running network wire because, uh,
Marco:
non-nerds have wanted it for more things and so that benefits us nerds because when we say hey can you just run like cat six or cat seven cable everywhere uh they're like okay yeah so do you also want speakers no no no no i i don't want that please don't do that oh how about this smart hub nope don't want that either i just want these ethernet jacks in these places and another tip there you know i said cat six or cat seven
Marco:
make them install the highest end ethernet cable that exists today right now that is cat seven as far as i know um because you know or you know as john said if you can get them to install conduit which is just a pipe in the wall with like uh pulls in it like string pulls and so when cables change down the road they can like pull a new cable through the existing tubes that are already in the wall um
Marco:
That's a wonderful dream.
Marco:
In practice, good luck finding that, and then good luck, if you can't find it, good luck getting it to work.
Marco:
But anyway, assuming you can never replace the cables easily, obviously, make them put in the highest-end cables that exist when you do it.
Marco:
When I did my house, that was Cat6, and that was...
Marco:
eight years ago now, and that's still totally fine.
Marco:
I can't do the full 10 gig speeds in most cases in theory, but that's fine because I don't yet have any 10 gig equipment, and it's been almost a decade since I did that wiring, and it's fine.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
You know, that was the best thing at the time, and it's lasted almost a decade, and it might last longer while still being pretty useful.
Marco:
So that's certainly, you know, get whatever you can get.
Marco:
You know, today it's Cat7, I think.
Marco:
Whatever is the highest-end network wiring, the installer will complain because it's more expensive, the cables are thicker, they're harder to work with, but you'll be happy in 10 years when it's still relevant.
Casey:
Finally, this was not, strictly speaking, an SKTP, but one of us spotted it.
Casey:
And since I don't know, it must be John.
Casey:
That's the rules.
Casey:
One of us spotted this and added it.
Casey:
And I think it's a great question.
Casey:
Shahab writes, what has been your favorite thing to come out of WWDC this year that flew under many people's radar or wasn't featured in the keynote?
Casey:
For me, it's been the historical stack when long pressing the back button on navigation bars.
Casey:
I don't have a good answer for this yet because I haven't really spent enough time with either.
Casey:
I've spent a fair bit of time with Big Sur, but certainly almost none with iOS 14.
Casey:
In fact, just yesterday I put it on an Aaron's old iPhone 10.
Casey:
So I wish I had a better answer for this.
Casey:
The thing that jumps to mind, though, which certainly is...
Casey:
on a lot of people's radar is the non full screen phone takeovers you know when they just it just shows as notification center or i'm sorry like a notification dropping down from the top of the screen and doesn't take over the entire darn phone uh but i don't have any really good unsung heroes john do you have any unsung heroes
John:
My obvious answer is the APFS time machine changes, which definitely weren't in the keynote and didn't even have sessions.
John:
We found out about it afterwards.
John:
My other one, going the other direction of things that were actually at WWDC, was I love the iPad cursor session.
John:
It's one of those sessions where there's not really much for developers to do.
John:
They always try to spin it like, here's how you can make your cursors.
John:
But really, it's mostly explaining the philosophy of how Apple did its cursor work and how cursors work in iPadOS.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Because once you understand that, then when we say, when you're making your cursors, follow our lead, right?
John:
And here's a bunch of rules for you or whatever.
John:
I love those sessions.
John:
Speaking of the file system, they sometimes have sessions about the file system that are like that, where there's not really anything for you to do.
John:
Maybe there's one or two new APIs for doing the APS clones, but they really just want to explain...
John:
We're the file system team.
John:
Here's a bunch of stuff we did, and here's why.
John:
And yes, there's always some developer impact angle, but it's really just explaining their reasoning.
John:
And those are great.
John:
I think those are incredibly valuable because you need to have those low-level sessions where it's like, here's how to do this particular programming task.
John:
But those high-level ones, explaining a philosophy, those really serve people well to understand.
John:
When I'm faced with a problem that wasn't discussed at WWDC...
John:
what set of values should I use to make decisions about how to handle it?
John:
If you watch that iPad cursor session, you know where Apple is coming from with cursors on the iPad.
John:
And hopefully when you're making your cursor, even if they didn't address your specific need, you can say, well then what would Apple do in this situation?
John:
Like what, how does this fit into their philosophy?
John:
I highly recommend that session if you want to take a look.
John:
And by the way, I've, you know, one more thing.
John:
I know we were talking about Mac hardware, but like software wise,
John:
Pretty much everything they said about the cursors for the iPad thing is applicable to the Mac.
John:
The Mac's cursor support is very much like it was in Next Step because that's where it came from and is very much like it was in Mac because that's where Next got it from.
John:
It hasn't changed a lot.
John:
The iPad cursor system is sort of the next generational leap in Mac.
John:
basic cursor control it wouldn't you can't take it exactly as it is and just slap on the mac and say done because the mac is a different environment but many many of the ideas technologies lessons everything about it i can imagine coming to the mac uh in the next year or two if not sooner
Casey:
Marco?
Marco:
I haven't had a lot of time to look into many of the sessions yet, unfortunately, because life has been very busy for me recently, but I think so far what I'm most excited to look into are the split view changes and all the new stuff in SwiftUI.
Marco:
I mean, it's not quite under the radar in the sense that everyone was talking about the SwiftUI stuff, but stuff like the lazy stacks that basically allow you to make much more performant lists and tables and stuff like that, and
Marco:
And the split views having really like finally a native three column mode and how that reacts between the Mac and iPad and phone.
Marco:
I'm very interested in diving into that.
Marco:
Cool.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Hover, Linode, and Bombas.
Marco:
And thank you very much to our members who support us.
Marco:
Go to ATP.fm slash join to join us.
Marco:
And we will 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.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
They did it.
Casey:
I feel like I can give you the long, drawn-out story and put the punchline at the end, but I'll pull a Hamilton and put the punchline at the beginning.
Casey:
Skip, skip, skip.
Casey:
Go ahead.
Casey:
I'm the damn fool that's considering shooting vignette.
John:
And in other words, I'm so living in 2015.
Casey:
I know I am.
Casey:
It's so bad.
Casey:
I am really, really genuinely considering.
Casey:
What is the official Silicon Valley sun setting sun setting?
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
Sun setting vignette.
John:
No, that's for destiny weapons.
John:
Oh, God.
John:
Oh, God, I've awoken the beast.
Casey:
So anyway, I'm thinking about... You thought fish was bad.
Marco:
You entered destiny territory now.
Casey:
I was having fun this episode, but it's all taking a turn.
John:
Actually, it's the same.
John:
You're trying to think of the Silicon Valley euphemism for when they're getting rid of a product and they're trying to make it seem nicer.
John:
They're using the term in exactly the same way in destiny.
John:
They're getting rid of things in the game, but they don't want people to be mad about it.
John:
So they're literally calling it sunsetting.
John:
they learned about watching you tech industry oh dad all right so anyway so let me kind of set the stage oh wait hold on and thank you very much to our members who support us go to atp.fm slash join to join us you really need to just write down like the spiel like you had the spiel down for seven years and now there's this been monkey wrench thrown into it and it's just we just let's put it in a document we'll workshop it together
Marco:
Yes, I'm going to put it in the middle.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
Editing works wonders.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Remember when I made you say bull Siri?
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Moving on, gentlemen.
Casey:
So here's the situation.
Casey:
For...
Casey:
A while, ever since Vignette was released, it had in, I'll call it extreme circumstances, but not necessarily that extreme.
Casey:
It had some memory management problems.
Casey:
I don't know to this day what I was doing wrong.
Casey:
I don't doubt I was doing something wrong, but I don't know what I was doing wrong, but it was having some memory management problems.
Casey:
And
Marco:
You should rewrite it in Go.
Casey:
Well, it's funny you say that.
Casey:
I did rewrite pretty much the entire crawler using NSOperation.
Casey:
And I actually feel like it's pretty good.
Casey:
And so I feel like that may be fixed.
Casey:
And that's actually sitting in test flight right now.
Casey:
And that's been a lingering issue that's been really frustrating.
Casey:
And I haven't really...
Casey:
really narrowed down what the root cause is, other than just plain using too much memory.
Casey:
But again, I've done a lot.
Casey:
I've spent a lot of time in instruments.
Casey:
Nothing has jumped out at me.
Casey:
It's my fault.
Casey:
It probably is my fault, but it's not clear to me where or how it's my fault.
Casey:
Meanwhile, for at least the last six months, Facebook has been deeply unreliable with Vignette.
Casey:
And one thing that I've found that seems to work for a lot of people is
Casey:
is and this sounds nuts i will be the first person to tell you it sounds bananas but if somebody reports oh you know facebook is just not working for me i i've i'll tell them switch from wi-fi to cellular or vice versa and try it again and like eight or nine times out of ten it all starts working
Casey:
I have no idea what that's about.
Casey:
My current theory is some sort of caching with the, uh, URL session subsystem.
Casey:
So also in test flight is a build that cranks the caching down.
Casey:
So, uh, maybe that maybe would fix the problem, but it's been lingering for forever and I can never reproduce either of these problems.
Casey:
So for the life of me, I'm just shooting blind.
Casey:
I don't know what I'm doing in so many ways, but particularly around these two bugs.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
Then about a month ago, maybe Twitter got rid of non auth access to profile photos.
Casey:
So it used to be that you could go to a special URL and it was not like some super hacky thing.
Casey:
It was just you had to know what the URL was, but you go to this URL.
Casey:
And I think for any Twitter user, if I'm not mistaken, even ones that were protected, you could at least get their profile photo.
Casey:
And that was it.
Casey:
And that worked for me up until about a month ago.
Casey:
And now they've killed it.
Casey:
And there's not a lot of really great ways to work around that, work around Twitter.
Casey:
One thing I could do is start, instead of like crawling the web to get this stuff, I could start registering my app as an actual Twitter app.
Casey:
So it has its own like...
Casey:
authorization token or what have you.
Casey:
And now this is different than having a user login, the users would still not log in, but the app would be known to Twitter.
Casey:
And then I believe I haven't looked at this in a little while, but I believe I get 900 profile requests in a 15 minute window.
Casey:
which is okay, but you could have 900 Twitter contacts in a single contact list.
Casey:
Like I have people writing me saying they have 10,000 contacts, which I think is frigging crazy, but you know, it is what it is.
Casey:
So that's not really a sustainable solution.
Casey:
Meanwhile, while all this is going on since day one, the contacts framework has some very, very interesting API limits.
Casey:
And I feel like you've run into this, Marco, with audio stuff, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
But you can only save but so many contacts to the contacts database in so much time, or else it gets angry at you and tells you no, no more.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Now, is this documented anywhere?
Casey:
Of course not.
Casey:
That would be way too simple.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
That hasn't caused problems often, but it does occasionally cause problems.
Casey:
So all of that is to say the app is kind of feeling, even to me, like it's creaky and fragile.
Casey:
And I'm not really proud of it anymore the way I was when I first released it.
Casey:
Now, I have a couple of options where to go from here.
Casey:
I could like go all in on it.
Casey:
And I could start doing like log into Facebook, log into Twitter, maybe at that point, log into LinkedIn, which is a very popular request.
Casey:
Because once I'm doing like this OAuth login dance for these services, then it opens up a lot of possibilities in terms of much less hacky, much more reliable crawling of profile photos.
Casey:
So that would fix a lot of problems.
Casey:
But I just don't want to do that.
Casey:
It's not gross, but it just feels gross, especially since I started marketing it on how it's all about privacy because you don't have to give your credentials to anyone, including me.
Casey:
I really don't want to do that, but it is a solution to my problem.
Casey:
But the other solution to my problem is just frigging kill it.
Casey:
And sitting here now, not having heard your opinion from the two of you, that is what I'm leaning toward.
Casey:
And part of that, and a not small part of that, is because I have three different things that I think I want to build that are brand new.
Casey:
And one or two of them in particular would be, it would be very good if I could do that by the time iOS 14 is out.
Casey:
Because they're using new iOS 14 things.
Casey:
So I'm looking at my summer and what I probably should be doing is doing these vignette fixes and updates and improvements.
Casey:
But what I want to be doing is the new hotness and the new ideas and seeing if those stick and vignette is making money.
Casey:
It is definitely making money, but it's not making a large amount of money and it's not making enough money that I feel like I would be really shooting myself in the foot to, to, to, to remove it from sale.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So that is many words to say, I think I want to sunset it and I think I want to put it to bed.
Casey:
Tell me if I'm wrong.
Casey:
Marco, let's start with you.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So first of all, I agree with you.
Marco:
You probably, probably should kill it, but we'll get to that in a minute.
Marco:
The one thing to consider here is that you're not being forced to adhere to a certain timeline.
Marco:
I'm
Marco:
There is no rush for you to decide.
Marco:
You don't have to decide right now, kill it or work on it all summer.
Marco:
That's not your only options.
Marco:
You have many other options.
Marco:
The one that I think you should probably pick from the most pragmatic point of view is leave it in the store but just don't work on it anymore.
Yeah.
Marco:
Now I know that you probably don't want to actually do that.
Marco:
What you probably want is like a clean break to either make it awesome and something that you can be really proud of.
Marco:
When you just said you're having problems with that right now, um, or, you know, just totally remove it and it's gone forever.
Marco:
And that way you don't have to, you know, feel bad that people are getting something that's maybe not your best work anymore or something like that.
Marco:
Right?
Marco:
So the reality is that you do have this third option of just leave it there and don't work on it for a while.
Marco:
Whether you want to take it is up to you, but that's, that is an option.
Casey:
That is an option, but to briefly interrupt you, I don't love that option because it is currently in the stores saying it works with Twitter, and it doesn't.
Casey:
It just plain doesn't.
Casey:
Now, I could put in a little update to pull the Twitter out, for example, but I feel like I'm not literally stealing people's money, but I kind of feel like I am, you know what I mean?
Casey:
And so...
Casey:
At the very least, if I were to leave it in the store, which is an option, you are correct, I would need to do maybe a day's worth of work in tearing out the things that just plain don't work and rejiggering the way it's presented in the store and stuff like that.
Marco:
So the other things to consider here are the environmental, the macroeconomic conditions that you're in right now.
Marco:
And I'm not talking about the virus.
Marco:
I'm saying you created Vignette right before...
Marco:
iOS 13 came out that had that built-in feature to share people's content and photos with everyone automatically.
Marco:
You finished it really fast to get it out there before that WWDC.
Marco:
It had a nice summer where the system had not Sherlocked its main functionality.
Marco:
You got a great amount of sales and it went really well.
Marco:
For the initial amount of effort you put into it, it paid off well.
Marco:
Now, as you go, it's kind of like a peak oil kind of thing where, like, you got all the easy money out of it already.
Marco:
As you go further, it's going to get harder and harder to advance the app in meaningful ways because all the low-hanging fruit is picked.
Marco:
So now you're faced with these much larger things of, like,
Marco:
deeper service integrations, authentication logins, registering as an API client and becoming a whole app for these other third-party services, which, by the way, is a terrible business to be in if you can avoid it.
Marco:
You don't want to have to rely on these third-party services and their logins.
Marco:
For your business, that's a terrible idea.
Marco:
It puts you in a terrible spot.
Marco:
They change and shift their rules all the time.
Marco:
You're never going to be a priority for them, so that's not a good idea in general.
Marco:
You know, if you can help it to not be one of those anyway.
Marco:
So to make the app move forward at all or to even maintain its functionality as you have conditions like Twitter messing up their, you know, the method you're using and stuff like that and Facebook being unreliable to fix those things or to potentially even fix those things.
Marco:
requires a ton of effort on your part to dramatically change the way the app works to dramatically expand its problem set and you know add many more screens and possible error conditions and and everything else so it would dramatically you know expand and bloat the app it would add way more to your workload to extract
Marco:
marginal more money out of an already mature product that is kind of in coasting mode right now like marketing wise and business and pr wise it doesn't make a lot of sense to do all that work unless you think there would be a huge upside on the other side of it and there probably won't be because in the meantime your sherlocking has continued and
Marco:
And the share my avatar functionality is slowly spreading throughout people's usage.
Marco:
And so the need for this is going down over time, not up.
Marco:
So for you to be investing a huge amount of effort to what would probably result in a marginal increase in sales in an environment where demand is probably going down over time, that's not smart.
Marco:
So I suggest you either leave it as is and maybe just, like, kind of don't mention Twitter in the description anymore.
Marco:
Like, you know, don't promise something that you can't necessarily rely on.
Marco:
So just, like, remove some of those mentions of that.
Marco:
Or just take it off the store and move on.
Marco:
Because...
Marco:
No one's forcing you to keep working on this.
Marco:
You don't have to feel guilty about that decision.
Marco:
You have new ideas you want to work on?
Marco:
Work on them.
Marco:
Because first of all, you have probably more potential upside.
Marco:
you know financially and you know professionally like you have more potential upside from working on something new right now than from making like a point update to vignette that you have to break your back over to actually do all this crap and that you know only a small handful of its users will even notice or care about uh so you you really should if you have something else that you'd rather be working on which you said you do then that is a better place to spend your time right now
Marco:
So the only question is what you do with vignette, whether you let it coast or whether you kill it.
Marco:
But working on it significantly I don't think is a good idea.
Casey:
And I think you're right.
Casey:
And I do want to hear, John, what you have to say.
Casey:
But something I didn't state in my kind of opening monologue is that I don't see this difficulty really changing.
Casey:
And by that I mean I don't have any leverage over Facebook, over Instagram, over Twitter, over anyone else.
Casey:
And so really at any moment they can –
Casey:
they can pull the rug out from under me or, you know, pull the football away from me.
Casey:
And there's nothing I can do about it.
Casey:
And that's already sort of happened.
Casey:
And I'm looking, I'm looking down this tunnel of this happening over and over again.
Casey:
And I just don't, I don't think I want to be on that treadmill.
Casey:
You know, I don't think I want to deal with that.
Casey:
It's not fun for me.
Casey:
It's not great for my users.
Casey:
It's just, it's kind of crummy for everyone involved.
Casey:
And
Casey:
Because of that, that's another big reason why I'm really strongly considering just being done with it and just pulling it from the store.
Casey:
But John, what are your thoughts?
John:
And you fell victim for one of the classic blunders.
John:
You and Marco already just said it.
John:
The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well-known.
John:
Is this never write an application that relies on third-party APIs?
John:
There's other ones like this.
John:
This is a silly thing, but if you're making an application that...
John:
has certain aspects to its functionality that make it more difficult to maintain over time, the bar gets raised for how successful that product needs to be.
John:
So the two big categories, that's not even the biggest one.
John:
I would say the biggest one is never write an application with a server-side component, Marco.
John:
Because...
John:
to sustain a server-side component both its complexity and its cost you need a much higher level of success than a wad of code that lands on somebody's device and runs right um you could also say like the other examples never write an application that has a huge amount of creative content so you say games aren't those ideal no third-party apis and it all runs locally no you know i'm not gonna make a network-based game it's gonna be a local puzzle game it just runs and it's fine it's like oh now you have creative content
John:
like and that you think oh well just i just need some artwork and some sound and then eventually you realize how much work that is like maybe some magazine articles there there are certain categories of applications that have attached to them this huge amount of hidden baggage which doesn't mean that they're bad to do like the best applications like you know to get back to server-side component overcast is as good as this is because of the server-side component the server-side component adds value like
John:
But you have to make sure you're in a situation where I'm going to put in the work and I'm going to spend the money and the time to do and add the complexity to do this thing because it will make my app more valuable.
John:
And customers will see that value and give me more money.
John:
Right.
John:
You need that part to connect.
John:
Right.
John:
So if you can do the big game with a huge amount of creative content or, God forbid, you're going to do a network based game with third party API integration and a huge amount of creative content.
John:
it better be a pretty big hit game right or you better be getting paid a lot by apple to put it into apple arcade or something like that right um and third-party api stuff it's the same deal like you as you noted you are a you know that's to quote another thing from a an old snl sketch
John:
You've got to ride the snake, and the snake is Facebook, and they're a bad snake.
John:
Or Twitter or any of the other APIs.
John:
Like you said, at any moment, they can go away.
John:
Now, the normal version of this for applications is, oh, Apple's going to release a new update every year or so, and that could break my app, and that's a pain in the butt.
John:
But users, I feel like, are much more accepting of on a yearly basis when the new OS comes out, maybe some of my old apps don't work with it immediately, and maybe some never make it to the new OS.
John:
They're grumpy about it, but they're less grumpy than just some random day of the week.
John:
All of a sudden, the app that they just paid for stops working for an invisible reason that they can't detect because Twitter changed its API, right?
John:
And then you're scrambling to be like, oh, I've got to change my app to chase this API because Twitter's not going to consult you when they change their API, right?
John:
Facebook's not going to consult you.
John:
And what if it's just flaky on a particular day?
John:
And what if they had these invisible limits and like tracking Apple's OS changes, at least you get a WWDC and you know, it's kind of on a yearly cadence, but third party API stuff is, you know, so, and again, the server side stuff, it's like, now you have to keep the server up and keep it running.
John:
And,
John:
networking problems and just yeah so anytime you're considering an idea for an app think about how much invisible baggage is attached to this particular kind of application and don't you know don't bail on it because of that but make sure that you factor that into your equation and see if it balances out with i expect this many customers and i'm going to charge this price and if i get this amount of success does that offset the baggage and
John:
The vignette probably made sense as kind of like an app that you would make for a moment in time and be useful to a bunch of people.
John:
And it was priced – what was the price?
John:
It was like $2.99 or something for the online?
John:
$4.99.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So that's – I think it all matched up.
John:
for what it was right but as an app that you're going to maintain for years and years across os updates across api changes that doesn't seem sustainable again unless unless you have a steady stream of fairly significant a significant percentage of income
John:
based on like you have the big burst and then after that it goes down if it's gone down to a trickle you're not it's not worth investing more time to maintain that trickle right it's the the app has done its job like learn learn from underscore like he's got a million apps and he mercilessly cuts them loose when their time is over right um vignette is very much like a sort of single serving underscore style application and you know you'll know you'll know when it's time to invest
John:
more time and energy into a particular application maybe it has a service side component maybe it does rely on third-party apis but you'll know based on customer response based on your own enthusiasm for developing it your own enthusiasm fed by customer response right like it won't be a mystery when it's worth time to invest more money versus when it's not
John:
Right.
John:
And I feel like if you if you're leaning in the direction of not continuing it and you have new ideas, it's no brainer.
John:
Go for the new ideas.
John:
As for whether you actually pull vignette or just take functionality out of it, that's up to you.
John:
I don't know what the steady trickle of income is compared to the amount of effort you put in.
John:
But I can tell you for the two tiny apps that I made, I was very conscious.
John:
One of the reasons I haven't written maps is because I'm so conscious of the potential maintenance cost.
John:
of any application that my apps are intentionally very simple because i'm the only maintenance cost i'm willing to endure is the yearly apple maintenance cost of they're going to release new os and new hardware and i got to get my stuff working that's enough for me i've been resisting adding features to switch glass for a long time both because i don't want the features and because it's like look
John:
Yeah, I could add those features, and it would be fun.
John:
And I could rewrite it all using the new Swift UI style.
John:
I could do all sorts of stuff.
John:
But it's like, but is that going to give me any amount of new customers?
John:
No.
John:
Do I want those features personally?
Casey:
No.
John:
So don't do it.
John:
Let it lie.
John:
And my things don't talk to any servers, don't rely on any third-party applications, don't have a server-side component.
John:
Again, not saying that's what you should shoot for, but that feature set matches up with the meager amount of income they get.
John:
So I'm happy with them, and I will continue to maintain them because I need to run them all the time.
John:
But vignette seems like the equation tipped a while ago.
Casey:
Yeah, I think so.
Casey:
And, and the thing is, I, I don't have a large support burden, but I have enough of a support burden.
Casey:
You know, I'm getting like a handful of emails a day and some of them are, yeah, like some of them are, some of them are very nice.
Casey:
Very, very nice.
Casey:
Like, Hey, you know, I really tried this and it didn't work for some reason.
Casey:
I'm not really sure why.
Casey:
Is there something I can do to fix it?
Casey:
But most of them are, I don't understand why I paid for this.
Casey:
Give me my money.
Casey:
Which, of course, is wonderful because up until sometime soon, I can't give them their money.
Casey:
I have no mechanism for doing so.
Casey:
You know, the best thing I can do is point them to that page on Apple's website that says, here's how you get a refund for an IAP, you know, in an app purchase and whatever.
Casey:
So I think it's like the support burden.
Casey:
And I don't even answer all of these emails, but I answered more than I probably should bother answering.
Casey:
And that kind of drags me down.
Casey:
And I'm not really that proud of it anymore.
Casey:
I was when it was new, but it's already gotten creaky.
Casey:
It's already showing its age at all of a year and change.
Casey:
So even though you could make a strong argument to just let it sit in the store or, you know, make whatever small tweaks I need to make so that I don't feel embarrassed by it and then let it sit and just chill in the store.
Casey:
And that would probably make me at least a little bit of money.
Casey:
But
Casey:
I don't really feel comfortable with that, and I don't think it really does anyone any good.
Casey:
It doesn't do users much good.
Casey:
It doesn't do me much good.
Casey:
And, you know, the numbers coming in, you know, the checks coming in from Apple are not completely – like, it's not nothing, but it's not enough –
Casey:
to really justify the kind of stress that I feel like I'm carrying by keeping it out there, which is why basically I had already decided to kill it.
Casey:
It was just a matter of, are either of you guys going to give me some really strong reason not to?
Casey:
And it sounds like neither of you are providing that, which is fine.
Casey:
That is totally fine.
Casey:
A couple of people in the chat have said, and I don't want to get specific about it, but the trickle from Vignette is considerably less, considerably less than what membership is now providing.
Casey:
So that's even more reason in my mind to just kill it.
Marco:
Look at it this way.
Marco:
It's not like a death of this app that's like a source of mourning.
Marco:
You're clearing your plate to work on stuff that you're excited about.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And the nice thing about Peek of View, which I am still proud of, and it's not perfect either, but I think it's much closer to perfect than Vignette is.
Casey:
But Peek of View, even though it's, I think, responsible for considerably less income, that only relies on Apple APIs.
Casey:
And that doesn't mean I will never have to do updates.
Casey:
In fact, I think there's a couple I'm going to have to do for iOS 14, but it's much more like Switchglass than it is like Vignette.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
Where I'm not...
Casey:
I'm not beholden to all of these other entities that are massive, and I'm not even on their radar.
Casey:
It's not like I'm on their radar, but they just don't care about me.
Casey:
I'm not even on their damn radar.
Casey:
So the more I think about it, the more I think it just needs to go away.
Casey:
And I would think by the time this episode is posted, if not soon thereafter, it will probably be gone.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Thanks, gentlemen.
Casey:
I really genuinely appreciate it.
Casey:
That was very helpful to make me feel like I'm not totally bananas.
John:
Not totally.
Casey:
Is there something happy we can talk about?
Casey:
Yeah, not for this reason anyway, right?
John:
Should have talked to us sooner.
John:
I didn't know I was having all these problems.
John:
We could have advised you to ditch it earlier.
Casey:
Yeah, and I probably should have, to be honest.
Casey:
We're such good friends.
John:
Well, yeah.
John:
Yeah, but having support emails and having crash reports and the API is changing, but you haven't changed the app.
John:
I can imagine that being stressful.
John:
That's the last thing you want is to know that the app that was working before, because of no fault of your own, they just changed their API.
John:
Now all of a sudden your app is broken and you have to either scramble to fix it or live with knowing that it's broken.
John:
That's terrible.
Marco:
Yeah, get rid of it.
Marco:
It served its purpose.
Marco:
It did very well.
Marco:
It had a wonderful life.
Marco:
Send it to a farm-up state.
Yeah.
Casey:
Well, and to that end, like, part of the reason I hadn't killed it yet was I really thought that this whole NS operation-based spider, you know, re-architecture, I really thought that was going to fix a bunch of my problems.
Casey:
But then, like, actually, Instagram may be broken with what's in the store right now.
Casey:
I don't remember that.
Casey:
But it's fixed in test flight.
Casey:
And then Twitter when when so Instagram was broken briefly and then Twitter was broke is broken.
Casey:
And like the combination of all of these things put me over the edge and made me just think it's just it isn't worth it.
Casey:
I just don't think it's worth it.
Casey:
So that's where I'm currently sitting.
Casey:
And like I said, sometime probably tomorrow, the day after I will just pull it from the store.
Marco:
farewell vignette we knew you something i don't know i don't know how this we hardly we hardly knew you there you go don't don't hire me for any funerals goodness i haven't seen it just gotta wait for shakespeare to come on disney plus