The Best Secret Store
Casey:
If you recall, my backup Vortex is not as robust, perhaps, as John's, but it's robust.
Casey:
And one part of the backup Vortex is a Synology... I couldn't even tell you the model number off the top of my head, but a listener and friend had...
Casey:
I completely forgot.
Casey:
Took me a second to reach it.
Casey:
It scared the poop out of me.
Casey:
But anyways, a listener and friend had sent me one that he had decommissioned.
Casey:
And really, it was just collecting dust.
Casey:
And I was like, sure, I'll use it.
Casey:
And I put it at mom and dad's house, which is a little less than an hour away from here.
Casey:
And it was literally the only real purpose it had was to slurp up backups from my synology here at the house.
Casey:
Well, there was some real bad thunderstorms that went through the area like a week ago or so.
Casey:
And I guess wherever my dad and I put this analogy, perhaps it was not on a surge suppressor.
Casey:
I don't know what happened, but apparently it is dead.
Casey:
I haven't gotten physical control of it since this happened.
Casey:
So I genuinely don't know what the issue is.
Casey:
It could be just a power supply.
Casey:
It could be something much more damaging, whatever the case may be.
Casey:
So that's tale of woe number one.
Casey:
And again, it could be an easy fix, who knows.
Casey:
But tale of woe number two is I decided to take my footstool, I'm sorry, my old Synology, and bring it back to life so it can serve as the backup vortex.
Casey:
I had an 1813+.
Casey:
That Synology was kind enough to give to what won to all three of us, won a piece, literally 10 years ago, or 11 now or something like that.
Casey:
More, I think.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And so...
Casey:
It had been my Synology up until a few months ago when I got a new one.
Casey:
And I just kind of turned it off and basically used it as a footstool.
Casey:
Well, I brought it back to life and started the backup process anew.
Casey:
You know, I deleted everything that was on it because I haven't needed it in months.
Casey:
And in theory, everything was duplicated to the new Synology.
Casey:
So I started my backup.
Casey:
I don't recall exactly what day I started it.
Casey:
But today...
Casey:
was something like two or three days after I started the backup.
Casey:
And I have something to the order of 10 terabytes that I'm backing up.
Casey:
I don't remember the number offhand, but it was around that much.
Casey:
And I was looking at the hyper backup app within the Synology web interface, which is what's doing this backup.
Casey:
And it said I was at like 93%.
Casey:
and I was very excited because I think I'm going to be seeing my parents in the next couple of days, and depending on where we are, I'll either hand them the Synology and say, please plug this in, or perhaps I will bring them the Synology if we're going to their house, and I'll plug it in, and I can assess the damage on the other one.
Casey:
And I really wanted this backup to be done locally rather than having to do it across the internet.
Casey:
So it was at like 93%.
Casey:
And I went to get up from my desk and past Casey made poor choices.
Casey:
Because there was no great power outlet anywhere near where the old sonology needed to be.
Casey:
And I think you can see where this is going.
John:
Yeah.
John:
As soon as you said you got up from your desk, I saw where this was going.
Casey:
So I have a power strip.
Casey:
I have a fully Jarvis desk.
Casey:
It's, you know, the cool kid desk that I got long after it was no longer cool.
Casey:
But I really do love this desk.
Casey:
It has on the back of it a tray where you can put like a power supply and cables and whatnot.
Casey:
Past Casey was smart insofar as I draped like a little six inch extension cord off of it so I can easily plug things in temporarily, right?
Casey:
And so that's where I plugged the Synology in on like a five or six foot, you know, standard, I don't remember the code for it, but the standard computer plug, right?
Casey:
So I have this going under the desk and just hanging, I mean, not in tension, but hanging off the back of the desk, basically in this tray.
Casey:
Well, I had my legs crossed and I go to get up and I put my legs down and flip.
Casey:
93% I was.
Casey:
And now I'm starting over, baby, because that thing just died instantly.
John:
It won't resume?
Casey:
Well, so here's the thing.
Casey:
It tried to resume, but it very well could have been user error.
Casey:
I don't know what I did, but it tried to resume for a second, and then it was like, no, the target device is not there.
Casey:
And I had already rebooted everything on the old device, you know, the destination.
Casey:
I tried to get it in a known good state, and it very well could have been something I screwed up.
Casey:
But one way or another, no, it did not resume.
Casey:
I think it tried to, and it failed.
Casey:
So now I'm starting over, baby, which is really, really annoying and unfortunate.
Casey:
Things could be much worse.
Casey:
Don't get me wrong.
Casey:
We're ready to plug it in for the second attempt.
Casey:
Oh, it's in the exact same spot.
Casey:
However, however, I knew you were going to ask this.
Casey:
What I did was I, there's enough slack on the cable that I draped it over the edge of the tray.
Casey:
So instead of being like, you know, directly where my feet would be, it's way over to the edge of the desk.
John:
You know, this is going to be a multi-day process now.
John:
Why don't you get it plugged in somewhere that, you know, it will be safe for multiple days?
Casey:
Because that was, that would, that would make way too much sense.
Casey:
And I didn't want to, I didn't want to have to get a different extension cord.
John:
Rest your glass of water on it while it backs up.
Casey:
All right, let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
Scott Shuchart writes, did you forget about the HP iPods in your iPod tier list special?
Casey:
Surely a letter grade off of their proper peers.
Casey:
I knew this was a thing.
Casey:
Did not even occur to me when we were recording, however, that we should talk about these.
John:
We probably should have included it.
Marco:
Well, they weren't really distinct models, were they?
Marco:
I mean, although neither were the U2 ones, John.
John:
No, the U2 ones I thought were worth putting in because I think they are...
John:
There are strong opinions in both directions.
John:
Some people really love the black and red, and some people hate it.
John:
Nobody liked the HP iPods.
John:
They were like baby blue, baby bluish gray.
John:
So whatever color HP thought stood for HP back in those days, it was kind of like, I don't know, it was terrible.
John:
It was like a powder blue that was really dirty.
John:
It just was not good.
John:
And I just, I mean, they would have just ended up going to F because it's like taking a good iPod and ruining it.
John:
It was kind of the way when, you know, like when Steve Jobs was introducing the Rocker phone or I think that was the device that he threw it at somebody.
John:
Like you can tell when he was introducing a device that he really had disdain for.
John:
That was the HP iPod.
Marco:
Well, it wasn't the whole point of that basically a distribution deal because HP had so much more distribution than Apple back then.
Marco:
And I think that was the point, if I remember correctly, of just like getting it into into places that sold HP products.
John:
I mean, maybe it was definitely one of those deals where somebody convinced Jobs that they should do this for some businessy reason.
John:
And then immediately after, I'm sure he said, we're never doing this again.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
There's no way he liked that at all.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
I think the rocker was the best.
Casey:
Maybe it was an HP iPod, but the just utter disgust as he was introducing this was so good.
Casey:
Anyways, all right.
Casey:
With regard to the tier list, we've asked this question several times before, I feel like, but it wasn't until this time that David Schaub wrote in to tell us S tier is borrowed from Japan.
Casey:
So remember on a tier list, it's S, A, B, C, D, F, or sometimes A, B, C, D, E.
Casey:
And if you look at the Wikipedia entry for the tier list, S tier may stand for special, super, or the Japanese word for exemplary, which is Shu, I guess.
Casey:
I'm sure I'm pronouncing that wrong.
Casey:
I apologize.
Casey:
You got it.
Casey:
And originates from the widespread use in Japanese culture of an S grade for advertising and academic grading.
Casey:
And then additionally, if you look at the academic grading in Japan entry in Wikipedia, in Japan, each school has a different grading system.
Casey:
Many universities use the following set of categories, Shu or S for exemplary or excellent.
Casey:
which apparently is from 90% to 100% in terms of score, and it is rarely given.
Casey:
U, which is very good.
Casey:
That's Y-U, not the letter U. That is the letter A for 80% to 89%.
Casey:
Ryo, which is good, or a letter B, I'm sure I'm butchering these, I'm so sorry, which is 70% to 79%.
Casey:
Ka, which is an average or pass, or C, 60% to 69%.
Casey:
Nin, approved or acceptable, which is D or F, which is 50% to 59%, also uncommon.
Casey:
And then FUKA, which is unacceptable or failed, which is anything from 0% to 59%.
John:
It's interesting that they basically have a shifted version of the American grading system because 80-89 is a B around here.
John:
But in Japan, 80-89 is an A. And for the tier list, when most people do tier lists, including us...
John:
i guess maybe when when americans do it they're thinking of a as like the top grade and s is a very very special tier but the actual japanese you know academic grading system it's not like that at all it's not like s is like 99 to 100 and then a is the rest of the 90s or something s is the entire range of the a's so it's kind of weird but yeah this makes sense we did link to the uh tier list wikipedia page the very first time we did a tier list but just in case people didn't follow that link
John:
Some more information for you now.
John:
Yeah.
John:
S tier.
John:
In tier lists, I think it means maybe, let's say 90 to 98, 90 to 99.
John:
Does it mean 101 to 100?
John:
Whatever it is, it's definitely not 90 to 100.
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
AirPods Pro do have an inward facing microphone.
Casey:
I thought we had theorized this.
Casey:
In fact, I think I was going to bring it up and then maybe Marco beat me to the punch.
John:
Marco was talking about it as if it exists.
John:
And I asked, is that a thing that's actually in there?
John:
And we didn't know for sure.
John:
iFixit knows for sure.
John:
They tore the thing open.
John:
You can find the little microphone.
John:
It's in there.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Terry Gilbert writes with another proposition for a Brexit-style name for Apple leaving the EU market.
Casey:
Terry writes, I propose the term Pomme Voyage, P-O-M-M-E, Voyage.
Casey:
It means Apple journey or travel in French, which is one of the main EU languages.
Casey:
It's pretty fun.
John:
It's a play on Bon Voyage, which is having a journey.
John:
And you could also do the Apple of the Earth, which is, everyone knows, the potato.
Yeah.
John:
Pomme de terre is potato in France.
John:
I did not know that.
John:
It makes perfect sense.
John:
You mean apple and then you just bury it in the ground?
John:
Apple of the earth, potato.
John:
They're so similar.
John:
Great language.
John:
Sure.
John:
Until you hear how they say 80.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
With regard to blocking AI crawlers, Manu writes, I wish Marco had explained why he thinks it's short-sighted to block all AI crawlers from being able to see your content.
Casey:
How do I benefit from letting an AI train on my data and profit from it?
Casey:
Or what do I lose by blocking it, setting aside whether such blocking is actually possible?
Marco:
So it depends on what we think AI will bring to the table in the future.
Marco:
I mean, imagine if there was a big dispute when the web first came out on not allowing search engines to find your page for whatever reason you might think.
Marco:
Obviously, think back to the 1990s when the internet was extremely young, the web was extremely young at least.
Marco:
And, you know, imagine if there was some, you know, some kind of fear out there.
Marco:
Like, what if like what if Google serving results like drives like the wrong people?
Marco:
I don't know, like whatever people would have been afraid of back then.
Marco:
Not necessarily even just, you know, fear about new tech, but even if even something as simple as like.
Marco:
What might interrupt somebody's business model?
Marco:
What if... Remember, like, there have briefly been publishers who think that, like, you shouldn't be allowed to, quote, deep link into their site, that you should force everyone to, like, go to the homepage first and then go into the rest of the site from there.
Marco:
Publishers have actually tried to insist upon that or legally require that a long time ago.
Marco:
I don't think that I've really got anywhere.
Marco:
But you can imagine maybe there's some business case why people might want that.
Marco:
And then search engines come along and say...
Marco:
We're just going to index anything you have publicly and let people jump directly to your other leaf pages without having to go through your entire site navigation first.
Marco:
And that's actually probably better for most sites to have that ability and to have that inbound traffic to those leaf pages.
Marco:
But at some point in the past, some publishers have thought that goes against my business model or my preferences or what I think is right.
Marco:
We don't know yet what kind of value AI will bring in learning from our content.
Marco:
It looks pretty bad right now.
Marco:
I'll give you that.
Marco:
It looks pretty bad.
Marco:
It looks like it's mostly taking and not a lot of giving.
Marco:
But what if AI models start keeping track of where they learn something from?
Marco:
Now, I recognize that is not really how most of them work today with the training methods and everything like that.
Marco:
But we are seeing what a lot of people want out of chatbot-style models is basically references.
Marco:
Show me where you got this because I don't trust you, which is fair, right?
Marco:
Well, what if AI models start taking over a large portion of search traffic, which I think seems likely, and what if they start actually having links to follow to verify where they got that information from?
Marco:
Well, then, if that comes to pass and if that becomes a lot of search traffic, if you've blocked AI crawling on your site, you're not going to get that traffic.
Marco:
Now, yes, in the meantime, they could steal your value by basically spitting out your content without linking to you.
Marco:
And I recognize why people don't want that.
Marco:
Like that makes sense.
Marco:
But if five years from now, half of web searching or more is now going through an LLM style model and it does link out to where it found the information from like Wikipedia style and you're not in there, you've just lost half of search traffic.
Marco:
So I want to caution you, like be careful blanket blocking everything unless you really know it's actually really going to hurt you right now.
Marco:
If it's not hurting you right now, I would say, wait, see how this plays out.
Marco:
Don't make any rash decisions that might like block your entire site and all of your content from what might be how most people find stuff in a really short time.
John:
Why not do the reverse of that and block everything now?
John:
And if it turns out beneficial, let them back in.
Marco:
I mean, you can.
Marco:
But in the meantime, you'll be losing out on whatever comes of this.
Marco:
Again, if this is actively hurting the value of your content right now, do what you got to do.
Marco:
But if you can't tell that it's directly hurting you, I would say hold off on taking any action if you can.
Marco:
Give it a second.
Marco:
See where it goes.
Marco:
If there's no harm happening right now, this is not a pressing issue for you.
John:
I mean, it may be a while to see that harm because there could be models that were trained on this that have not yet shipped, right?
John:
And who knows how long those models will be in service, especially if they're open source models or if Apple doesn't retrain its models on an annual basis or something.
John:
There could be a model that was trained on your content that isn't hurting you right now, but because you allow them to crawl you, you know, when iOS 18.4 comes out and has Apple intelligence and there's stuff trained on your model that's part of it, then it starts hurting you.
John:
But by then it's too late to block them because they already crawled you a year and a half ago.
Marco:
Yeah, and honestly, that might happen, but I think odds are if most people are going to get most of their searching done through LLMs, it's not going to matter if you are still in the old Google index or whatever.
Marco:
You're going to lose all your search traffic anyway.
Marco:
Granted, this is me not having blogged in like 5,000 years.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So I get why I don't maybe have a lot of credibility here because I personally don't have a lot to lose right at this second with the way things are today.
Marco:
But if this is where the world is going and everyone starts searching through these kind of interfaces and the regular web crawling indexes start becoming marginalized, you're out of luck if you're not in them.
Marco:
Right now, at least you might be out of luck.
Marco:
You might not be.
Marco:
But if things go that direction...
Marco:
It's like you can be pushing really, really hard to be included in the Yellow Pages phone book, but that doesn't matter so much these days.
Marco:
No matter how great the Yellow Pages was for your business in the past, the reality is no one's finding things that way anymore.
Marco:
So you kind of have to play ball with like Google Maps and Apple Maps and Yelp and stuff like that.
Marco:
That's how people find things now for businesses.
Marco:
If search takes a similar kind of turn where the way web searches are done and where people find content from the web is through LLM-based models that train on public sites and then try to give answers, if you're not there, you're leaving yourself out of where all the people are going.
Marco:
It's a separate problem how we figure out how to compensate publishers for that.
Marco:
In the olden days with the search index, as we mentioned last episode, it was this kind of trade.
Marco:
I will let you index my site because the value that I'm going to get is that people are going to click on those links and come to my site, and then I can serve them ads or whatever.
Marco:
And so there's kind of an equal value exchange there.
Marco:
Obviously, that's not the case now with LLM based search answers.
Marco:
You know, that's that's obviously a problem now.
Marco:
But if that's where all the searches go, you kind of have no like to stand on if you're not there.
Marco:
So at least you can be there if and when this stuff gets worked out a little bit better.
Marco:
And, you know, publishers start figuring out through lots of probably lawsuits.
Marco:
Publishers start maybe having some way to have attribution and click through links and stuff like that.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Cloudflare is offering a one-click AI bot blocker.
Casey:
So from Cloudflare's blog, we hear today clearly that customers don't want AI bots visiting their websites, and especially those that do so dishonestly.
Casey:
To help, we've added a brand new one-click to block all AI bots.
Casey:
It's available for all customers, including those on the free tier.
Casey:
We've observed bot operators attempt to appear as though they are a real browser by using a spoofed user agent.
Casey:
We've monitored this activity over time.
Casey:
We're proud to say that our global machine learning model has always recognized this activity as a bot, even when operators lie about their user agent.
Casey:
This feature will automatically be updated over time as we see new fingerprints of offending bots we identify as widely scraping the web for model training.
Marco:
Please don't do this.
Marco:
Please don't enable this.
Marco:
Please, for the love of God, don't do this.
John:
Fight fire with fire.
John:
Machine learning versus machine learning.
John:
Because as we said, there's no hard and fast way to block this because they can just lie about the user agent.
John:
Aha, but we'll use fingerprinting and we can detect their behavior because bots behave in certain ways.
John:
Anything that's based on sort of heuristics and best guess and machine learning type stuff,
John:
it's going to have false positives, right?
John:
It's not a system between parties that agree on conventions that can be made fairly solid.
John:
This is adversarial.
John:
One party is trying to get through.
John:
The other party is trying to detect them when they're trying to hide.
John:
So inevitably, this will block some legitimate traffic in ways that, you know, are not easy to understand or fix.
John:
But that might be worth it to some people.
John:
And so Cloudflare is just trying to offer a service that people are asking for.
John:
I just do wonder exactly how well it will work.
Marco:
So here's why you shouldn't do this.
Marco:
Again, unless you know specifically that you have a problem that AI crawlers are causing you directly, please don't do this.
Marco:
Because again, first of all, it always catches other stuff in it.
Marco:
I can't tell you how many problems I've had with overcast crawling feeds because some IT admin for a podcast website...
Marco:
Make some blanket decision and says, all right, for our entire site, we're going to hit this switch on Cloudflare that says protect against DDoS or whatever.
Marco:
And it ends up blocking like a third of crawlers, including my own.
Marco:
And then their podcast feeds can't be read by half the podcast apps out there.
Marco:
This happens all the time.
Marco:
The amount of pain in the buttery that Cloudflare has caused web crawler and bot and just web app makers, the amount of pain in the butter they've caused us over the years with these platforms,
Marco:
kind of DDoS-like protections that maybe put people through a JavaScript redirect or a Captcha or whatever before they view the site, or they just block you because they think you might be the wrong kind of bot.
Marco:
What even is the wrong kind of bot?
Marco:
It's been such a problem.
Marco:
The only way I even got around this is that Cloudflare has a...
Marco:
a program that you can apply to be a good bot it's like to be classified for your bot to be a good bot and to not be blocked by most of their stuff and that process I think it took me like six months and repeated emails and reaching out to any contact I might have possibly had like hey do I know anybody at Cloudflare like can you please look at this all this is to say if you turn on stuff like this for your site you will be causing lots of problems for things that you probably consider legitimate
Marco:
So again, I would caution you, if you aren't having an active specific known problem, don't do this.
John:
A lot of the stuff is free through Cloudflare, but conceptually it's a nice business where you sell the blocking and then you also sell the ability to not be blocked by the thing that you sold the person that's blocking you.
John:
Yeah, I think there's other words for that.
John:
It does make sense, though, because for the types of services that you do actually want DDoS protection, but it's a difficulty to figure out what's good and what's bad.
John:
What is a good bot?
John:
What is a bad bot?
John:
Your example is perfect.
John:
In the case of podcasts, people publishing podcasts want people to listen to them.
John:
That's the whole point of publishing a podcast.
John:
You would think.
John:
And the point of podcasting in general is that there's not one podcast client.
John:
There are many of them, right?
John:
Right.
John:
And some of them have their own crawlers.
John:
Some of their listeners are using Overcast or Apple Podcasts or whatever thing they're using.
John:
And if the bots that feed those apps get blocked, you're cutting off your own audience, right?
John:
And it's not an easy thing to resolve.
John:
From a user's perspective, they're like, oh, you're...
John:
Your feed doesn't load.
John:
And so maybe, maybe if they go beyond that complaint, which is just like the hoster, like, I don't know what you're saying.
John:
Our feed is fine.
John:
It works for everybody else.
John:
I don't know what your problem is, right?
John:
Maybe the next level they go and complain to the developer of the app.
John:
Hey, I'm using your app and I try to do this thing.
John:
Your feed doesn't load.
John:
And if they're really technical, they go to the app developer, and eventually the app developer says, when we try to crawl that feed as per your request through the application because you've subscribed to it, we get blocked.
John:
And then maybe the podcast developer talks to the person and says, why are you blocking us?
John:
We can't load your feed in our client and blah, blah, blah.
John:
And then if you're really, really lucky, they say, oh, it must be that thing that we pay for that blocks DDoS.
John:
And then you start the six-month thing that Marco went down, which is, hey, Cloudflare, can I be classified as a good bot?
John:
That's what happens when you try to use best guess estimates, machine learning, heuristics, stuff like that, to try to implement a feature between parties that are adversarial.
John:
Because actual DDoS attacks are adversarial.
John:
They're trying to take down your site by hitting you with tons and tons of requests coming from all over the world.
John:
That's what you're paying to get protected against, and that's a real thing.
John:
And you do have to protect against it, and it's not easy, and paying somebody is usually how people do it.
John:
But...
John:
People, you know, legitimate requests get caught up in that and it's just, it's a pain.
John:
The internet is not as straightforward and simple as you would imagine it is.
John:
It's really more like, you know, just, I don't know, undersea ecosystem where you've got sharks eating little fish and whales and crabs jumping out and biting things.
John:
It's just, it's, or maybe it's more like a jungle.
John:
I don't know, but it's complicated.
John:
It is a complicated ecosystem with all sorts of things doing all sorts of stuff at all times.
John:
And we wish it were simpler, but it's not.
Marco:
We were sponsored this week by Delete Me.
Marco:
You ever wonder how much of your personal data is out there on the internet for anyone to see?
Marco:
It's more than you think.
Marco:
Of course, your name, contact info, social security number, and then even your home address.
Marco:
And then what's even more creepy is all that information about your family members too.
Marco:
It's all being compiled by data brokers and openly sold online.
Marco:
Anybody can search the web for a few minutes and get those private details really easily.
Marco:
This can lead to lots of problems and annoyances for you.
Marco:
So now you can help protect your privacy with Delete Me.
Marco:
I actually have used Delete Me before they were a sponsor.
Marco:
I was looking for a service like this.
Marco:
I did the research.
Marco:
I found them and I use them myself.
Marco:
What they do is they find and remove any personal information that you don't want online and they make sure it stays off.
Marco:
So Delete Me is a subscription.
Marco:
that removes your personal information from the largest people search databases on the web.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Oh.
Casey:
The ongoing saga of Epic Games and Apple.
Casey:
A lot happened, particularly on the 5th of July.
Casey:
So at about 9 o'clock in the morning, on the 5th of July, or 9 o'clock, I think, ATP time anyway, Epic accused Apple of delaying its iOS game store launch.
Casey:
So Epic had said, we are going to make our own game store for the EU.
Casey:
In theory, this should be allowed under the terms of the DMA.
Casey:
And they said, hey, we've submitted and Apple's delaying it.
Casey:
So reading from 9 to 5 Mac, Epic Games has accused Apple of deliberately delaying its attempt to launch its own iOS game store in Europe and has filed a further antitrust complaint with the EU.
Casey:
Now reading from Epic's newsroom on Twitter,
Casey:
We are using the same install and in-app purchases naming conventions that are used across popular app stores on multiple platforms, and we are following standard conventions for buttons and iOS apps.
Casey:
We're just trying to build a store that mobile users can easily understand, and the disclosure of in-app purchases is a regulatory best practice followed by all stores nowadays.
Casey:
Apple's rejection is arbitrary, obstructive, and in violation of the DMA, and we've shared our concerns with the European Commission.
John:
So that's part of the problem of Apple being in this role of like, okay, so you can have third-party stores and you have to pay us for them.
John:
And also, by the way, you have to go through us to get anything into the third-party store.
John:
And that's that last one that makes Apple do things that...
John:
Would never happen if third party app stores were truly independent.
John:
Like let's think of it this way.
John:
Personal computers, you know, Apple sells them.
John:
Other people sell them.
John:
Apple has no control over approving other people's personal computers.
John:
So when the iMac came out and I forget what company is, but some company introduced a computer that was made with translucent teal plastic right after the iMac came out.
John:
Apple had no control over them doing that because Apple did not have approval, right of approval or rejection on every single personal computer that was sold because those are independent companies.
John:
Apple was not like the funnel for everything.
John:
Presumably, Apple would have stopped many computers from being shipped.
John:
But instead, what happens is the company shipped them.
John:
But Apple does have mechanisms to stop that.
John:
They sued one of these companies for...
John:
violating apple's trade dress it's some part of the law that's like if a customer could uh reasonably be confused to think that your thing is actually an iMac because they'd heard of an iMac or whatever and i think they won that suit um whatever but anyway that's when you have actual independent parties in the market when there actually is independent competition it's not like apple has to let people rip them off
John:
There are ways that Apple can stop things that are ripoffs.
John:
If Apple thinks that this thing looks too much like their app store, that people would be confused by it, that it's a violation of their artwork, copyright, trade dress, I don't know all the things that might apply to it.
John:
There are ways they can sue to stop that.
John:
But having them say, actually, we just looked at this and we're not even going to allow it to be on the store.
John:
That's not the way a healthy market works.
John:
There were one party who's, by the way, Epic's competitor for selling games on iPhones gets to decide ahead of time.
John:
Yeah, no, I don't like that.
John:
Like they become, you know, they're Judge Dredd, right?
John:
They are the law, like they're Judge, Jury, and Executioner.
John:
that's that's not due process no one wants their competitor being able to decide whether their thing is allowed to be available to the public so i you know in a healthy uh market epic should ship this and if it is a ripoff apple will sue them and apple will win that's a much better system so that was nine in the morning
Casey:
At about five in the afternoon slash evening, Apple approved the Epic Games Store for iPhone and iPad in the European Union.
Casey:
MacRumors reports Apple today said it has approved the third-party Epic Games Store in the European Union, allowing the Fortnite developer to launch its alternative app marketplace in those countries, reports Reuters.
Casey:
It appears Apple has relented and approved Epic's previously rejected submission.
Casey:
Tim Sweeney chimes in and says Apple is now telling reporters that this approval is temporary and they are demanding we change the buttons in the next version, which would make our store less standard and harder to use.
John:
It's like they, you know, epic complaints to the EU.
John:
Apple says, OK, maybe we went too far.
John:
We'll let you.
John:
We'll allow it to go through.
John:
But they said, but then supposedly saying we let it go through, but they still have to change the buttons.
John:
They just have to change in the next version.
John:
It's like this is not this is not a healthy relationship.
John:
Like, Apple shouldn't be a decision maker in this process of whether or not the Epic Games Store can be released.
John:
That really flies in the face of what the DMA is supposed to be doing.
John:
Again, you don't want your competitor being able to stop your competing product from launching for whatever reason they feel like it, or to say, okay, we'll let this one go through, but the next time you try to do an update, you better have changed all those buttons.
John:
If the buttons, if it's really a ripoff, sue them and you'll win if it's a ripoff.
John:
If like if someone is confused and they go, this looks just like the app store, it looks, you know, pixel for pixel.
John:
Let's show that, you know, put the exhibits in court, say, look, they're tricking people into thinking their stories as trustworthy as our store.
John:
Sue and win.
John:
But you can't preemptively reject stuff like this.
John:
It's not, it's an abuse of their power and it's a power that arguably they shouldn't have.
Marco:
Yeah, this is a bad idea.
Marco:
Apple should not be tarnishing what notarization means by basically making it just like AppReview.
Marco:
This both harms their notarization politics and their other platforms like the Mac that use it, and it will further alienate and freak out Mac developers who rely on that for their entire businesses and Mac users who rely on notarized software that can't be in the App Store for their work.
Marco:
But also, it just flies in the face of the EU rulings and clear intent of the DMA, and you know this is going to just blow up in their face again and again and again.
Marco:
Why does Apple continue to provoke more and more regulation?
Marco:
Again, what's the strategy here?
Marco:
First of all, this kind of particular nitpick that they're doing here, who cares?
Marco:
That's number one.
Marco:
Who cares?
Marco:
It doesn't affect them really at all.
Marco:
But number two, what's going to happen here?
Marco:
I'll tell you what's going to happen.
Marco:
They're going to keep fighting the EU forever until the EU basically says, all right, you know what?
Marco:
No, you can't even have notarization.
Marco:
You cannot screen things at all, even for your alleged security and privacy reasons.
Marco:
That's what's going to happen.
Marco:
And then the iPhone as a platform gets worse.
Marco:
They're going to lose their ability to even do security screening because the regulators will never let this stand.
Marco:
So again, like Apple, what are you doing?
Marco:
You are bringing on problems yourself that will undermine your biggest and most important platform's future.
Marco:
This is not a good strategy.
John:
I think they're just judging that they can get away with it and that dragging their feet is the best strategy because the longer you delay and the more you drag your feet, the less harm you have from competitors.
John:
And I don't think the EU will ever say you can't do notarization at all.
John:
I think just...
John:
you know, even the worst case scenario, the EU will say, we allowed this carve out for security, whatever.
John:
That's all you're allowed to use it for.
John:
So every time Apple does something that clearly has nothing to do with security, like we think your buttons look too much like ours or whatever, the EU will forbid them from doing that, fine them from doing it.
John:
You know, like, I don't think the EU is going to get rid of the carve out because the EU is not Apple.
John:
They're not going to punitively say, because the EU also doesn't want
John:
the iphone platform to be a free-for-all in europe that's why they wrote the dma this way right so i don't think there there's any fear of that uh but you know this this definitely doesn't make the relationship between the parties any better i just think apple's calculation is we can afford to make them drag it out of us we'll see how that goes if and when fines actually appear and have to be paid and of course apple is like counter-suing and using whatever repeal process that is available in the eu so
John:
As always, this will continue to drag on and on.
John:
But right now, the outcome is not clear.
John:
But yeah, as we said, it would be better if Apple figured out a solution that worked for everybody, but that's not currently their strategy.
John:
A lot of times in lawsuits where the two parties are really...
John:
I'm going to say two parties really hate each other, but either way, the two parties, neither one wants to give an inch.
John:
The optimal strategy, they both think the optimal strategy for them is to give nothing, take everything, be as extreme as possible.
John:
Obviously, that's usually not the way it goes down.
John:
Usually, one side is going to win, one side is going to lose, and it's not always entirely one-sided in the judgment, but sometimes both parties can think the strategy is to be as extreme as possible, and from the outside, seeing that strategy play out, it's like, why can't these people be reasonable?
John:
They're just making it worse for themselves, but...
John:
Especially when lawyers are involved, sometimes they're like, look, you've got to fight tooth and nail to get, in the end, an agreement that is somewhat equitable.
John:
Because if you're reasonable now, the other party will take advantage of that.
John:
I don't know if that's really true here.
John:
Apple definitely seems like they're doing that.
John:
The EU...
John:
It's debatable.
John:
But yeah, this continues to grind on.
John:
And you keep mentioning notarization.
John:
This is another instance where Apple has used the same word to describe two fairly different things.
John:
So notarization has existed on the Mac for a long time.
John:
And as far as I'm aware, notarization on the Mac does not involve humans at all.
John:
You submit an application, you get a developer account, you get certificates, blah, blah, blah.
John:
You can submit your application to a server that Apple runs that they will do whatever private API scanning or whatever they do.
John:
It doesn't involve a human.
John:
A computer will just take your input, grind it up, and if it passes some basic checks, spit it back to you and say, here you go, notarized application.
John:
no humans involved no one's going to look at it and say your buttons look too much like the app stores there's absolutely no human intervention that is my understanding of notarization on the mac and as someone who has notarized many many mac apps and seen it come back pretty much immediately i continue to think that there's no human involved but this this is also called called notarization and people are getting things delayed for months or weeks or months and then get them rejected for things that obviously human had a hand in maybe even an executive had a hand in so
Marco:
Yeah, this is just app review.
Marco:
It's like app review lite.
Marco:
Well, not only is it app review, this is like, so there's, you've always kind of been able to feel this as an app developer.
Marco:
There's a second level of app review that your app sometimes gets kicked to for what appears to be some kind of like executive review.
Marco:
Uh, and so this is like, if something in your app is maybe on the edge of a rule or might be controversial, um, your app will be stuck quote in review, uh, for a long time.
Marco:
Like normally the in review status lasts less than one day.
Marco:
And you, you can kind of always tell like if you're, if you're a quote in review for more than a day, chances are you got kicked up to the higher queue and you know, somebody between the reviewer and possibly up to Phil Schiller has to make a decision on that.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
It seems like all of the alternative app store kind of things are getting that level of scrutiny.
Marco:
Probably, if I had to guess, I bet Phil Schiller is personally approving or denying each one because there's going to be so few of them and they're going to be so important in terms of PR.
Marco:
And so they're going to be such big stories.
Marco:
I bet every single one of these is Phil Schiller reviewed.
Marco:
And so you're going to get the Phil Schiller attitude.
Marco:
You're going to get like the harshness, the punitive rejections.
Marco:
You're going to get the personality.
Marco:
You're going to get all that from these.
Marco:
So it's going to continue to be like, again, I think this is the wrong approach.
Marco:
I really do.
Marco:
I think Apple should make this notarization wrong.
Marco:
a lot more like the other notarization, because if they continue not to, they're only going to keep inviting regulators to take control away from them in ways that matter a lot, like actual security and privacy, which this is not that.
Casey:
I think, John, you make a really good point about this being kind of two different kinds of notarization.
Casey:
And it's really too bad because Apple has done a really good job, to your point earlier, of treating notarization as notarization.
Casey:
You know, it literally just says, yes, you know.
Casey:
There's nothing that an automated system, or at least we think automated system, can tell is bad about this.
Casey:
This seems to be good.
Casey:
And worst case, if it isn't, they can revoke whatever thing they need to revoke to prevent machines from running that app anymore.
Casey:
And Apple has been a really good steward of notarization on the Mac for years.
Casey:
Nobody's ever really doubted it.
Casey:
Nobody's ever really, to my recollection, had this kind of drama with it.
Casey:
And here it is.
Casey:
They said, okay, we're going to notarize third-party apps for the EU app stores.
Casey:
And everyone kind of shrugged and said, yeah, okay, I guess that makes sense.
Casey:
But none of us, I don't think, or maybe you guys did, and I just didn't realize it, but none of us really thought that...
Casey:
they were going to treat this, like you said, as app review light.
Casey:
And now they're treating it as app review light.
Casey:
And I think that that very clearly flies in the face of the DMA.
Casey:
It's kind of gross anyhow.
Casey:
And now they've kind of tarnished the sanctity of, or they've sullied the good name of notarization.
Casey:
And so now the next time Apple says, oh, we're going to start notarizing, you know, X, Y, and Z, my eyebrow is going to go up and be like, oh, what?
Casey:
What does that really mean?
Casey:
Yeah, which notarization is this?
John:
Is it the Mac automated notarization or the third-party app store Phil Schiller review?
Casey:
I don't understand why they keep kicking the hornet's nest.
Casey:
I don't get it.
Casey:
And I do know, and I've said it many times, having spoken to many rank-and-file employees – well, that sounds like it's hundreds.
Casey:
I shouldn't say that.
Casey:
But I've spoken to enough rank-and-file employees to know that a common –
Casey:
understanding or perspective is that, look, we did a lot of hard work to make iOS, iPad OS, TV OS, Vision OS, et cetera, et cetera.
Casey:
And we deserve to be compensated for that.
Casey:
We are owed for that.
Casey:
And the implication there is, by our good graces, are you allowed to be there, third-party developers.
Casey:
And
Casey:
I really think that that perspective is not only is it gross, but I think it's losing sight of the fact that without those third-party developers, and granted, I am a very biased participant in this conversation, without these third-party developers, there isn't an iPhone, or at least not the way it is today.
Casey:
And I don't think that Apple realizes that while we are...
Casey:
scratching their back or, and they're having to scratch ours too.
Casey:
Like it's both ways that, that analogy fell right down, but that's okay.
Casey:
You know what I'm driving at is, is, you know, it's, it's mutual, right?
Casey:
It, it, it's, it's symbiosis or whatever the biology term for it is.
Casey:
Aaron will correct me, but, um,
Casey:
it's it's symbiotic and i don't think apple appreciates that i don't think apple realizes that and if they do realize it they don't friggin care they are owed they are owed all of this money they are owed this control because it's it's all because of us you know all because of apple that you guys can have call sheet and overcast and all of these other apps and and you should be thankful that we allow you on our platforms and it's
Casey:
on the surface, like, I guess if that's the attitude you want to have, fine.
Casey:
But, you know, they f***ed around and now we're finding out with Vision Pro, right?
Casey:
Because nobody's touching it.
Casey:
I mean, I have an app on there, but nobody's really touching it.
Casey:
And this is, I really think this is part of the reason why.
Casey:
And if you want to hear more about it, listen to, what was it, last week's overtime?
Casey:
Yeah, because we had thoughts.
Casey:
But it's just, it really is too bad that this thing that, okay, well, they're going to notarize and
Casey:
well, we know from the past that's okay.
Casey:
We're okay with that.
Casey:
And now, well, are we okay with that?
Casey:
Which notarization is it?
Casey:
Who knows?
Casey:
It's a bummer.
Casey:
It's such an own goal, is I guess what I'm saying, and it just bums me out.
Marco:
That's it too, because like, I mean, look, we've had this discussion so many times on the show because they keep messing it up.
Marco:
But, you know, people will say like, well, of course they should be able to monetize.
Marco:
And again, like,
Marco:
that if you look at the history of capitalism we make exceptions to that all the time once it becomes fairly damaging to a market not to um so that that you can set aside you can also say well what incentive does apple have to you know make their platforms if they can't make money on them and you know case you covered that well like there's other value to apps being on their platform besides being able to extract money from the apps this is just gravy
Marco:
You can try to make the pure capitalist arguments.
Marco:
You can try to say, well, of course, they should be able to make as much money as they can.
Marco:
You can make all those.
Marco:
Even if you accept those arguments, which you shouldn't because most of them have giant holes in them or are invalid for lots of other reasons, but even if you would let those arguments pass, it's a bad strategy long term for Apple as a company and for the quality and health of their products and ecosystem because they depend on developers making software for their platforms and
Marco:
for the platforms to succeed obviously very true when you look at their less successful platforms in terms of third-party support uh like vision os is obviously like the big headlighting one right now there's no apps for it and there's lots of reasons for that but even if you look at things like the ipad like how many big companies have made their ipad apps great uh or even are there at all that's been a problem for the ipad since day one uh and and even now when the ipad has lots of apps a lot of times their companies drag their feet on them when we think about the way the iphone and the app store came up
Marco:
it was a lot of indies like us making apps for it today it's a very different world so you could maybe make some argument back then that apple created this market and it helped indies like me succeed that is largely and largely true there's some asterisks on on that but for the most part that is largely true there's a lot of uh merit to that argument and i've personally been one of those people i've benefited from that uh because
Marco:
I have had my apps in the app store since day two or whatever, and it's been great.
Marco:
It has been my career.
Marco:
It's wonderful.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
However, this is a different world today.
Marco:
Today, most indie developers don't exist anymore.
Marco:
Today, what most people want in software for these platforms is made by big companies.
Marco:
So, you launch something like the Vision Pro.
Marco:
Not only are there no indie developers there, effectively, for lots of reasons that we've covered.
Marco:
Basically, nobody can afford them, and there's no users, so they can't afford to buy them, and then once they're there, they can't make any money there.
Marco:
That's okay.
Marco:
But what users of the Vision Pro mostly want...
Marco:
is for larger companies and larger content producers to adopt it and bring their stuff there.
Marco:
Because we want to do things like watch the YouTube app.
Marco:
And I know of Christian Seelig's app, and that's wonderful.
Marco:
But that's what most people are looking for.
Marco:
They're looking for things like Netflix, HBO, YouTube.
Marco:
They're looking for the big players.
Marco:
For something like an app platform, they're going to look for things from Microsoft and Adobe and Google.
Marco:
They're going to look for things from the big companies.
Marco:
If you think Apple has soured relations with the small developers, you should ask some big companies what they think of Apple and their developer platforms.
Marco:
Apple has poisoned the well so much that their platforms are suffering.
Marco:
Look at how much money they have poured into the Vision Pro.
Marco:
so much time, so much engineering resource into this platform, it's going to probably fail in ways that there's multivariate reasons why this platform is not doing great.
Marco:
But a big one is the lack of content and apps on it.
Marco:
Whatever they're doing is not working enough to make this new platform succeed.
Marco:
Again, look at all their platforms that don't have the iPhone's customer base.
Marco:
They all have similar problems.
Marco:
So this isn't just about Apple being their right to take their 30% or enforce their very, very strict rules.
Marco:
It isn't just about that.
Marco:
It's literally that their products are being held back.
Marco:
Where they make way more money than the App Store, their products are being held back.
Marco:
by their app store policies.
Marco:
This is not just us saying we should have more money and Apple should have less.
Marco:
It is literally, this is probably the wrong strategy for Apple overall.
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Casey:
Tech and labor.
Casey:
So this is something that we've kind of had bubbling around in our internal show notes for a while.
Casey:
And it seems like there's a bunch of different storylines that are all kind of intermingled and interleaved together.
Casey:
So we'll start with in April in the United States, the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, banned non-compete agreements for workers.
Casey:
So reading from The Washington Post.
Casey:
The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday, April 23rd, banned non-compete agreements for most U.S.
Casey:
workers with a new rule that will bar employers from enforcing clauses that restrict workers from switching employers within their industry, which the agency said suppresses wages and gums up labor markets.
Casey:
The FTC voted 3-2 Tuesday to issue the rule it proposed more than a year ago.
Casey:
The new rule makes it illegal for employers to include the agreements in employment contracts and requires companies with active non-compete agreements to inform workers that they are void.
Casey:
The agency received more than 26,000 comments about the rule after it was proposed some 16 months ago.
Casey:
The rule will take effect after 120 days, although business groups have promised to challenge it in court, which could delay implementation.
John:
I wonder how pervasive non-competes are.
John:
When I started in the industry after graduating college in the nineties, they were standard.
John:
I don't think the first like two, three, maybe even four jobs I had all had non-competes.
John:
Uh,
John:
Maybe they're not as common now, but and I don't remember what I thought of them back then I mean, I thought they were pretty terrible and I'm like, well, I guess this is just the way things are done This is my first real job.
John:
I don't really know how things go But yeah, for people in other countries who just don't know what we're talking about here if you worked for example for a video game developer You're not and I don't know if don't competes are common video games, but I'm just as an example I
John:
Your non-compete would say, okay, well, you can quit this job whenever you want.
John:
Like, you're, you know, you're not a prisoner here.
John:
But if you quit, you can't get a job with another video game developer for two years.
John:
And if that sounds totally bonkers to you, that's the reaction you should have.
John:
It's like, well, wait a second.
John:
I'm a video game developer.
John:
If I quit this job, presumably, I would want to go work for a different video game developer.
John:
And you're telling me, oh, you can quit.
John:
You just have to get a job doing something other than video game development.
John:
Right.
John:
And that was across all industries.
John:
All like, like sometimes it'd be narrow, like you can't work for these specific competitors.
John:
You can't do this specific thing or whatever.
John:
But, but as an employee, I was like, well, I do want a job and this does seem like a good job and they're going to pay me a lot of money and I'm going to get this, that, and the other thing.
John:
And I like this company.
John:
And when you're taking the job, you're like, I don't have to worry about quitting or whatever.
John:
But then like three years later, you decide you want to quit and go work somewhere else.
John:
And you're like, oh, now I can't go work for any of the three companies that I wanted to go work for instead of this one.
John:
What am I going to do?
John:
So this article is saying that it is –
John:
Oh, gums up the labor market?
John:
Yeah, that's putting it mildly.
John:
Suppresses wages and gums up the labor market.
John:
Suppresses wages because if a competitor, you know, if you're working for one company and you're going to work for a competitor because they're going to pay you more money, you're like, oh, go work over there.
John:
They're offering me more money.
John:
I'm good at my job.
John:
I did a good job on the last product that my company makes.
John:
They know I worked on that product.
John:
and i and i applied for a job over there and they said hey we'll give you more money and so you go where you can make more money that's a competitive market for labor the more in demand you are the more in demand your skills are the better you are at your job the more you can get paid oh but if there's a non-compete uh yeah you can't if you quit your job today you can't apply for a new job at us for two years according to this non-compete that you got so
John:
It's terrible.
John:
It's terrible for employees like this.
John:
This big major topic here is tech and labor.
John:
And even though people who work in the tech industry don't like to think of themselves as labor and tend to resist the idea of unions and stuff.
John:
We are workers just like anybody else.
John:
We do not own or run the company.
John:
Sometimes we get equity in them depending.
John:
Uh, but if you're just, uh, working for a salary, part of your power, your meager amount of power you have in the market is that if someone wants to pay you more for your skills and your labor, you should be able to go over there and do that.
John:
And non-competes fly in the face of that.
John:
So they are super duper evil.
John:
And I came to hate them more and more as I worked in the industry.
John:
And in my limited experience, they did become less pervasive.
John:
I don't know why.
John:
Maybe it's because, uh,
John:
People stopped taking jobs.
John:
They said, you know, like people would turn down jobs because they had a non-computer or whatever, and they could find one that didn't have one.
John:
But anyway, they seemed less pervasive to me in my experience.
John:
And the FTC banning them is long, long, long overdue.
John:
They're banned in many specific states.
John:
Like I think California has had them banned for a while, but a federal ban makes...
John:
a huge amount of sense.
John:
This gives way too much power.
John:
Non-competes give way too much power to employers.
John:
The ability to quit one job and go get a better job, that is a power that employees should have.
Casey:
No argument here.
Casey:
I completely agree.
Casey:
So put that aside for a second.
Casey:
We're going to come back to it.
Casey:
Meanwhile, also in April, Inside TSMC's Expansion Struggles in Arizona.
Casey:
This is a post that Gruber put up, which is commenting on a post from restofworld.org.
Casey:
We will link to both.
Casey:
Vilo Show reporting for the rest of the world on TSMC's massive but now much-delayed chip fabrication campus outside Phoenix.
Casey:
So from rest of the world, the American engineers complained of rigid, counterproductive hierarchies at the company.
Casey:
Taiwanese TSMC veterans described their American counterparts as lacking the kind of dedication and obedience that they believe to be the foundation of their company's world-leading success.
Casey:
TSMC's work culture is notoriously rigorous, even by Taiwanese standards.
Casey:
Former executives have hailed the Confucian culture, which promotes diligence and respect for authority, as well as Taiwan's strict work ethic as key to the company's success.
Casey:
Chang, speaking last year about Taiwan's competitiveness compared to the U.S., said that, quote,
Casey:
If a machine breaks down at 1 in the morning, in the U.S., it will be fixed in the next morning.
Casey:
But in Taiwan, it will be fixed at 2 a.m.
Casey:
And, he added, the wife of a Taiwanese engineer would go back to sleep without saying another word.
Casey:
To which Gruber very astutely points out, even the use of wife rather than spouse speaks to the culture clash.
John:
So I just mentioned how people in the rest of the world with stronger labor laws would be shocked about the idea of non-competes.
John:
Here's another culture clash this time in the other direction.
John:
There are many markets in the world where labor has even less rights and stricter expectations than in America.
John:
So the kind of work culture where
John:
uh loyalty to your business is above even your own family it's above your it's above your own health certainly it's above your own everything it's like the company is everything strict hierarchies whatever your boss says goes that's flies in the face of american culture in many ways but also it flies in the face of a lot of american labor laws and basic american values and
John:
Having worked with people, engineers even, just doing the same job as me in other countries, I can tell you that some countries pride themselves on the same as Taiwanese, pride themselves on the idea of our employees work late and they'll stay until the job gets done and they'll do all this sort of self-sacrifice to do whatever it takes to make the company successful.
John:
And the first time someone said this to me in a casual environment, someone from another country at work, I was like, that's not something to be proud of.
John:
I know it sounds like it is.
John:
It sounds like you're doing a great job or whatever.
John:
And for limited amounts of time, that can be true.
John:
But at this point...
John:
it's not it you know it is a uh resolved uh you know it's not an open question that driving your employees to the point of burnout is obviously bad for the people involved but also counterproductive to the organization that people who are working longer and longer hours the work they're doing an hour 14 costs you money like it's it's negative money because they're doing such a bad job because they're burnt out because they've been working for 14 hours straight
John:
The company would do better if it let them go home after an eight-hour shift and sleep and come back rested the next day, especially in programming and that type of work.
John:
But a lot of countries don't think that way, and their culture is about – talk about all the other counter – anti-patterns of being blindly loyal to a strict hierarchy and doing whatever your bosses say.
John:
You need people at all levels of an organization to –
John:
not blindly obey what they're told to do, but to have minds of their own and to stand up when they're told to do something that's bad or wrong or a safety hazard or whatever.
John:
And workers should stand up for their rights to have a life and to be healthy.
John:
And that is kind of similar to Marco's point before.
John:
In the end, that is better for the organization, too.
John:
He was like, oh, you're taking stuff away from the company.
John:
The company would do better if all their employees worked 14-hour days.
John:
The company wouldn't do better.
John:
That's the thing.
John:
The company believes that they should drive employees to work, you know,
John:
And if there's anything wrong, you got to jump out of bed and do it.
John:
And we don't care how you destroy your life and a company comes to a family.
John:
That's not better for the company in the long run.
John:
And whether or not American companies actually realize that or whether existing American laws constrain them from doing things, right?
John:
Because it's questionable.
John:
Depending on the company you work for.
John:
uh you may feel like the only thing stopping my company from being exactly like this are laws right and even those they break as much as they possibly can that's true and by the way it's it's more true of lower paid jobs believe it or not like you know relatively speaking if you're like a tech employee in america you are treated the nicest of any employee in any industry in america
John:
Because you get paid the most money and you actually do get vacation days and there is some acknowledgement of burnout.
John:
And still, as someone in the game development industry, and still, even those tech jobs, people are exploited.
John:
People are ground up and spit out.
John:
And it just gets worse and worse as you go down the line to, you know, people working just...
John:
you know, hourly wage jobs that are not big, fancy tech jobs, they get treated even worse.
John:
And, you know, that's why, well, it's not why, but one of the reasons that you see more willingness to unionize in industries that get paid less is because, you know, tech employees are like, oh, we get paid so much money.
John:
We don't need a union.
John:
We're doing fine or whatever.
John:
But,
John:
You know, this this culture clash really highlights just the lack of agreement across the world and across cultures about what a healthy what a healthy working relationship looks like.
John:
And, you know, the TSMC CEO saying like, this is why we're ahead of you, America.
John:
I mean, there's lots of reasons why other countries are ahead of us in various industries.
John:
I don't think one of them is that their employees are willing to work longer hours, right?
John:
They have a better educated workforce.
John:
They have, you know, you know, a better government system with better support, better education, better healthcare.
John:
Like there's all sorts of reasons why the government reasons why they may be doing better in a certain area, cheaper labor, so on and so forth.
John:
But the willingness to work hard is really not one of them.
John:
Like I think,
John:
America is closer to a reasonable balance of productivity and hours worked than a culture like the one described here in Taiwan, which I don't know if this is pervasive culture or just TSMC or whatever.
John:
And even in America, whenever you look at the big studies, Americans work longer and harder than other countries and get less vacation days and
John:
And then people say, that's why we have higher productivity in America, because we work longer and harder.
John:
It's like, that's probably why we have more burnout.
John:
I'm not sure why it's how we get more productivity.
John:
But anyway, of all the things that are delaying and messing with this TSMC thing in Arizona, I'm kind of not surprised that one of them is the culture clash about...
John:
uh engineering practices and work-life balance i mean even you know i don't know if you guys remember this but back in the 80s there was a movie gung-ho back when uh the japanese were going to take over america there was a movie i think it was michael keaton where it's like a japanese car company came to build a factory in america and they had to deal with all the lazy shiftless american workers who didn't know what they were doing and eventually in the end the americans showed that they're good workers too and you know it's a it's a rah-rah completely racist 80s movie about fear of japanese people
John:
I was going to say, were Casey and I even alive yet for this?
John:
Maybe not.
John:
But anyway, that was the big fear.
John:
Japan, they do everything efficiently.
John:
All their workers are hardworking and diligent.
John:
They do exactly what they're told and so on and so forth.
John:
It's just so much more complicated than that.
John:
But anyway, on this specific issue of employees staying late and working long hours and sacrificing their family for their job, that's not healthy and it's not something we should endorse.
John:
No, definitely not.
Casey:
Alright, so continuing on, U.S.-made chips will cost Apple more, despite government subsidies.
Casey:
Also from April.
Casey:
This is 9to5Mac.
Casey:
Apple was pledged by at least some of its chips from TSMC's upcoming plants in Arizona.
Casey:
There had initially been doubts about whether this was much more of a PR move, since the chip elements seemed likely to have to be sent back to Taiwan for what's known as packaging.
Casey:
or a final assembly.
Casey:
One analyst said this made the Arizona plant, quote, a paperweight.
Casey:
However, Apple later said it would use another U.S.
Casey:
company, Amcor, to do the chip packaging.
Casey:
Producing chips in the U.S.
Casey:
carries higher costs than doing it in Taiwan.
Casey:
Those subsidies were recently confirmed as totaling $6.6 billion in grants across three plants and a
Casey:
Then, according to the Financial Times, TSMC plans to charge customers more for making their chips outside of Taiwan as global capacity expansion, power costs, and increasingly complex cutting-edge technologies weigh on its profitability.
Casey:
Quote, if a customer requests to be in a certain geographical area, then the customer needs to share the incremental costs, said CC Wei, chief executive of the world's largest chip manufacturer, to investors on Thursday during the company's first quarter earnings call.
Casey:
Again, quoting...
Casey:
In today's fragmented globalization environment, costs will be higher for everyone, including TSMC, our customers, and our competitors, Wei said, adding that discussions with customers about price increases had started.
John:
Yeah, so it's good that Apple is trying to get more things manufactured in the U.S., as happened with Mac Pro, the trash can Mac Pro.
John:
I believe even this one, too.
John:
I forget.
John:
Building stuff in the U.S.
John:
tends to be more expensive.
John:
The cost of living is more expensive.
John:
The cost of labor is more expensive because you have to pay those people so they can afford to live here.
John:
um than it is in some other countries and tsmc is passing that cost on to the customer so if some customer meaning like apple not like an individual if some customer of tsmc says hey we want to buy chips from you we'd like to we'd like them to be manufactured in the u.s please they'll say great that'll be x amount extra because it costs us more to manufacture them there
John:
Strategically speaking, it is a good idea for Apple to have multiple geographic sources for its ships.
John:
Now, having TSMC make them in Taiwan and TSMC make them in the U.S.
John:
is not as good as having two different companies, but you take what you can get.
John:
And Taiwan, there's a potential geopolitical instability over there.
John:
Uh, so having a backup plan is good.
John:
And honestly, it's, yes, it's going to cost more.
John:
And I think Apple should pay more.
John:
Uh, it was again, usually unlike things like phones and Macs and stuff, the chip is not the most expensive component.
John:
It's usually the screen.
John:
Um,
John:
As long as it's not twice or three times the price or whatever, pay a little extra.
John:
Pass some of that cost on to the customer.
John:
Advertise the fact that more and more of your components are made in the U.S.
John:
I'm not sure how much of a selling point that is, but Apple has been touting for years and years how much of their devices are recycled.
John:
And they keep increasing that.
John:
And I applaud that effort.
John:
I also don't know how much customers care about that.
John:
But whether customers care or not, Apple continues to travel that road to reduce their packaging, to use more recycled materials, to try for that carbon neutral 2030 goal.
John:
I think those are all things they should be doing and not just out of a sense of nobility, but just because if they achieve them, they'll be so far ahead of their competition in these areas because everyone will have to do this stuff eventually.
John:
And if Apple does it first voluntarily, it's kind of an analogy for the regulations.
John:
Apple does it first voluntarily and does a good job of it.
John:
they will be ahead of their competitors.
John:
And I think it's the same is true of sort of like paying to build up, you know, US manufacturing prowess.
John:
Like Apple put billions of dollars into manufacturing in China to help pay for all that, to help subsidize the plants and the machines that are in them to build all their fancy computers and help train all the employees and so on and so forth.
John:
Obviously, there was a much bigger industry there already before Apple, but Apple did put a lot of money into that.
John:
Apple should be dedicated to putting in even more money in factories and all the surrounding infrastructure to do that stuff in America.
John:
That means paying to educate the workers, paying, you know, paying to build the housing that's going to, you know, and I'm not saying like I have a company store or whatever, but like,
John:
Through the means that we have in this country, through government subsidies, through Apple, paying higher prices for products, that's the way Apple would do this.
John:
It's not like Apple's going to build everybody's houses and stuff.
John:
What they're going to do is they're going to pay X dollars more per chip, and that's going to allow these factories to exist and be profitable, as opposed to Apple saying, no, we demand the lowest possible prices, so we're not going to buy a single thing from Arizona.
John:
We're going to buy it all from Taiwan, right?
John:
So this...
John:
It's not going to be easy.
John:
It's going to be expensive.
John:
It's going to take a really long time.
John:
And in the end, it's still just TSMC instead of an actual American company like Intel.
John:
And Intel, by the way, did also get some billions of dollars in subsidies.
John:
But I feel like this is the road Apple should be traveling down.
John:
And U.S.
John:
labor is a big factor in this because...
John:
The path to success here is not, you know what?
John:
U.S.
John:
employees should also sacrifice their health and family life for our employers.
John:
It's the only way we can compete.
John:
That's not the way to do this.
John:
That's not the way to win.
John:
That's not the correct move here.
John:
And in the end, Taiwan will also have to grow out of that as well, if and when they travel the same path we have.
Casey:
All right, and then moving on, and we said we would come back to this.
Casey:
Just a few days ago on the 5th of July, a judge has said that the FTC lacks the authority to issue rules banning non-compete agreements.
Casey:
So reading from Ars Technica, a U.S.
Casey:
judge ruled against the FTC in a challenge to its rule banning non-compete agreements, saying the FTC lacks substantive – substantive?
Casey:
substantive.
Casey:
There we go.
Casey:
You can just leave it in.
Casey:
Who cares?
Casey:
Rulemaking authority.
Casey:
The preliminary ruling only blocks enforcement of the non-compete ban against the plaintiff and other groups that intervened in the case.
Casey:
But it signals that the judge believes the FTC cannot enforce the rule.
Casey:
The case is in U.S.
Casey:
District Court for Northern District of Texas, so appeals would be heard in the U.S.
Casey:
Court of Appeals for the Fifth District, which is generally regarded as one of the most conservative appeals courts in the country.
Casey:
Womp womp.
John:
It's an ongoing problem in this country where, you know, one of the major parties and all of the people in power who support that major party believe that the government shouldn't be allowed to do things that they don't like.
John:
And one of those is restraining companies in any way.
John:
And so, of course, of course, there's going to be a judge and a bunch of plaintiffs who are going to say non-competes.
John:
That's not fair.
John:
We should be able to stop employees from getting another job in the industry for as long as we want.
John:
If they don't like it, they can just choose not to take this job.
John:
There's nothing wrong with this system.
John:
Please don't try to give any power to employees.
John:
We're going to claw that back by saying the FTC lacks the authority to do that.
John:
In fact, all government agencies lack authority to do anything, and they shouldn't be allowed to do anything.
John:
Companies should be able to do whatever they want, and there's no problem with this system.
Casey:
It's so exhausting.
Casey:
It is so very exhausting.
Casey:
It stinks, but what are you going to do?
Casey:
I mean, you just do the best you can, I suppose.
John:
I mean, they would say, oh, let the states do it.
John:
California did it or whatever.
John:
We just don't want a national one.
John:
Yeah, we think it's good.
John:
It's great.
John:
You want that?
John:
Go move to California.
John:
No tech companies ever succeeded there.
John:
Obviously, these laws are going to strangle the economy.
Casey:
Let's do a little Ask ATP.
Casey:
And Traeger writes, with the announcement of Apple migrating their password functions into a standalone app, adopting pass keys is getting more interesting.
Casey:
And I'm starting to consider moving away from my password manager of choice.
Casey:
I've always been hesitant to do so in the past because I figured that an OS native password manager would be a more likely target for getting hacked.
Casey:
Is this irrational or do you think there might be a case for third party managers being more secure?
John:
There absolutely is a case for this.
John:
This is one of the strongest arguments at this point for third-party managers.
John:
Now that Apple's adding more and more features to their own password manager, it's built in, it's well-supported.
John:
The Apple ones have shared groups now.
John:
The number of things that third-party ones do that Apple doesn't do is getting smaller by the day.
John:
But one thing they do have going for them is that if your Apple ID gets compromised, for example...
John:
and you don't have like your third-party password manager like master password in your iCloud keychain they can't get it all your other password things now obviously if they've cracked your Apple ID and you use that email address then you can they can use your password reset things or whatever but anyway it is still one more layer of protection lots of stuff in securities how many different layers of protection can you add and by sort of tying your password manager to your Apple ID to the you know like just all one big ball of stuff if that ball gets cracked that's
John:
Just one layer now I know within Apple stuff there are additional layers But a third-party password manager does add an additional layer Third-party password managers don't have as nice integration as Apple's stuff tends to have
John:
Third-party password managers can get compromised.
John:
You hear the stories all the time.
John:
I can't even remember the name of the company, so I don't want to throw them out there.
John:
But a bunch of names of third-party password managers that I recognize, in the past several years, I've seen stories that, oh, they got hacked, and all their stuff might be compromised, and sorry about that, and that's really bad.
John:
And Apple is a bigger company and has had better luck defending iCloud keychain, but maybe their day is going to come eventually, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
This is the difficulty of making security decisions.
John:
When I recommend what people should do, I usually try to pick the passive least resistance, which is not to use a third-party one.
John:
And because they're much more likely to have problems dealing with a piece of third-party software than they are to, you know, get hacked by somebody because everything was all in one place.
John:
But for people listening to the show and tech nerds or people who have higher security needs...
John:
Using things for multiple vendors that are truly separated from each other does add an extra level of security.
John:
And like I said, that's one of the strongest remaining reasons to use a third priority password manager is if you feel like you need or want that additional level of security and you can deal with the downsides.
Casey:
All right, Jamie writes, with so many flops and mistakes, the reputation of AI is arguably going the way of crypto.
Casey:
Do you envisage WWDC changing this course with Apple's input, or do you think they're frantically scaling back the emphasis they put on the words AI in their presentations and perhaps returning to machine learning to avoid being lumped together with all the failures of other tech companies?
Casey:
I believe this was sent in before WWDC.
Casey:
Yes, it was.
John:
Sorry, there's some old ass ATP, but I thought it'd be fun to read now.
John:
They didn't do that, Jamie.
Marco:
I mean, it's a little bit unfair for us to answer the question after we know the answer.
John:
This was a reasonable thing to think about because if you're only hearing the bad stories about AI, you might think, geez, are the negatives outweighing the positives?
John:
Apple's judgment, and I think the judgment of everyone in the industry was like, no, Apple needs to have an AI story.
John:
Yes, there are bad things and downsides, but if Apple didn't say anything or...
John:
shied away from the letters a and i and instead said machine learning or tried to separate themselves in a way that was you know sort of like oh everyone else is doing ai but we're not that would have been bad for apple it would have been an example of apple not
John:
not correctly having their finger on the pulse of the industry, and in the end, Apple did not do that.
John:
And I think the comparison to crypto is unfair because AI already does useful things, and crypto does such a small number of useful things that are the most useful for applications that people don't want to encourage, like illegal activity.
John:
It's not a fair comparison.
John:
AI has already shown that it does a bunch of useful things.
John:
It's just a question of what is the best way to use it and where should it be applied and how can we make it better?
John:
And honestly, I think Apple's answer at WWDC was pretty good.
John:
I think we talked about this on the WWDC show.
John:
Apple did have a different angle on it.
John:
They are leveraging their strengths.
John:
They're trying to maintain their values while implementing AI, but they're not shying away from the term, and they were trying to get as much value out of it for the customer as possible while still maintaining privacy.
Marco:
Yeah, and I think also, keep in mind what Apple did here with their marketing was they're not directly calling it AI, they're calling it Apple intelligence, which is interesting.
Marco:
I mean, for lots of reasons, but I think one area that will be interesting to see how this plays out over time is...
Marco:
By calling it Apple Intelligence, it better work.
Marco:
Because imagine how bad that looks if, quote, Apple Intelligence gets a bad reputation of not being reliable or not being good.
Marco:
Imagine if Siri was called Apple Intelligence all these years.
Marco:
It would have a pretty bad reputation.
Marco:
So I think naming it that is both pretty good marketing, but also that's a bold stance to take.
Marco:
That sets the bar high, and they...
Marco:
That puts a lot of pressure on them to make sure it's really good and really reliable and really stable and really gives decent answers to things or performs well.
Marco:
They have set the bar very high by putting their name so prominently on it.
Marco:
So I hope it works for them.
Marco:
I hope it plays out.
Marco:
Time will tell.
John:
Well, they did call the device Apple TV and for many, many years it did not live up to the Apple name, but eventually it got okay.
John:
So I don't know.
John:
I mean, it's the, you know, the old joke, uh, the example of an oxymoron is military intelligence.
John:
Hopefully Apple intelligence is not the punchline to that same joke.
John:
Sure.
John:
Hope not.
Casey:
And then John Wilson writes, you rightly said that the Windows recall database is a valuable trove of information that can be accessed by the user and so could be vulnerable to exploitation.
Casey:
It would be disastrous if some bad actor gained access to it.
Casey:
But don't you all have the same arguments or don't all the same arguments, excuse me, apply to other things like iCloud keychain?
Casey:
I mean, yes, in that it's a treasure trove, but no, in that it's not stored in plain text, right?
I mean...
John:
Yeah, to be fair, Recall was stored in PlainDex and then they fixed that.
John:
But yeah, having this is kind of links up well with the first question.
John:
Having all your important stuff in one place is great for convenience.
John:
And it also allows for that one place for you to pick for that one place, the most secure one place.
John:
Part of the reason iCloud Keychain exists is because Apple also values it.
John:
making one big secure thing and making sure it's implemented right and securely instead of having a bunch of little things of variable levels of security if you need some secret to be stored somewhere put it in icloud keychain it's accessible to applications you can use it in a browser like it's it's used everywhere right um in in you know cloud parlance is called a secret store there are whole companies that have businesses making secret stores for you right and
John:
put all your eggs in one basket and watch that basket, right?
John:
That's the strategy here.
John:
But it also means that if iCloud Keychain gets hacked or there's some flaw or whatever and someone gets access to this stuff, they get everything.
John:
That's true of a lot of stuff.
John:
That's usually true of our email addresses.
John:
We've said this a million times.
John:
If someone has access to your email account, which is probably not that secure because your email password maybe isn't that great,
John:
They can just use the forgot password links on most of the websites and reset all of your passwords.
John:
Some sites will be more secure than that.
John:
But it's not going to be stuff like your bank.
John:
It's going to be like some shoe store that requires like two-factor authentication and wants to have someone give you a call and show a picture of yourself and scan your photo ID or whatever.
John:
But your bank will be like, fine, yeah, you're in.
John:
Anyway, security is difficult.
Yeah.
John:
But the recall database was egregious because all the stuff that went into iCloud Keychain end-to-end encrypted, even Apple can't get access to it using things in the secure enclaves.
John:
Even if you have access to RAM, you can't read this information because this is in the secure enclave, which is not accessible to regular programs from RAM.
John:
Apple has worked really hard to make iCloud Keychain as secure as possible from the world and even from itself.
John:
Windows recall database that it was not true of and remains not true of.
John:
That's part of the trade-offs of security.
John:
We always talk about the convenience and security trade-off.
John:
The other trade-off is should I have one really secure place that I put all my energy into making sure that's secure or should I have a bunch of little individual places?
John:
I think the one really secure place, despite the concentration of data, is the better strategy because it's so hard to make something secure.
John:
Even a company the size of Apple does well to
John:
essentially make a secret store and have a dedicated team whose only job is to make sure that is the best secret store in the world.
John:
As opposed to letting like, oh, the mail team will come up with its secret store and the notes team will come up with its secret store and the Safari team will come up with its secret store, which maybe it's the best one in the company.
John:
But like...
John:
have a single place and put the team on that because having a bunch of little ones is just going to mean you're going to be exploited more easily in multiple places rather than making one place that's really screwed.
John:
That's my opinion now.
John:
If iCloud Keychain gets 100% broken and my life gets destroyed, I mean, it still would have been my opinion, but I think the odds are lower of that happening with iCloud Keychain.
John:
Certainly they're lower than with the Windows Recall database.
Casey:
All right, let's do a little more Ask ATP.
Casey:
And Stephen Wood writes, is Apple still a privacy-first company?
Casey:
We know that Android isn't due to Google being the world's biggest advertising company.
Casey:
In recent years, Microsoft has been evolving Windows to display ads and track users.
Casey:
A few years ago, Apple was consistently and constantly emphasizing privacy.
Casey:
However, with Apple now earning more from ads, can we still expect them to uphold their commitment to privacy or will they compromise it?
Casey:
That's a good question.
Casey:
I mean, they've kind of...
Casey:
I don't know if they've already compromised it, but they've certainly gotten fast and loose with what's okay.
Casey:
Like, hey, did you know this Apple TV Plus show is starting soon?
Casey:
Do you want to try it?
Casey:
You know, like all that sort of stuff.
Casey:
It's not necessarily not private.
Casey:
I don't know, but it's just kind of icky.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
What do you fellas think?
Marco:
We have already seen exactly how Apple compromises its standards for advertising.
Marco:
Because the reality is like most people don't want ads.
Marco:
And so almost any ad based business is having to form some kind of compromise with the product quality or the user experience in some way.
Marco:
And I wouldn't necessarily say Android isn't private because Google's an ad company.
Marco:
I think lots of other Google products have severe privacy problems, especially the way they treat their dumb login prompts around the web these days.
Marco:
I mean, those are just massive disrespect of the web experience.
Marco:
Again, I've said this before, the way Apple views everything that happens on the iPhone is theirs and they own part of it.
Marco:
That's how Google views the entire web.
Marco:
Google thinks the entire web is theirs to do whatever they want with, that they always have.
Marco:
And over time, they've only gotten more and more power, especially with the rise of Chrome being such a dominant browser.
Marco:
So Google is perfectly willing to crap all over the web, to harvest it for everything it's possibly worth, to totally invade people's privacy all over the web.
Marco:
But I don't think...
Marco:
we see them doing that kind of abuse on Android specifically.
Marco:
I think that's more of a Google and the web problem, not Google and Android problem.
Marco:
Anyway, so going back to Apple and privacy here, I think we have seen exactly how Apple compromises their standards in the name of increasing revenue through things like ads, whether that's ad money directly,
Marco:
But like things like app store search ads or whether it's using promotion, cross promotion, you know, within their products to try to promote their services, which is kind of like ads, kind of different.
Marco:
But so that'll be things like the promos in the setting screen when you haven't like
Marco:
finished setting up your phone.
Marco:
Like, oh, do you want to maybe set up Apple Music?
Marco:
You know, like, all those kind of things.
Marco:
And then, of course, when you're in Apple Music or things like that, if you don't subscribe to their plan, they harass you endlessly.
Marco:
Or they'll send notifications from their apps that you never gave permission to send notifications from, like, from their own store app and their own app store app and their own... You know, like, they'll...
Marco:
Apple has shown they will harass people, they will bug people, they will shamelessly promote upsells everywhere, all over their platforms.
Marco:
So that is a massive compromise.
Marco:
But it's a compromise in user experience and respect for the users and respect for their own products and respect for themselves.
Marco:
But it is not a compromise in privacy.
Marco:
So obviously you can tell by the way I'm phrasing this, I'm not a fan of this practice at all.
Marco:
It kind of saddens me that platform vendors for like general computing platforms,
Marco:
have now taken it upon themselves and microsoft is again a good example of this i think they go they go even too far with it but like it is now acceptable for general purpose computing platforms to harass the user on a regular basis for upsells or put ads in the general ui of the platform apple is not the only person doing this they're not the only company doing this um but i always thought apple was above that and
Marco:
And what they've shown in recent years is that they're not, which is sad.
Marco:
They really should raise their standards in that department because they used to be the most respectful of their users across the entire computing industry.
Marco:
And that is no longer the case in ways like this.
Marco:
So they will happily spam the crap out of users.
Marco:
They will bother users.
Marco:
They will harass people.
Marco:
They will put ads and promos and interstitials and notifications up to promote their own stuff or to drive their own services revenue or to promote upsells or sell more AppleCare or sell more Apple Music or whatever else.
Marco:
But
Marco:
They're not actually doing that in a way that invades privacy.
Marco:
They are also, in efforts to serve their own goals, they're also doing things like app tracking transparency, which is really good for privacy for the user and actually helps destroy other people's ad models, which is its own...
Marco:
antitrust potential issue over there.
Marco:
That's kind of a thorny issue.
Marco:
There's a lot of detail to that that I'm not going to get into in this Ask A TV question.
Marco:
But I think what they've shown is that privacy is not something they compromise on.
Marco:
They will just compromise the user experience in lots of other small annoying ways.
John:
yeah that's why apple you know say with apple making more money from ads apple it's not just that their heart isn't isn't into ads to do advertising in the way that makes the most money requires an innovation of privacy that apple will not do right you need to know so much about a customer and track them across all sorts of things apple will track you across all of its own platforms and to marco's point google thinks the entire web is its platform so we'll track you across the entire web that makes perfect sense to them but like
John:
You know, Apple does have platforms that it owns.
John:
Google doesn't actually own the web.
John:
So there's the difference there.
John:
But anyway, Apple's not willing to do that.
John:
So when it does sell ads, it can't sell ads as well as Facebook and Google because it doesn't have the kind of privacy invasive tracking and targeting that lets you pick, you know,
John:
18 to 13 year old people who live in this state who recently looked for a mattress and blah blah like they just don't have the power to do that they don't have it their platforms aren't big enough and they don't gather that information and they don't sell that information they anonymize everything in their own services they don't want to know stuff about you and so the parts of apple that do have to sell actual ads not ads for apple's own stuff but they have to sell ads that other people pay for
John:
It's an anemic, less powerful interface because the whole rest of the company says, yeah, you can't have that information.
John:
It's probably difficult to run an ad platform inside Apple because you have to constantly tell the people who want to run ads, no, that information isn't available to you.
John:
Even if Apple itself tracks it, I would imagine they wouldn't give it up to third parties because they know once you give that up to third parties, third parties will...
John:
do things with it that Apple doesn't agree with.
John:
So I do think Apple is still, for the most part, holding strong on all their privacy stuff.
John:
But when it comes to Apple looking at itself, oh, these aren't ads.
John:
We're just trying to tell you about the other great services Apple has, right?
John:
And in some ways, like Apple...
John:
Apple should tell people about Apple TV Plus and the shows that are available on it.
John:
When Apple does an ad for Apple TV Plus at the beginning of the WWDC keynote, you're like, how does that relate to developers?
John:
Apple's got a service.
John:
They paid a lot of money to make those shows.
John:
They should advertise.
John:
They advertise on television.
John:
They advertise in magazines.
John:
They advertise in their own materials.
John:
I give them a pass on that.
John:
It's stuff like the Apple equivalent of what everyone complains about at Windows these days.
John:
You go to the start menu and there's a third-party ad in there.
John:
The Apple equivalent of that is Apple...
John:
trying to upsell you in the setting screen granted it's all apple stuff you're not seeing an ad for like a mortgage lender inside the setting screen right that's more of a microsoft move but even when we just see stuff from apple we it's hard to distinguish that from you know the perspective of the users like a thing that i didn't ask for that's in my face i think there is a bounce to be struck there because apple does have to let you know about the things that are available to you
John:
Like, for example, when you fill your phone, that would be a good time to tell somebody that one of the solutions to this is to pay Apple for more storage.
John:
In fact, probably the only solution to this is to pay Apple for more storage, right?
John:
But getting that message at that time is like, oh, man, all Apple did was sell me an ad and you're mad because you got to pay money or whatever.
John:
But like it would be I think Apple has to do stuff like that, not has to like, oh, you know, like someone's forcing them.
John:
I think it's just good business.
John:
And
John:
Despite the fact that some people are annoyed by it, letting people know about the products and services you offer is a part of being a good business.
John:
It's just a question of when, how often, where, what context.
John:
Sometimes the context is uncomfortable, like you just filled your phone.
John:
That is an uncomfortable context, but that is also a time when you should show it to them.
John:
When you just set up your phone and then you have 25 come on for you to set up Apple Pay, not appropriate.
John:
Right?
John:
too annoying or whatever.
John:
But the people who run Apple Pay probably lobbied hard to the other executives to say, look, we got to be in there because otherwise we're not going to hit our numbers for blah, blah, blah, blah.
John:
And that's, again, not privacy invasive, but annoying.
John:
So this is a multifaceted angle and sometimes people lump it all into privacy.
John:
Technically, there are distinctions, but from a user experience perspective,
John:
uh people always say they don't want to be tracked but in practice they don't care when it happens to them right as evidenced by their actions and what they're willing to pay for versus not when given the choice between like like the there's another eu case about a facebook saying you can use instagram for free and we'll track you or you can pay us money and we won't track you as much everybody picks the free one right
John:
So everyone says, oh, I don't want to be tracked.
John:
And there are a few people who are really genuine about that and change their life to surround it.
John:
But in practice, being tracked in that way doesn't have as many consequences that most people choose not to do it.
John:
Right.
John:
Privacy invasion.
John:
I think people can feel more acutely like if they knew that anyone in the world could find out what they had for breakfast yesterday.
John:
That's an invasion of privacy.
John:
And even though it's probably you don't you know, I didn't have anything super secret for breakfast.
John:
You don't want the world knowing that.
John:
And if you knew they could know that by going to an ad vendor and getting that information, it's shocking what ad companies know about individual people based on the magic of computers and data aggregation and various other signals.
John:
That's one of the reasons everyone is convinced that their phones are listening to them, because it's sort of the low-tech, non-technological explanation of, how would somebody know this about me?
John:
They must have been listening.
John:
So they just personify the phone and say, how would the phone know this about me?
John:
It must have been listening.
John:
It's like, no, they get they can get all this information about you from your activity of using the Internet.
John:
They don't need to use the microphones.
John:
They would if they could, but they don't need to.
John:
Right.
John:
So like and it's people don't understand how that mechanism works.
John:
So they just think that, you know, it's been eavesdropping on them, but it's so much more complicated than that.
John:
So, you know, that's why it all gets lumped together.
John:
It's like your actual privacy of like other companies not knowing stuff about you that you don't want to know is actually separate from how annoyed you are at ads that are thrown in your face, which is separate from who those ads are from and so on and so forth.
John:
So anyway, we've gone around in circles about this.
John:
Sorry, Stephen, but I would say my answer is that I think Apple still is being consistent in their dedication to privacy, but it doesn't mean they won't be annoying.
Yeah.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thank you to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and Delete Me.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
One of the big benefits of membership is we do a bonus topic every week now called ATP Overtime.
Marco:
This week, the bonus topic is feature requests for death, for dealing with deceased people and your contacts and things like that.
Marco:
It's an interesting issue that I think people don't generally think about until it happens to them.
Marco:
And so we'll talk about that and kind of where Apple could go from there, certain considerations they should have for dealing with death and their features.
Marco:
So it's kind of a bummer, but I think it'll be an interesting conversation.
Marco:
So that's ATV Overtime happening right after the show for members.
Marco:
You can join it and hear it at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
Thanks, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
Marco:
and if you're into mastodon you can follow them at c-a-s-e-y-l-i-s-s so that's casey list m-a-r-c-o-a-r-m-n-t marco armen s-i-r-a-c-u-s-a syracusa it's accidental they did it
Marco:
It's super hot here.
John:
Let me tell you about super hot.
John:
This tiny little closet closed in here with a dog for extra body heat and a 2019 Mac Pro.
John:
No air conditioning.
Casey:
John, you can solve these problems.
Casey:
You can install air conditioning and you can get a good computer.
John:
There is an air conditioner in the room.
John:
It doesn't turn it on.
John:
It's too noisy.
John:
Well, you could get a mini split.
John:
Those make noise too.
Marco:
A lot less.
Marco:
They are very quiet.
Marco:
They are way quieter than a window unit.
Marco:
You just don't want to make holes in your house.
John:
And also, my property is so oddly shaped that the mini split fan would probably be like right on the other side of this wall.
John:
I could touch it with my hand.
John:
So as quiet as they are, I still wouldn't be able to have it on.
Marco:
No, they're really like the condenser or compressor, whatever it is.
Marco:
Those things for them, the outside part is also really quiet.
Marco:
Like if it's just a one room size one, especially they're really small and they're really quiet.
Casey:
Strongly recommended for the low, low price of putting holes in your house.
Casey:
I mean, what do you think is going to happen?
Casey:
You think your house is going to fall down when you put a couple holes in it?
John:
No.
John:
Let this be the next person's problem.
John:
Resale value, Casey.
John:
You know about that.
Casey:
I do.
Casey:
But the thing is, nobody's going to buy that house in this globally warmed world when you don't have any sort of air conditioning answer.
John:
Oh, sure they will.
John:
Everyone buys houses that are fixer-uppers.
John:
This is going to be a fixer-upper.
John:
Yeah, if there's no air conditioning, it will be.
John:
That's what people will do.
John:
The number of houses in our neighborhood that have air conditioning has gone up over time, but it would shock you how low it is.
John:
Obviously, in Virginia, every place has it.
John:
air conditioning uh and even long island i think it's more than here but yeah new england it's not it's not the same as old england uh it's not as bad as old england in terms of air conditioning penetration but uh the number is surprisingly low but when i left long island pretty much every house said air conditioning not true here in new england getting getting truer all the time but not true
Casey:
You know, it was a real weird thing when I graduated high school in western Connecticut where there was no air conditioning in the school except for the main office and the library.
Casey:
Still true in our schools.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
And then I came down to Blacksburg, which is southwest Virginia, where there were no air conditioning in almost all the dorms.
Casey:
The brand new ones that were suite style did have air conditioning.
Casey:
And everyone was very jealous.
Casey:
But generally speaking, there was no air conditioning in the dorms.
Casey:
And to be fair, it was in the mountains.
Casey:
So to a degree.
Casey:
And so it did get relatively cool most nights.
Casey:
But, you know, a lot of the I think all the academic buildings had air conditioning, I think.
Casey:
And it was quite a change.
John:
And my son's.
John:
school uh there's people when they're picking like the dorms like if you're a freshman you're coming in which dorm should i pick i think one or one or two of them have air conditioning and the rest of them don't because the assumption is oh well you're not in school during the summer and that's the only time you need air conditioning so i'm sure it'll be fine but when it's 90 degrees in september and you're moving everything into a dorm room and it's not air conditioned everyone's got these fans in the window blowing 90 degree humid air at you
John:
Yeah, there's – like old England, it takes a while for people to get over the idea of like, look, it does actually get hot.
John:
You can't pretend that it doesn't, right?
John:
Sometimes – and, hey, I was – none of my dorms – my freshman dorm for sure was not air-conditioned.
John:
I don't think any of the other dorms I was in were air-conditioned.
John:
And, yeah, sometimes even in Boston, it gets hot in the dorms.
John:
And, you know, then the winter comes.
John:
You don't have to worry about that.
John:
But, yeah, we'll get there eventually.
John:
Have you seen the trend lately?
John:
So –
John:
You know, air conditioners, mini splits, blah, blah, blah.
John:
They're all just heat pumps.
John:
We can link to that Technology Connections video if you want to learn about heat pumps.
John:
Air conditioners have always been heat pumps over refrigerators.
John:
This is not new technology.
John:
It's existed for many, many decades.
John:
But they're getting more popular because they're really efficient.
John:
Um, and again, if you want to see in that video that we'll link, uh, the reason they're efficient is because they don't, uh, you know, produce heat.
John:
For example, when heating in the winter, they move heat from one place to another.
John:
So they don't have to do the work to produce it.
John:
So if you, for example, have an electric heater, it can be essentially a hundred percent efficient because all of the waste energy goes, uh,
John:
emitted as heat but that's what you wanted anyway so success um but that means every amount of heating you get comes from the electricity that goes into it so it's a best case it's 100 efficient but a heat pump doesn't produce heat or cool it moves it from one place to another so all it has to use to expend the energy to move it so you can have an efficiency it's called like a cop coefficient of something or other anyway
John:
Of like five to one.
John:
So you put in like one unit of energy and you get five units of heating out.
John:
Why?
John:
Because you didn't get all the heat from the one unit of energy you put in.
John:
You used one unit of energy to pick up a bunch of heat from one location and carry it over to a new location and dump it, right?
John:
That's why heat pumps are great.
John:
And that's what air conditioners do.
John:
And here's just air conditioning running in reverse.
John:
The new trend is for...
John:
essentially what something that looks like a window unit air conditioner have you all seen the window unit air conditioner lets you like close the window it's shaped like a u so rather than having to have your window propped open i have not seen this yeah it's like imagine a window unit air conditioner but put a slot in it and obviously it's not all the slot doesn't go all the way to the bottom there's like a little thin thing right it lets you close your window right so most of the way yeah almost all the way anyway that's been around for ages i don't know how good those are i've never had one of those uh
John:
and it's it's the same thing it's just a heat pump and you can do this because if you look at how heat pump is designed you can snake all the piping through the bonapart and it works fine right it lets you close your window more uh a new version of that is inverted so now it's like an upside down you and it hangs down on the window which is much more stable because you're basically putting it in your window and half of it is hanging on the outside of your house and half of it is hanging on the inside of your house right and then you can put your window down almost all the way same type of deal but
John:
But they're huge, right?
John:
They're like the size of the inside portion is the size of like a radiator.
John:
And the outside portion is often even bigger, right?
John:
This is a way to add heating and cooling more efficiently to things like apartment buildings.
John:
So in every single window in an apartment building, you hang one of these big U-shaped things.
John:
Like it's not like just a window unit that you put in and out.
John:
It's a permanent part of...
John:
the infrastructure.
John:
But if you have a really old building and you're using like steam heater radiators or whatever, and you want to like refurbish it, this is in theory a less expensive way to do it, to put one of these units in every single room.
John:
You often see them in like hotel rooms where there's that annoying thing on the wall that does both heating and cooling.
John:
I'm assuming those are also heat pumps, kind of a built-in type of thing.
John:
Anyway,
John:
they're really kind of scary looking and kind of cool looking but i endorse this technology because you can use it for like a whole house heat pump or you know something that's built into your basement and just has like the little fan units outside individual window units or things that essentially replace radiators in apartment buildings without having to replumb the whole building or whatever of course those upside down u-shape ones wouldn't work in a house in new england actually has actual radiators because the actual radiator is sitting in front of the window and you can't hang a unit like that down into it but
Marco:
Heat pumps are great.
Marco:
Houses in New England don't need things like that.
Marco:
Apartment buildings, you're right.
Marco:
It's a great use for apartment buildings.
Marco:
Houses in New England can just install split units.
Marco:
You don't need to put anything in the windows.
Marco:
You can let the windows be windows.
Marco:
You can let them be closed and sealed all winter and some summer long.
Marco:
And you can just have heat pumps stuck to the wall with a small pipe running through the house to go to the outside.
Marco:
Trust me, it's a great system.
Marco:
Everything you said about heat pumps is correct.
Marco:
every modern split unit that's worth anything can also heat because it's just when you convert an air conditioning unit to be a air conditioner or heater heat pump, it's a very, very minor difference in hardware.
Marco:
And it's a very cheap difference.
Marco:
It's basically like a reversing valve or something.
Marco:
It's a very, very simple difference between the two.
Marco:
So anybody out there, like if you are buying a new method of air conditioning for your house, whether it's wall split units or whether it's like a central thing, central air conditioner,
Marco:
spend the extra very small amount of money, if there even is a difference for you, and get one that can also heat.
Marco:
Because again, it's so simple.
Marco:
Usually it's either no cost difference or it's like $30.
Marco:
It isn't a big difference.
Marco:
So if you get an air conditioner that can also heat, then you have pure electric heat, either as your only heat or as an option.
Marco:
But as John was saying, whatever...
Marco:
impression you might have about electric heat being like super expensive or whatever that's because it was using the old like electric baseboard radiators that were just giant toaster oven elements that were just you know 100% heating and that's and that's it but heat pumps you know as I was saying like you get more out of them than you than you put into them in terms of heat because it steals heat from the outside world yes even in the winter and
Marco:
yes even when it's like zero degrees outside they still work because they can still steal heat from the zero degree air and make your house warm that still works and i can tell you this because now i am 100 heat pump all of my heat and cooling comes from central heat pumps and it is great like because you know you have obviously a forced air you have
Marco:
Some downsides of forced air heat, but the way people always say, like, it's so dry, that's not true.
Marco:
Everything you know about humidity is probably wrong.
Marco:
Forced air central heat is actually the easiest kind to humidify because you just put a central humidifier on it and it works all winter long.
Marco:
But anyway, it is the best because once you have heat being produced by electricity, but not that much electricity compared to the old ways of doing it,
Marco:
then you have more energy options available to you.
Marco:
You can put solar on your house.
Marco:
You can reduce the cost of it.
Marco:
You can sign up for one of those various ways to get renewable energy to your house through the grid.
Marco:
Usually most places will have some way where you can pay a little bit extra through your utility company and they'll give you wind power instead or whatever it is.
Marco:
You have a lot more options there.
Marco:
So it's something to really consider even if it's not going to be your only heat source.
Marco:
Even if you want to have some kind of like oil or gas as backup heat, like make the heat pump your primary source and only use the oil and gas as some kind of backup if you really think you need it.
Marco:
Trust me, it's great.
Marco:
And it's certainly...
Marco:
A lot better in terms of climate control or climate change, rather.
Marco:
Certainly a lot better in terms of energy options.
Marco:
It's way more efficient and way more people should be using heat pumps to heat their houses.
Marco:
And whatever you think you might know about heat pumps, check your information.
Marco:
It's probably outdated.
Marco:
They're better than you think.
John:
Yeah, this is a time of rapid advancement in heat pumps.
John:
They're getting so much better every year.
John:
Like you mentioned, how low a temperature can they handle?
John:
Even within just the past five years, the lowest temperature and the most efficient heat pump, that record is being broken all the time.
John:
They're getting more efficient.
John:
They can go down into the negative degrees.
John:
It's just changing so fast that...
John:
you know, already in most of the United States, the heat pump can do everything for you.
John:
And in the places where you need supplemental heat, like heat pumps are trying to get down to that.
John:
Obviously, someone mentioned in the chat the thing I remember seeing on this old house, you know, decades ago, which is really cool, but also super expensive, which is a geothermal heat pump where it steals heat from the ground.
John:
They build, they dig a gigantic hole in your property, which is where all the money is, because like the ground may freeze down to X number of feet.
John:
But if you just keep digging, eventually you get down to ground that is above freezing like all the time.
John:
Uh, and during the winter, when it's negative a bazillion degrees, you have essentially an infinite source of above freezing heat that you can move with the heat pump into your house.
John:
Uh, the big cost there is, okay, now I have to dig a gigantic hole and deal with all that costs or whatever, but, uh,
John:
Heat pumps that work just in the air, like air conditioners and, you know, air conditioners running in reverse.
John:
No giant hole needs to be dug in your yard.
John:
And they're not as efficient as geothermal ones yet, but they cost so much less.
John:
So that's why they're so popular.
John:
And lots of the government programs, like those things in apartment units, like government programs subsidizing those to say, we want, like, all of New York City to be more efficient.
John:
They're using, you know, fossil fuels to run steam radiators through these giant buildings.
John:
It's massively inefficient, right?
John:
What can we do about that?
John:
And these type of, like...
John:
sort of mobile heat pump units are a great way to do that without having to pay millions and millions of dollars to like replumb an entire building for like, you know, forced air heat pumps.
John:
I think you just put one in every single unit or whatever.
John:
We'll see how this works out because again, uh, technology is advancing.
John:
If you put those units in a building and they end up being obsolete, you can tear them all out in 20 years and put in the new, more efficient ones that are half the size and twice the efficiency.
John:
Right.
John:
So I'm optimistic about this and, uh,
John:
Yeah, you have limited choices when you're buying a home, but you can always retrofit.