Daisy Hates Ticketmaster
Marco:
So this will be a bit of an audio risk for me today.
Casey:
Always a great way to start the show.
Casey:
Are we all recording?
Casey:
Because I only started recording during pre-flight.
Casey:
So are we all recording?
Marco:
Yes, that's okay.
Marco:
We'll eliminate that category of risk.
John:
My dog is in the room, so that's the second risk.
Marco:
All right, well, it's a third risk because I have two.
Marco:
So risk number one for me is, in case you haven't heard in my voice yet, my voice is kind of shot.
Marco:
So it turns out in the spring, my entire head fills with pollen.
Marco:
You and me both.
Marco:
I assume it's allergies.
Marco:
I think it's allergies.
Marco:
I could be sick, but it feels more like...
Marco:
Very, very, very severe pollen and everything.
Marco:
I also live in Dust House right now because not only is my house filled with pollen, but it's also still being partially constructed.
Marco:
And so there is some construction happening actually literally right now.
Marco:
And the funny thing is this is the morning that they're working on the room directly behind me.
Marco:
Cool.
Marco:
There was no one here yesterday.
Marco:
The room behind me has not been worked on in weeks.
Marco:
But today is the day they're working on the room behind me.
Marco:
So we have, from my end, the risk of me just sounding like this the whole episode, which is not amazing.
Marco:
That's a pretty sure thing.
Marco:
We also have behind me grinders, saws, people talking, people possibly dropping things.
Marco:
So it's going to be an interesting audio experiment over here.
Marco:
But I assure you, listeners, this normally is not the time that we record, and I normally don't sound as bad.
Marco:
So sorry for this one episode where it's going to sound a little rough on my end, and hopefully John's dog will cover up most of the flaws.
Casey:
I mean, I got to say, you don't sound bad to me.
Casey:
You sound ever so slightly needy.
Marco:
Yeah, a little tiny bit stuffy.
Marco:
Oh, I should also disclose that this is also a new audio environment because I'm in my new office in the new house, and it's still partially set up, but it's a new desk, new audio wiring, new audio device, and new sound panels behind me that I hung up 12 hours ago.
Marco:
So it's kind of an untested situation.
Marco:
Nothing like saying, screw it, we'll do it live.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But I will say, though, that, John, you sound better than you did the last time we recorded at roughly this hour, because, you know, last time we did this, I don't recall what episode it was, but last time we did this, it sounded like you had rolled out of bed and then gone immediately in front of the microphone.
Casey:
Now you sound mostly like John to me.
John:
Yeah, I've been up for a few hours.
John:
I think I ended up for a few hours last time, too.
John:
Maybe it's because it was closer to winter and it was dark.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Who knows?
John:
Anyway, I'll survive.
Marco:
Oh, also, I have a new update and a benefit, actually.
Marco:
I've discovered an undocumented benefit to having a pollen-colored car.
Marco:
You can't tell when my car is covered in pollen.
Marco:
Now, in pollen season, my car turns yellow.
Marco:
Guess what?
Marco:
It's already yellow.
Marco:
It looks like nothing.
Marco:
People talk about how, oh, you get a black car to hide dirt or whatever.
Marco:
I don't think anyone says that about a black car.
Casey:
Yeah, no, it's quite the opposite about black cars.
Casey:
But I'm with you in principle, though.
Marco:
Yeah, right, right.
Marco:
But most of those things are total BS because every car shows every kind of dirt.
Marco:
However, a pollen-colored car does not show pollen.
Marco:
It's glorious.
Casey:
Hey, so this is your last chance.
Casey:
This is your last chance.
Casey:
Go to atp.fm slash store.
Casey:
Seriously, we are not going to tell you on the program again.
Casey:
You will probably see this on Masked On.
Casey:
You'll probably see it on threads, but you will not hear it again.
Casey:
This is your last chance.
Casey:
The store closes Sunday, the 28th of April.
Casey:
I forget what time.
Casey:
It doesn't matter because you're not going to order on Sunday because you're going to be careful and you're going to order right now or at the very least before Sunday the 28th.
Casey:
You'll order on Saturday the 27th at the very latest.
Casey:
And what are you going to order?
Casey:
You're going to order all sorts of sweet new merch from atp.fm.
Casey:
We've got ATP windows in both color and monochrome.
Casey:
We've got ATP graffiti.
Casey:
We've brought back the ATP Sport or Performance shirt.
Casey:
We've got Monochrome Pro Max.
Casey:
We've got six colors.
Casey:
We've got the OG.
Casey:
We've got a hoodie.
Casey:
We've got the polo.
Casey:
We've got the hat.
Casey:
We don't have glasses anymore.
Casey:
We finally sold out of glasses, but we've got everything else.
Casey:
So, atp.fm slash store.
Casey:
This is your last chance.
Casey:
John, please tell them.
Casey:
Now is your last chance.
Casey:
This is the time.
Casey:
What should they buy?
John:
I mean, I think you should buy one of the new shirts because people tend to like the new ones.
John:
But if you have some old ones that you've been wearing and you haven't looked in a while, check to see if they're threadbare.
John:
You know, like every five years, every five, ten years, it's good to replace T-shirts so they don't get too ratty looking.
John:
So, you know, replace that ATP logo shirt that you bought ten years ago.
John:
which I think is a thing that could have happened.
John:
And hey, maybe you want a long sleeve this time or a sweatshirt or a tank top.
John:
We've got lots of varieties.
John:
And yeah, this is the last time you'll hear us talk about it on the show because by the next time we record, the sale will be over.
John:
So this is literally your last chance.
John:
Do not wait.
John:
Do not forget, as I have done in the past.
John:
Just do it now.
John:
Or at the very least, hold down the power button on your phone and say, hey, dingus, remind me to buy something from the ATP store tomorrow at 9 a.m.
John:
or whatever.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Please do.
Casey:
Because I kid you not, every time, oh no, it was me.
Casey:
I'm the one.
Casey:
I forgot.
John:
Don't be that person.
Casey:
Do it now.
Casey:
ATP.fm.
Casey:
And members, remember, because I know you're probably listening to me as you're ordering right now because you're good, kind people.
Casey:
But if you're a member, remember that on the 5th of November, no wait, that's not right.
Casey:
Remember that you can go to ATP.fm.com.
Casey:
And get your bespoke coupon code for 15% off sales, time-limited sales like this one.
Casey:
So, atp.fm slash store, and go check out the merch.
Casey:
This is your last chance.
Casey:
Order by Saturday, the 27th, even though you can really do it on the 28th.
Casey:
We're not going to say that.
Casey:
So, Saturday, the 27th, that's your deadline.
Casey:
Thank you so much.
Casey:
Let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
Max Bucknell writes, I can't believe John talked about case sensitivity and mounting a separate disk image without talking about APFS volumes, which make this so much more straightforward.
Casey:
I agree with your takes on Unicode normalization, but the reality is that if you are deploying code to Linux, your local setup should match that behavior as much as possible.
Casey:
I've watched many a junior on my team hit this exact issue with a file import and walked them through the steps to mount their work in a separate volume.
Casey:
Frustratingly, though, our iOS app refuses to build on those volumes because library developers have been building on case-insensitive file systems for three decades, as you said.
Casey:
P.S., you are going to hear from all of the United Kingdom about your pronunciation of address bar.
Casey:
Address bar?
John:
Yeah, we didn't hear from anybody on that, but we did hear from a couple people about this thing.
John:
So what he's talking about is the ability of APFS to very easily create new volumes on the same disk, on the same storage group, whatever the hell they call it.
John:
we've talked about this before but like if you haven't visited disk utility in ages you can get a brand new disk out of the box like a one terabyte disk and you can open it in disk utility and you format it as a one terabyte disk and then you can add a second one terabyte volume and a third one terabyte volume and a fourth one terabyte volume you can keep adding one terabyte volumes till the cows come home you're like how does that work the disk is only one terabyte how can i add multiple one terabyte volumes well
John:
they share the space and so whoever allocates that space and uses it gets it and when obviously when the one terabyte of space is gone then the disk is full but every single one of those volumes thinks it has the full one terabyte and it's just whoever grabs the space first gets it you can also limit volumes to be smaller than that you can say okay well i want a volume i want to create a volume on this one terabyte disk
John:
that's half a terabyte, and then I want to create another one that's a quarter of a terabyte, and then I want to create another one that's a full terabyte.
John:
Again, they're all sharing space up to whatever the configure limit is.
John:
So what Max is saying is, hey, if you want a case-sensitive APFS volume, just create another volume on your existing APFS disk
John:
don't worry if your current volume is the size of the disk like but i already have a one terabyte volume on one terabyte disk how can i create another volume well like i said you can create as many volumes as you want and they'll all just share the space and that second volume you create can be case sensitive um so yeah you can have it have the full space or give it some amount of limited space now the reason i am not as big a fan of this approach well there's two reasons uh one is that
John:
may call it superstition but when you create new volumes on apfs like you're messing with some essential structures of the you know of the partition map and all or whatever and although it is lightweight and easy to do and fast uh
John:
If something is going to go terribly wrong with your disk, especially if it's like your boot disk or whatever, it's probably going to happen when you're in disk utility, like adding and removing volumes.
John:
So if you make it a habit of doing this, I feel like you're tempting fate to, you know, for them to be some weird bug or weird problem with your volume and just screws everything up.
John:
right uh that said if you know uh like max was saying that as part of your work you're just always going to need a case sensitive volume yes by all means do this it's better than a disk image i'm saying like you're going to create it it's just going to be there forever just make it make it once no problem and just use it right but if you're constantly creating and destroying tiny little case sensitive volumes i would still suggest maybe disk images are the
John:
slightly more conservative approach maybe also a little bit more annoying although it depends if you have volumes mounted on your desktop and you're sick of seeing all these volumes mount all the time and you can mess with at cfs tab to make it so they don't auto mount and then you're using a remounting them like it depends on what you find annoying but yeah it's good to point out this approach i am superstitious about it maybe i've been burned by too many years of hfs and hfs plus
John:
uh but i don't every time i go into disk utility and start messing with like the partition map of my drive i get a little bit scared so i wouldn't make a habit of it but if you want a permanent one this is a great solution and like i said you can limit the space so you can say look uh case sensitive apfs you only get to use 100 gigabytes or whatever of my one terabyte disk and remember you that's not actually used until something goes on that disk to use that space so
John:
space sharing it's why you can never tell how much free space there is in anything in the finder because it's a feature of apfs not a bug is it though i mean i know what you're saying but is it that's the that's the thing that people complain about they're like there's no there's no actual good solution like i mean you just described like what if you have a terabyte disk and you have five one terabyte volumes on it and they're all sharing space that's a great feature now how do you explain when those disks fill up right like how does the finder say something you would have to have like a paragraph it's like look
John:
Uh, this disc is full and I know it's a one terabyte, uh, this volume is full and I know it's a one terabyte volume and it's only got 200 megabytes on it, but I want you to know that there are a bunch of other volumes on that same one terabyte hardware disc that are using that space.
John:
So that's why your thing is full, even though it's not anywhere close to the rated capacity.
John:
It's very confusing.
Casey:
ad writes from the handwriting sample i wonder whether casey's left-handed if yes i would love to hear about the experience of being left-handed hardly anyone hardly hear anyone talk about it i am not i'm not entirely sure why that conclusion was reached i am completely useless with my left hand in pretty much every measurable way uh my mom is the weird kind of ambidextrous where she writes left-handed but like eats right-handed i forget how i think she throws right-handed but bats left-handed i don't know it's very unusual
Casey:
Um, but yeah, I am, I'm right-handed.
Casey:
I just have crappy handwriting, but we also got some other feedback.
Casey:
Uh, John, do you want to handle that?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Um, when I, my handwriting sample, I tried to write like that sentence that has all the letters in the English language in it.
John:
And I forgot that it's, uh, what is it?
John:
A quick brown Fox jumps with an S not the quick brown Fox jumped past tense ed.
John:
Uh, so I apologize for not including a lowercase S in my writing sample.
John:
Somehow you'll have to survive.
Marco:
Oh my God.
Marco:
That's what that was about.
Marco:
I saw that feedback and I'm like, what is, what are they talking about?
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
It took me two or three tries before I realized.
Casey:
Yep.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Do you know the other, a couple other sentences?
John:
I know there's like a really short one that's terrible.
John:
I don't remember where that one is.
John:
Someone can Google it.
John:
But the other sentences that use all the, use all 26 characters.
John:
I do not.
John:
You got nothing?
John:
You don't have a single one?
John:
no quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog it's the only one i can think of all right yeah no i think there used to be examples in mac os there's like a web page that comes up high in google search results that says here are the sentences that were used in mac os for various times i remember maybe that's why i know them because they were in wherever they were in mac os i don't know if they were in like the font like the thing showing you a sample of a font or whatever uh the one i remember is how razorback razorback jumping frogs can level six peaked gymnasts
John:
yikes waltz bad nymph for quick jigs vex 28 letters baby super easy to remember yeah there's some really tight ones uh the the the six peak the six peaks gymnast is pretty long quick zephyrs blow vexing daft gym these are these are real bad sphinx of black quartz judge my vow yeah there you go sphinx of black quartz is a good one yeah this web page says system seven use this phrase to show fonts
John:
It may not be the shortest pangram, but it's decidedly more interesting than the quick brown fox.
John:
They're talking about the six-peak gymnast thing.
Casey:
Today I learned.
Casey:
This is all news to me.
Casey:
Yeah, 35 letters.
Casey:
Quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
Casey:
Oh, here you go.
Casey:
Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.
Casey:
That's my new favorite.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
That's big Casey energy there.
Casey:
All right, moving along because we can get lost in this.
Casey:
Matt Gad has some clarification with regard to the XZ sabotage.
Casey:
I think we talked about that week before last.
Casey:
Matt writes, the XZ backdoor wasn't adding the attacker's key as an authorized key to SSH.
Casey:
Which is what I said because I messed up.
Casey:
Sorry.
Casey:
Well, I was right there with you.
Casey:
By the way, I'm pretty sure this was during overtime.
Casey:
Oh, I think you're right.
Casey:
It was even more nefarious.
Casey:
The attacker could send encrypted commands as part of the SSH handshake, which were then executed as root by SSHD.
Casey:
On the wire, it would appear normal, which presumably would mean a failed login attempt in the logs, and so less likely to be seen as a threat.
Casey:
Very, very clever.
Marco:
So what I had said was if this XD backdoor would have actually gone out there, that it would have added a root key to SSHD that would allow the attacker to log into any Linux system as root remotely that had this version.
Marco:
And so it turns out, yeah, this is even better than that.
Marco:
It would allow that, but because of how it was implemented as part of the handshake, it would then also not leave a trace in the logs.
Marco:
Wow.
Marco:
Just wow.
Casey:
You could say that a mad boxer shot a quick glove jab to the jaw of his dizzy opponent.
Casey:
54 letters.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
And I think so.
Marco:
If I understand this correctly.
Marco:
So I think because it probably wouldn't show up in the logs as a failed login attempt to a compromise system.
Marco:
Because it wouldn't fail.
Marco:
So is the idea of this that it wouldn't show up in the logs in other systems that don't have this version?
John:
No, it's not.
John:
As part of the handshake, you could send commands that would be executed.
John:
So all you would see is an SSH handshake.
John:
What happened after the handshake?
John:
So you don't even need to be logged in at all.
John:
So it doesn't even count as a login.
John:
You could just not even...
John:
I think you could not even try to log in.
John:
You would just do the handshake and it would say, OK, tell me like the user.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Maybe maybe the handshake is part of like the attempt to log in.
John:
But worst case, it would show us a failed login to whatever, you know, whatever you could put whatever you wanted as the failed login credentials because you don't care that logged in during the handshake is when you essentially get to issue a command that will be run by root.
John:
Now, obviously, one of the commands that you could issue that would be run by root would be to put your key in and then allow you to log in.
John:
But you're just essentially, it's like a remote shell.
John:
Please execute arbitrary command on this machine that will be run by root.
John:
And once you have that ability, you can do all sorts of things.
John:
But that happens as part of the SSH handshake.
John:
That is incredible, man.
Marco:
I mean, one of the really scary aspects of this XZ infiltration and attack is it just shows the level of sophistication and long-term planning.
Marco:
I mean, this was years in the making.
Marco:
The bad actor who was trying to get right access to the repository –
Marco:
started doing commits to their repository something like three or four years ago.
Marco:
It's been this very long-term, very sophisticated attack.
Marco:
And so, you know, you got to think, like, who would have the motivation and the resources to do this?
Marco:
And that's why most people, when you have attacks of this scale, most people assume it's probably like a state-sponsored or a state intelligence agency-sponsored hack.
Marco:
Because this is not just like some dude having fun in his basement.
Marco:
This is a much more sophisticated and longer-term planned attack.
Marco:
And it's really scary.
John:
but it could be some person in their basement because people don't have hobbies and they decide this is what they want to do but definitely looks like you know especially i mean it could it could actually just be a single person but that's quite an amount of dedication and the reason like the hacks the hack is clever but on the other hand it's going in easy mode because if i tell you you're allowed to write code that runs inside sshd boy it's really easy like you don't have to find a clever exploiter where you just just literally write the code that you know you're in you're in the binders i was trying to get out in the overtime like
John:
You don't have to find the next point.
John:
You don't have to overflow buffer.
John:
You don't have to do anything.
John:
It's like just write your code here.
John:
You're literally inside the SSHD process running as root.
John:
Have fun.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We have some semi breaking news.
Casey:
I believe it was yesterday as we record that Riley tested Delta game emulator is available as alt store pal or as part of alt store pal in the European Union.
Marco:
Which is his alternative marketplace.
Marco:
By the way, what an amazing name that is.
Marco:
It really, really is.
Marco:
Because it's like PAL versus NTSC video standard.
Marco:
That's the European video standard.
Marco:
Oh my God, it's so good.
Casey:
Yep, it's incredibly good.
Casey:
And so the alt store PAL requires, it costs money of some sort, isn't it?
Casey:
It doesn't matter.
John:
It's like two euros a year or something.
Casey:
Yeah, and that's in theory just to offset the core technology fee, which, I mean, makes sense.
Casey:
Yeah, that's extremely reasonable.
Casey:
Yeah, it very much is.
Casey:
And I also have great news that Delta is also available in the regular App Store.
Casey:
And as we record right now, it is the number one free app in the regular global App Store.
Casey:
So how do you like them apples?
John:
Yeah, of course.
John:
The Delta in Alt Store is supported by Patreon, and that is not a business model that the App Store allows.
John:
So if you're wondering, like, why did he bother putting it in Alt Store?
John:
Well, one, I think he wants to do the alternative marketplace thing, period.
John:
for this and other potentially other apps but two you can't like send people to patreon to pay for your app or whatever like that's not supported by the app store but on the app store uh delta is free yeah yeah so why not put it globally like i mean i have some theories but why not just put it in the app store everywhere
John:
Isn't it in the app server?
Casey:
I didn't think so.
Casey:
I might have that wrong, but I didn't think so.
John:
We can't test this.
John:
We're not in the EU.
John:
I don't know if there's a good way for end users to fake their location or change their region to EU or whatever, and I certainly wouldn't want to try it with any of my real Apple IDs given how friendly the Apple ID system is to change it like that.
Marco:
This must be really glorious for all the EU people who, for years, have had to manage US IDs and stuff for streaming services and various Apple stuff.
Marco:
And they have to have fake US Apple IDs and stuff like that.
Marco:
Now, finally, we have to go the other direction to try to figure out, how do you make an EU Apple ID?
Marco:
Can we use EU VPNs?
Marco:
We're finally doing it in the opposite direction.
John:
ZM Knox in the chat room says Delta is not in the App Store in Europe.
John:
I mean, again, we have no way to test this and I didn't see anything in there.
John:
Oh, maybe it's like, doesn't Apple have the rules that like if you choose the.
Casey:
Oh, yes, that's right.
Casey:
That's right.
John:
If you decide you want the different business terms or whatever, then you can't be in the App Store.
John:
I don't know.
Casey:
No, I think that's correct.
Casey:
And apparently it's a Euro 50 per year for alt store.
Casey:
But no, I think you're right.
Casey:
I think that probably is it.
Casey:
And honestly, if I were Riley and I wanted to try to encourage people to get on alt store, irrespective of anything else, why not put Delta behind it?
Casey:
Because you know you're going to get a bunch of installs because it's making tremendous news now that it's available globally.
Casey:
And if I was in the EU, you bet your bottom I would
Casey:
go and download Alt Store Pal in order to give this a shot.
Casey:
And I did download, by the way, I did download Delta yesterday.
Casey:
I'd had it already, thanks to Test Flight from Riley, because we know each other a little bit.
Casey:
But man, getting it in the App Store and then playing like a Nintendo 64 or Game Boy game on it,
Casey:
It's something.
Casey:
It is really freaking cool.
Casey:
And it's so well done and so good.
Casey:
It's not shovelware like everything else we've seen so far has been.
Casey:
It's really, really good.
Casey:
And I'm not entirely sure why Riley made it free, but I am thankful that it is.
Casey:
Oh, that's the business model.
John:
It's supported by Patreon.
John:
Like, it's free in the alt store as well.
John:
And by the way, we have a bunch of EU and UK residents who are looking for Delta in the app store in the UK and the EU, and they say it's not there.
John:
So there's that real-time answer from our listeners overseas.
John:
Yeah, so I'd like...
John:
I think the idea is like you get it for free and then if you pay for the Patreon, you get early access to betas or something like that.
John:
But either way, like in the Alt-Star, in Delta, he could say whatever he wants and put whatever screen up he wants and describe the Patreon business model and provide links to Patreon and do all sorts of things that Apple doesn't allow.
Casey:
Yeah, so we'll put a link in the show notes to the blog post announcing Alt Store Pal, and Riley calls out some other things that are apparently also in the Alt Store, including UTM, which is a full-featured virtual machine for iOS and iPadOS, so you can literally run Windows on your iPad, apparently.
Casey:
There's also Katoba by our friend Will Haynes, which is just the built-in iOS dictionary as a standalone app, which isn't allowed in the App Store because it waves hands, reasons.
Casey:
And so there's a bunch of other stuff in there in Alt Store Pal that looks interesting.
Casey:
So you should check it out if you're in the EU.
Casey:
And again, I mean, regulation works, at least, or it sure seems to, because here we are with Delta in the US as well, and I'm really excited for it.
Marco:
And can we clarify, is Apple out of business in the EU?
Marco:
Oh, wait, nothing happened.
Casey:
No, it doesn't seem so.
Marco:
That's right.
Marco:
There's no downside whatsoever.
John:
Not yet.
John:
For people who are newer iPhone users, I'll give my advice.
John:
Anytime you see...
John:
a emulator especially a game emulator on the app store even if you think you have no interest in it download it because these things get pulled from the app store so frequently but if you've previously purchased or downloaded it you still have it on your phone and it will still run and apple doesn't like yank it off your phone
John:
So that's why I have so many like Nintendo emulators that were on the app store for like, you know, five hours or 24 hours or whatever.
John:
If you download it before they pull it, you get to keep it as long as you manage to bring it from one phone to the other.
John:
It might be more difficult now with iCloud restores and not doing iTunes backups and stuff like that.
John:
But I have had NES emulators on my phone since before I had a phone, since I had an iPod touch, I think.
John:
because Apple and AppReview are sometimes slow in removing things when they accidentally allow them to go through.
John:
And then another, speaking of emulation, another thing someone brought up, I didn't grab it for the notes in time, but what about emulating, there's a question about this in AskATP if we get to it, what about emulating old iPhones?
John:
iphone os ipad os or whatever that's another emulation frontier that obviously is not well i say obviously i'm gonna assume it's not allowed on the app store um but in alt store if someone comes up with essentially like an an ios emulator so you can run like ios 4 and run like your old games in 32-bit mode somehow uh that would be a cool thing i don't know if such a thing exists but when you mentioned utm well
Casey:
I have some news.
Casey:
So first of all, real-time follow-up.
Casey:
I misspoke earlier.
Casey:
UTM and Katoba are not currently on AltStore.
Casey:
These are examples of things that could be.
Casey:
So I misspoke before.
Casey:
I apologize for the error.
Casey:
The offending party has been sacked.
Casey:
However, one of the things that is in this blog post in the same section of things that could be on AltStore…
Casey:
I will read from the blog post.
Casey:
Or take old OS, a beautifully made recreation of iOS 4 built entirely in SwiftUI.
Casey:
I know that's not exactly what you're talking about, John, but the spirit is the same.
Casey:
Clearly a labor of love that does no one any harm but is not allowed in the App Store because it, quote, appears confusingly, confusingly, John, similar to an existing Apple product interface or app.
John:
I'm kind of surprised Switch Glass was allowed in the Mac App Store.
Casey:
It's exclusively like the Doc.
Casey:
Right?
Casey:
Don't tempt them.
Casey:
Don't tempt them at all.
Casey:
Anyway, I'm so excited for Riley.
Casey:
I mean, Riley's been doing, working on this, depending on your definition, for like literally a decade.
Casey:
It's been forever.
Casey:
Riley just wants to do the stuff he wants to do, and it doesn't seem to be hurting anyone, as far as I can tell.
John:
Well, let's see what Nintendo thinks about that.
Casey:
Well, I mean...
Casey:
He's not offering ROMs, but I do take your point.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah, no.
Marco:
I mean, I think Nintendo's massive overreaction to the Switch emulator and the Zelda ROMs, that was a direct attack on their current system.
Marco:
And yes, we can say, yes, it's very old, but it is still their current system.
Marco:
And it was a current new hot game release.
Marco:
So that really slapped them in the face in a way that...
Marco:
People trading around old ROMs for the NES and Game Boy.
Marco:
Nobody really cares that much about those today.
Marco:
I mean, Nintendo does sell all those things.
Marco:
They do, but I don't think that's a massive source of money directly for them.
Marco:
And they also tend to usually roll those into their monthly service more recently.
Marco:
And so I don't know how much incremental extra money they're making from having Mario 1 on the Switch.
Marco:
I'm sure it's some, but it's probably insignificant.
Marco:
They care a lot, though, if you pirate the new Zelda game for Switch.
Marco:
That's a very, very different beast.
Marco:
So their reaction to the Switch emulator and to that, I think, was more warranted.
Marco:
Emulators have existed for a very long time, though.
Marco:
And until that, they seem to not really care.
Marco:
People who work at Nintendo and who make these kind of decisions...
Marco:
They're not stupid and they're not living in a box like they they knew about emulators beforehand.
Marco:
This was not how they learned about them.
Marco:
So I wouldn't expect major crackdowns on other emulators by Nintendo.
Marco:
I think they just care a lot about the current ones that, you know, things to emulate their current system that still has a lot of commercial value.
John:
We'll see.
John:
I mean, this thing is in the news a lot.
John:
And by the way, I think some of our chat room folks were a victim to the leisurely, let's say, CDN propagation of App Store things because someone said that Delta was not in the App Store in the UK.
John:
And then someone in the UK said, no, it is in the App Store in the UK.
John:
So anyway, UK is not in the EU.
John:
And that would make sense.
John:
So apparently Delta is in the App Store in the UK, but not in the EU.
John:
As far as we can tell, based on CDN propagation as of this morning.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Apple will allow the reuse of iPhone parts for repairs with a notable catch.
Casey:
Reading from Ars Technica, Apple has always had a strong preference that only its own parts be used in repairs, but only if they're brand new.
Casey:
Now, soon after Oregon passed a repair bill forbidding devices from rejecting parts with software locks or quote unquote parts pairing,
Casey:
Apple says it will allow for used Apple parts in future iPhone repairs.
Casey:
Again, regulations don't work.
Casey:
Gentlemen, they don't work.
Casey:
They enforce no change.
Casey:
They compel no change.
Casey:
It doesn't work.
Casey:
Similarly, you should never run to the press.
Casey:
That doesn't work either.
Casey:
Stephen Hackett over at 512 Pixels writes,
Casey:
Says, for the last two years, teams across Apple have been innovating on product design and manufacturing to support repairs with used Apple parts that won't compromise user safety, security, or privacy.
Casey:
With this latest expansion to our repair program, we're excited to be adding even more choice and convenience for our customers while helping to extend the life of our products and their parts.
John:
This is a fun dynamic where there's a proposed law that will make Apple change something about how they do business.
John:
Apple lobbies against the law and tries to stop it from happening.
John:
But once it happens, they're so excited to comply with it.
John:
Mm-hmm.
John:
Mm-hmm.
John:
Right?
John:
Sure.
John:
I mean, again, they could have just complied in Oregon or whatever, but they're complying globally.
John:
So I don't – there is – Apple is okay with these laws as long as they –
John:
don't make apple do the things that it really doesn't want to do uh so and they already have that whole repair program thing that they've been expanding so i think actually probably apple's lobbying was sufficient to make this law not as bad as apple thought it would be and then you know they're rolling out this change globally instead of just doing it oregon which is nice
Casey:
PIRG, the Federation of State Public Interest Research Groups, pointed to not only the organ repair bill, but also a similar bill in Colorado.
Casey:
iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens also pinned Apple's announcement to the Colorado bill.
Casey:
Wiens, who authored a blog post shortly after Apple's announcement, describes Apple's new policy as, quote, a strategy of half-promises and unnecessarily complicated hedges, quote, designed to deflect more laws that would ban pairing entirely.
John:
another quote aftermarket parts are key to the repair ecosystem and apple seems keen on continuing to ban those weans wrote to ours technica yeah so that's what you know this is all about oh apple used to require you use apple parts and also that they be brand new and now it's like okay you can use apple parts but they don't have to be brand new and yeah the people who are totally against parts pairing are like that's great and all but what we really really want is to outlaw the practice of forbidding parts or preventing parts from working based on software lockouts yada yada yada
John:
And Apple's argument is very often that they really need to know that a part is authentic and, you know, cryptographically paired with the server validation for important stuff like touch ID and face ID.
John:
So you can't make like compromised phones.
John:
And there's also an angle.
John:
Apple has a lot of angles in this where they say this bad thing will happen if you make us do this.
John:
And one of them is like, well, now people will be buying phones and harvesting the parts and selling them.
John:
And I mean, I feel like.
John:
there's still it's not like there's not already a lucrative market for stealing people's iphones and so i don't think this would change much of anything there but yeah they're trying to strike a balance between have we talked about this when we talked about the security stuff like a trusted platform module or whatever um security uh does have benefits to the user in terms of being able to uh be more certain that the software that your phone is running is the software that isn't intended to run and has not been hacked or root kitted or whatever
John:
and parts pairing for things like face eddy and touch eddy sensors uh or even cameras or whatever are actually part of that chain of trust but on the other hand it's ridiculous when uh it becomes too difficult to repair phones unless you go through apple it's like kind of a way to say well you got to go through us because we're the only ones who have the keys to the kingdoms of part pairing or whatever or you can't buy a third party part or if you have two for example if you have two phones you own both of them and the camera's good in one and bad in the other nope sorry you can't swap that at a third party thing because of parts pairing and
John:
Yeah, I think we are getting closer to a reasonable compromise.
John:
The old solution was Apple makes all the rules and they make the rules for their own convenience and tough luck.
John:
And now we're getting we're moving away from that and towards a little bit more sanity.
John:
But obviously, the people who want parts pairing to go away entirely are not satisfied.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Possibly the most important follow-up that we've ever had on the show.
Casey:
I will read from our internal show notes.
Casey:
It reads as follows.
Casey:
Marco has important ceiling fan switch follow-up.
Casey:
I am here for this.
Casey:
Please tell me more.
Marco:
So in last episode's after show, I was discussing my – no, it was in Ask ATP.
Marco:
Sorry.
Marco:
I was discussing my –
Marco:
Tribulations with Fanimation smart remotes and how I only had two-wire wiring going from the switch to the fan in the ceiling, but the ceiling fans tend to frequently have lights in them.
Marco:
So if you only have two-wire wiring and you have a fan with a light, you can't have a wall switch that controls speed of the fan and the light separately.
Marco:
I was lamenting this and saying I had to use their dumb remote and their weird switches.
Marco:
Well...
Marco:
And I realized, you know, we just had these fans installed like two weeks ago.
Marco:
We still have the boxes for them and everything.
Marco:
Like everything is still like, you know, happening in the house.
Marco:
I realized, wait a minute, those light kits are optional.
Marco:
What happened?
Marco:
What kind of fan do you have if you don't buy the light kit?
Marco:
And it turns out since they're sold separately, the fan by default comes with a little like plug that goes like in the middle of it if you don't use light on it.
Marco:
I never use the lights on these fans.
Marco:
They're terrible.
Marco:
So I just, I went to everyone here.
Marco:
I'm like, hey, we still have those plugs.
Marco:
Like, can we maybe return the light kits and just not use them?
Marco:
And so now the fan only has...
Marco:
one wired function the fan so i can now use good caseta light switches for the fans so finally nice i have the best of both worlds i have caseta fan switches at the wall so the wall switch works like a wall switch and i can have a little mini pico remote on my desk to control it separately without getting up during the show
Marco:
And it turns out those dumb, awful LED lights that are on the bottom of these fans are totally optional.
Marco:
And it works even better without them, as long as you have other sources of light in the room.
Marco:
But you should, because those lights are terrible.
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, I know we've brought it up several times, especially in the last couple episodes.
Casey:
And they did sponsor one or two episodes in the past.
Casey:
But I am so in the bag for Lutron Caseta.
Casey:
It's not even funny.
Casey:
Like, so incredibly in the bag for them.
Casey:
It's up there with, like, Sonos and probably Apple.
John:
um actually i'm probably more in the bag for sonos and caseta lutron caseta than i am for apple but that's okay i don't know i don't think i don't think you're too close to switching to windows or anything fair speaking of three-way switches uh one small bit of follow-up on that we were talking about our our various habits about the you know setting the three-way switches and obviously the uh the lutron switch that mark was talking about solves that because it's stateless but we were saying oh well you need some smarts to do it obviously because
John:
it's sending a signal to you know whatever uh there is a non-smart stateless switch solution which is switches that essentially have relays in them and when you activate the switch it just flips the relay from one position to another so the physical switch is sometimes it's just a push button or it could also be a rocker or whatever but inside it is like a relay so even if you don't want to do any of the smart home stuff you can apparently find switches for your you know confusing three-way setups that just essentially work like push push buttons and it's just like every time you push it it just toggles it from what it is and that way
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
You know, I got a message from a friend of the show, Ryan Jones, with a link to some Leviton, which is the other brand that is really good, that's not Lutron, but sounds like Lutron.
Casey:
Anyways, some Leviton switches, or no, I'm sorry, it is a Lutron switch, my mistake.
Casey:
And these are switches that do this sort of thing with a dimmer.
Casey:
And what I want is a non-dimming version because the particular ceiling fixture that I have, it doesn't need to dim.
Casey:
I don't want it to dim.
Casey:
And I don't know if it supports dimming.
Casey:
Well, anyways...
Casey:
Trying to find a non-dimming version of this is both exorbitantly expensive and very, very difficult, which is very weird.
Casey:
It's pretty cheap to do a dimming version or to find a dimming version.
Casey:
But for whatever reason, a non-dimming version is very, very expensive.
Casey:
And so I don't know what I'm going to do.
Casey:
I might see if maybe this fixture does support dimming and the bulbs that are in it support dimming.
Casey:
And maybe I'll just, you know, never use the dimming functionality.
Casey:
But it's literally like three or four times the cost to get a non-dimming one, which makes zero sense to me.
Casey:
Maybe there's some justification I'm not aware of.
John:
Well, they make fewer of them.
Casey:
I mean, that's... I guess that's true, yeah, yeah.
John:
Or maybe it's not made at all anymore.
John:
That's a HomeKit feature, by the way.
John:
Among the million features that HomeKit doesn't have that it should have is the ability to take a smart switch that is dimmable and for you to say in settings somewhere, you know what, I know it's dimmable, but just make it a toggle because my two lights in my living room that are on Lutron switches that happen to be dimmable, and the lights are dimmable, but I never want to dim them.
John:
So when I go into like...
John:
like control center on my phone to turn it to manually turn a light on if i'm not doing like a scene or whatever i have to like drag the little dimmer bar up to the top instead of it just being a toggle and it'd be so easy in software to just say uh you know make this not dimble i mean i know that's like oh but what if someone actually sends it that sets it that way now they're confused why they can't dim things like i know software's hard but i know there's a software solution to this and every time i have to drag my thumb up a little progress bar to turn the light on and off that i just always want to be completely on or completely off it annoys me
Marco:
Yeah, don't blame you.
Marco:
By the way, and actually I did that at the beach because the bulbs I use in that office are non-dimmable bulbs.
Marco:
And I feel like I have to shout these out.
Marco:
Somehow, I forget, I think it was an ATP listener who told me about these by email at some point.
Marco:
But I love these bulbs from this company called Waveform Lighting.
Marco:
Not a sponsor, you know, just I just they're just really good LED bulbs like the wide CRI, the, you know, the flicker free, all the stuff that you actually want out of LED bulbs.
Marco:
They theirs do it all.
Marco:
But many of their bulbs are non dimmable.
Marco:
And so I actually I had this exact requirement at the Beaks just for like a regular light switch circuit.
Marco:
And it's I can strongly recommend these light bulbs.
Marco:
If you are a lighting nerd, which given our audience, I'm sure there are many of you out there.
Marco:
They're very good bulbs.
John:
yeah that's the thing about led light bulbs that is always annoyed me i mean you mentioned last time like oh you buy these lights with the fan and it's a custom component and they say it's going to last forever but it doesn't the thing like lights have become like electronics where it's the part that will wear out or will annoy you because it's crappy is the electronics not the part that produces the light i know they're intimately connected because of the way led lights work
John:
but that electronic part that's the little board that's gonna burn out that's the part that's not gonna have uh you know a good circuit to handle dimming without flickering and like it's they're not that they're little computers but they're essentially consumer electronics devices in a way that the like tungsten filament bulbs from my childhood were not they were just like a wire with a with a different element and a curly little thing and you sent electricity through it and
John:
now yeah what happens to all the lights in my house is like oh this led light bulb will last you for 20 years like no way the electronics if you buy cheap on the electronics are going to burn out in four years yep it's terrible
Marco:
We are brought to you this episode by SwiftCraft, a brand new conference in the UK for Swift and iOS developers in the UK, Europe, and beyond.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
And there's tons of great content at Swiftcraft, with 28 sessions and two keynotes over the two main conference days, a full-day workshops day with three workshops, and a tutorials day with eight half-day workshops.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Some of the community's best speakers are on their schedule, led by keynotes from Daniel Steinberg and Jessica Kerr, better known as Jessatron.
Marco:
Daniel's also running a workshop, along with Paul Hudson and John Reed.
Marco:
Check out their full program at swiftcraft.uk and use code ATP when you register for 10% off.
Marco:
So once again, that's swiftcraft.uk for this beautiful conference happening next month in May.
Marco:
So hurry up.
Marco:
Swiftcraft.uk.
Marco:
Use code ATP to register for 10% off.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Swiftcraft for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
I got to tell you, I have mixed feelings about what the DOJ has been up to recently, but right now they're doing the Lord's work because Ticketmaster's Taylor Swift ticketing fiasco might just have led to a lawsuit from the DOJ.
Casey:
If there's a bigger group of assholes that deserve to be sued, I cannot find them because...
Casey:
Holy God, I haven't bought anything from Ticketmaster, well, for myself in a while.
Casey:
I bought for some dear friends of ours.
Casey:
It's complicated, but I think Verizon was doing a pre-sale and they're like T-Mobile people or whatever.
Casey:
And so they had me buy them two tickets to a Justin Timberlake concert in North Carolina, I believe.
Casey:
Granted, a lot of this was the cost of ticket, but it was something to the order of $750 for two tickets.
Casey:
And I am still dumbfounded by this, and I think I bought these two months ago.
Casey:
And a lot of that, easily $100 plus was bullshit fees that Ticketmaster charges because they can.
Casey:
So, apparently, as per The Verge, the Department of Justice is preparing to file an antitrust lawsuit against Ticketmaster's parent company, Live Nation, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.
Casey:
The lawsuit could reportedly come as early as next month and will target the company's alleged monopoly in the live ticketing industry.
Casey:
Live Nation drew antitrust scrutiny when it merged with Ticketmaster in 2010.
Casey:
But those concerns boiled over in November 2022 when a Ticketmaster crash blocked thousands of Taylor Swift fans from purchasing tickets for the Ares tour due to, quote, unprecedented demand, quote.
Casey:
As if they couldn't see that coming.
Casey:
My God.
Casey:
Anyway, the DOJ opened an investigation to Live Nation shortly after, the New York Times reported.
Casey:
Again, I cannot find a better group to befall the DOJ's ire.
Casey:
Like, I am so here for this.
Casey:
Please, just slag them.
Casey:
Just absolutely destroy them.
John:
i think it'll be easy to prove monopoly power for like this is just such a slam dunk like ticket master people don't know is a company in the united states that essentially has a stranglehold on buying tickets to live music events they have deals with all the people who run all the stadiums and all the clubs and it's just like it's like a cartel like if you read the history of like ticket master and the fact that they merge with their largest competitor like they're just
John:
They're all powerful.
John:
I mean, if you want to go all the way back to the 90s, you can see like Pearl Jam protesting.
John:
The Pearl Jam was way ahead of its time, basically saying we are sick of dealing with Ticketmaster.
John:
It's bad for us.
John:
It's bad for our fans.
John:
We hate them.
John:
So now we're not going to use Ticketmaster.
John:
And Ticketmaster was like, well, now you're never going to have any place to play.
John:
And there was this whole...
Marco:
drama surrounding that so go back in the the 90s history and look that up yeah ticket master is close to pure and my dog is here's some other dogs barking so as prophecy foretold no i i think really it's the you know daisy realizes the ticket master is just awful like look that just shows everybody hates ticket master even dogs right it's that's the thing like you you will not find many causes in the u.s that will get more people behind you
Marco:
than trying to you know kick Ticketmaster in the crotch like everyone hates Ticketmaster everyone who has ever worked with them on from any side of it everyone who's ever bought a ticket to anything from them which is if you've basically if you've attended a concert in the US from any major band at any major venue in the last 20 years you've probably bought a ticket from Ticketmaster and when you see those fees on those tickets it's like it makes the app store look positively generous by comparison like that's true and it's gone up
John:
up and if you're asking yourself if everybody hates Ticketmaster then why does everybody still use them that's the nature of monopoly that's what the DOJ will be saying about Apple and that's what it's so easy to say about Ticketmaster everyone hates you and yet they still have to do business with you that's because you have monopoly power because there's no other choice and that's exactly where the DOJ should step in
Marco:
I commend the DOJ for finally doing this.
Marco:
I don't know what took so long, but I'm glad they're doing it now.
Marco:
Thank God.
Marco:
I wish them all the best of luck in succeeding in this case.
Casey:
Yeah, seriously.
Casey:
I mean, just drag them.
Casey:
Whatever you need to do, I'm here for it because it's so, so bad.
Casey:
And I mean, their website is trash.
Casey:
The entire experience, everything about it is trash.
Casey:
Their fees are absolutely astronomical.
Casey:
It's just...
Casey:
It's just out of control, and I cannot begin to overstate how much I hate that company.
Casey:
It's just so, so bad.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I was trying to find if I could figure out what the fees were for this, so maybe I'll interrupt with some real-time follow-up.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
And they've just been increasing the fees slowly because they can.
John:
Like, that's, again, an example of Monopoly power.
John:
Everyone hates you, and you can keep raising prices.
John:
Yeah, who's going to stop them?
Casey:
Yep, okay, here we go.
Casey:
I got it.
Casey:
Two tickets.
Casey:
$315 per ticket.
Casey:
There's nothing that has nothing to do with Tickmaster.
Casey:
That's all them so far.
Casey:
So that's, what is that, $630?
Casey:
Then $4.62 for an order processing fee.
Casey:
A $5 facility charge times two is...
Casey:
A $3.10 tax times two, but here's the kicker.
Casey:
A $42.70 service fee per ticket.
Casey:
$42.70 a ticket.
Casey:
Why?
Casey:
Why?
Casey:
What have they done?
Marco:
They used to call it a convenience charge.
John:
Convenience fee, service fee.
John:
This is a thing that sells you tickets over the web.
John:
It's not rocket science.
John:
It is like an e-commerce site from Web 1.0 with similar quality in many cases.
John:
Apparently, they were surprised that there was a lot of traffic for Taylor Swift tickets.
John:
It's not an insurmountable problem.
John:
It's not rocket science.
John:
They're just selling tickets over the internet, and they're bad at it.
Casey:
I'm so mad now.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Let's calm me down and talk about something that makes me happy.
Casey:
M4 Macs might be coming later this year.
Casey:
Well, that makes me mildly happy because I have an M3 Mac.
Casey:
You know what I'm saying?
Casey:
According to Mac rumors, all Macs will have an M4 by the end of next year.
Casey:
And there's apparently going to be no skipping like the iMac, Mac Mini, etc.
Casey:
So here's the launch order according to Mark Gurman.
Casey:
Around the end of 2024, a low-end 14-inch MacBook Pro with the M4, a 24-inch iMac with the M4.
Casey:
Between the end of 24 and early 25, new 14 and 16-inch high-end MacBook Pros with M4 Pro and Macs, a Mac Mini with an M4 and M4 Pro.
Casey:
Spring of 2025, new 13-inch and 15-inch MacBook Airs, a Mac Studio with a high-end M4 chip, whatever that means.
Casey:
Then the second half of 2025...
Casey:
A Mac Pro with an M4 Ultra, allegedly.
Casey:
And then Apple is apparently considering allowing its highest end Mac desktops to support as much as a half terabyte of memory.
Casey:
Current Mac Studio Mac Pro top out at 192 gigs.
John:
So this is the rumors about the M4 and that, you know, there's this whole AI angle like, oh, the M4 is going to be AI optimized as if the M3 and M2 and M1 don't have neural engines to do AI stuff or whatever.
John:
Part of it's marking.
John:
Part of it is, yes, the neural engine keeps getting bigger and it will continue to do so.
John:
But the interesting part of this rumor is like the like you said at the start, that every single Mac will have an M4 by the end of next year.
John:
which the current situation is kind of like a motley collection of m3s and things that still have m2s including the high-end ones so like you know skipping obviously the imac did skip the imac never had an m2 right so we know that skipped the mac mini hasn't skipped yet technically because it had the m1 and it had the m2 it could still have the m3 and not skip we don't know about the studio and mac pro are they ever going to get an m3 class chip are they going to wait for their m4 variants and so that
John:
But that kind of like when we imagine Apple taking over control of its chips, it's like, well, now Apple doesn't have to wait for Intel for things and they can get exactly the chips they want or whatever.
John:
But a series, as we've discussed in the past, a series of things have made that difficult.
John:
Like, you know, the global pandemic has really hurt everything having to do with parts and supplies and everybody's plans, but everything.
John:
So in the middle there, there was definitely...
John:
uh some time when apple's plans were surely messed up by that uh but what we would like to see happen like what is what happens with the iphone which is obviously the iphone is the more important product but like every year the iphone gets a new chip and sometimes the chip is not as new as we thought it would be like we didn't get the new gpu like the last year or whatever when we thought we would
John:
because it wasn't ready yet, and there's always the difficulties of TSMC and whether their process is ready and M3B and all that stuff, right?
John:
But you would think it's like, okay, Apple has chips, they have a letter and a number that goes up in them, and they produce new ones every year.
John:
It would be nice if every year, oh, this is the year of the M4 Max, and next year is the M5 Max, and next year is the M6 Max.
John:
But instead, it's like, well...
John:
these you know these products that apple cares less about like say the ipad and the mac they just kind of come staggering out of apple with a with whatever chips are available at the time and every time we try to find a pattern it's like oh they do the low-end chips than the high-end ones or maybe they do the the middle-end ones and then save the low-end ones for like i don't know what the rhyme or reason is but it is surely very complicated it is obviously not a premeditated strategy about how to roll out chips it's like what chips can we make how many can we make for what price at what time and
John:
and the the end result is confusion in apple's product line uh not so much about which chip is better than which because the number going up is a clear sign but it's like well you know people keep asking us should i buy computer x now or should i wait until the next cpu is going to get like we don't even know if the mac studio is going to get an m3 if if it's not going to get anything until like next year when it gets an m4 at the end of next year or something
John:
yeah by all means get it but if an m3 mac studio is going to be released to wwc you should wait and we just don't know there's not enough precedent there's not enough of a pattern right so i like that one of my favorite thing about this rumor is with the m4 no more of that every mac will get an m4 like there's no exceptions nobody's skipping a generation there's going to be one for every computer maybe it'll even be one worthy of the mac pro we'll see but that's so much more easy to explain to people that like
John:
that all the macs have m4s they're all safe to buy and next year all the macs will have m5s or whatever it is 1.5 years whatever the cadence they want to do it would be so refreshing if this was true and even this like the rollout is a slow rollout for getting but at least at one point there will be a point in time i will say now all the macs have a chip with an m4 in them uh and that will be refreshing
Casey:
I mean, I'm excited to see Apple untethered, for lack of a better way of putting it, you know, like you had said, without having to be beholden to Intel or, you know, IBM and Motorola in days of yore.
Casey:
I'm happy for it.
Casey:
I wish we had a more...
Casey:
concrete set of examples so we could extrapolate easier but i'm not complaining it's just it's it's fun actually to kind of be surprised and see oh we didn't expect this to happen right now like that like the very macbook pro i'm talking to you through right now i didn't expect to have this in in this past fall but here it is and it's great
John:
And this rumored order is kind of back to the old thing where it's like you release the low end chip first.
John:
So you get the, you know, the plain M4 in the iMac and the low end MacBook Pros.
John:
And then next you get the M4 Pro and Macs in the MacBook Pros and the Mac Mini.
John:
And then finally you get the high end chip.
John:
And of course the MacBook Air is being shoved next to the high end chip one in spring of 2025.
John:
It's just a slight oddity, but that is a more understandable cadence.
John:
But on the other hand, I did like it when, like you said, they rolled out the M3 chip and it was like, not just the M3, but also the M3 Pro and the M3 Max all at the same time.
John:
I'm sure we'll see the M3 Ultra soon after.
John:
And we sit here waiting.
Marco:
There's a pretty interesting point, I think, from user MyNameIsT in the chat regarding our previous topic, the Ticketmaster thing.
Marco:
So MyNameIsT says, I'm no Ticketmaster fan either, but what Casey just demonstrated with the convenience charges was that Ticketmaster charges a smaller percentage for selling tickets than Apple charges for selling apps.
Marco:
They just allow customers to see the itemized price where Apple doesn't.
Marco:
Imagine if the App Store showed the convenience fee.
Casey:
Oh, that's so good.
Marco:
What's interesting about this is, like, you know, part of what makes the Ticketmaster situation so, you know, abusive and horrible and such a slap in the face is similar to the way hotels and some other things in the U.S.
Marco:
are priced, even just sales tax, that the advertised price to customers does not include pretty substantial fees.
Marco:
And then, like, you see them at checkout.
Marco:
So, you know, we have that with sales tax.
Marco:
We have that with hotel taxes.
Marco:
And, you know, there's a few other things in –
Marco:
And, you know, various U.S.
Marco:
dysfunctions that have this.
Marco:
But I think it's interesting.
Marco:
Like, what if, you know, apps were structured that way where, like, the price that would show on the IAP was the post commission price that the developer actually received.
Marco:
And then at like on the checkout screen, it showed, you know, Apple convenience fee.
Marco:
That's the kind of thing.
Marco:
Of course, Apple would never do that unless forced.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But wouldn't it be cool if they were forced?
John:
I mean, I don't think it would be cool.
John:
I think the price should just be the price.
John:
In the EU, I believe they even have sales tax put into prices to let people know what the bottom line is.
Marco:
Most civilized places don't have the crazy rip off all of a sudden at the end fees that we have here.
John:
Right.
John:
But like in general, like you don't it's I think it's unreasonable to ask to essentially see people's business model exposed.
John:
Like when you buy a box of cereal, you get to see what portion of that goes to the manufacturer versus which portion goes to the store.
Marco:
That's the problem.
Marco:
That's why in practice, this would never happen.
Marco:
And it probably shouldn't happen.
Marco:
But wouldn't it be cool if it did?
John:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, the other problem is that if you took a survey and asked how many people think that when you buy an app, you're buying it from Apple, like that they think every app is made by Apple.
Marco:
Everyone thinks this.
Marco:
Everyone.
Marco:
Every regular person who's not a tech podcast listener thinks that.
John:
Even if they understand that developers make the app, they essentially think the developers work for Apple.
John:
I forget, I probably tweeted it or whatever, but one of the most profound moments that I can remember, like a tectonic shift in the landscape of the tech world that I'm in,
John:
was when Apple announced the App Store and had like a, you know, look how much money we paid for developers.
John:
It was like essentially developers who had previously been selling their applications to customers would receive money from customers.
John:
And as soon as Apple announced the App Store and it became popular and Apple started bragging about it, it was so clear that the world has changed.
John:
Developers previously, you would receive money from your customers.
John:
Now you will never receive money from your customers.
John:
Your checks will be signed by Apple.
John:
So even though we don't actually work for Apple as developers or whatever, the bottom line is, hey, when you get money, where does it come from?
John:
Who signs those checks?
John:
The answer is Apple.
John:
Apple gives you your money.
John:
They're not your customers.
John:
They're Apple customers.
John:
Apple gives you the money.
John:
And I know it's just like, well, you know, Cheerios, General Mills gets money from like, you know, the supermarket or whatever.
John:
But like still, it's just such a profound difference where, you know, there's a new middle party that came in there.
John:
That they deal with the customer, they keep the customer, they have total control, and they give you whatever money they feel like giving you.
John:
And again, that might just seem like not profound.
John:
That's just the way that retail works.
John:
But it was such a fundamental shift in the particularly Mac developer community to no longer be getting money from your customers.
John:
And I feel like the Ticketmaster thing, like obviously, yes, they want to advertise the lower price as it come on or whatever.
John:
But the thing to understand about Ticketmaster is their monopoly power grew over time.
John:
So in the beginning, it was just Ticketmaster would take whatever their cut is.
John:
And that was built into the price.
John:
Right.
John:
But then they started doing things online.
John:
And then you could add the tack on a little online convenience fee because online is special somehow.
John:
And the Ticketmaster as it amassed power.
John:
Right.
John:
slowly just turn the dial on those fees to the point where they're so significant.
John:
They're like, well, why is that not included?
John:
Because if we see it as a convenience fee of like $1.50, we all hate it and it's stupid, but you're like, whatever.
John:
But when it's $40, right?
John:
When the percentage starts going up, it's like, how did this happen?
John:
How did this cancerous tumor of fees grow?
John:
It's like, well, it used to be small and that's why they would tack it on at the end.
John:
But now it's a significant portion of the price because they just keep increasing it.
John:
And what are you going to do?
John:
You can't buy tickets anywhere else and everyone has to deal with Ticketmaster.
John:
So yeah.
Marco:
But it is interesting, though.
Marco:
Why aren't ticket prices just advertised with this fee built in?
Marco:
And why do customers even have to see this?
John:
Yeah, I mean, I guess it's probably to give Ticketmaster flexibility.
John:
There's probably laws about advertised price versus whatever and itemization.
John:
I mean, there's another law going through Congress, I forget if it passed or whatever, about broadband and how broadband does a similar thing where they advertise you pay this number of dollars a month for this speed or whatever, but then they tack on fees at the end.
John:
And the new law is essentially, what are they calling it?
John:
Stupid analogies that our legislature loves.
John:
The nutrition labels for broadband, there'll be essentially requirements where you have to show what all the fees will be up front.
John:
And so you can't advertise a $50 thing.
John:
And then when the people get their first bill, they see 20 fees stuck onto the end that double the price.
John:
You can still have those fees and they can still be as big as you want, but you at least need to show the customer
John:
what all those fees are going to be and so that I think that law just passed or is wending its way through so that's progress at least like I don't like I think it's fine as long as to have all these fees as long as there is transparency about it all you need is actual competition in the market because that will you know because then Ticketmaster's ability to add $40 to your ticket price would be impaired if there was another company that would also sell you tickets online that you know only added $30 I hate Ticketmaster so much
Casey:
You know, Michaela, who's six, has been in a kick of, I hate this, I hate that.
Casey:
And she's normally a very happy, agreeable child, but, you know, she's really emphatic when she doesn't like something.
Casey:
I've been trying to break her of, I hate.
Casey:
I don't love phrasing things that way.
Casey:
It's not very tasteful, and it's a bit dramatic.
Marco:
Would you say you hate it?
Marco:
You wouldn't be the first parent in the world to try to get your kid not to say hate.
Marco:
Hate's a strong word.
Marco:
Exactly, exactly.
John:
Are you going to have her say H-E double hockey sticks?
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
but i will tell you right now i freaking hate ticket master god do i hate them so much setting a good example for your children i mean do you think is there is there any like like what what companies in america do you think are more hated than ticket like maybe like monsanto like what it like it it takes a lot like the tobacco companies maybe like how haliburton used to be yeah maybe comcast comcast at various times oh that's a good one yeah
John:
although i feel like comcast has gotten better excuse me it's xfinity now so it's totally different yeah i know you know when a company has to change its name because people hate it so much that it's a bad sign intellectual ventures yeah there are more hated companies that are obscure like intellectual ventures is probably more hated but nobody knows they exist right so for big companies like ticketmaster and comcast and if you don't see live music you don't probably think about ticketmaster either but
Casey:
It makes me so mad.
Casey:
All right, moving on.
Casey:
It looks like the iPhone 16, we are definitely getting into rumor season.
Casey:
iPhone 16, 16 plus rumored to feature increased eight gigabytes of RAM.
Casey:
This is coming from Mac rumors from actually a few months ago now.
Casey:
The iPhone 15, the 15 that is available today.
Casey:
has 6 gigs, 15+, 6 gigs, 15 Pro, and Pro Max 8 gigs.
Casey:
The rumored iPhone 16 will have 8 gigs across the board, 16, 16+, 16 Pro, and 16 Pro Max.
Casey:
So that's a difference from 15 and 15+, to 16 and 16+, of 6 to 8 gigs.
Casey:
And I don't have too much to say about this.
Casey:
I think, John, you wanted to say something about it.
Casey:
But I will note very quickly that I have noticed, particularly on my 15 Pro Max, and the fact that it's a Max is irrelevant in this context, I see evictions due to memory almost never.
Casey:
What I mean by that is I will go back to an app that I haven't run in possibly 48 hours.
Casey:
And it comes up so fast.
Casey:
Like, either... Maybe it's been...
Casey:
what's the word I'm looking for, where it's like been charged up in the background, not charged up, you know what I'm, hydrated, hydrated, that's what I'm looking for.
Casey:
It's been hydrated in the background.
Casey:
And so maybe that's what I'm seeing.
Casey:
And I'm just, and I'm attributing this to an overabundance of RAM.
Casey:
And really, it's just iOS being good at, you know, pre-hydrating and getting things ready in the background.
Casey:
Or what it feels like anyway, is just that I really have a ton of RAM in this phone.
Casey:
And I don't personally ever hit a scenario where evictions are happening, where the phone is saying, oh, well,
Casey:
You haven't run, you know, Ivory, which, of course, I'm running constantly.
Casey:
But for the sake of discussion, you have run Ivory in, you know, 16 hours.
Casey:
We're just going to punt that from memory because we need that memory for something else.
Casey:
I feel like I'm seeing that very rarely these days.
John:
Yeah, so the reason I put this in here way back in January, as we're lurking and I hoisted it up,
John:
is simply to note that we are at the moment where every current model iPhone, the iPhone 16 or whatever, will come with as much base RAM as the low-end Macs.
John:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
Oh, that's so bad.
John:
How soon before every new iPhone you can buy has more base RAM
John:
than say a macbook air oh my god because apparently apple will increase the ram inside its inside its iphones but they will not increase the ram inside the macs uh and like like you mentioned about you know going taking an app that hasn't been running in two days and seeing that it's basically still in ram or still able to come back online real fast uh the thing is the phones because of the way they're designed and you know the size of the screen
John:
are we don't ask them to do as much as we ask a mac simply because on the mac when you have multiple apps running at the same time they can all be on the screen at the same time you can have five apps on the screen at the same time at
John:
which you expect to update their display or whatever like the display is bigger the winding system lets you do that and if these two things if apple thinks eight gigs of ram is appropriate for the lowest end iphone 16 which you can only see one or two or maybe three apps on the screen at the same time depending on the dynamic island and picture and picture and so on and so forth whereas a macbook air with a much bigger screen where you could see five apps on screen six apps eight apps like depending on what portion of windows are visible like
John:
the mac should have more ram not because it's physically bigger or but but because you can do more things at the same time with it like its multitasking model is different than the phone uh and i think it should be different the phone i wouldn't to be clear i don't want the mac to go to the phone's multitasking model where it kills apps in the background and restores them transparently and all that although apple has tried to do a bunch of technologies that help the mac be more like that
John:
all i'm gonna say is eight gigs of ram it's time for apple to bump that do they need to bump it to 16 of course i would love that but something more than eight apparently the phone is going onesie twosie going from six to eight maybe they'll go to 10 uh next year or the year after right but it's time like there's there's that graph that uh i think we talked about
John:
on past shows that somebody said it was like how much ram is in the base uh apple laptop over time and it's like the slope that goes up and as soon as tim cook become ceo at flatline and it's not just like oh well he made the ram stop or whatever like there are arguments we made that like there is a point of diminishing returns tim cook stopped the ram
John:
you're able to do more in the eight gigs of ram or eight gigs was sufficient for the things that most people do with their laptops and nothing new has come along to force the change in that like local ai or something that hasn't really right like i don't expect the slope to continue at the same angle forever but i also don't expect it to be flat for 15 years or whatever
John:
like this the phone certainly haven't been right the the phones have been creeping up in the amount of ram and those are portable mobile devices that generally cost less than the macbooks that people buy as well by the way it's apple needs to increase the ram in the max i don't know when it's going to happen but yeah this is we're at a we're at a possible inflection point here where the phones will have more ram than the base model max
Casey:
Hey, but you know, there's good news.
Casey:
Installing Rogue Amoeba apps is now a lot easier.
Casey:
This is wildly unrelated, of course, but we use the wonderful Audio Hijack to record our audio.
Casey:
We were using Piezo, or I was using Piezo many, many years ago.
Casey:
I use Fission for some things from every now and again.
Casey:
And one of the only crummy things about using Audio Hijack, which generally gets my highest recommendation, we are friends with several Rogue Amoeba people, but truly, it's incredible.
Casey:
It is an amazing app, but up until very recently, the dance you had to go through, particularly on Apple Silicon, but it was true of even Intel models, the dance you had to go through in order to install their audio capture engine, which is the thing that lets you capture audio, it was bananas.
Casey:
You had to reboot not once, not twice, but I think thrice in order to do it.
Casey:
It was absolutely out of control.
Casey:
And as of very, very recently, in fact, sometime this month, reading from their own blog,
Casey:
Audio Hijack has now been updated to provide our new installer-free setup on macOS 14.4 and up.
Casey:
Just as we showed off last month with our recent Piezo update, you can now get started using Audio Hijack nearly instantly.
Casey:
There's no need to restart your Mac, use recovery mode, or even enter a password.
Casey:
I have to assume that Apple provided some new APIs or something, or maybe like gave them some sort of entitlement or something like that.
Casey:
But this is excellent because it was ornerous and just user hostile.
Casey:
And it wasn't Rogue Amoeba's fault, as far as anyone could tell.
Casey:
It was Apple's fault.
Marco:
No, they were doing the best they could with what the system threw at them.
Marco:
Yep.
Casey:
So I'm very happy for this.
John:
Yeah, you can see the explanation they put on their website.
John:
But it's not just like, oh, you only have to do one restart or you just have to go into accessibility or permissions and system settings or whatever.
John:
It's like you don't have to do anything.
John:
It has gone from the most complicated install that you can imagine that was scary and technical and require you to change security settings and reboot seven times or whatever to, oh, there's just none of that anymore.
John:
just load the app and i think that's great because surely that required some cooperation from apple because if roguemiro could have done it before or was using some weird hack that like you know exploited a security flaw in the operating system we would hear about it and it would be closed by now so whatever has gone on here is it is such a change from like the worst install experience to like the same experience as text edit
John:
So it's an amazing update.
John:
And it gives me some faith that if you wait long enough, like five to 10 years, that maybe Apple will actually give you APIs that you need.
John:
And we've talked about this about iOS and iPads forever.
John:
what audio hijack does sort of be able to be like a switching station slash recorder for audio that happens on the system is such a useful function and so essential for people who work with audio on their devices like we do uh that it makes the mac so much more powerful than the other device and like why aren't there apis like this on ios and ipad os
John:
And it was difficult to have optimism because back when it's like, well, you can do it on a Mac, but man, look at what Rogue Amoeba has to do to make that happen on the Mac.
John:
It used to be easy to do on the Mac because it was less secure and it was more open to things like this and you run kernel extensions, yada, yada, yada.
John:
But it just got harder and harder.
John:
We're like, this is going in the wrong direction.
John:
We want these APIs to be on iPad and iOS, but on the Mac where we have them, it's getting harder and harder for them to even exist there.
John:
And this is a welcome turn in the other direction, which is like,
John:
you know now it is way easier to do on the mac and also more secure than it was in the past thanks to presumably cooperation from apple so this gives me some more hope that maybe they'll realize that some of the other operating systems they have like say an ipad is going to ship with an m4 in it maybe that should be able to uh do similar things it'd be great to see that functionality appear on uh on non-mac platforms
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Let's do some Ask ATP, and let's start with Scott McCauley, who writes, As someone who is about to buy an M3 MacBook Air to replace a 2019 Intel MacBook Pro, I noticed the latest German leak about the AI-enabled M4.
Casey:
That's kind of tangential to what we were just talking about.
Casey:
I know new tech is always around the corner, and I usually don't worry so much about future-proofing, but in this case, I'm wondering if there's possibly something more qualitatively meaningful about this next-gen release that should cause me to hold off another year.
Casey:
My two cents, especially if you're coming from Intel, hell no.
Casey:
You upgrade and you upgrade now.
Casey:
The best I could do is meet you in the middle and say, wait for WWDC just in case something happens, but I doubt it will.
Casey:
If it were me, I would upgrade immediately.
Casey:
Marco, what do you think?
Marco:
When we hear things like this will be made for AI or this will support AI or this will be a big upgrade for AI, that kind of thing doesn't usually happen within the same product line in one year.
Marco:
It's generally speaking that's marketing focus.
Marco:
When you look at what does it mean for a computer to support AI or to be good at AI, I mean these days it mostly means it has a web browser.
Marco:
because most important AI developments are happening now remotely on servers.
Marco:
And so any laptop with a web browser can access things like ChatGPT and all the fun models like that.
Marco:
If you're talking about running models locally, what you're generally talking about is having custom acceleration hardware that is good at running models.
Marco:
That can be the neural engine.
Marco:
That can be the GPUs.
Marco:
In some cases, it can be both.
Marco:
It depends on the model.
Marco:
It depends on the AI.
Marco:
But
Marco:
What we're probably looking at here, if somebody says the focus on the M4 is going to be more AI capability, what that probably means is more cores in the neural engine or more advancements in the GPU.
Marco:
But when you're looking at M3 versus M4, you're still talking about probably the same process size in terms of manufacturing or at least a very similar process to manufacture it.
Marco:
You're still talking about probably the same rough physical chip size.
Marco:
So there's not really a ton of room on the chip to make massively more GPU cores, massively more neural engine space and neural engine cores.
Marco:
This is the best time for all this pounding to be happening behind me.
Marco:
This is the most I've said the whole show, and this is when they're pounding stuff into the wall.
Casey:
I thought I heard your mic stand jostling, so I'm kind of glad you acknowledged it.
Marco:
Anyway, so M3 to M4, you're talking about the same process, roughly, if not exactly the same.
Marco:
You're talking about the same approximate size and power usage of the chip.
Marco:
So you're not going to have massive differences that the M3 just can't do something really important that the M4 can do, or the M4 is not going to be three times as fast for AI.
Marco:
It's not going to be that level of difference.
Marco:
The M4 will probably have...
Marco:
More of everything.
Marco:
More CPU power, more GPU power, more neural engine capacity.
Marco:
Yes, it'll have all those things.
Marco:
And they will, I'm sure, market it as a big AI thing.
Marco:
And it will be good at running local AI models relative to PC hardware and the same performance and wattage class, I'm sure.
Marco:
But relative, you know, between the M3 and the M4, this is not a like you must wait for this kind of boundary probably.
Marco:
It's much more likely to be a nice incremental boundary like we've had on the other M chips going from M1 to M2 to M3.
Marco:
Each one of those had like a 15%-ish, you know, kind of, you know, roughly, you know.
Marco:
This is better, but it's not like you don't have to hold off your entire life to get it.
Marco:
There will always be the next M chip coming out next year.
Marco:
That will always be the case.
Marco:
So buy the laptop when you need it.
Marco:
Even the M3 today is a massive upgrade over your 2019 Intel MacBook Pro.
Marco:
And so enjoy it and just buy it.
Marco:
If you need it now, buy it now and have it for the next year.
Marco:
And when the M4 comes out, if I am totally wrong and somehow they've defeated physics and they've managed to make the M4 be amazing at some kind of AI thing that the M3 cannot do, then you will hear me do some follow up and I will leave my words and you can be right.
Marco:
But I'm pretty sure I'm going to be right on this.
Marco:
So in the meantime, just buy the stupid M3 MacBook Air.
Marco:
It's an amazing computer.
Marco:
You're going to love it.
Marco:
And it will be able to do everything you need to do.
John:
yeah because this person's coming from intel it's it's a no-brainer if they had an m2 and we're asking it would be a different conversation but coming from intel by now especially since the rumor is that the m4 macbook air is towards the end of next year so forget it but by now but that said i think it is entirely plausible for the m4 to be three to four times as fast in some ai task as the m3 not because they've suddenly found more room on the die or whatever but for typical apple reasons which is basically
John:
you know the m4 will have whatever silicon is slightly more advantageous to do like modern local on on device ai stuff than the m3 but then also that has library support where apple will you know have optimized versions of whatever algorithms that it's using for whatever ai features that it's going to roll out at wwdc and those libraries will take advantage of the different neural engine or whatever they're going to end up rebranding as if they do
John:
inside the m4 uh and the m3 and m2 and m1 and maybe even intel will still be able to do all this stuff although maybe not intel but still be able to do all this stuff but will the will the library uh for that you know be optimized as much as the one that's for the new silicon that's the way these things tend to happen where apple says that you know and on the m4 it's four times as fast as the m3 at this task yeah because they optimized it in their library for the specific neural engine that's in the m4
John:
And the M3 just gets like the old code path that they had before that is, you know, it was what it was before.
John:
Right.
John:
It doesn't mean that the M4 has like four times more space on the die dedicated to it.
John:
It simply means that Apple is going to optimize for whatever new thing they're rolling out in silicon, assuming these rumors are true.
John:
right in a similar way to when apple rolled out the neural engine they the first chips that had the neural engine on the mac is like look how much faster it is than whatever intel thing that doesn't have a neural engine it's not because the intel thing couldn't potentially do that it's just that apple didn't spend time optimizing it for you know or spend any new time optimizing it for the intel chips and the neural engine was specifically designed by apple to run whatever exact library that they built for
John:
like it's the hardware and software built together, whereas Intel, they just have to take what, you know, Apple has to take what Intel had available to them and then make a library that works with it, right?
John:
So that's always going to be the case when new silicon comes out.
John:
But Apple's not going to have a big AI splash WWDC and say, and this is only for M4 Macs, which none of you own yet.
John:
Of course, it's going to run on the M3 Macs and it'll run on the M2 Macs and it'll run the M1 Macs, maybe not at Intel, but it'll just be slower, a little bit slower.
John:
And what you should be really asking yourself is,
John:
In the coming year, how much do I care that whatever AI features that I don't even know about yet that Apple's going to roll out will run slightly slower on my Mac?
John:
You probably don't care that much.
John:
Like, no matter how great the features are, if they run at all, which they will on your M3 Mac, it'll be fine.
John:
Is it like, oh, I have to throw this Mac into the ocean because this new feature that I didn't even have before, but now that I have it, it's the only thing I care about.
John:
That's not going to happen.
John:
Like the first wave of AI features that Apple has, as amazing as they are, it's not like you're going to buy your entire machine focused around them because we're not at that state in this technology, right?
John:
So you'll be fine.
John:
You'll wait for the M5.
John:
The M5 will be even faster than the M4 on these tasks, and it'll be fine.
Casey:
And moving on, Joe Bezdek writes, the recent discussion about 64-bit versus 128-bit registers reminds me of something I'd long wondered about.
Casey:
Given the power of the M-Series chips and the impressive performance of emulators like Rosetta 2, why aren't there emulators that allow 32-bit software to run on 64-bit chips?
Casey:
Is it technically impossible?
Casey:
I've smoked Mac games that I'd love to play again.
Casey:
What do you think, John?
John:
so uh here's the thing about running your old 32-bit games your old 32-bit software it's like oh can't they just emulate that can't they just translate the instructions from 64-bit instructions to you know from 32-bit instructions to 64-bit instructions uh yeah i'm pretty sure they can do that uh but here's the thing you need all the 32-bit libraries that came with a 32-bit version of the operating system that that 32-bit game ran on apple doesn't ship those anymore
John:
in their operating system so now you're like okay i'm not just emulating a thing now i need essentially a vm that's going to run an old version of mac os inside a vm where i can run my 32-bit game um i'm not sure if that is uh exists anywhere or as possible it's conceivable that something about aren't the arm 64 chips apple uses makes it
John:
more difficult to do this or puts a barrier in the way which would explain why even like vms don't do or whatever but it's not going to be as simple as like rosetta where you just have an intel app and you double click it and it runs uh that only works uh because that's also a 64-bit intel app and you know they have the 64-bit libraries or whatever i think you need the whole stack because apple just sort of excised 32-bit from their entire thing so there's a bunch of files that aren't part of that application that you need to run that 32-bit game
John:
That said, I really wish, I mean, we just talked about, you know, Rogue Amoeba and Apple actually, you know, doing the right thing and making APIs that make useful apps even better and safer for everybody.
John:
After years of dealing with that, it would be great if Apple continued down the path that it's kind of like tiptoeing on to try to...
John:
make it so that virtualization of apple os's on apple hardware is more of a thing used to be apple was just totally out of the game they like run vmware run parallels were not in the thing and now they have the hypervisor framework which makes it way easier to make those type of emulators you know such that like individual developers can do it by just saying i'm just going to use apple's hypervisor framework and build a gui around it right
John:
what mac developers want is kind of like what ios has with simulators where you can just pick a device pick an os version and run your thing and xcode in a simulator yada yada on the mac that's if you're doing a mac development that's so much harder you got to use vms you got to use old macs the vms can't log into your apple ids right
John:
if apple truly embraced virtualization of mac os and hell virtualization of all its platforms there would be a huge developer boon uh and they would have to like fully support it like so you can run old versions of mac os in a vm but like i said you can't log into your apple id in those vms for like weird security reasons only apple can really fix that due to the whole security chain there and
John:
that would be so great if they enabled that as a side effect maybe it would allow you to run your 32 bit games right but i just think it's the thing apple should do to make their platform more flexible and to you know to make lives for developers easier and preserving your past legacy like like nintendo does by selling you the original super mario brothers and all those nes games and snes games and all that stuff uh
John:
I know Apple doesn't like to do that, but maybe you could appeal to Tim Cook's desire to sell the same iPad for 17 years.
John:
Look, if people are willing to buy classic 32-bit iOS games...
John:
And maybe not on iOS because running virtualization in your phone might be too resource intensive, although they have as much RAM as low in Macs now.
John:
But there may eventually be a market for running old Mac software on Macs, for running old iOS software on phones.
John:
And if Apple already has the infrastructure to do that because it's good for developers, it would be easy to roll out a consumer-facing version of that.
John:
So I don't know if there's a solution to this today.
John:
I don't think there are any technical barriers to it, but...
John:
you're going to need more files than just your game executable.
Casey:
Anonymous writes, once John has gotten the upcoming OLED iPad Pro, I'd like to ask, does it work well as a secondary HDR screen for a Mac if the primary screen is an SDR screen?
Casey:
This is bold to ask what the state is of something that hasn't been released, but let's go with it.
Casey:
I'm contemplating upgrading from an 11-inch iPad Pro second gen so that in addition to normal iPad use, I could see HDR photos and HDR in Lightroom Classic when my primary screen is a studio display.
Casey:
Yes, I know that the Pro Display XDR is the proper solution, but I bought the Studio Display for €2,200 in September before I knew that HDR Support Lightroom Classic would launch in October.
Casey:
And €8,000 for the XDR with stand and nano grooves is a lot, even knowing that I have a hobby use case.
John:
Well, there's a lot easier way to get a smallish HDR screen that works with macOS and is not buying the 8000 euro XDR.
John:
All the MacBook Pros come with pretty amazing HDR capable screens.
John:
You get a whole computer with them, too.
John:
uh and and some of them might cost as much as a high-end uh ipad so having having ipad as a secondary screen like there are hdr ipads you can buy now like the the mini led 12.9 inch whatever i use my ipad as a secondary screen when i'm doing uh multi-screen development work on switch glass that is my second screen this is another example of mac os's support for ipads as a second screen is good enough for me to use that
John:
as a way for me to test multi-screen scenarios like the mat the operating system just sees it as a screen there's nothing particularly weird about it uh it works as expected and so that has given me a lot of time to use an ipad as a second screen and granted my main screen also has hdr but i think
John:
If you had an iPad, especially like a 12.9 inch iPad with the big screen, the mini LED back ride and HDR, I think you could use that as a way to see what the pictures will look like in HDR.
John:
Because the problem if you have an SDR screen is you just like, it'll display them okay, but you just like, if you want to know, what does this look like in HDR?
John:
And there's just no way to know without an HDR screen.
John:
So if you already have an iPad and you just want to see what a photo looks like in HDR,
John:
yeah i think it works fine bring the photo over there full screen it on the ipad screen there's not going to be as many pixels if it's a high megapixel image and you have a small ipad like it's it's a compromise or whatever but there's that if you don't already have an ipad pro but you want to just have a second screen or you want you basically you want an hdr screen for photo previewing
John:
consider buying a macbook pro as your next computer use the desktop laptop lifestyle that marco uses only actually open the lid on your computer because the macbook pro screens are really good like this every time someone asks should i buy a macbook air or macbook pro the main reason i tell people to buy a macbook pro is not for the cpu performance not for the gpu performance it's for that screen
John:
and it's going to kill me how long we're going to have to wait for the MacBook Air to have an HDR screen long after, like, every iPhone already has an HDR screen.
John:
They're going to be everywhere.
John:
It's going to be like, but the MacBook Air, just like it couldn't get Retina for like a decade and a half, is not going to be allowed to get HDR, which is stupid because HDR should just be table stakes, given that all of our devices take HDR photos.
John:
But anyway, yeah, think about a MacBook Pro as potentially your next computer, and you can hook up your same external monitor to it and just use the MacBook Pro's internal display as your HDR preview display.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsor this week, Swiftcraft.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
In this week's ATP Overtime, our member-exclusive bonus segment, we'll be discussing the Humane Pin Rabbit R1, but with more Apple influence, because Johnny Ive and Sam Altman are apparently...
Marco:
seeking funding for a personal AI device.
Marco:
And then also, Apple's apparently teaching an AI system to use apps, maybe as part of Advanced Siri, kind of like the Rabbit R1 is doing its large action model.
Marco:
So we'll be covering that in ATP Overtime as well.
Marco:
Join as a member to listen now, atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
Thank you very much, and we'll talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Casey:
Cause it was accidental.
Casey:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Casey:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
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 Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Casey:
It's accidental, they didn't mean it.
Casey:
So long.
Marco:
So we were talking about Ticketmaster earlier, and I am going to Las Vegas to see the Phish shows at The Sphere, to see the last two of them.
Marco:
I'm leaving tomorrow.
Marco:
And I had to buy those tickets secondhand on the various constellation of things like StubHub and all those other... And I think Ticketmaster even has their own secondhand market built in Ticketmaster now.
Marco:
Of course they do.
Marco:
Of course.
Marco:
Talk about ripoffs.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
When you buy the tickets up front, directly you pay whatever it is, the $40 in your convenience charge and whatever that stuff is.
Marco:
When you buy tickets from a reseller service like the StubHub and these other things, it's amazing.
Marco:
So I have both bought and sold tickets on these platforms before.
Marco:
They charge both ends, and they charge a lot.
Marco:
So when you buy it, suppose you go to StubHub.
Marco:
I don't have the percentage just in front of me, so forgive me.
Marco:
But when you go to StubHub, if you buy a ticket, you on the buyer side, you pay something like a 30% or 40% surcharge.
Marco:
Well, the seller, out of the fee that is the base price for the buyer, the seller also pays a large surcharge on that order.
Marco:
So the vast majority of the money is being taken by the platform.
Marco:
It's kind of amazing.
Marco:
The amount of ripping off happening here on all sides.
Marco:
Oh, it's so gross.
Marco:
That's another thing that Tiki Master is...
John:
says that it tries to prevent but probably is making half-hearted efforts is the whole idea of like stopping scalpers essentially from buying up all the tickets and just reselling them oh no they just want to be the scalper themselves yeah right exactly well they you know ticketmaster is some unmotivated to do that because ticketmaster is like we want to make those exorbitant profits we don't want a bunch of scalpers buying it so the ticketmaster does make some efforts to
John:
limit who can buy or whatever but i mean people just hire people to be humans to buy the tickets like it's it's kind of uh you know it's a cat and mouse game there but yeah ticket master's motivations are not pure and also as noted before ticket master is bad at their jobs so what happens with taylor swift concerts the the site crashes because they're bad at their job uh huge amounts of tickets are sold by scalpers because they're bad at their job
John:
And then those tickets go on those scalping sites for more huge profits, for more middle parties.
John:
I mean, the secondary market is always going to be a ripoff, but at least that is actually somewhat competitive because there's not just StubHub.
John:
I forget what the other ones are.
John:
I used to know what all the names are because I was trying to get Taylor Swift tickets.
John:
At least there's some competition in that area, but the main problem is why are...
John:
how are these scalpers all getting tickets and like i said the the ultimate hack is well you just pay people a small amount of money to buy the tickets for you use human power right kind of like the uh amazon just walk out store where they had humans monitoring on cameras to make up for the errors that the uh the supposed uh you know computer vision things were making so for the sphere thing in vegas like it doesn't seem like a
John:
like fish friendly venue to me like i would expect well i don't know like sort of outdoors more sprawling not so much about the laser light show like as fish no way it's the world's biggest hot box it's perfect i was gonna say you're worried about the smoke collecting at the top i know i get that but it's like i just feel like it's more sort of hippy dippy and also like fish like they're up there and they play their instruments they're not about big productions right like but the sphere is all about the biggest production like the biggest screens you've ever seen wait so what are you saying about you too then
John:
Oh, U2 is all about the big production.
John:
Are you kidding?
John:
Ever since after the Joshua Tree Tour, the whole Zouropa Tour and the Pop Tour, that's just spectacle on spectacle on spectacle.
John:
It's a perfect U2 venue.
Marco:
I mean, that's part of why I fought so hard to get myself in to see this because I think – I don't really know what to expect.
Marco:
Like I've been to something like five fish shows so far, something like that.
Marco:
And they have a certain formula.
Marco:
They have a certain format.
Marco:
And so I kind of know what to expect at most fish shows.
Marco:
this I think is going to be really weird and really interesting.
Marco:
And so I, that's, that's why I want to see it.
Marco:
Like it's, it's actually going to be different from what they almost always have done.
Marco:
You know, I know train of states who gave an interview that I watched earlier basically saying, you know, like that they, they've had to, you know, re architect entire things about how they do, you know, cause you know, the sphere doesn't seem to really have like a traditional lighting rig even.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
And so you have these these giant, you know, this like spherical projection video screen to put something on.
Marco:
And there's there's little to no traditional lighting, it seems.
Marco:
And then they have on the stage, like he was saying that when you look at like how you two had to stage it, there was almost nothing on the stage.
Marco:
The stage actually looks fairly small.
Marco:
Like if you look at pictures and video, you'd be blocking the screen.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And normally, Phish has tons of stuff on the stage.
Marco:
Like, there's all sorts of, you know, obviously instruments and drums and, you know, various, like, amps and monitor speakers and different, like, you know, plug-ins and pedals and all this other stuff they use.
Marco:
And, you know, so I'm just really curious to see, like, how do they stage it?
Marco:
What's in the background?
Marco:
You know, normally they have this guy, Chris Corotta.
Marco:
He's a famous lighting designer, and he does, like, live lighting cues with...
Marco:
with the band because like you know one thing like most most big touring bands for each tour they basically develop a show and then play that show over and over again in every state they go to that's not how fish tours with fish like everything is kind of riffed off the cuff like there's some advanced planning but not a ton of advanced planning for each show and
Marco:
And every show is different.
Marco:
That's part of why people like me like it so much.
Marco:
This actually breaks that format in the sense that I assume that they have to kind of preset a lot of what they're doing with the visuals and things like that.
Marco:
But I don't know.
Marco:
I don't know how it's going to work.
Marco:
And that's why it's interesting.
Marco:
And it might be awesome.
Marco:
It might suck.
Marco:
That's part of the excitement of going like I kind of want to see it because whatever it is, they're probably not going to do it very often like this.
Marco:
This might be a one off like these are four shows they're doing.
Marco:
They might never do any any other shows at this venue or maybe they'll come back every year and do it.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
But I think it's going to be interesting and risky and that's that's going to be fun.
John:
i think you really do need to it's kind of like making a music video because it's it's a screen right you can do essentially lighting with the screen but there's all sorts of and it's not just a screen but like it's so environmental that like normally what you might put up on the screen behind a band is different than what you put in the sphere so if you give an example of youtube stuff like there's a lot of like sort of mood and environmental stuff that you put up there for like a slower song or whatever instead of having the equivalent of
John:
You know, let's see close ups of the people in the band or let's see some flashy graphics or whatever.
John:
It's more like let's just put something on the screen to be atmospheric, to change the mood in the entire sphere.
John:
And that's the thing you can do when you've got a screen that's so huge and wraps around the audience like that.
John:
And so I think it really is an entirely separate skill from like traditional lighting or even like what U2 has done in the past by having giant screens in their concert venues.
John:
And I saw some parts of the U2 one.
John:
It seemed fine.
John:
Like it is definitely a different vibe than a show.
John:
Like I feel like it's much like a rock show.
John:
Traditional lighting and yes, even like, you know, 80s metal hairband, like the little sparker things, you know, those things like little explosions and sparks that go out and smoke and colored lights and flashing lights.
Marco:
that is kind of part of the genre but you're not going to get that in the sphere not the least of which because it's indoors but also because yeah you'd be blocking the screen it's it's all about what's on the screen so i think it'll definitely be a a different vibe than uh watching them on the beach oh yeah totally and again that's why i think it'll be interesting to see and and i and i honestly i think i'd be surprised if they did it again but we'll see what it ends up being but that's kind of why like again like i think this might be a one-off which is why it's interesting to go see it now
John:
They can have a residency.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
Well, they can't do a residency because they play a different show every night.
Marco:
Most things in Vegas, it's one show that the act performs every single night for months or years until it goes off and they move on.
Marco:
That's not how Phish performs.
John:
They could still do it the same way they always do it.
John:
Residencies don't have to be every single... I don't know what the deal is with the sphere or whatever, but I was just thinking of the Billy Joel one.
John:
Billy Joel has had a residency in Madison Square Garden, but he does one show a month.
John:
He just did his 100th.
John:
I'll see if I find a link to the show notes.
John:
Casey can find a good link for us somewhere.
John:
It was the 100th Billy Joel Madison Square Garden residency.
John:
And I think I have to find that link that I think we put in before of the story in the New Yorker or the Atlantic or wherever it was.
John:
Billy Joel lives on Long Island and he takes a helicopter.
John:
to Madison Square Garden because he doesn't want to fight the traffic so once a month he leaves his mansion on the beach gets in a helicopter flies to Madison Square Garden plays one show gets paid multiple millions of dollars for that one show and then flies back that's amazing I mean I think he's earned that yeah for sure that's what I'm saying like a fish residency doesn't have to be like other people's residencies it could be they do one show a month and every single one of those shows are different yeah it could be but yeah we'll see I'm very excited I think it's going to be
Marco:
really cool to see because i i think the band will be a little bit outside of their own comfort zone too actually like something interesting to see and i'm kind of curious to see how they handle that i think they'll handle it well but it'll be fun to see um and then like i i just no clue what they're gonna do for the visuals i assume
Marco:
It's going to be kind of like an iTunes visualizer from the early 2000s.
Marco:
And I assume whatever it is, I think it's going to be designed for a class of drugs that I don't use, but that many of the people there will be using.
Marco:
And so that will also have an interesting thing to experience.
John:
Well, apparently Billy Joel is not taking a helicopter anymore.
Casey:
i was gonna say yeah i love classic rock.com is a good article about this uh blah blah blah i got a little freaked out confessed joel admitting the occasional turbulence put him off the chopper rides now he's traded the sky for the rails the train lets you get get up right there so he takes the long island railroad or it continues but the helicopter and train weren't the only modes of transport joel had tried he even admitted to taking a greyhound bus on what john the hudson river line
Casey:
Very good.
Casey:
Very good.
John:
Yeah, it's certainly not going to be driving himself.
John:
He's too old and too rich to be sitting in traffic like that.