Demand-Paged Outrage
Casey:
So I've got a little bit of weird setup this week.
Casey:
Next week is the time that I am hypothetically going to be not at home, which is a semi-inconvenient time from the perspective of, though there's nothing going on next week, right?
Casey:
But nevertheless, I thought, you know what?
Casey:
I should probably try out all this new equipment, including a brand new friggin' computer.
Casey:
And so I am recording and speaking to you this week for my MacBook Pro, and if everything sounds like garbage, I'll just lie and say that it was the Adorable the whole time.
Marco:
So, yeah, I want to hear more about that computer later, actually, because this is your first new laptop in a while.
Casey:
Yeah, definitely.
Casey:
And we will talk about it.
Casey:
But yeah, if it all sounds like garbage, don't blame Marco.
Casey:
Blame me.
Casey:
I've changed everything except my microphone and the preamp.
Casey:
But cabling got changed.
Casey:
The computer got changed.
Casey:
Everything is different.
Casey:
And so I figured, you know what, if I'm going to screw this one up, then let's screw this one up and not next week's, which is a little bit more important.
Marco:
Why not both?
Marco:
Did you by any chance get the oxygen-free gold everything solid monster cables?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
This guy who used to work at Staples told me that it was all garbage and I shouldn't do it.
Casey:
And then he got fired for it.
Marco:
I didn't get fired for it.
Casey:
Oh, you didn't?
Casey:
Okay.
Marco:
No, I just was reprimanded a little bit by telling customers not to buy the super expensive cables because they were a waste of money.
Casey:
Lightly reprimanded.
Casey:
I know how that goes.
Casey:
What else is going on?
Casey:
How's the beach?
Casey:
It's amazing.
Marco:
I feel bad appreciating anything right now and having a good time right now, but I really am having a good time.
Marco:
After months of misery, it's extremely nice for my mental health to have some repair time.
Casey:
It's funny you say that.
Casey:
Something I wrestle with a lot, I carry with me a lot of guilt about a lot of different things.
Casey:
Not white cars, coincidentally, because those can just happen to you, as a listener wrote to us, which I won't say any more than that.
Casey:
But white cars can happen to you.
Casey:
I don't carry guilt about that.
Casey:
But I carry guilt about basically everything else in the world.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
It's funny because I, you know, I'm going away soon and not for a whole long time, but long enough.
Casey:
And I'm really looking forward to it and really excited about it.
Casey:
And I also feel a little guilty about that.
Casey:
But on the same side, or not on the same side, I guess on the flip side of the coin, uh,
Casey:
I feel like all of us, every single one of us, the three of us, everyone listening, we all need to take care of ourselves by whatever means we possibly can.
Casey:
Maybe that's buying something frivolous.
Casey:
Maybe it's getting takeout from a really expensive restaurant.
Casey:
Maybe it's going to the beach for a while, be that a day, a week, a month, or a year.
Casey:
Whatever the case may be.
Casey:
I don't think any of us should feel guilty about taking care of ourselves and our loved ones, even though I totally agree with you and I totally feel guilty about the fact that I'm excited to be going away and quarantining in four different walls for a little while.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So have you been to any restaurants yet?
No.
Casey:
I've gotten plenty of takeout.
Casey:
I have not been to any.
Casey:
And this is going to be really challenging for us when we're on our vacation because even though none of the restaurants in this little town that we love so much are particularly remarkable, we still really love these restaurants.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I've not experienced.
Casey:
Is it Boom Boom or Bang Bang Sauce?
Casey:
boom boom sauce that might be something else yeah yeah well fair enough well it's bang bang shrimp at uh what you call them uh what's the outback owned uh bonefish grill anyway uh point is like i don't know if boom boom sauce is is like the most amazing thing that's ever been put on any food item ever and it may be but my ex my my assumption and my expectation is that it is legitimately very good but
Casey:
in the grand scheme of things, it's not earth-shatteringly good, right?
Casey:
And so these restaurants at this place that we're going, they're good.
Casey:
They're good restaurants, but they're not earth-shatteringly good.
Casey:
But part of the experience was that we would go out to dinner most nights, which is a very unusual thing for us, and go to these restaurants in years past and experience them and eat at these restaurants.
Casey:
And we really loved that.
Casey:
And
Casey:
You know, there's no reason we can't do takeout this year.
Casey:
But part of the fun is eating out.
Casey:
And our kids, thankfully, are pretty good for the most part at restaurants.
Casey:
And so I always enjoy that.
Casey:
And Aaron always enjoyed it.
Casey:
And they enjoyed that.
Casey:
And I'm a little bummed that that's not going to be part of the shtick this year.
Casey:
Unless on the Extraordinarily Slim Chance, there's like literally nobody else on the patio.
Casey:
And then maybe I would consider it maybe.
Casey:
But even then, I'd probably just get takeout.
Casey:
But have you done anything, Marco?
Casey:
Have you had your boom boom sauce?
Marco:
Well, first of all, the Boom Boom sauce can be ordered at one of the delis in a to-go container.
Marco:
Ah, there you go.
Marco:
And so I have been having Boom Boom sauce on my eggs since we've gotten to the beach.
Marco:
Because the very first day I went there and I ordered, you know, you had to like, you know, give them a list, like text a list to a number and they would bring it to your house basically.
Yeah.
Marco:
and uh and on that list was a tub of boom boom sauce from the deli and i i can get it whenever i want it's it's just like a ken's food service thing you just have to order like a whole gallon of it and it's you know from amazon or from some kind of food service uh provider uh you can't get it you know like in regular consumer sized amounts and i decided to just leave it be like a special fire island thing i think that's a
Marco:
I really enjoy having this part of my life be a whole different mode.
Marco:
And so much of modern life, you can kind of keep the same and bring with you wherever you go year round, anywhere in the world.
Marco:
You know, you can, if you want to, you can have a lot of things be exactly the same all the time.
Marco:
And for some things in my life, I do that.
Marco:
You know, this is why I have brought my iMac here.
Marco:
And I, and you know, I continue most of my work here and everything.
Marco:
But yeah,
Marco:
It is nice to have a different mode that you go in in certain places or in certain seasons or certain times of year or whatever that is to have a different lifestyle.
Marco:
And one of the reasons I like it here so much...
Marco:
is that the nature of Fire Island forces a different lifestyle to a large degree.
Marco:
There's no cars here.
Marco:
You get everywhere on bikes.
Marco:
It's flat, and everything is just... Instead of roads, there's just very wide sidewalks, and it's charming.
Marco:
Part of a recipe for charm is to take something that you have to do all the time and add inconveniences to it that are something...
Marco:
at inconveniences that that result in a pleasurable but more difficult requirement so for instance here to get groceries you can't just drive your car to the grocery store and load up and drive home you have to either order for delivery which is i don't usually do if i can help it or take a bike or a wagon to the grocery store
Marco:
And you walk, and you're only here in the summer when the weather's nice.
Marco:
There's no cars in the way.
Marco:
There's no hills.
Marco:
It's flat.
Marco:
It's kind of charming to have to walk outside in the summertime or bike to the grocery store and then bike home.
Marco:
You take these things that in everyday life are kind of too easy in a lot of ways, or they've gotten too easy or they've gotten too routine,
Marco:
And you add things that make everyday life slightly more of a pain in the butt, but in ways that result in charming outcomes.
Marco:
Either you get more exercise, you get fresh air, you get to ride a bike around, you know, that kind of stuff.
Marco:
So this place forces a certain lifestyle that includes a lot of that kind of stuff.
Marco:
And this is where, you know, I wear my Apple Watch a lot more here.
Marco:
I do different kinds of exercise here.
Marco:
I started running this year for the first time ever.
Marco:
Because running here is really easy.
Casey:
We should talk about that sometime.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
Running at home is – where I live at home, running is – Oh, no.
Casey:
That would not be fun.
Marco:
It's pretty unpleasant most of the year.
Marco:
Just for weather reasons, it's pretty unpleasant.
Marco:
And it's a very hilly, very hilly neighborhood.
Marco:
So running at home is not incredibly pleasant.
Marco:
um so at home i like to row on a rowing machine but here i like to run if it turns out because it's a really nice place and a really nice time of the year to run i like having the a more different lifestyle here like just to be different as much as possible like i have i wear different clothes here i i have different priorities here like so anyway i forgot how do we get on this topic again
Marco:
i don't even know but inconvenience and doing things differently and unique and the boom boom sauce yes so so the boom sauce is one other thing that i add to that pile of like things that are different i have an entirely different flavor profile for my breakfast when i'm here when i'm you know at home we make scrambled eggs a certain way with spinach and tomatoes and everything when i'm here
Marco:
we usually do boiled eggs cut in half with boom-boom sauce or fully deviled with boom-boom sauce on top.
Marco:
So it's a whole different lifestyle.
Marco:
It's part of the charm of shifting into this mode.
Marco:
I like having more of those things.
Marco:
I use different headphones out here.
Marco:
Everything is a little bit different, oftentimes in ways that I like more or that are better or just different from what I do the rest of the year.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
I'm glad that you're there.
Casey:
You sound happy.
Casey:
Not that you sounded unhappy before, but you sound a little bit airier.
Casey:
I don't know if that's the right word, but happier, more jovial maybe.
Casey:
So I'm excited.
Marco:
Oh, and to actually answer your question that you actually asked 15 minutes ago before I rambled on about how much I like it here.
Marco:
after the day after uh last week's episode was my birthday as you mentioned thank you for thank you that it turned out that the day before my birthday was the first day in this county that restaurants were allowed to be open and it's still very restricted it's still it's outdoor seating only the tables are spaced really far apart so they don't have many not a lot of tables and you have to wear masks and
Marco:
The entire process, unless you are sitting at your table, so to and from the table, if you get up to go to the bathroom, like masks during all those times, the servers and the entire staff wear masks all the time.
Marco:
But you can sit there at your table outside, far from everybody else, with no mask on when you were at the table and eat your food.
Marco:
Part of my birthday celebration is I got to go out to a restaurant for the first time in months.
Marco:
Oh, that's awesome.
Marco:
It was amazing.
Marco:
And, you know, it's a decent restaurant.
Marco:
It's not like a mind blowing restaurant.
Marco:
It's a nice restaurant, but it's not like, you know, mind blowing.
Marco:
But it was a restaurant.
Marco:
And when you've been, you know, quarantined for all this time and you've had at best takeout food, which, again, we weren't actually doing that much of because the takeout around us isn't very good.
Marco:
So we were mostly just cooking.
Marco:
And we're not that great at it or into it.
Marco:
So it's been a few months of really bland food life.
Marco:
And so to celebrate my birthday with a night at a restaurant, even though it was a very strange experience with all the masks and everything and all the spacing and outdoor, it didn't feel incredibly normal, but it was really nice.
Marco:
And that was a fantastic way to celebrate.
Marco:
So if you have the option to do that safely where you are,
Marco:
I suggest it.
Marco:
You don't have to do it all the time and obviously it's up to you what kind of risk you want to take.
Marco:
If you can do it safely in a way that fits your risk profile, it's a really nice luxury to have restaurants again.
Casey:
I'm looking forward to whatever that time is.
Marco:
And they could really use the help, honestly.
Marco:
Don't feel guilty about going to a restaurant.
Marco:
Feel guilty every meal you're not going to a restaurant because they are desperate for business right now because...
Marco:
Restaurants, as we mentioned before, restaurants are not, even in the best of times, a high-profit business with a lot of runway.
Marco:
To go three months or whatever it's been with either significantly reduced or no profits, not a lot of restaurants can absorb that.
Marco:
Help your restaurants.
Marco:
Go to them.
Marco:
Spend a lot of money at your restaurants.
Marco:
They need it.
Casey:
All right, let's start with some follow-up and we have to, there's no way not to start with a genuine and deep thank you to all of our listeners for even considering joining our brand new membership program and for more than I expected of you to have actually joined our membership program.
Casey:
The feedback has been almost universally great.
Casey:
I've been overjoyed by the feedback.
Casey:
What did we say, John, that you were in the middle, I was the pessimist and John was the optimist?
Casey:
Is that what we concluded?
Yeah.
John:
Margot was the optimist.
John:
Yes, I'm the optimist.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
That's what I meant.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Well, anyway, so I definitely was wrong without question.
Casey:
And I don't know.
Casey:
I haven't talked with the guys about where they think it all landed.
Casey:
But I have been overjoyed by it and extremely impressed by it.
Casey:
A couple of things that we want.
Casey:
Well, actually, before we go any further, any comments from the two of you about what what is transpired in the best possible way for ATP membership?
Marco:
Oh, it's been wonderful.
Marco:
I'm extremely pleased.
Marco:
Thank you all so much for supporting us.
Marco:
So honestly, so quickly.
Marco:
I mean, so we my optimistic goal was a certain percentage of our listener base.
Marco:
And we are like halfway there already after one week.
Marco:
So that's extremely is heartening a word.
Marco:
I know disheartening is heartening.
Marco:
Whatever the opposite of disheartening is, I assume it's heartening.
Marco:
I've never heard people use that word.
Marco:
But it's extremely heartening.
Marco:
I'm going to go with it.
Marco:
That we have so much support from all of you.
Marco:
So thank you very much.
Marco:
We've gotten a lot of great feedback on what you might want out of membership.
Marco:
Possible improvements we could make to it.
Marco:
Surprisingly, most people seem very happy with exactly what we already launched, which is kind of fun.
Marco:
We have heard a few concerns about things like currency conversion or annual payments.
Marco:
We're looking into a lot of different things.
Marco:
No guarantees.
Marco:
We're going to see what we can do.
Marco:
There's a lot of trade-offs to a lot of this stuff.
Marco:
But rest assured, we are looking into a lot of that stuff as well.
Marco:
As for the, like, you know, what you get, everybody wants cooking with John.
Casey:
That is true.
Casey:
That is absolutely true.
Casey:
John, is it going to happen?
Yeah.
John:
Talk about everybody.
John:
I saw about the same number.
John:
Well, I saw more requests for Destiny.
John:
Maybe it's just because they're sending them just to me, and maybe they're sending the Cooking with John ones to you.
John:
Anyway, those are stretch goals.
John:
We're nowhere near any of these things yet.
John:
So we thank you for the innovative ideas.
John:
We will keep them in mind.
John:
But a lot of stuff like that, we'll see.
Marco:
And one thing that I can definitely say that we are working on and that we do plan to launch, unless we've run into some massive showstopper, but we do plan to work on, or I'm working on it, we do plan to launch a, quote, bootleg feed, which is a feed that basically gives you recordings of the live broadcast very quickly after it ends.
Marco:
We're looking into that now.
Marco:
I've started building some of the support into the CMS.
Marco:
We just ran out of time, and I don't know when this will be done, but this is something that we are, you know, again, unless some massive showstopper comes up that we can't foresee, we do plan to do this sometime fairly soon.
Marco:
Maybe by next week, if it's aggressive, but I don't know.
Marco:
Well, next week is WDC, so maybe not next week, but no.
Marco:
We'll see.
Marco:
We probably have a very busy few weeks ahead of us with WBDC stuff, so it might not happen before that, but we're trying.
Marco:
We're working on it.
Marco:
A lot of people have asked for it.
Marco:
Keep in mind, what this is is the often-requested unedited feed.
Marco:
And that's for better and for worse.
Marco:
You know, unedited really means unedited.
Marco:
There's going to be stuff like, you know, our stumbles.
Marco:
You might, depending on how we do it, you might hear a Skype artifact here or there.
Marco:
Or you might like, you know, somebody might drop a word if the Skype connection gets a little bit flaky.
Marco:
Like depending on how, you know, what end we record this on, how we do it.
Marco:
the audio quality will not probably be anywhere near as good as the final released show is but a lot of people don't care because it's still you know it's it's less than a bowl it's not bad so anyway so we're working on that it's basically going to be exactly what we are broadcasting on the live stream people have requested that in large numbers and so we are working on that i don't think any other standout requests are have been coming in do you guys think of anything else
John:
You covered most of them.
John:
The currency and longer time periods.
John:
There's a bunch of other stuff.
John:
Anyway, we'll expect the membership to evolve.
John:
Speaking for myself, I'm very motivated to try to make the membership program good.
John:
We talked about diversifying income and everything, and
John:
We're very happy with the membership sign-ups and everything, but realistically, it's still a tiny fraction of the listeners.
John:
But for that tiny fraction, it's a new relationship with our listeners.
John:
Not that ad sales and everything is particularly indirect.
John:
It's still fairly direct.
John:
You listen to the show.
John:
We sell ads on the show.
John:
It's not...
John:
really that complicated but now with direct payment i feel like there's a straight line from listener directly to us so i do want to provide something that everybody likes and so i'm i assume that this the offering will evolve over time but right out of the gate uh we're trying to hit the the top request which is the bootleg feed
Casey:
Yeah, we don't know what the timing will be in terms of when any bootleg will be available.
Casey:
We're also at this point making no guarantees about, you know, oh, it'll always be, you know, within the first half hour after the show.
Casey:
It might be the next morning for us.
Casey:
We don't know.
Casey:
We're going to aim for as quickly as possible and we're going to aim for as good sounding as we can reasonably get with as little work as possible.
Casey:
But again, it very well may be
Casey:
that you're hearing a Skype recording of two-thirds of us and a really crisp recording of one of us.
Casey:
We'll just see.
Casey:
And it can evolve.
Casey:
If we start with the bootleg and we do it immediately, but it sounds like dirt, and then we realize, well, maybe you'd rather do it in the morning, but it'll sound really, really good.
Casey:
Maybe we'll do that.
Casey:
We'll see.
Casey:
But we are committing to, barring, like Marco said, any major showstoppers, we're committing to having that sometime as soon as can reasonably be hoped, given that the most busy time of the year starts in a few days.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
We're going to try.
Casey:
Also, something that I thought was extremely kind and flattering, even though it wasn't flattering to me, was that a lot of people said, well, I don't know if I want to stop listening to the ads because the ads are really good.
Casey:
And I find stuff that I like in the ads.
Casey:
And that's the idea.
Casey:
That's what the ads are there for.
Casey:
And I just wanted to remind everyone, both tongue in cheek and seriously, that even if you are a member, that doesn't mean you have to use the member only feed.
Casey:
You can continue to listen to the regular feed, the free feed, even if you're a paid member.
Casey:
I mean, you do you.
Casey:
That's perfectly fine.
Casey:
And I like Marco's ads.
Casey:
And I also find things that I enjoy in not only our own ads, but other podcast ads.
Casey:
So that's a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
Casey:
But yes, in summary, thank you so very, very, very much.
Casey:
It really does mean an incredible amount to all three of us that so many of you have opened your wallets specifically for the three of us.
Casey:
And that's extremely, extremely kind.
Casey:
And I'm really flabbergasted at how the response has been.
Casey:
So thank you.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
John, tell me about Xbox 360 dev kits.
John:
This is kind of a collected follow-up about the ARM Mac dev kit thing that we talked about last show.
John:
If Apple's going to roll out a series of ARM-based Macs or Macs based on some other CPU other than x86, we were talking about what kind of hardware they might give developers to port their applications and test their applications.
John:
And we talked about a bunch of stuff, and then we got a bunch of feedback about different theories.
John:
The first bit is when I was talking about how console development works, how you get a dev kit for a console and it's not like the console, right?
John:
And that's just something that game developers deal with in the console world and have forever.
John:
Someone pointed out an old item from back a couple generations ago in the console world.
John:
The Xbox 360, that was the generation where everybody decided to use PowerPC CPUs in their consoles, including Microsoft with the 360.
John:
One of the early dev kits for the Xbox 360 was a Power Mac G5.
John:
There was that picture, I remember, of a truck full of Power Mac G5s being delivered to Microsoft.
John:
And at the time, it was like, isn't this weird?
John:
Microsoft getting a bunch of Macs, and it's not even part of their Windows thing.
John:
It's all...
John:
You know, they're getting them to do development work on the Xbox 360.
John:
So we'll put a link in the show notes if you want to take a look at that.
John:
Someone tried to, like, resurrect an Xbox 360 dev kit using a Power Mac G5.
John:
You know, I don't know if it was hardware from that era or just trying to recreate it, but it looks like the person got actual Xbox 360 games up and running on a Power Mac, which is totally weird.
John:
So yeah, development hardware, that was internal, obviously.
John:
I'm not sure it was ever sent out to game developers, but it probably was, knowing the way console development works.
John:
Very often, first-party or second-party developers get really weird early access to hardware just to get going on their games.
John:
Um, the next idea that was, uh, suggested by many people was what if Apple just released an add-in card for the Mac pro and that adding card had basically, you know, an arm CPU and all the other stuff in it.
John:
Uh, could that work?
John:
Well, yeah, it totally could work, but basically nobody has Mac pros.
John:
So I'm not sure how that helps anybody except for maybe people inside Apple.
John:
Like the Mac pro is the only Mac that Apple sells that has PCI card slots in it.
John:
And they have not sold a lot of them, I can imagine.
John:
And it's really expensive and they're not going to sell more of them by suddenly putting ARM cards in them.
John:
So I'm going to file that under technically plausible and maybe even something that they possibly could be doing internally at Apple.
John:
But boy, I cannot imagine...
John:
Any significant number of Mac developers running out and buying an extremely expensive Mac Pro plus an add-in card to test their ARM Mac stuff on.
Marco:
Imagine the complexity involved in the software and hardware architecture of that.
Marco:
You're running an Intel architecture computer.
Marco:
Inside of it is a smaller ARM computer that, yes, I know they have the T2 and everything, but this is a whole separate thing that would have
Marco:
totally separate needs and totally separate hardware engineering requirements and all of that for a very, very temporary solution that's preparing you for a very near term probably, like within a year future where they're selling
Marco:
arm only max so like they're already doing all the engineering to make standalone arm max complete you know arm only presumably standalone max right so they're already doing like you know they're having to engineer motherboards and io and power management you know all this stuff in a desktop you know desktop and laptop context that's all going to be a little bit different than like an ipad
Marco:
They're already doing all that.
Marco:
Why would they also have a solution that's only going to be around for a year, maybe, that is, okay, we're also going to build on the ability for this Mac Pro that nobody except John bought to have this entire daughter card thing.
Marco:
It's very implausible compared to, okay, they're already making an ARM Mac engineering platform.
Marco:
It's standalone.
Marco:
Just ship an early version of that as a dev kit.
Marco:
That is way more likely.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Unless they already did it internally, but I think that honestly the timeline of the Mac pro, it was probably too late.
John:
Like I presumably they were working on the arm max on a timeline that was, that started earlier than the Mac pro, especially given how it was kind of, uh, rushed out.
John:
Um,
John:
Yeah.
John:
You know, Apple, the idea of having a whole separate computer inside there, Apple's done that a couple of times in their past.
John:
They used to sell a Mac with a 486 PC inside it.
John:
I don't know if you remember that one.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
For virtual PC stuff, right?
John:
No, no.
John:
Like with a literal 486 PC.
John:
Oh, right.
John:
Like an actual Intel 486 CPU and like an entire PC.
John:
I think it was back with the Pizza Box Macs.
John:
They used to sell an Apple II card.
John:
For some Macs where it was basically an entire Apple II inside your Mac, and so it would run Apple II software on the Apple II card.
John:
Yeah, technically plausible, but highly unlikely.
John:
Mac Mini was suggested.
John:
I don't know if we talked about this last time, but it's like, oh, well, you know...
John:
suggesting that they ship early versions of a mac that they're going to make what about just hacking together something you know like back in the day with the with the pentium 4 inside a mac pro case that was let's assemble a working intel mac out of the pieces that we have we're never going to sell this we're never going to sell a pentium 4 mac but we've got this big case and we can get a motherboard and we'll shove it inside the case and ship it out and that's our you know their dev kit for intel macs right
John:
You've got a Mac Mini case.
John:
These days, I don't think they're going to use this $700 fancy drilled-out Mac Pro case, but a Mac Mini case is rarely available, and it's really easy to shove a tiny little ARM-based computer inside there, like the Raspberry Pis that Casey has, or you could put five of them inside a Mac Mini case.
John:
And ARM CPUs are probably relatively small and power-efficient and no problem using a Mac Mini case, and that's a fairly cheap way to make a dev kit that
John:
could be economical and presumably there will eventually be an arm-based mac mini but that doesn't matter like again the the pentium 4 developer kit they sent had no relation to any intel mac that they were making other than the fact that they use a cheese grater case and eventually they made you know intel max in the cheese grater case but everything about it was different then they never used that motherboard they never used that cpu they never used any of that stuff right
John:
so they could take a mac mini shove some guts in there and distribute that that's a pretty cheap way to do it it's cheaper than even doing a laptop because you don't have to worry about the screen and stuff although again it might be annoying to people to have to hook up an external display if they don't have one um apple tv in the same vein how about an even smaller box hey we've got this little rounded black rounded rectangle thing that already has an arm cpu in it again hollow it out put in a little arm cpu or if they're working on a new apple tv variant
John:
then maybe they can share some hardware with that that could work too it starts to get a little bit too small and a little bit too cute but hey who knows stranger things have happened um getting getting even more cheaper you know going down the line from a card for your mac pro or a mac mini or an apple tv how about this uh marco mentioned the t2 macs have had little arm cpus in them for a while especially ones you can't think it started with a touch bar
John:
the was the t1 powering the original touch bar i forget what the numbering was yeah but anyway um most macs have a t2 in them now the t2 is help me out here is it like an a7 equivalent i think a10 no it's a10 from the iphone 7 yeah yeah um so it's it's no slouch the t2 is no slouch uh you know if you think it's basically the the similar cpu to what was in the iphone 7
John:
slow ish for a mac but plenty fast to just do a proof of concept dead work on unfortunately the t2 is doing stuff in there it's not just hanging around for the hell of it right the t2 in addition to you know running the touch bar and doing whatever other stuff like that it also is like the io controller for the ssds and it does like video processing and although you could probably eke out some more headroom in the thing by shoving something else it's not even running like it's running bridge os or whatever the hell like it's
John:
It's busy.
John:
The T2 is busy.
John:
And anyone who has a T2 Mac knows that it's taken a while for the T1 and T2 chips to shake out in terms of driver support and having weird issues, not just related to the touch bar, but in general.
John:
I really don't think Apple would try to shoehorn anything else onto that T2.
John:
I really think it's busy doing other things, running a different operating system.
John:
so i think we can set that one aside that said if there's a t3 or something in future max maybe that has more headroom i don't know but like i i feel like the chips that are in your computer now are doing stuff so you know especially that one um i wouldn't want the thing that's that's controlling reads and writes from my ssd it all of a sudden be running like mac software on it right uh you know our mac software on it that is
John:
uh another suggestion was cloud hey why do they have to give anyone hardware at all why not just say uh we have a bunch of virtual arm max in the cloud and you can just sort of remote desktop into them and run your software on there and just trust us those are all running on arm that way we don't distribute hardware to anybody it's kind of laggy but you don't really care and you know you just want to make sure your software works uh
John:
Yeah, they could do that.
John:
But does that sound like an Apple-y thing to do to you?
John:
I mean, it sounds like a Google-y thing, maybe.
John:
Not that I'm saying Apple doesn't have any cloud expertise.
John:
Obviously, things like the iCloud photo library and CloudKit.
John:
Apple has gotten a lot better at the cloud stuff than it used to be.
John:
but the cloud arm max in the cloud strike me as not an apple style approach and in the end developers would much prefer to have hardware in front of them you know reducing the lag being more realistic having more control over it and you know if you have to like mess with it or reset it or poke it or product doing it you know remotely over the cloud is a little bit of a distance and and like marco said about the arm card
John:
That seems like a lot of work for a thing that's just going to be a brief transition, and then eventually we'll all just have ARM Macs to test on.
John:
So I don't think that's going to happen.
John:
And the final one is software only.
John:
Not in a cloud, not anything.
John:
There'll be no ARM hardware at all.
John:
All there will be is an ARM simulator, essentially, an ARM emulator that you run on your Intel Mac, and it's an actual emulator that emulates all the ARM hardware.
John:
It's not even like VMware, because VMware uses native instruction set.
John:
It's literal emulation.
John:
yeah that could work but in the end developers want to run their software on actual hardware if possible and if apple's making this hardware anyway i feel like they can come with some kind of solution that involves actual hardware i don't think they would go through the pretty big effort to try to make good enough software emulation of arm what they should be doing is figuring out how to emulate x86 on arm and not figuring out how to emulate arm on x86 and
John:
So it also seems like a lot of effort for not a big payoff.
John:
So of all these choices, I think the one I like the best is the Mac Mini because it is potentially smaller and cheaper than an ARM laptop and it is still real hardware.
John:
and it lets Apple reuse some of its assets.
John:
But honestly, with all these discussions, just because Apple has done CPU transitions twice in the past, and we can look at what they did during those times for helping developers, really has no bearing on what they'll do this time.
John:
It was a long time ago.
John:
Things have changed.
John:
Apple has changed.
John:
Developers have changed.
John:
The world has changed, which is why I think it's worth even just discussing all the different options like cloud and software only and the Apple TV and stuff like that.
John:
But
John:
Who knows?
John:
I mean, assuming this all goes off as planned next week, you know, there'll be, you know, hopefully some news related to this.
John:
But I can't imagine them announcing a CPU transition and also not at the developer conference telling developers how it is that they're expected to port their applications, because that's kind of the point of telling developers they want to know this.
John:
So we'll have the answer to this in a week or so, I think.
Marco:
Yeah, the more people wrote in and we heard various rumblings, the more I think the Mac Mini is the most likely solution here.
Marco:
Because basically they could almost just release the ARM Mac Mini today.
Marco:
It could just be the first ARM Mac.
Marco:
Like, okay, here's the Mac Mini.
Marco:
It's a low-profile product.
Marco:
It doesn't need any of the fancy power management stuff as laptops and everything.
Marco:
One area that I'm especially curious about is Thunderbolt.
Marco:
While it started out as an Intel-only thing, there was some effort.
Marco:
Intel, I think, officially started licensing it to other people or opened it up to other people about a couple years ago officially.
Marco:
But I don't think any of those open-to-other-people products have actually come out yet.
Marco:
There is also the kind of like bundling of Thunderbolt 4 into USB that is happening.
Marco:
Like USB 4 or Thunderbolt 4, whatever.
Marco:
Somehow, whatever the next big version is of Thunderbolt and USB, I think it's basically unified now.
Marco:
But I don't think that's out yet.
Marco:
And I don't think that's anywhere near ready to be out yet.
Marco:
So if they were to make an ARM Mac Mini, even for just development purposes, how would it output video to a monitor?
Marco:
Like, maybe it might be HDMI only.
Marco:
That seems... It's possible, but I think unlikely.
Marco:
They could have some kind of weird Thunderbolt hack, or maybe it could be kind of like the iPad Pro, where it only supports USB 3 over those ports and not actually Thunderbolt, so it wouldn't work with...
Marco:
any of apple's own monitors but well apple's one currently produced uh monitor or the last few that they that they made um so like that's one option as well again kind of a crappy option um but you know in the context of a dev kit it might not matter so much but it's something that they do have to solve and that also just goes to show like quite how much of a project it is to get our max because you have to deal with all the i o
Marco:
that you have either IO types and technologies and needs that either don't exist on iPads or only exist in a significantly reduced way to date.
Marco:
So that actually, like USB4 seemed like the kind of thing it would be worth waiting for before they even released these things.
Marco:
Maybe they are waiting for USB4, who knows?
Marco:
But yeah, for the purposes of a dev kit, definitely I think the Mac Mini is the most likely option at this point.
John:
i'd be worried about the thunderbolt thing like because it is free and open and anyone can license it and you know like the relationship between apple and intel is such that uh i would imagine that apple have no problem being first out the gate with a fully certified custom made you know for this reason though yeah i think hey we're gonna work really closely with you to cut our heads off
John:
yeah but but the intel's other option is okay well then we won't work with you and then intel does want apple's business and other things like cell phone modems and stuff and so you know intel needs apple more than apple needs intel and intel knows it so i feel like that they could definitely you know and this would have been things that they've been working on for years to like build a system on its ship with thunderbolt built in and when they when they started that project intel you know
John:
was probably enthusiastic about it because it was probably three and a half years ago and same thing with usb4 like the same way that apple purportedly has such influence on the the usbc connector and everything i imagine the usb4 standard has had some influence from apple as well so i'm not really worried i feel like the apple will have the ios situation sorted out when when they need to and for the dev kit like you said they don't need to the dev kit you just slap something at a dev kit dev kit could just have a complete thunderbolt controller in there like it doesn't have to have any relation to any software any hardware they're ever going to ship if they don't need it to
Marco:
I also thought about things like, are they going to provide different amounts of RAM so that you can test your app with different amounts of RAM?
Marco:
Stuff like that that you don't really think about in iOS land because everything is just the same.
Marco:
But on a Mac, are they going to give dev kits with only 8 gigs of RAM because that is...
Marco:
the minimum that people would probably have or are they going to give them with 16 because otherwise it might be hard to test some really big apps on it like who knows like i think all those like little tiny questions are all probably big pains in the butt to apple and developing such a thing but and we don't we don't even think about it really because like it just hasn't even come up you know in our in our speculation level at this point but it is all stuff that you kind of have to worry about
Casey:
Well, but the amount of RAM that exists today is irrelevant, right?
Casey:
Because nobody's going to be running an ARM Mac on existing hardware or an ARM Mac OS on existing hardware.
Casey:
So if they know that the minimum amount of RAM going forward is 16 gigs, then I guess that's what they would provide, right?
Casey:
Because it's only going to be new hardware that is going to be running these chips.
Casey:
So even if 8 exists in the wild, it doesn't matter for the purposes of this conversation.
Marco:
That's true, but does that mean if you're developing Photoshop for ARM, you have to build it on a 16-gig machine?
Marco:
That's the only configuration they offer for the dev kit?
Marco:
Yeah, I hear you.
John:
Doesn't Apple have that memory pressure tool?
John:
We could chip there with tons of RAM and just let people use the memory pressure tool to simulate what it would be like to have less memory.
John:
I don't know.
John:
That's...
John:
I feel like that's the least of people's concerns.
John:
Most people just want to get their software so it doesn't crash.
John:
It doesn't issue illegal instructions or use some data format or byte ordering that makes the ARM CPU flip out.
John:
That stuff will sort itself out.
Casey:
Todd McCann writes, and this is kind of related, thoughts on how Apple spins it if the ARM MacBook Air is faster than most or all of the MacBook Pro models.
Casey:
This is a really interesting question, and I'm sure there are examples in history where this has happened.
Casey:
I mean, I guess the October event that Marco and I were at where they kind of didn't really talk that much about the difference or how much quicker the iPad Pro, the then new iPad Pro was than the MacBook Air.
Casey:
And I think just focusing on battery life perhaps would be the most obvious answer to me.
Casey:
Like not even talking about speed, but more saying, hey, this new MacBook Air, if that's what it is, this new MacBook Air gets 89 billion hours on one charge.
Casey:
It's amazing.
Casey:
And it's great and so on.
Casey:
And not even really talking about speed.
Casey:
And oh, it's also very fast.
Casey:
And we didn't really make compromises on speed and maybe leave it there.
Casey:
Well,
John:
Why wouldn't they brag about the speed?
John:
They would say, this new ARM MacBook Air is faster than our old MacBook Pro.
John:
And you may say, well, if you don't have a new MacBook Pro, what you're saying is the MacBook Air is faster than your current MacBook Pro.
John:
And they'd say, yeah, isn't it amazing how great ARM Macs are?
John:
And of course, the MacBook Pro will eventually become ARM or whatever.
John:
But they're comparing it to their old model, right?
John:
And I don't think they would hurt the sales of the... Because Pros are buying...
John:
the existing intel macbook pro or mac pro or whatever because they needed to run their existing software right or like i don't i don't think it would say oh i i was gonna buy a macbook pro but now that the arm max are out i'm gonna buy that and not be able to run any of the software that i need to run like i think this is not actually an issue i think they would brag about it like crazy and say isn't this amazing now our lowest end computer is faster than the highest and and honestly that's not an unrealistic thing to imagine certainly in single thread it should be
John:
And then maybe even multi-thread, depending on how many cores there are in the MacBook Air ARM CPU thing.
John:
So I think Apple, this is a problem Apple would love to have.
Marco:
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Casey:
Tim Cook wrote on Twitter, the unfinished work of racial justice and equality call us all to account.
Casey:
Things must change and Apple's committed to being a force for that change.
Casey:
Today, I am proud to announce that Apple's racial equity and justice initiative with a $100 million commitment.
Casey:
You just had to show us up, Tim.
Casey:
We put some links in the show notes.
Casey:
People have been donating, but you got to show us up.
Casey:
I see how it is.
Marco:
In all fairness, his pockets are deeper than ours.
John:
Yeah, and all the things with companies announcing that they're giving some amount of money, the sport on Twitter is to calculate what that would be based on a normal person's income.
John:
So, like, Facebook gave, like, a million dollars or something, and they're like, that's like you giving a dollar and 32 cents, right?
John:
So, 100 million at least is a number with a little bit of heft, but honestly, compared to Apple's market share, market cap or whatever, the amount of cash they have on hand.
John:
Like, it's, you know, 100 million dollars is the least Apple could do, don't you think?
Yeah.
John:
Anyway, there's a good video attachment if you want to see Tim emoting into the camera.
John:
All this corporate communication in the coronavirus world is weird because it is like higher production value than you sitting in front of your computer in a dark room for your Zoom meetings.
John:
But it's not.
John:
It's not up to Apple's usual standards because it's like, I mean, I guess Tim probably did come into the office and maybe had someone set up a camera or maybe did it himself.
John:
But it's kind of it's kind of quaint to see sort of prosumer level media coming out of these multi bazillion dollar corporations just because we're all, you know, social distancing.
Casey:
And totally unrelated, Apple's head of diversity and inclusion has left, which is a little uncomfortable.
Marco:
Yeah, it's not great timing for that.
Casey:
No, certainly not.
John:
Well, I mean, I don't think any of us know.
John:
This just came out, what, today?
John:
So I don't think any of us know enough about the situation to know is this a good thing or a bad thing.
John:
It's just that things are happening, let's say, on these fronts at various companies.
John:
And Apple is no exception.
John:
I'll put a link in the show notes to the story.
John:
You can read about it.
John:
uh and you know with the with the exit of uh christy smith who is quote leaving apple to spend more time with her family i don't know if that's euphemism but that's what that's what the press really said or the the quote from apple said in this article is that is that ever not a euphemism
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I mean... Literally every time some high-powered executive or high-profile executive leaves or gets fired or whatever, they always say to spend more time with their family.
Marco:
And I like spending time with my family.
Marco:
That's the kind of thing I might actually do.
Marco:
But does that really happen in these cases?
John:
It has to happen.
John:
When high-powered executives actually stop working, like they've made their millions and they don't want to work anymore, they are leaving to spend more time in their... So it's got to be true at least once in everybody's career, right?
John:
You're not...
John:
Unless they don't have a family or something.
John:
But yeah, but it is a euphemism.
John:
So we'll see if the person immediately gets another job at another company, then it was obviously BS.
John:
But if they don't and never work again, and which is totally plausible for people at this level in Apple that they would have enough money to not have to work again, especially with all their stock and everything.
John:
Who knows?
John:
But anyway, diversity inclusion will be reporting to Deidre O'Brien, who was the head of HR and was also put in charge of retail.
John:
Am I remembering that right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Keep up with all the palace intrigue at Apple.
John:
But anyway, things are happening over there.
John:
They're given $100 million and the head of diversity inclusion is out.
John:
Hopefully things are changing for the better.
Casey:
indeed so i mentioned earlier that i am recording on a brand new computer this week i received my 13 inch macbook pro i think late last week if i remember correctly and i am using it to record this episode just to play everything safe and get that out of the way before i have no alternative options very soon and
Casey:
And I thought I'd talk about what I think of modern Mac laptops, because if you recall, I had one of Marco's beloved 15-inch MacBook Pros when I was still at my jobby job, which was two years ago now, by the way, my How Time Flies.
Casey:
And at the same time, I had my beloved MacBook Adorable, which is the single-port MacBook, just MacBook, not MacBook Air, not MacBook Pro, just MacBook Air.
Casey:
Um, that thing is still kicking aside from occasionally typing more letters than I've asked it to.
Casey:
And I think it will soon become, and I think it will soon become Aaron's computer.
Casey:
Uh, and she will finally, after all these years, retire the one that is gone in the drink like 17 times.
Casey:
So that's exciting.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
But yeah, I finally got this 13-inch MacBook Pro.
Casey:
I don't know if I ever said it on the show, but I did end up going with 32 gigs of RAM and one terabyte hard drive.
Casey:
I did that because I figured, and the same reason I went MacBook Pro, one of the reasons I went MacBook Pro rather than Air, I want this computer to last a few years.
Casey:
I don't want to have to replace this in a year.
Casey:
He says now, not knowing what the ARM MacBooks look like, but I don't want to be forced to upgrade this in a year.
Casey:
And so I want something that'll last a bit.
Casey:
And I don't want a 16-inch, even though...
Casey:
I would absolutely have that if it was my only computer, since it is not my only computer, and I have this wonderful iMac Pro actually right behind it right now.
Casey:
What I did was I went 13-inch because I really want something as close as I can get to my adorable, but that's actually useful.
Casey:
So here we are, and I have my first touch bar.
Casey:
macbook pro because i've only ever used this i've only ever used the touch bar at like the apple store for like five minutes or my dad's 13 inch macbook pro that's a couple years old now for like five or ten minutes um but yeah i thought i'd talk about a few things um first of all
Casey:
I've been touting for a long time, and in fact, this is probably going to come up in an Ask ATP later, if we have time anyway.
Casey:
I've been touting brew bundle, which is kind of like Bundler on Ruby.
Casey:
And what it basically does is it allows you to say, here's all the homebrew stuff I would like to install.
Casey:
And you just put a list together.
Casey:
And then you say, okay, homebrew, look at that file and download all the things.
Casey:
And this can also include...
Casey:
GUI apps.
Casey:
It can include Mac App Store apps.
Casey:
And it works really well.
Casey:
And part of the reason I've gotten to this point of believing my computers are to some degree ephemeral is because all the stuff I really care about is in the cloud or on my Synology.
Casey:
So like code, for example, is on GitHub.
Casey:
Pictures are on the Synology and in the cloud.
Casey:
And I don't really have like Office or like Pages documents anymore.
Casey:
That hasn't been a thing for me in years.
Casey:
And even still, I have that on the Synology and in cloud services.
Casey:
So what makes these computers feel ephemeral is that I can basically type one command and get 80 to 90% of the way to having my computer be the way I want it to be.
Casey:
installations are just those that their installations I haven't they don't tweak settings they don't you know adjust this or that to just the way I like it but it does work out really nicely to get kind of a steady state not a steady state but like a base state like a foundation of the pyramid with only really one command which is super awesome that being said I was doing this I was having it install some things and and I don't remember if it was that xcode you know doing the xcode installation or if it was somewhere else but all of a sudden
Casey:
What?
Casey:
Oh, no.
Casey:
Oh.
Casey:
Oh, that's a fan, I hear.
Casey:
I haven't heard a fan come from a laptop in years.
Casey:
Oh, I don't like this at all.
Casey:
This isn't good at all.
Casey:
And here it is.
Casey:
Me, the guy who makes fun of you two idiots for being so dumb.
Casey:
deeply offended by any sort of noise whatsoever i'm mostly looking at you john any sort of noise whatsoever and suddenly i find myself after having two or two and a half years whatever it's been of not having a fan in my laptop i hear this thing just spin up and i'm just disgusted by it and it's ridiculous how how just gross it felt
Casey:
Now, with that said, it doesn't spin up the fans very often.
Casey:
It's not been egregious by any means.
Casey:
But it was so startling and striking that even as I was watching TV and kind of multitasking, I could still hear these fans and I found it so incredibly gross.
Casey:
Now, that being said, the touch bar.
Casey:
I am only a weekend and I don't know what to think about the touch bar.
Casey:
My initial impression was, Oh, this is kind of clever.
Casey:
And then it became, I can't get to like volume easily.
Casey:
It's like a two-step process for volume and for brightness.
Casey:
And who knew how often I adjusted volume and brightness.
Casey:
I guess I do it a lot because it's really annoying having to do the little slidey dance.
Casey:
Like I know you can keep your finger on the, on the touch bar and slide left and right.
Casey:
And that is, that is kind of nice, but yeah,
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I find the not having the control strip frustrating.
Casey:
Now, I should state plainly up front, I haven't really done any sort of system level tweaks to the touch bar.
Casey:
I haven't gone in to figure out like, I think there's a way you can always have a control strip active or do other tweaks like that.
Casey:
And I haven't really done any of that.
Casey:
I also haven't noticed any particularly stellar use cases of the touch bar.
Casey:
I've only done a smidgen of Xcode development on this thing.
Casey:
And so I have a feeling once I get used to the options that Xcode puts on the touch bar, I might end up liking it quite a bit more.
Casey:
But because I touch type and because I don't look down at my fingers while I'm typing, I just don't see it that often.
Casey:
And this is not an original thought.
Casey:
People have been saying this for years now, but I just don't see it that often.
Casey:
And it's
Casey:
it doesn't offend me.
Casey:
Like I'm not, I'm not grossed out by it.
Casey:
I'm not sure it has really brought anything to the table though.
Casey:
And then I installed better touch tool.
Casey:
And now I use better touch tool years and years and years ago when it was like pretty new.
Casey:
And I used it because I wanted to get some more interesting swipes on my then brand new magic mouse.
Casey:
And then I hadn't, I put it away after having used it for like a year or two and hadn't looked back since.
Casey:
But I, I was vaguely aware that you can do some nifty stuff with the touch bar and better touch tool.
Casey:
And so I installed it, and I think that has changed, dramatically changed the way I feel about the touch bar.
Casey:
Because what I have right now is I have it set up, and it's very simple at the moment, but I have it set up such that it has a little battery meter for when the battery is being discharged.
Casey:
It has a little icon, which is a little emoji.
Casey:
That's a button that will let me flip back and forth from day to night mode, which I don't really do that often.
Casey:
But I found it's often enough that I'm using this machine like at night where I'd prefer it to be in dark mode.
Casey:
And for whatever reason, it doesn't automatically switch to dark mode until either I'm not using it or it's well after sunset.
Casey:
Whatever the case may be.
Casey:
but at first was super freaking cool.
Casey:
I have this little display on my touch bar that shows how many members we have.
Casey:
How awesome is that?
Casey:
And so I have this little widget area on there.
John:
Do you want me to actually answer you how awesome that is?
Casey:
No, I think it's super awesome.
John:
You're reinventing iStat menus in the touch bar.
Casey:
I am.
Casey:
In so many ways, I really am.
John:
You should have like, oh, God.
John:
i i just i i'm picturing you coding away on your fancy new laptop and accidentally brushing against the thing that changes into dark mode like having your whole screen change to dark and then you brush it again it changes back to light like talk about i mean i know it's in theory non-destructive but that is a severe change to i get i mean that's that's my question for you i guess are do you find yourself accidentally brushing your fingers up against the touch bar has that not happened to you yet
Casey:
not that it definitely has happened but not that often i can't recall a time i have grazed the dark mode toggle that i've set up um but one thing i have noticed and i don't know if it's because i am hitting the touch id which by the way i didn't even have this in show notes but oh man touch id is nice like just for one password if nothing else touch id is super nice i use um my apple my apple watch is always on my wrist so for unlock it doesn't really get me that much but for for one password it's great
Casey:
But anyways, to answer your question, I feel like maybe because it's touch ID, maybe it's something else, but I feel like I'm grazing the Siri button fairly often when I have the like little minuscule control script strip or whatever it's called where it's just, you know, three or four icons.
John:
The first thing everybody removes is that Siri button.
Marco:
yep oh you can do that yeah you can customize yeah you can customize all the built-in stuff too just yank that right off there oh cool i i keep i think three or four things there so i have in the upper right i always have the show desktop thing because that that's like you know f11 or whatever normally and so like that's it puts it kind of near where it was and then i have uh brightness volume and play pause and that's it
Marco:
Huh.
Marco:
And I guess, you know, I let the system do the rest of it.
Marco:
I've tried better touch tool.
Marco:
I ran it for a few days.
Marco:
I couldn't really get into it myself.
Marco:
It's not really my style of how to do things.
Marco:
And I couldn't configure.
Marco:
I just couldn't figure out a configuration I liked.
Marco:
And it's just it's a little fiddly for me.
Marco:
But everybody always writes in and suggests it.
Marco:
So I'm glad you found some use for it.
Marco:
I don't want to make this whole thing about how much I hate the touch bar because we don't have time for that again.
Marco:
But the benefit I find to it is almost none.
Marco:
One thing I actually like about it is the autofill suggestions on filling out web forms.
Marco:
That is the only thing about it that is an improvement for my life.
Marco:
Because otherwise, it turns out all that stuff you mentioned at the beginning of this, it turns out you adjust brightness and volume a lot.
Marco:
Yeah, everybody does on a laptop.
Marco:
Those are very, very commonly done things.
Marco:
And with the touch bar, what used to be one key press is now at least one tap because you have to tap to like open up the volume thing.
Marco:
And then you have to slide it over.
Marco:
And even if you do the thing where you tap and hold and just move your finger, you're still doing it.
Marco:
And it's worse because you have to look a little bit more closely to see if you're actually hitting it.
Marco:
And if you're watching a video, the touch bar will have probably gone to sleep since the last time you touched it.
Marco:
So first you have to tap it to wake it up.
Marco:
then you have to actually adjust the thing.
Marco:
And so it makes this very common thing have more friction than it had before, sometimes significantly more.
Marco:
And then what's even better is quite often, I don't know if you've been using it long enough to run into this yet, quite often the touch bar will just freeze and you'll have to run some command to reboot the touch bar to make it work again.
Marco:
And it's had this problem ever since the Touch Bar started almost five years ago or almost four years ago.
Marco:
It's just buggy.
Marco:
So in addition to being questionably designed and of extremely controversial utility, it's also just been really buggy its entire existence.
Marco:
And it seems like Apple is not working on it at all.
Marco:
It has gotten no love, no changes, no updates, and apparently no bug fixes for its entire life.
Marco:
And yet someone loves it so much whose opinion matters so much.
Marco:
I think it's Phil that it's on every single pro laptop and you cannot remove it.
Marco:
Someone really important loves this thing and refuses to offer an option without it.
Marco:
but not enough to actually make it good or to fix its basic bugs.
Marco:
So it just drives me nuts.
Marco:
Everything about it, it drives me nuts.
Marco:
But anyway, you can keep going with the positive parts of this review if the touch bar is actually one of those things.
Casey:
Well, and John, you never really interact with touch bar because you're always on an external keyboard.
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
Even with your work computer?
John:
No, I use the keyboard a lot now because, I mean, I got tired of switching back and forth, so I just used it, especially since now I'm kind of wandering around the house to escape my kids and their Zoom meetings for school, at least, right?
John:
So a lot of times it's good that I'm on a laptop for work, so I'll go someplace else and actually work on the laptop as a laptop.
John:
but I've long since given up on the touch bar.
John:
I used it for more than a year to try to like, you know, did all the tweaking, remove the buttons, customize it.
John:
Just, I just never ended up using it.
John:
I don't accidentally hit it that much anymore.
John:
I think I probably accidentally hit the area where the Siri was because I was accidentally activating Siri all the time.
John:
And once I removed that, that wasn't a problem.
John:
But,
John:
I have it set to be pretend you're a bunch of keys mode.
John:
So it just shows F1, F2.
John:
Like that's permanently.
John:
It doesn't even change per app anymore because I was getting distracted by it changing.
John:
You know, it would change like, you know, I said Xcode.
John:
It changes to custom things in Safari.
John:
It shows the thumbnails and just I didn't even need that visual noise in my life.
John:
So now it literally is a worse version of buttons for me.
Casey:
I'm not trying to convince either of you that you're wrong or anything, but my initial impression is, hey, that's a neat thing.
Casey:
And I like it so far.
Marco:
If there is one of us who would like it, it's you.
Casey:
Yeah, that's true.
Casey:
I mean, I'm not convinced I will like it again or I will continue to like it in like a month or two.
Casey:
But sitting here now, it's novel and interesting and neat.
Casey:
So cool, I guess.
Casey:
But in general, the laptop is really great.
Casey:
Hey, did you know what, guys?
Casey:
I have a actually breaking piece of news.
Casey:
Having more than one port on a laptop is really inconvenient.
Casey:
Who knew?
Casey:
Who knew that that would be so convenient?
Casey:
Why didn't you guys tell me about this a long time ago?
Casey:
Because it's so convenient.
Casey:
Turns out.
Casey:
Turns out indeed.
Casey:
It was so delightful not having to get a dongle out just to plug in two things at once.
Casey:
And that actually brings me to...
Casey:
Now, one of the things I've been plugging in fairly often is an Ethernet adapter because one of the few things that I wish was still on these computers, you know, I could live without the SD card, whatever.
Casey:
I don't even necessarily need a old USB port.
Casey:
Like, I'd probably prefer it, but I don't need it.
Casey:
But you know what I really wish was in these darn computers?
Casey:
Was an Ethernet jack.
Casey:
Oh, I know.
Casey:
It would make them way too big.
Casey:
It would be bad in so many ways.
Casey:
But I would totally take an Ethernet jack.
Casey:
I would even take one of those heinous pop-out ones we were talking about last week.
Casey:
The X jack?
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
I would take one of those, man.
Casey:
I absolutely would.
Casey:
But anyway, I've been plugging in these dongles.
Casey:
And the particular USB-C Ethernet dongle I had that I've had since the Adorable was new...
Casey:
For whatever reason, and maybe this is something I missed, but it has been extremely flaky.
Casey:
And it seemed that it was particularly perturbed about being placed.
Casey:
How many alliterations can I get in here?
Casey:
It was particularly perturbed about being placed on the non at the port side.
Casey:
Darn it.
Casey:
I almost had another one on the right hand side of the computer.
Casey:
And I don't know.
Casey:
Aren't there like some weird differences about the left and right side ports or something like that?
Casey:
Or is that only about power delivery?
Yeah.
Marco:
There have been certain models where the – I believe the right side ports didn't have as much data transfer bandwidth on their Thunderbolt controller as the other side ports just because the CPU only had a certain amount of bandwidth or a certain amount of PCIe lanes or something like that.
Marco:
It was, I believe, limited always only to the 13-inch four-port models.
Marco:
Yeah, and I don't know if that's true of the current generation or not.
Marco:
Regardless, it wouldn't matter for the purposes of your Ethernet port.
Marco:
It would matter if you're hooking up big monitors and stuff or massive RAID arrays that actually max out that bandwidth.
Casey:
Sure.
Casey:
And so I have a new USB-C Ethernet adapter coming because I suspect this one is just a piece of garbage.
Casey:
But yeah, having multiple ports, really, really cool.
Casey:
I really enjoy that.
Casey:
Who knew?
Marco:
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Casey:
I got to thinking both before it arrived and after it arrived, like, am I going to want to return this in a week after we know potentially what's going to be happening with an ARM CPU and new fancy laptops?
Casey:
And I think I stand by what I said last week, which is...
Casey:
I can see myself folding when it comes to some sweet new industrial design or even just a spray-painted black color because, God, I wanted that black polycarbonate MacBook so badly.
Casey:
But short of that, I don't think I want to be on the bleeding edge of an ARM transition.
Casey:
Sitting here now, I don't have any Mac apps.
Casey:
I have no plans for Mac apps.
Casey:
And I don't think I want to go through all the, I don't know, like pain of having all of my software stop working, which is what you guys were talking about earlier.
Casey:
Like, I don't know, and we don't necessarily need to get into it, but say stupid stuff like FFmpeg and YouTube DL and other like shell stuff that I use really often.
Casey:
Do those have installations for ARM?
Casey:
Will somebody put those together?
Casey:
I mean, I don't have any interest in building this from source, although I know I could.
Casey:
Like, how is that stuff going to work?
Casey:
And you two can treat that as rhetorical or not.
Casey:
But I don't think I want to be on the bleeding edge of having my entire tool chain built.
Casey:
not work.
Casey:
And so even if there is some sweet and sexy new MacBook announced next week, even if it has some sweet new industrial design sitting here today, ignorance is list.
Casey:
I don't think I would want to.
Casey:
Oh yeah.
Casey:
Oh yeah.
Casey:
That pun just happened.
Casey:
I went there.
Casey:
I'm going to get so much email.
Casey:
Anyway, I don't think I want a new ARM laptop right now.
Casey:
In two or three years, oh, yes, I do.
Casey:
But sitting here now, I don't think so.
Casey:
Am I crazy to think that or does that make sense?
John:
Well, we went through one transition when the Mac – one CPU transition when the Mac had a bunch of command line utilities, right?
John:
So the PowerPC to Intel happened in the Mac OS X era.
John:
um and so we know how this shakes out what happened when you know you have power pc max and you had whatever ffmpeg or you know wget or whatever the hell you were using yeah yeah from the command line and then the intel max came out and yeah the people who maintain those projects tweak the make files so that they built on x86 max i mean you may say oh well they were just going to x86 and it's easy all those things already built in x86 but like it's not the same with different compiles different operating system you can't just use the linux makes file on a mac anyone who's tried to compile something from source knows that
John:
Unless the program is very simple, there are obviously tweaks you have to make.
John:
I don't think I've ever gotten one to work.
John:
Yeah, there are obviously tweaks you have to make.
John:
But yeah, I feel like this gets into a whole other issue that we may touch on in a little bit.
John:
But the people who maintain these projects, whether it's YouTube DL or FFmpeg or whatever...
John:
at the time of the intel transition and probably now it's not unreasonable to think some of them some of those developers who work on those projects might be using max themselves and so are therefore highly motivated and in a position to know how to uh you know make it so that they build on the r max um and obviously the more obscure the command line utility you're using the less likely it is that some will actually update to make files for but eventually all software that is an active use in being developed
John:
will get ported that's my hope unless something really terrible happens related to this um which i think is the the topic that i just moved up in the notes because i want to touch on it now because i won't have a chance to talk about this once wwc goes and we know all the answers um i'll try to make this quick because i do want to get to the the topics after that um
John:
I was thinking about this after last week's show when we were going through, like, oh, here's what the ARM Mac, you know, looks like it's coming.
John:
Let's speculate about what it's going to be like.
John:
And, you know, we talked sort of about the stuff that's likely to happen, right?
John:
But a lot of the feedback, as evidence from the follow-up about the dev kits, has been, okay, well, we talked about what's likely to happen.
John:
What about stuff that seems like it might be unlikely but is still plausible?
John:
And one, you know, my description of a theme that ran through all that feedback is,
John:
The thing in the notes here is a new breed of Macs.
John:
And the idea is that an architecture transition is an opportunity to change stuff up.
John:
You don't have to.
John:
There's nothing about an architecture transition that says you have to change the rules of the game and really redo it.
John:
But it's an opportunity to do that.
John:
It's a discontinuity.
John:
Things are going to be all screwed up anyway.
John:
So if there's something you want to do...
John:
Do it now because when everything's up in the air, it's the perfect place to do it.
John:
Like, get all the pain out of the way at once.
John:
A lot of the pain they've gotten out of the way already just from, like, getting off of 64 bits.
John:
They don't have to have 32-bit ARM CPUs.
John:
Like, you know, deprecating old APIs, getting rid of carbon.
John:
Like, lots of stuff has happened leading up to this.
John:
But transition to ARM gives Apple the opportunity to really rethink everything about this product line.
John:
All the way up to and including, no one suggested this, but I thought of it, and again, the least likely thing is, you don't need, you know, this new line of ARM-based computers that run a Mac OS, like...
John:
They don't even need to be Macs.
John:
They could run an operating system that's not called Mac, just like they made iPad OS.
John:
Like, wow, brand new operating system.
John:
I mean, we all know it's the iOS that you're running before.
John:
You just gave it a new name.
John:
What if Apple just says, the Mac has run its course.
John:
There's no more Mac, and now we have a new brand name for these computers that are basically running Mac OS.
John:
But we're going to give that operating system a new name because the one that runs on ARM is not Mac OS.
John:
It's whatever OS, and these are new whatever computers, like rebrand, right?
John:
and change all the rules about what it is now i don't think this is going to happen the mac has a huge amount of value in it or whatever but like that's at one end of the spectrum if you use a spectrum the other end of the spectrum what we talked about last show it's like oh there'll be macs but they have arm cpus and you know like a normal transition between those two endpoints though there's lots of interesting things that can happen and i was just musing about them one of them is uh you hear a lot of people talk about
John:
oh will i not be able to run non-sandbox applications anymore will everything need to be notarized will it only will i only be able to install apps from the mac app store unless i go into a developer mode all the stuff that we've talked about in terms of security and running signed software and all the way down to oh will i be able to build ffmpeg and just run it oh because it's not signed or whatever will it will i not be able to download arbitrary applications without
John:
doing stuff like disabling system integrity whatever the the equivalent of that may be like disabling security features is this the time that apple can really lock down the mac right again nothing about the arm transition says that that has to be the case but we know apple has wanted to and has been working towards making the mac more secure
John:
as secure as iPads and iPhones or whatever, this transition is an opportunity for them to change the rules of what constitutes a Mac, to change all those rules about, you know, what software can be installed.
John:
You know, so I don't think any of that is likely because, again, what the hell is the point of the Mac if you're just going to make it into an iPad running a weird OS, right?
John:
But I'm on the lookout for things like that happening now.
John:
And even though, obviously, you know, getting rid of the Mac and calling it something else is ridiculous,
John:
um i'm not putting it past apple to give this new line of arm based max some kind of prefix or suffix or other kind of branding that distinguishes them from the max that came before it again i don't think it's likely we talked about the likely stuff last show like that's this is this is the last my last chance to say here's all the weird stuff that could happen probably won't but could happen
John:
I don't know what the hell they would call it.
John:
I don't know what the prefix or suffix could be, but it is an opportunity to distinguish, again, especially if you're changing the rules, to distinguish this new line of ARM-based Macs from the previous ones.
John:
If you're changing the rules about what software can be loaded and sandboxing and third-party software and they're more locked down or whatever...
John:
And you have a boatload of good news to share, like, hey, the batteries last a long time and these are super fast or whatever.
John:
You can tack on a bunch of maybe not so appealing things in that same package and brand it as, you know, whatever.
John:
I'm not even going to speculate what a name might be, but...
John:
Those are all things that are up in the air.
John:
And this goes back to what I was saying before.
John:
It was like just because what they did one thing from 68K to PowerPC and a similar thing from PowerPC to Intel doesn't mean that they have to do the exact same playbook for this transition.
John:
That was a long time ago.
John:
The 68K one even longer ago.
John:
Apple is free to make moves like that that it thinks is bringing it towards its new unified future where everything runs SwiftUI and everything runs on ARM-based CPUs that they build themselves.
John:
And the iPad and the Mac move closer to each other.
John:
And, like, there is this future that we seem to be moving towards.
John:
And this architecture change, if it actually happens, is a point where Apple can make all sorts of changes.
John:
And the thing is, even though most of the stuff I've laid out here is like, oh, they're probably not going to do that stuff, right?
John:
There's something from this bucket of probably not going to do that's going to be in there.
John:
Like,
John:
Maybe a good thing that we think they're not going to do, like, oh, you know, like last week, you know, Mark was saying they're probably not going to do boot camp.
John:
Maybe it turns out they do do boot camp, and it's good news.
John:
Hey, there's a thing that really we didn't think they were going to do, at least out of the gate, but they did it, yay.
John:
But it could also be a, oh, by the way, this default security restrictions, don't let anybody install any Mac outside the Mac App Store, which developers would hate, and they'd have to tell everybody how to, like, you know, disable, you know, go to system preferences and click the lock icon and enter your min password and click a thing that lets you run applications that don't come to the Mac App Store.
John:
But if they're going to do that, now is the time to do it because especially if these are branded differently or whatever.
John:
Anyway, I tried to be brief.
John:
I'm sorry.
John:
But those are my thoughts on a new breed of Max.
John:
If there's going to be a new breed of Max, the spectrum from all the way from they're not even called Max anymore to they're exactly like we said last show but with one thing that is either a bit of good news or bad news, that's in my mind now as we are less than a week out from WWDC.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, that's definitely possible.
Marco:
Oh, and before I forget, some quick follow-up.
Marco:
I just wanted to try to avoid a week of email from people telling us this.
Marco:
Casey, all your FFmpeg and everything stuff will be fine because it's already compiled for ARM because it runs on Raspberry Pis.
Marco:
as well as there is some ARM use in the server world as well I know it's not like super mainstream but it's also not super obscure at this point so a lot of stuff has been compiled for ARM already just for the server world but definitely also for Raspberry Pis and stuff like that so yes while John said it's not you know you can't take those exact same make files and run them on macOS with that modification I'm sure most of the hard work has already been done and so many of those packages should be able to be updated like in homebrew without too much effort I would imagine
Marco:
So anyway, that part I don't think you should worry about.
Marco:
The part you should worry about is closed source software.
Marco:
All these open source packages, somebody can do the work if it hasn't already been done and make it compile and make it work.
Marco:
But if you have some closed source app that you're relying on that is not currently maintained, that's where you're going to have the problem.
Marco:
If there is a compatibility layer for running x86 code on the new ARM Mac, which, honestly, I think that's a big if.
Marco:
I wouldn't actually expect one, because I think it will be too slow and too crappy.
Marco:
So if there is a compatibility layer, I would expect it to only be around for a couple of years.
Marco:
It's not going to be in the OS forever, the same way Rosetta wasn't in the OS forever.
Marco:
But, John, I think your potential idea for what if they make other big changes to the Mac line...
Marco:
i don't expect any new product name things necessarily like because i mean what would they call it knowing today's apple they would just call it the apple book all they they have no other good names even if they ditch if they ditch mac like what would they call yeah the apple book the apple pro i apple i don't you know they they can't make new names for macs anymore they just know the mac name has way too much value to ditch it i'm just i was just pinning that as an end of a spectrum
Marco:
yeah but so i wouldn't expect a new name because i think having giving the arm products a unique name or or you know suffix or prefix or anything i think that would only make sense if they were intended to only ever be part of the product line rather than replacing the entire product line and i doubt i really doubt that's the case i think the the plan is for arm to go across the entire product line over a few years most likely so
Marco:
So I wouldn't expect that to really be like a, I don't expect this to be a temporary or partial product line conversion.
Marco:
And for that reason, I don't think the naming would actually change meaningfully.
John:
The thing to keep in mind, though, and this is weird for historical reasons, but they did this with the PowerPC transition.
John:
They called them Power Macs.
John:
They gave them all a prefix.
John:
Now, it's weird because they were already Power Books, but they were 68K.
John:
So I know it doesn't quite track exactly, but they literally said now the new Power Mac because they had a Power PC.
John:
And they just called them Power Macs forever and ever until eventually... I think the Intel is when they finally dropped it.
John:
But yeah, so it's not inconceivable that that could happen.
John:
Power is obviously a cooler name than anything we can think of off the top of our head related to ARM.
John:
They're sure as hell not going to call them ARM Macs or Apple Macs or AMACs or Mac Arms or Mac Airs or like, you know, I'm so afraid to even speculate about Apple naming things.
John:
But the name prefix thing is not without precedent.
John:
I don't predict it.
John:
It is obviously less likely scenario.
John:
I'm much more interested in like, oh, now's the time we've changed the security settings on you and make it more difficult for you to install stuff from the command line tools.
John:
I'm more worried about that.
Marco:
And that's, first of all, that's a valid concern because, you know, Apple, they do have a pattern of locking down the Mac slowly more and more over time, making things a pain in the butt slowly more and more over time in the name of security.
Marco:
And certainly I do think the armament transition will totally remove and drop everything.
Marco:
Any software API that is currently deprecated, so things like OpenGL, I don't think OpenGL will run on ARM ever.
Marco:
I think that's just gone.
Marco:
So any software that uses it, it's been deprecated for a couple of years now, I think.
Marco:
I seriously doubt that'll make it over.
Marco:
And again, Bootcamp, I think, is gone.
Marco:
I think anything related to x86, I would predict, is not supported at all.
Marco:
So we are going to have some losses there.
Marco:
But as for bitter pills to swallow with the rest of the OS, any kind of new restrictions on our software abilities or our hardware peripherals, I don't think...
Marco:
it's going to be i don't think there's going to be any like you know massive changes to what most people ever need to do including developers you know because the reality is that they sell a lot of max to developers so i don't think they would ever have things like making it so you can't compile your own version of ffmpeg or anything like it might continue to be an increased pain in the butt but they're already on that track anyway like i don't think it would be anything more of a pain in the butt than what we already have to deal with with catalina and its various bs
Marco:
so i i think i i don't i think they want to make this transition as kind of transparent and smooth as possible because what they don't want is to ruin the mac you know like they're trying to make the mac better presumably like they i think they've shown a pretty good track record of that over the last couple of years now um after after a very dark time but they've gotten through that i think we're we're now we're now in the light again uh for the most part except for casey's tux bar but otherwise like you know we're getting there
Marco:
And so I trust them that they're trying to keep it good.
Marco:
And so I don't think they're going to use this opportunity to really break or super unreasonably lock down a significant amount of new stuff.
Marco:
I think it'll be macOS 10.16 for the next one.
Marco:
Whichever is the first version that supports ARM, it'll just be like any other macOS release where things are...
Marco:
little bit more ratcheted down in certain ways like you know you're not going to get like you know unsigned kernel extensions you might not get any kernel extensions who knows uh but i don't think you're going to be dealing with stuff that is going to be a big pain in the butt or highly restrictive to what almost anybody needs to do with their mac especially if you if you like get rid of legacy hardware support needs and
Marco:
which is like a lot, a lot of reasons why you might need kernel extensions, for instance, like if you just say, all right, these new Macs only support, you know, USB, whatever peripherals that support standard, whatever, you know, if you have certain restrictions like that in place with new hardware, which would be pretty reasonable for new stuff.
Marco:
Uh, I don't expect there to be, to be big additional restrictions.
Marco:
Like, uh,
Marco:
I think they want this transition to just be like, here's the Macs you've already had, you know what this is, you know what to expect, it's a Mac, it runs Mac apps.
Marco:
Asterisk, that had been recompiled for ARM.
Marco:
And then that's it, and no other meaningful restrictions.
John:
kernel extensions are going away even if we don't transition to arm like right in a multi-year thing yeah it's just and this is just an example of like uh you know the transition being a place to just accelerate even existing plans like oh actually kernel extensions aren't going to go away in intel until 10.17 but on arm they go away in 10.16 just because how about we just never have them there then problem solved because nobody's kernel extensions are written for arm now so we just say no uh they're gone they'll probably be gone from x86 at the same time anyway
John:
I want to do two quick hits here before we move on to the next thing.
John:
You mentioned Intel emulation.
John:
What are our predictions?
John:
Marco already said he does not expect ARM macOS to have any form of x86 emulation so you can run old apps without recompiling them.
John:
Casey, your opinion, your guess, your prediction?
Casey:
Yeah, I would want there to be something like Rosetta or Rosetta 2, if you will.
Casey:
I think that would do a lot to alleviate a lot of the pain of moving to a place where software doesn't really exist if it wasn't built by Apple.
Casey:
But I don't know how possible that'll be.
Casey:
based on the hardware.
Casey:
If this hardware is really as screaming fast as we hope, then maybe it would be doable.
Casey:
Maybe it would be fine.
Casey:
I also think, though, that Apple is not afraid to use the stick rather than the carrot.
Casey:
And so it wouldn't surprise me if Apple perceived it as, well, if we have Rosetta 2, that'll let the developers that have x86 software not have a fire under their bottoms to compile for ARM.
Casey:
And we really want them compiling for ARM, so screw it.
Casey:
Let's just not offer it at all.
Casey:
And if they really need this software, they'll virtualize with VMware or what's the parallels, or whatever the case may be, and do an x86 macOS installation on top of that.
Casey:
And that'll be good enough for them.
Casey:
So I'm going to say I want it to be there, but I don't think it'll be there, especially since Apple seems to be on their high horse about how mighty and powerful they are these days, which we're about to talk about.
Marco:
Keep in mind, anything like we were talking earlier about, when John was talking about options for a dev kit and there being a software-only one, and you very quickly corrected yourself and you said simulator to emulator.
Marco:
Because the simulators for iOS apps are able to be really fast because you're running native code.
Marco:
The whole point of this transition would be it would have to emulate ARM, like on the Intel.
Marco:
And same thing in reverse now.
Marco:
To run Intel software on ARM...
Marco:
You can't just do full speed simulation or what hypervisors do with virtual machines and stuff where you are able to run full native speed and native code.
Marco:
You can't do that when you have a different architecture.
Marco:
You have to emulate the whole thing.
Marco:
And emulation is really slow.
Marco:
And Rosetta was a pretty advanced emulator.
Marco:
I'm sure maybe there's also similarly advancing techniques that we've developed since then that have made emulation a little bit better than it used to be.
Marco:
But it's still a really slow process.
Marco:
So running software in Rosetta was something that you could do it
Marco:
And some stuff was, you know, you wouldn't notice the speed difference, but a lot of stuff you would.
Marco:
And so I don't see that being a great solution for most people for most apps.
Marco:
And that's why I don't think Apple's going to ship it at all.
John:
so one thing from history that was going around on twitter and people were discussing this like the uh the i don't know for name of it was but the thing that emulated 68k on power pc uh very quickly i don't know if it was on the first set of power max but maybe on the second or third set of power max could emulate 68k faster than any 68k mac ever actually ran it like it was the emulator was faster than the hardware now
John:
Now, it helps that the PowerPC was much faster than 68K, and it also helps that that was in the period in the 90s or whatever when chips were getting so much faster every year.
John:
And we just talked about Rosetta, but what I'm getting at is that both times Apple has done this, their emulators have been really good.
John:
Obviously, yeah, emulation is slower, but, you know, both times – again, both times they did it in the past.
John:
Moore's Law was much more in effect than it is today, so they took advantage of that, and it gave them the backward compatibility story, a pretty good backward compatibility story.
John:
In fact, with the 68K to PowerPC, a backward compatibility story that Apple itself needed because they didn't get their whole operating system onto PowerPC for, like, years after the transition just because there was so much legacy stuff there.
John:
But they did such a good job with those.
John:
And I understand all the reasons that you both think they're not going to have one.
John:
They all make sense to me.
John:
But just something my gut is telling me, because Apple has done it twice before and they were so good at it, that there's enough institutional, perhaps wrongheaded institutional momentum behind it, that it would be part of the transition strategy.
John:
And I'm going to predict that.
John:
I probably wouldn't put money on it, but I'm going to be the odd one out here and predict that there actually is a way to run x86 software on these ARM things using emulation.
John:
And yes, it will be slower.
John:
And yes, it won't be as good as either of the two transitions.
John:
But I just I just feel like it's in Apple's DNA to do this.
John:
And my fingers are crossed.
John:
Like Casey said, I want it to be true.
John:
And I think I just want it so much that I'm willing to predict it.
John:
The final thing, we can't take as long on this, but this will be quicker.
John:
Names for MAGO is 1016.
John:
There's a story that we'll put in the show notes where someone's going through things that Apple has trademarked, trying to pull the names out of it.
John:
Catalina came out of these trademarks.
John:
The remaining ones that are still trademarked are Mammoth, Monterey, or Skyline.
John:
And of course, it could be something entirely new.
John:
Of Mammoth, Monterey, Skyline, and other of your choice, what would you predict is 1016?
Casey:
name if the arm transition is happening it has to be mammoth right because it's it's the marketing just plays itself because mammoths have arms no no no because it's a mammoth change like this look at this mammoth change and it's mac and it's mac os the reasoning the reasoning works that it tracks marco
Marco:
So with the disclaimer that I don't know anything about these actual places in California.
John:
Yeah, same thing.
John:
None of us know.
John:
This is all just blind.
John:
You can pick other.
John:
A name of your choice.
John:
It's probably a city in California.
Yeah.
John:
Or maybe they'll just break the naming scheme and call it something totally different.
Marco:
Yeah, fair enough.
Marco:
So it was Mammoth, Monterey, what was the third one?
Marco:
Skyline.
Marco:
Skyline.
Marco:
Hmm.
Marco:
That's a place name?
Marco:
Not like the Chili Chain in Cincinnati, but that's like a... Apparently.
Marco:
Put it into Google Maps.
Marco:
Okay, so I think the one that sounds the coolest is Monterey.
Marco:
Therefore, that's not the one they're going to pick.
Marco:
I think the one they're going to pick is Mammoth.
Marco:
It's the weirdest.
John:
I think I don't know.
John:
I don't know enough to pick an other.
John:
I think Monterey is the most likely, but I'm rooting for Skyline.
Casey:
I think Skyline would be a better one for sure.
Casey:
I just think that if I'm Apple, I would choose Mammoth.
Marco:
Real-time follow-up, Skyline Chili still exists.
Marco:
I'm very excited.
Marco:
It is still a Cincinnati-based chili chain.
Marco:
Not in California.
Marco:
No, definitely not.
Marco:
We had them in Columbus, and I'm pretty sure, like, I don't think it really leaves Ohio, though.
Marco:
It traveled from Cincinnati to Columbus halfway across the state, and that's about it.
Casey:
So, quickie, because I can't resist now and we're never going to end this show.
Casey:
This is going to be a 12-hour show.
Casey:
Do universal binaries come back and are they still called universal binaries?
Marco:
I would imagine so.
Marco:
I mean, it would probably work the same way.
Marco:
Like, you know, the fat binary system, I believe, supports any number of architectures.
Marco:
So this would just be, like, another one that would be in there, potentially.
John:
I mean, not for the Mac App Store, because that will do what the Mac App Store does, which is strip down to just the code that your particular machine needs.
John:
But for individual developers, yeah, they'd be able to make them fat.
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Casey:
What is going on with Hey, the email app, and inbox?
John:
Oh, we're not saying that word.
John:
Stop.
John:
Cut that out.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
I also hate inbox, but here we are.
Casey:
I only have so many things I can be outraged about, and so I haven't really followed this very closely, and I'm falling down on my job as Chief Summarizer-in-Chief, but
Casey:
My understanding is—and interrupt me when you're ready—that they released this new email app, a pay email app, and the first-run experience on the iPhone is basically put in your username and password, and if you don't have one, you need to figure out by magic or divining rod—
Casey:
where you need to go in the rest of the world to get yourself a username and password.
Casey:
And I guess the initial app 1.0.0 came out.
Casey:
And then when they tried to get 1.0.1 out, then Apple said, no, you can't do this because in-app purchase, in-app purchase, in-app purchase.
Casey:
And then there's been a big brouhaha ever since, mostly because David Hannemeyer Hansen is a very well-known developer and CEO or CTO or whatever on the internet.
Casey:
And it's from Basecamp.
Casey:
And what is it, 37 Signals?
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
Was that the old name?
Marco:
It was formerly 37 Signals.
Marco:
They made a product called Basecamp, and it became the main thing they did.
Marco:
And then I think it eventually became the only thing they did.
Marco:
And so they renamed the company to Basecamp.
Casey:
Right, right, right.
Casey:
So, I mean, that's kind of the extraordinarily too brief summary.
Casey:
I have feelings about this, but I don't know if they're fair because I haven't looked into this enough.
Casey:
Which one of you would like to take me through the deeper blow by blow summary of what's actually happening?
John:
I don't think we need to go blow by blow, but I think this is interesting for a couple of reasons.
John:
It's interesting because of the timing.
John:
We've talked on this show over many, many years about, oh, App Store rejections.
John:
This was rejected.
John:
It seems like it shouldn't have been.
John:
This is not a new story.
John:
This is the shape of the same story.
John:
It's like, oh...
John:
Apple, you know, tweak the rules or change them or interpret them differently.
John:
And it's affecting this developer and it seems unfair.
John:
And the developer, depending on our complaints about it, like that's that's the same old story.
John:
But the timing is interesting for two reasons.
John:
One, it's happening right before WWDC.
John:
Here we are, you know, the week before WWDC.
John:
Not great timing for one of these things to blow up.
John:
as Casey mentioned, because David Hennemar Hansen is very loud on Twitter and is already famous and, you know, there's a lot of stories being written about it.
John:
Apple doesn't love that.
John:
You know Apple hates this.
John:
Apple does not want this to be a story anywhere, regardless of, you know, what, like...
John:
the actual specifics of the issue.
John:
Apple hates it when there are stories like this.
John:
That's why the thing you say, don't run to the press.
John:
They have to hate this.
John:
And second is that Apple is in the process of, in various legal battles, and potentially even in the United States, antitrust rulings against them in the EU, and potential legislation in the United States going through Congress, and just...
John:
They it's not a good time for this issue to come up on that front either, because Apple's lawyers are busy writing lawyerly type press releases, disagreeing with, you know, decisions in the EU.
John:
And, you know, I'm not tracking the individual legal cases here, but it's like, you know, it's antitrust.
John:
It's like, do these tech companies have too much power over the market?
John:
And it seems like there's growing momentum.
John:
in the various legislative bodies across this planet to see if there's something that can be done to check, not just Apple, but all the big tech companies, you know, for all the reasons you would imagine, privacy concerns, market power, competition, anti-competitive behavior.
John:
Apple has been down this road before with Amazon and the ebook thing, and they lost that one.
John:
And like, you know, this is, this is just generally bad timing, um, for Apple and maybe good timing for everybody else.
John:
Um,
John:
This specific instance here, if I was to talk about this, I feel like I could talk about it with someone at Apple without reference to antitrust, to individual developers, to fairness and rule changing and power and monopolies and everything.
John:
The argument that I would make and I have always made and will continue to make on this specific issue is that it's better for everyone, including Apple, if Apple just gets out of its own way and lets people make better applications.
John:
We had the same conversation when the Kindle app was out there.
John:
The Kindle app is a better app if you can buy books on it.
John:
It just is, right?
John:
And Apple doing everything in its power to make that not happen.
John:
Oh, you can't even mention that you can go buy the things on Amazon.com.
John:
This is all old news.
John:
I'm sure these rules have changed since then.
John:
But like that whole thing of like...
John:
make it so the app doesn't say anything about where you can sign up for netflix like people will just have to know that because it wouldn't be better in the app if you could sign up for netflix right there in the app and apple would say you can do that just give us 30 and it's like apple like we know it's not gonna happen right
John:
No one wants to give you, Netflix does not want to give you 30% of their income or 30% of the signups that are through the app.
John:
Like they, you know, they used to do that and they don't anymore.
John:
And you know, there's a lot of money that went away.
John:
Same thing with Amazon.
John:
Amazon literally can't give you 30% of every ebook sale because there's not that much money to wring from that stone.
John:
And David Hennemeyer Hansen and Basecamp sure as hell don't want to give you 30% of all the Hey.com subscription.
John:
No one wants to do that.
John:
And by making these rules and thinking if we make these rules, we will have enough power to force this to happen.
John:
History has shown it just doesn't happen.
John:
No one's going to give you that money.
John:
And so all it does is it makes the apps worse in the app store.
John:
Apps that are inexplicably worse, where you can't do things that you would... The developers want you to be able to do it.
John:
The users want to do them, but it's just not happening.
John:
This is...
John:
Not a situation where interest and incentives are correctly aligned to make better and better apps.
John:
Everything is aligned to be oppositional and to result in us getting worse apps and us getting worse apps in the end reflects poorly back on Apple.
John:
I'm sure they've heard this argument a million times.
John:
Like this is the whole debate.
John:
Is it better to try to go for that 30%?
John:
And of course they have arguments about it.
John:
Oh, control.
John:
And we don't want to send you to a scammy website to use other people's payment methods and yada, yada, yada.
John:
Like, but yeah,
John:
The goal that Apple is shooting for a world where they have all the control and also get all the money and also have apps that have all the features the customers expect is never going to happen.
John:
Like the App Store has been around long enough to know that's not going to happen.
John:
The companies will not give you or can't literally can't and stay in business, give you that 30 percent.
John:
So given that that's the case, stop trying to make Fetch happen.
John:
Apple's not going to ever get it all.
John:
Best case scenario, we get this tense Cold War where our apps are inexplicably stupider than they need to be, developers are cranky, and Apple's platform has apps that are worse.
John:
On Google's platform, the competing platform, the dominant mobile platform...
John:
Apps have fewer restrictions in this particular regard, and the apps are better for them.
John:
That's not good for Apple.
John:
And so every time one of these things comes up, I just hope that whoever is arguing the side that I just articulated, which surely has been argued inside Apple for years, I hope they get a little bit closer to winning.
John:
So the more damaging and annoying this particular blowup is about...
John:
Hey.com, an email service being subjected to rules that other E-maps weren't, but that are eventually rolling out across every... It's a story we've seen before, and it's a sad story, and it's stupid, and the restrictions don't make any sense to consumers, and the restrictions are very annoying slash company killing to the developers involved, and we get worse apps like...
John:
I hope, you know, I'm excited that DHH on Twitter is super loud because he can afford to be super loud and he's using his fame to good effect and it happening right in front of WWC with the antitrust stuff going on.
John:
I hope that all comes to head and lets Apple, before it's too late,
John:
give up on its impossible dream of making developers both give it 30% of the money and also make better applications for consumers.
John:
That's my feeling on this issue that like...
John:
I don't want to root for a PR blowup, but sometimes that's just the only way things change.
John:
And I really hope this time it doesn't just blow up and then fizzle again.
John:
And on Apple's side of this, the thing they have going for them is that if they have a WWDC and introduce Arm Max and they're all super amazing, that will change the conversation.
John:
And for a while, people will forget about Hey.com.
John:
And that'll kind of be a shame.
John:
And honestly, I don't want Apple's WWDC to be overshadowed with stupid apps or stuff.
John:
I just want Apple to do, quote unquote, the right thing, meaning the thing that I think that they've been resisting doing in favor of the strategy that's producing worse outcomes.
Marco:
Yeah, this kind of stuff just makes me mad.
Marco:
Because Apple has, you know, it's a big company.
Marco:
There's a lot of sides to it.
Marco:
There's a lot of personalities in it.
Marco:
And we see multiple sides of it at different times.
Marco:
One of the dark sides of Apple is that they can be incredibly power hungry and shockingly stingy.
Marco:
We say that certain things are a good value, certain things, like every WVDC, when they open up some API that we thought they'd never open up, we're like, wow, that's great.
Marco:
We're really surprised by opening up this API that seemed to be locked down forever or whatever.
Marco:
But then there's this dark side where they do some things and they stand by certain things that are just embarrassingly stingy for a company that produces premium products and prides itself in quality and almost unconscionably stingy for a company that has so much money as they have.
Marco:
It's a bad look to be super rich and super cheap about stuff.
Marco:
One of the biggest areas of this is the stupid in-app purchase rule.
Marco:
So this is the same rule, as you mentioned, that prevents Amazon from offering in-app purchase, although now there's an asterisk on that.
Marco:
Now Amazon kind of sometimes can offer in-app purchase because Apple needs Amazon more than Amazon needs Apple in certain ways.
Marco:
And so they negotiated and made a special deal.
Marco:
Netflix, famously, they had a net purchase for a while.
Marco:
They removed it.
Marco:
That caused friction.
Marco:
That hasn't been resolved yet, but Netflix is allowed to do something that now Hey.com can't do, which is the compromise that Amazon had and in many places still has, which is, okay...
Marco:
We don't want to use your in-app purchase system because 30% is a lot.
Marco:
I often think, all the money I've ever made from Apple, all the apps, everything like Instapaper, the magazine, Overcast, all the money I make from Apple, they keep almost half as much, again, more than that.
John:
i have made apple a lot of money over all these years and netflix has made like when netflix canned their in-app thing yeah like some they had numbers like it was like hundreds of millions of dollars maybe it was even billions like netflix gave apple the 30 cut for a really long time and arguably they benefited from that and well and it was i mean it was really 15 behind the scenes for like yeah they had a special deal for a while but it's
John:
But it's still like hundreds of millions of dollars.
John:
Right.
John:
And, you know, so so when this gets back to my earlier point, when Netflix stopped that, those hundreds of millions of dollars just stopped cold.
John:
Right.
John:
And Apple was like, no, we like hundreds of millions of dollars.
John:
Like, well, you know, and as you said, that hasn't been resolved like the Amazon thing has done.
John:
And of course, yes, we've mentioned many times in the past.
John:
Not everyone is Amazon and Netflix, so good luck negotiating a special deal for yourself.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And so the way it's been to date until fairly recently is if you didn't want to use or couldn't use Apple's in-app purchase system, you could have an app where it gives you a login form.
Marco:
But it never mentions, like, where do you create this account?
Marco:
And the rules have actually gotten more stricter over time.
Marco:
It used to be that, like, you could link out to Safari.
Marco:
They clamped down pretty fast on that after a couple years, I think.
Marco:
Then it was like, okay, you can't even do that.
Marco:
But you can at least mention, like, go to our website to sign up.
Marco:
And in recent years, you can't even do that.
Marco:
In recent years, you can't even mention a website that you could go to create an account.
Marco:
You can't link to a support page that if you click a few links in the in-app browser after you get there, you can get to a purchase page.
Marco:
They have gotten remarkably strict about like, okay, if there's any way to get from your app to a purchase page, even if it's like 17 levels deep after they've already jumped out of your app into a web view...
Marco:
That still counts, and they prohibit that.
Marco:
Well, apparently, in the last few months, this has gotten even more restrictive to, now, certain types of apps, and how they're defining this seems vague.
Marco:
The statement they gave to some news outlet basically said, like,
Marco:
consumer versus business is the distinction but that's stupid as as i think john gruber wrote like there is no difference between consumer like that's that's not an enforceable distinction and it's just clear bs from apple um they they gerrymandered it like they basically drew the outline so it exactly so it included like netflix and amazon it was like there's a bunch of other stuff like oh reader apps or apps for content like if you try to read the language it's like
John:
are you trying to say netflix and amazon's kindle store like it doesn't you know consumer business doesn't make any sense and then the the previous language also doesn't make any sense about like well if you're a reader app like so email is not a reader app but netflix is like what do you you know if you're if you're viewing content that had been licensed elsewhere like it's all this language is basically written to specifically include just the things they want to include without naming them by name uh but yeah like the the rules changed apparently you know several months ago
John:
to say that even if you follow all those rules that Marco outlined, also if your app isn't one of these apps that we want to be like this, you can't do it.
Marco:
Right, so no matter what, and they've decided that Hay is one of these apps, that basically, yeah, it's gerrymandering, such a good analogy here, because like,
Marco:
It's ostensibly supposed to be this like codified system with like fair rules.
Marco:
But in reality, it's not at all fair.
Marco:
It's all political.
Marco:
And it's all to to achieve this this basically this sinister goal.
Marco:
This is pure, blatant, shameless greed.
Marco:
This is Apple being a huge dick.
Marco:
And look, I'm a huge Apple fan.
Marco:
We all are.
Marco:
We happily celebrate when they do great things.
Marco:
And for the next few weeks, we're probably going to be celebrating the great things that they're about to announce to us.
Marco:
But this situation with this rule and the way they've treated this rule over time is Apple being a huge dick all the time.
Marco:
And it seems like their incredible dickitude is increasing over time in particular about this rule.
Marco:
All I can speculate...
Marco:
is they must make a ridiculous amount of money from particularly this rule.
Marco:
Because, as you mentioned, this rule, this one thing about totally prohibiting any other outside payment system in many types of apps from being at all mentioned or even now at all existing in certain types of apps...
Marco:
Even when it's totally reasonable to have a separation like that, like in this case, I think it's totally reasonable.
Marco:
This one rule and the way they operate this one rule is responsible for such a massive amount of not only negative sentiment, but of antitrust action and antitrust probes and anti-competitiveness actions by governments.
Marco:
They are totally warranted.
Marco:
I mean...
Marco:
The response Apple posted – what was it, yesterday?
Marco:
To the European Commission probe thing, whatever that was?
Marco:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marco:
The response they posted and the big puff piece they posted about all the money that they enable in the economy from the App Store –
Marco:
That was such a massive pile of bullshit from so many different angles.
Marco:
It's a terrible look for Apple.
Marco:
It makes them look like dicks.
Marco:
Leading into what they hope to be a, you know, rah-rah, look at us, everyone's great, we love you developers conference in a week.
Marco:
They lead with that pile of crap?
John:
It read like a lawyer wrote it.
John:
Didn't it read like a lawyer wrote it and not a PR person?
John:
Because you know when there's a legal case in the courts, whatever it's about, and whatever the outcome is, there's a verdict or something, and there are statements from the lawyers.
John:
Lawyers always say the most lopsided, one-sided, do not acknowledge the other side has any good points whatsoever, whether they're on the winning side or the losing side.
John:
But especially if they're on the losing side, it's like, we disagree with this judgment, and we think Apple is the best company in the world, and developers love it, and everybody's great, and like...
John:
it is not like a pr thing that tries to be like balanced and have the desired effect it's a it's like a lawyer wrote it and said there is no other side but our side apple is right and that is all there is to it and that's why if you read it as a regular developer like are you kidding me apple hard working what it said like determined developers it's a level playing field it's like none of these words are true like yeah it's like every word of this is wrong
John:
yeah it was very bad but but it read exactly like you would see a lawyer ever say after a legal case so i feel like that's not that it's excusable but it didn't surprise me and like when there is a legal case and you come out on the losing side your lawyer puts out a statement like that and the fact that we read it as developers like you're not supposed to look at that's for like politicians and lawyers so
Marco:
It's a terrible look.
Marco:
Do they not know or do they not care how bad this – it's so just blatantly disrespectful of our intellect.
Marco:
Honestly, it's the kind of thing you'd expect our president to put out if he was slightly more articulate.
Marco:
Oh, let's not go too far.
Marco:
He doesn't understand these words.
Marco:
Yeah, that's true.
Marco:
But it's so stingy and double talky and just distorting.
Marco:
It's almost like trying to gaslight the public into thinking that we're not being screwed as much as we are by Apple's rule here.
Marco:
And it's just awful.
Marco:
And for a company that prides themselves on the principles they claim to pride themselves on, to then also be acting like this is just this crazy double talk that is not a good look at all.
John:
Their strategy for doing these changes, it's not a new strategy, but their strategy reveals – it makes it clear what they understand about it.
John:
So the strategy whenever they have a rule change like this, like, oh, well, we've decided now that actually these certain kind of apps are allowed to let you sign up elsewhere and these other ones aren't, right?
John:
But whatever the decision is.
John:
The strategy they use seems to make sense if you're like, oh, they're trying to be gentle to developers.
John:
What they do is they make a change in this policy and maybe they update the wording or whatever, but they don't immediately ban every app.
John:
They wait for you to have to update your app.
John:
That spreads out the outrage because they make the new ruling and if they just suddenly banned every app that we've decided actually email apps can't do this and they ban every email app that does this.
John:
We'll put a link in the show notes to DHH's
John:
twitter thread where he says look at these five email apps they all do exactly the same thing as us how come they're not banned right that's not a thing that apple does they don't say okay we've changed the ruling all these email apps are banned we're pulling them from the store what they do is wait for one of those email apps to do an update and then they say yeah about that um actually there are new rules you're no longer in compliance with blah blah blah and then you have to go back and forth and deal with trying to get a human and you know
John:
But they do that on a case-by-case basis with each individual thing, sort of demand-paged outrage.
John:
And as each one of those person tries to update, that spreads out the story so there's not a critical mass of things.
John:
And you're like, well, isn't that better?
John:
Isn't that kinder than pulling all the email apps from the store?
John:
Wouldn't that be an incredibly hostile thing?
John:
You're not even getting any notice.
John:
You're pulling all the apps.
John:
It's just terrible.
John:
It's better to spread out like that.
John:
But by spreading it out like that, it reveals what Apple clearly knows, which is,
John:
This is an incredibly unpopular, potentially damaging rule change.
John:
They don't Apple does not have the courage of its convictions to say we think this rule is in the best interest of everybody, users, Apple and developers.
John:
They know it's not in the best interest of developers.
John:
And I think they also should know by now it's not in the best interest of users, given how we know developers will react to it.
John:
And so they try to do it slowly and sneakily and just kind of like, oh, when you try to update will remind you.
John:
And they probably think they're being kinder and gentler by doing that.
John:
And in some respects they are.
John:
But I think it reveals what they know to be true, that this is such an incredibly unpopular and potentially damaging change.
John:
They literally can't afford PR-wise to do it how they would do a good rule change.
John:
Say the rule change was, hey, guess not.
John:
We're not taking 30% anymore.
John:
We're taking 25%.
John:
You think they would demand page that out?
John:
No.
John:
they would announce it and it would apply to everyone instantly because it's good news when you got bad news don't really say anything and spread it out and that's that's just like it comes off as sneaky and shady even though i think they're they think they're motivated internally by trying to be kind with that and i see that angle like there is an aspect to that but i just if you find yourself having to do that maybe rethink the real change you're making
Marco:
The App Store has always had this problem of the rules as written are pretty vague in a lot of ways.
Marco:
They leave a lot to case-by-case interpretation, and they've always been enforced pretty inconsistently.
Marco:
I've heard stories about them specifically wanting to make examples out of developers.
Marco:
That's one of the reasons why people like James Thompson, who have public apps, he makes pCalc, and he's been screwed over in weird ways so many times by AppReview.
Marco:
I've heard that that was actually intentional to make an example out of popular developers so that they spread the word so Apple doesn't have to.
Marco:
So I used to think that whenever they would have one of these slight changes or negative changes to the way a rule was being enforced and they would pick on some developer, I used to think it was just random.
Marco:
Or that maybe it was down to app review is just a bunch of humans.
Marco:
Maybe some of them interpret things differently at different times and they just have to get their enforcement consistent and they were just going to get to it.
Marco:
I no longer think that.
Marco:
I think it's very clear that when they have these behind-the-scenes enforcement changes that usually, by the way, and in this case also, are not updated in the published rules.
Marco:
There was not a published rule update a few months ago that made this rule start being enforced differently, but it was.
Marco:
I no longer think that it's just because they want to be gentle about it or don't want to tell us.
Marco:
I think it's a tactic.
Marco:
It's a tactic to really help extort money out of people.
Marco:
Because if you publish the rules the way they are, in all honesty, in direct, clear terms like this...
Marco:
Then somebody like Basecamp releasing a new app would already know before they developed the app over months or years, they would already know we can't do this without supporting an app purchase.
Marco:
And that might affect whether they choose to make it, how they choose to price it, etc.
John:
I think the actual the rule change that forbids this type of thing actually did happen many months ago.
John:
The problem is that that Basecamp logically was not just reading the letter of the rules, but saying, how does the App Store actually work?
John:
And in practice, the way the App Store actually works is there are existing email apps that do this.
Marco:
There's lots of that.
John:
Right.
John:
Right, so regardless of whether or not the rule... I think the rule changed back in whenever it was.
John:
If you read it closely, you say, are we a reader app?
John:
Are we a business app?
John:
Whatever.
John:
Those words have been in there, but then you look at the actual store and say, well, it basically comes down to interpretation.
John:
It's like, well, I think these rules would forbid our app, but it's open to a lot of interpretation, so let me look at what's actually happening on the store, which is what all developers do, to do their due diligence.
John:
You have to.
John:
Is anyone...
John:
We have to do that because Apple never fully documents their rules.
John:
But what I'm saying is I don't think Apple needs to change the text to comply with this rule because the text that is in there fits with the gerrymander that they are doing.
John:
But the thing is because they slow roll it, because they don't automatically enforce it at once, if you look around and say, well, what's actually happening on the App Store –
John:
What you may see is, oh, it seems like this is allowed.
John:
I see a bunch of other competitors doing the exact same thing.
John:
I bet we're good.
John:
We'll just watch and make sure they don't change the rules.
John:
And you watch and they don't actually change the text.
John:
But little did you know that the text changed three months ago.
John:
And Apple is in the process of slowly rolling out their interpretation of those rules.
John:
You think you know the interpretation because you see this app on the App Store already.
John:
But really, that developer is going to find out the next time they try to release a point release that they are mistaken about the interpretation of the
John:
rules and like that that slow rollout is it's so terrible because there's just no way like the the tools we have are we can look at the text but then we might have a different interpretation and we can look what's happening in the app store but then what's happening the app store is a you know a trailing indicator of what's actually going on because of the way apple rolls out these type of policy changes and like i said i can imagine them thinking they're trying to be kind with the slow rollout but it makes it just impossible to figure out what's going on and it just you know it just kind of shady
Marco:
No, at this point, I have thrown out all possibility that they're doing this trying to be kind.
Marco:
I think it used to be that they were trying to be a little bit weaselly about avoiding bad PR.
Marco:
Because whenever you change the rules publicly, if it's going to be in the direction of making things more restrictive like this, it will generate bad PR.
Marco:
So I think they try to just do it quietly and hope no one notices, which is absurd, really.
Marco:
Because...
John:
everyone will we will notice and i think it backfired on now because if this change if this if they started slow rolling out this change in march it it just so happened to have come to the head right now like if they had done the change all at once they would have taken the bad pr in march but by doing the slow rollout where you don't really have control over how slow it rolls up because you don't know when people are going to try to update their apps right and
John:
And getting unlucky to essentially, like, that Hey.com was launching right before WWDC and their high-profile app, and they have enough money and nerve to, say, F you to Apple, right?
John:
And by the way, DHH has already testified in front of Congress in the U.S.
John:
about tech antitrust issues.
John:
So it's, like, the perfect storm of bad timing.
John:
And the DOJ is talking to him again, right?
John:
So this is a perfect storm of bad timing.
John:
But, like, this is one potential consequence of a slow rollout of a rule change.
John:
And, boy, like, I mean, obviously...
John:
you know apple can't plan for these things and coronavirus i'm sure put a monkey wrench into all this but it's like not this yeah live by the sword die by the sword like if this is going to be your strategy this eventuality of like you know someone inside apple might be mad like how do we let this happen the week before wwdc it's like you only have yourself to blame like there's you were in control of this whole process you decided to do it this way and this is the consequence
Marco:
Again, I don't think this is even being Weasel anymore.
Marco:
It used to be being Weasel-y, let's try to avoid bad press by just not publishing anything and just hope it goes away.
Marco:
When a kid gets in trouble and they bury their head in their hands, it's like, oh, if I can't see it, then I won't get in trouble.
Marco:
The problem will just go away.
Marco:
I think it started out that way.
Marco:
But now I think with this rule in particular, the way they're enforcing this and the way they have been enforcing this,
Marco:
I think it's a tactic because you are able to build your entire business, build the entire app, spend God knows how much time and money building out a service and an app and everything, get it into the store, maybe even get version 1.0 out there.
Marco:
And then when you try to submit your bug update, bam, you got to update, you got to issue this right now, or you got to, you know, you got to add at our payment system right now.
Marco:
It's like they, I think it is now a tactic to be punitive and
Marco:
And to be kind of extortion-y, to really get people when they are most desperate.
Marco:
Because look, they're trying to launch a service right here.
Marco:
Hey.com, they're trying to launch a service.
Marco:
And instead of being able to launch it now, now they have a serious problem with the interface that is on probably the most popular device that would be used to access that service.
Marco:
And they can't like Apple's holding it hostage until they pay up until they agree to their extortion scheme.
Marco:
There is no charitable way to look at this.
John:
You've chosen the least charitable way that they intentionally that 1.0 through to get their app launched and then took the 1.0.
John:
I'm not willing to go that far and think that that was intentional strategy.
John:
Right.
Marco:
That's not quite what I'm saying.
Marco:
What I'm saying is that their strategy of not publishing these rules... Not having conversations ahead of time.
Marco:
Like, that's a thing people could do.
Marco:
Yeah, not having conversations ahead of time, not publishing the rules.
Marco:
Their entire... What Apple always has told developers...
Marco:
When it came to questions about whether app review would approve something, the answer has always been, just build the whole thing and submit it and we'll let you know later.
Marco:
That's not really anything.
Marco:
I honestly think that the way they've been doing things where they let people build entire services, build entire apps, spend years possibly, millions of dollars maybe building out services,
Marco:
And then only to have AppReview slam the hammer down after they've already done everything.
Marco:
And because their entire economics model rested on the like vague interpretation of this rule that now Apple decided to change their mind on.
Marco:
You have to believe that the result of that much of the time is developers saying, fuck.
Marco:
fine i guess we'll support your 30 now because we have to it works so the the strategy of being weaselly about this and you know being vague and changing shifting their enforcement over time is profitable for them i
Marco:
I have to imagine this all goes back to one of the big root challenges Apple faces is revenue growth.
Marco:
Their product lines have been slowing down dramatically and the economic conditions of the world are definitely not going to help them out this year.
Marco:
And so they've been driving for services revenue.
Marco:
And it's been working.
Marco:
They've been making lots of service revenue.
Marco:
But services revenue is often...
Marco:
consumer hostile or developer hostile or both they have a significant financial motivation to ratchet up the extraction of money from existing customers and existing developers so these rules are never going to go the direction they're never going to like people always think every wc they think like apple maybe this year apple will lower the cut
Marco:
They're never lowering the cut.
Marco:
Work is lucky they don't keep raising the cut.
Marco:
Instead, they do search ads.
Marco:
They did lower the cut.
John:
They did the subscription thing after the first year it lowers.
John:
They lower it if your name is Amazon or Netflix.
John:
It has happened.
Marco:
Asterisks.
Marco:
A lot of asterisks everywhere.
Marco:
Not in a mass way here.
Marco:
When you have a significant push for ever-increasing aggressive growth on services revenue, the result is going to be increased friction and tension between you and your customers and your developers.
Marco:
Because one of the...
Marco:
Most common and easy ways to get additional services revenue is to just tighten the bolts and extract more for the same thing or make things more strict or get more stingy with important stuff that make people want to pay more money to get around it or that you have to pay to get around it or in this case that you have to lose more of your revenue to Apple.
Marco:
that's just going to keep happening there there are some services revenue streams that it's beneficial you know you look at like okay well if they offer some kind of service that people actually want and they offer it a reasonable price like you know we talk about apple arcade that seems pretty pretty okay so you know apple arcade five bucks a month sure we'll pay that and you don't feel ripped off by paying for apple arcade like you you pay it if you want to no one's forcing you and it's fine
Marco:
So there are ways to get good services revenue.
Marco:
But then there's also ways that you just kind of put a tax on a system that's already in place or you use your power over people or your lock-in or your monopoly power to extract rent from everybody in ways that you're not really providing the value that you're extracting.
Marco:
You're just extracting it because of the position you're in.
Marco:
And
Marco:
Apple is doing a lot of that latter one as well.
Marco:
And I see that only increasing over time.
Marco:
And that's why when I see crap like this happening in the App Store to developers, first of all, I know there is no way that a guy complaining on Twitter, even a very popular guy,
Marco:
Or a bunch of podcasts talking about how Apple's being a dick here is actually going to change anything.
Marco:
They're clearly making way too much money from this, and they're not about to cut into their services revenue, especially not this year.
Marco:
So the only way this is going to change is if governments force them to.
Marco:
And Apple's walking a really fine line with this rule because this one rule, as I said earlier, has clearly inspired so many government probes and will continue to do so for any functioning government.
Marco:
Ours should be doing it too.
Marco:
I don't know if we are.
Marco:
At least the EU has some kind of functioning consumer protection stuff.
Marco:
So they're doing it at least.
Marco:
But this one rule about allowing alternative payment systems and not allowing alternative payment systems in the app, if that one rule was relieved a little bit, the entire Spotify complaint would evaporate, basically.
Marco:
So much of the antitrust issue with Apple and the App Store would go away with just this one rule being relaxed.
Marco:
It wouldn't even have to be fully relaxed.
Marco:
It could go back to, like, you can link out to Safari for your own payment method and then go back to your app, which would be a huge relaxation of the rule.
Marco:
That alone would probably remove any teeth to any of these complaints, any of these antitrust filings and everything.
Marco:
That would kill it.
Marco:
But they won't even do that.
Marco:
So obviously they're making a ton of money from this, and it's only going to get worse over time.
Casey:
They're also backed into a bit of a corner.
Casey:
I shouldn't be making excuses for Apple because I echo what you're saying, Marco, that this seems in extremely poor taste and just mean, just downright mean.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
From Apple's perspective, if they've shown all of the services revenue, it's not like they're going to throw it away.
Casey:
I mean, imagine Wall Street and the damage that they would take from Wall Street if all of a sudden they were like, well, we just thought we'd be nice today and we'd reduce our cut and we'd allow people to get around our IAPs.
Casey:
And, you know, that's cost us a billion dollars or whatever the number may be, because at Apple scale, it might be that much.
Casey:
And so I just to your point a second ago, like, why would they ever relax these rules?
Casey:
I think as much as I as much as I want to believe that Apple is a company that wants to do right by its customers and do right by its developers.
Casey:
Ultimately, I should have stopped with Apple is a company.
Casey:
Period.
Casey:
And companies are made to make money.
Casey:
And Apple, like you said, Marco, is making a shed load of money on all of this.
Casey:
And they can't stop making a shed load of money because that's what their investors are expecting.
Casey:
And that's who Tim works for.
Casey:
Tim works for the investors.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I come back to something that I feel like I always heard from Gruber, and maybe it wasn't him, but that's where I always heard it, which was that, and I might even butcher it, but Apple cares about Apple first, its users second, and developers third.
Casey:
And
Casey:
This is one of those cases where we haven't gotten past step one, that Apple cares about Apple, and there's little room in Apple's heart for anyone but Apple.
Casey:
And that's really unfortunate because, as you guys had said way early on, these decisions that Apple have made...
Casey:
to my eyes, inarguably make these apps worse.
Casey:
They absolutely do.
Casey:
And this was covered earlier, but I can't emphasize it enough.
Casey:
They make the apps worse.
Casey:
But they make money, and that's more important than Apple, which to some degree is kind of why they're there.
Casey:
But it bums me out, and I guess when I get angry, is that I like to delude myself into thinking that Apple is a company made up of good people, which is true, trying to do right by everyone.
Casey:
And that's not really as true as I want it to be.
Casey:
They're trying to do right by Apple.
Casey:
And if they do right by other people too, then sweet, that's a good bonus.
Casey:
But ultimately they're trying to do right by Apple and I can't necessarily fault them for it, but it just kind of bums me out that this company that I, that I want to celebrate for being just and right and progressive ultimately at the end of the day is still just a company and it's still just a money-making machine.
Marco:
Yeah, and that's where the services revenue is so corrosive to that.
Marco:
If you consider just what they were for the most part before, just make good products and sell them to you.
Marco:
It's much easier to align what is good for Apple with what is good with their customers and what is good with their developers.
Marco:
If you're just making great products and putting them out there and people want to buy them and then people want to run software on them, that's great for everybody.
Marco:
And that's what they did for a long time.
Marco:
And that's what they still mostly try to do today.
Marco:
But then when you also then try to push into services, you introduce these potentially very corrosive incentives that actively fight against your customers and your developers, but benefit Apple a lot.
Marco:
And it takes a certain degree of...
Marco:
probably like self-control really to avoid those corrosive influences and to, to not go down that route as you pursue services revenue.
Marco:
And Apple has messed that up in a few ways.
Marco:
Like I think iCloud storage being so stingy is one of those ways, like the, you know, the free tier of that, this kind of stuff is just going to keep happening because now if you look at the company financially, uh,
Marco:
They need services revenue more than anything.
Marco:
It is the only area of the company that is significantly growing right now.
Marco:
And if you look at what the product lines have in store and the world economy being kind of in the crapper right now,
Marco:
They're going to be relying on services revenue for growth for a long time probably because everything else they sell is pretty mature.
Marco:
Maybe someday they'll release some kind of, you know, AR goggles that'll take over the world in some way.
Marco:
But so far that's not here and that might not happen.
Marco:
So services revenue is going to be the main driver of growth financially for a while.
Marco:
And they're going to keep ratcheting things down or up.
Marco:
Some metaphor is very strange.
Marco:
But they're going to keep ratcheting things to a more painful direction to get that extra money out of service revenue.
Marco:
And sometimes it's going to be things that we want that we're happy to pay for, and sometimes it's not.
Marco:
for a company that spent most of its existence not even having to make that kind of trade-off, that for most of its existence it could just make good products and keep making more good products and keep making their products better and that generated their success,
Marco:
So they never really had to develop the muscle for self-control against the corrosive influences of some of these services revenue streams.
Marco:
So they're really bad at it.
Marco:
I don't know if they will find that balance or if the money is too good for them and it's going to corrupt what makes them so great.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Linode, and Foley.
Marco:
And thank you to our members for supporting us as well.
Marco:
You can go to atp.fm slash join to see for yourself.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin.
John:
Because it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
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.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
I actually don't necessarily have any need to do an extensive WWDC predictions thing.
Casey:
But I would like to state on record, which is now going to convince – it's going to cause the universe for it to be wrong because I'm feeling very smug about this prediction.
Casey:
But I just have this gut feeling that there's going to be some pretty interesting developments on iPad and I think specifically around the home screen.
Casey:
I can't tell you why.
Casey:
It's just a gut feeling.
Casey:
It's not that I'm trying to hide anything.
Casey:
I can't tell you why, but I think that there's going to be... I'm not sure there's going to be multitasking changes that we all really want, but I think something about the iPad home screen is going to be significantly different this year.
Casey:
Even more icons.
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
List view for Springboard.
Marco:
I really hope
Marco:
that it is a refinement year for the most part.
Casey:
Oh, I hope so too.
Marco:
I know we probably won't get that.
Marco:
And we just finished talking about ARM Macs.
Marco:
An architecture transition is not a small deal.
Marco:
But in a way, it helps to do that transition if the OS is fairly stable otherwise.
Marco:
Hopefully, at least on the Mac side, I really am hoping for a stability-focused year.
Marco:
Every time I see any major new Mac feature, it concerns me now.
Marco:
First of all, that means they didn't fix a whole bunch of bugs they could have been fixing at the same time.
Marco:
And then second of all, the Mac features are so often really buggy and half-assed for the first few years that they're out, possibly forever that they're out.
Marco:
Please stop touching the Mac in most ways and just refine what's already there because it needs it.
Marco:
And then, yeah, for the other platforms, again, I'm hoping for a refinement year as well because iOS 13 kind of sucked for a while.
Marco:
The only platform I really hope to see major progress and changes on is watchOS, right?
Marco:
because it needs it the most still.
Marco:
WatchOS is still so primitive and limited in what apps are allowed to do.
Marco:
SwiftUI helped a lot, but there's still a lot more to go.
Marco:
SwiftUI itself, I hope, gets a significant update for its second year.
Marco:
I forgot about Catalyst until this exact moment.
John:
I think we'll get Catalyst versions of the message.
John:
Speaking of not touching the Mac, I really hope they do replace the Messages app with one that has feature parity, even if it's a quote-unquote worse app, because the
John:
the current non-catalyst message app is no great shakes on the Mac.
John:
Um, if you want a real stability, this is something I think we haven't talked about on the show and I haven't heard talked about anywhere really.
John:
But like if, if you're like, okay, I want this year to be like a stability year where we just do a refinement and stuff.
John:
You know, the best way to do that, don't do an arm transition this year.
John:
just delay just delay it another year have this be a refinement year like you just said like oh no major new features maybe you get new catalyst apps on the mac but in general everything is like it's is all stability release and also no arm transition and we would all be sad because we've been talking about arm transition and all the rumors and we'd i think we'd all be disappointed because we're all getting psyched up for it but that would sure be a more stable year than oh by the way architecture transition so i'm not rooting for that
John:
But we have to put it out there as a possibility, again, especially with coronavirus.
John:
And it could be for, like, uninteresting reasons having to do with manufacturing that really isn't, like, Apple's quote-unquote fault.
John:
Or they just, you know, got cold feet and pushed it out another year.
John:
Like, things like this happen, all right?
John:
So I just, you know, if you're...
John:
If you're listening to this show before WWDC, I want you to at least have some preparation in your mind, like, maybe it won't be ARM this year, and then you'll be pleasantly surprised when it is, and you'll get to enjoy it all the more.
John:
But that is definitely a way to make it a stability year.
Marco:
An ARM transition happening this year would actually let most developers treat it like a stability year for the app side, and maybe even most developers in Apple, too, because...
Marco:
most developers are not writing architecture-specific code anymore.
Marco:
Those days are long behind us for most apps.
Marco:
For most developers, an ARM transition actually would not require very much work at all.
Marco:
It would be a lot of work for some developers, anybody obviously writing assembly code and anybody relying on all the frameworks that we were talking about earlier that are probably going to be deprecated like OpenGL, or probably going to be removed like OpenGL.
Marco:
But for most developers of most apps, there's not going to be much to do.
Marco:
And so that actually might kind of enable a stability year on a lot of different fronts.
John:
There's also your dependencies.
John:
I mean, I know you don't use a lot of dependencies in your code, but that's not the case for other applications.
John:
And so you have to also wait for all your dependencies to be sort of both ported and validated on ARM.
John:
And it's quite a long chain for a long application.
John:
It's not even entirely under your control system.
John:
how easy it is to port your app.
John:
I don't think it'll be a big deal.
John:
Again, we've gone through it twice.
John:
Developers will get it done.
John:
But the bigger the app, the more potential there is for it to be quite a lot of work just to get the thing working and performing well.
John:
That's the other aspect.
John:
Just because it compiles and runs and doesn't appear to be any bugs, how's the performance?
John:
Presumably, these new CPUs will have very different performance characteristics.
John:
Some for the better.
John:
It's like, oh, it's much faster than it was before.
John:
I didn't have to do anything.
John:
But sometimes...
John:
depending on how apple optimizes the libraries or how the libraries you're using are optimized or maybe if you're a big company you wrote a bunch of stuff yourself that was tailored for not with assembly code but tailored for what you know to be the strengths and weaknesses of x86's vector instructions or whatever uh could be very different on the arm stuff or it could be that the arm cpus like to get the best performance you really have to use this new api that uses the built-in neural engine or something because it doesn't have
John:
you know, the generic hardware to do what you want to do.
John:
Anyway, the stuff is always more complicated.
John:
Hopefully for, you know, the pitch for, uh, small developers, like, look, you'll be able to port your app in like a day.
John:
It'll be up and running.
John:
And then, you know, it shouldn't be a big deal, but companies like Microsoft and Adobe changing anything of that in that giant house of cards is always going to be quite a headache.
John:
Luckily they have a lot of money and people, so I'm sure it'll work out.
Casey:
So John, if you had one Ricky pick for WWDC, what would you pick?
John:
I don't know what you mean by that.
John:
I refuse to acknowledge gags from other shows.
Casey:
Fine.
Casey:
If you had a risky pick that you would like to pick for WWDC, it's for nothing but bragging rights.
John:
What would you pick?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I mean, I think I already made mine of predicting X86 emulation on ARM.
John:
Let's see.
John:
I mean, obviously, I haven't really been keeping up with the rumors because I've been believing the ARM transition ones.
John:
I'm like, that's more than enough.
John:
Beyond that,
John:
I'm, I'm with Marco.
John:
I'm mostly hoping that there's not anything that I'm not thinking of.
John:
Like my, I would be so overjoyed if like bugs got fixed, like with existing features.
John:
I mean, the only thing that I haven't heard rumored at all that I would be excited about, uh, that I think is worth doing is improvements to time machine, taking more advantage of APFS.
John:
But that's, that's it.
John:
That's, you know, I think that will happen eventually no matter what, but it would be cool if they made further advancements this year, uh, just because, but like,
John:
everything else i just i just want to fix all the bugs and make everything better and faster and more stable and have a cool arm transition and you know all the ios and ipad stuff that'll be cool too but it doesn't really affect my life that much so so yeah that's all i got i got x86 emulation on arm and uh and time machine improvements for apfs
Casey:
Those are pretty good.
Casey:
Those are pretty good.
Marco:
I hope that if they do any kind of significant Mac features, which again, I hope they don't as well.
Marco:
I think if they put a lot of effort into changing the Mac beyond the ARM transition...
Marco:
that might be a failure to read the room.
Marco:
What most Mac developers want is stability.
Marco:
The Mac has been suffering in that area for a while.
Marco:
But one thing I would hope for with the Mac is if they do touch it at all, if they insist on touching it,
Marco:
I want to see some evidence that Catalyst can be used to make a good app.
Marco:
We have yet to really see much of that, including from Apple's own apps.
Marco:
I know people are picking on the new developer app being pretty crappy on Catalyst.
Marco:
It seems so far that Catalyst still is nearly impossible to use well, even for Apple.
Marco:
And so I really hope that we get some kind of progress on that front.
Marco:
If this thing is ever going to be good, we should see some progress towards the direction.
Marco:
You know, like I was complaining earlier, like when the touch bar first came out, it was pretty mediocre and then nothing ever has changed about it.
Marco:
It has never gotten better.
Marco:
I hope catalyst doesn't follow that same path.
Marco:
Like if you're going to have this thing that came out really crappy or really mediocre, like let's see some movement in the direction of being good.
Marco:
It wouldn't take a lot.
Marco:
I don't think to like, but it seems like they're doing almost nothing.
Marco:
Uh, so I, I hope, I really, really hope that, you know, catalyst version two is, is better.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
And beyond that, I'm hoping at the framework level, Swift UI should get a lot better.
Marco:
It's wonderful as a 1.0, but it would be a lot more useful if a lot of limitations were lifted and a lot of bugs were fixed and performance issues were solved and everything like that.
Marco:
And then on the watchOS side,
Marco:
I want everything to be burned down and started over as, as they, not only as I wish for every year, but as they do every couple of years, once they actually do it, you know, this summer I've been using the Apple watch significantly.
Marco:
As I mentioned earlier, it's always shocking to me, like how, how weird of a platform it still is for apps, how limited it still is, how buggy it still is.
Marco:
Even with Apple's own built in apps, like,
Marco:
Does Apple use AirPods with Apple Watches to play music frequently?
Marco:
Do they know?
Marco:
There's tons of bugs with one ear having its volume set to zero all the time for some reason until you adjust the volume and it goes back up.
Marco:
There's weird bugs that you would think they would run into.
Marco:
But anyway, the watchOS stuff, I'm always going to have a massive wish list because it's always going to need a lot of work.
Marco:
So I'm hoping for some big improvements there.
Marco:
But everything else, please just do stability releases.
Marco:
The watch doesn't need it because it's already so unstable.
Marco:
There's no expectation.
John:
Is everyone in favor of Catalyst messages?
John:
Because I totally am.
John:
Even if it is just as bad as current Catalyst apps, I just want feature parity.
John:
It annoys me so much that there's things I can only do on my iPad and iPhone through messages.
John:
Such as?
John:
Like do all the screen effects and be able to see them.
John:
It doesn't have feature parity.
John:
It's just not as capable as the iOS version.
John:
And I know if we make a Catalyst, it'll be worse in a bunch of ways than the Mac app.
John:
But Catalyst will mean, in theory, I'm assuming, that it would actually have feature parity.
John:
And so that way, it could go in lockstep with the iOS version.
John:
So if they add some feature to Messages, it will come in both of them at the same time instead of having this lag or whatever.
John:
And honestly, Messages could be a better app overall, right?
John:
So I share...
John:
uh marcos hope that catalyst apps get better i think they will because you know it was the first year for catalyst it was it was bad we all know it's bad the apps are bad right but you know year two let's if apple's going to continue to have this be a thing i'm sure it will improve uh and i'm hoping that the apps that they bring and what was it was the other app that desperately needs to be ported i forget and so we got messages and what's the other one that everyone keeps uh having rumors about that was it maps or is that's already catalyst no it's not um
John:
anyway this type of situation like the whole thing that catalyst is made for that there's something on ios that wouldn't be on the mac at all except if there's a way to get it there with you reusing the ui that's that's why that's one of the reasons that catalyst exists apple itself needs to start doing them i did it before with like voice memos and a whole bunch of other stuff it's like okay yeah right you're right that those wouldn't be on the mac if you couldn't just reuse the code for ios but honestly
John:
yeah, that's, they're more like a proof of concept.
John:
Like messages is, is getting into serious apps that you care more about.
John:
Um, hopefully they never do it with mail.
John:
Boy, that would be a nightmare.
John:
Mail has gone catalyst.
John:
It'd be like, no, I should destroy that application.
Casey:
You know,
Casey:
You know, speaking of messages, a slight tangent, something I really, really, really want, and it doesn't seem to me like it's impossible, but I really want to have support for, what do you call the tap backs, the, you know, thumbs up, thumbs down, ha ha, exclamations, et cetera.
Casey:
I want to have support for those in mixed forms.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
To, you know, thumbs up a comment or thumbs down a comment or haha comment or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
And because it's a group, I guess it's not strictly speaking an SMS.
Casey:
I guess it's a group MMS message.
Casey:
What comes out is liked.
Casey:
I'll be there soon.
Casey:
You know, like the words liked.
Casey:
I'll be there soon instead of the message that reads.
Casey:
I'll be there soon having a thumbs up on it.
Casey:
And it seems to me.
John:
It says Casey liked.
John:
I'll be there soon.
John:
Casey laughed at.
John:
I'll be there soon.
John:
Right.
John:
Isn't that what it says?
Casey:
I don't think it, it doesn't attribute it as Casey said, I don't think, and I'm not going to try to look it up now, but one way or another, it's clear that it took the verbatim message and put the word liked and then quotations around it.
Casey:
And so you feel like, I feel like this is a solvable problem with computers today that we could look back at prior messages and see if anything matches verbatim and see, maybe we should just throw a tap back on there if you're an iOS or, you know, macOS person.
Casey:
I really wish that worked.
Casey:
That would be very, very nice because it's very, very annoying.
Casey:
But this is the thing.
Casey:
For all of the incredible things Apple does in general, and as much as we poop all over them, Apple software developers seem to be a pretty smart, pretty talented group.
Casey:
But I think one of – to my eyes, one of Apple's bigger problems from a software development point of view is how unbelievably myopic they are.
Casey:
The quintessential example of this was how great Apple Maps has always been in the Bay Area but has been utter garbage – well, was utter garbage for the longest time everywhere else.
Casey:
And hey, guess what?
Casey:
If everyone is working in the Bay Area that works on Apple Maps, it's going to be great there and it's going to be garbage everywhere else.
Casey:
And so one thing I hope that comes from this godawful pandemic is if Apple were to, you know, somehow actually start to acknowledge that there are other parts of the country that exist and, hey, people might want to live there.
Casey:
then maybe things like that will get better.
Casey:
And so this relates to my messages complaint because I would bet that most of these Apple engineers just don't really exchange text messages with Android people that often.
Casey:
I mean, why else would this not be a fixed problem already?
Casey:
And it's just, that sort of thing just really chaps my hindquarters when it's something that's a real bugbear to me with Apple software, but because it's like just barely off the happy path, I suspect that nobody at Apple has ever seen it.
John:
I think tons of Apple people have mixed conversations with people who don't have iPhones.
John:
I mean, it's the same reason you do.
John:
Like they may work for Apple, but it doesn't automatically mean their entire family works for Apple.
John:
Like I understand their constraint, like your idea of like, oh, if you see a verbatim message with the word liked in front of it, but that obviously doesn't work.
John:
If what if someone legitimately types a message like that?
John:
And like, where did my message go?
John:
Oh, it turned into a thumb because you happen to, you know, it's this, there's all sorts of problems.
John:
Like you're limited by the SMS network.
John:
right it has very limited bandwidth you don't want to put inline stuff in there that comes out as garbage on non-iphone so i understand the problem and obviously apple solution is that everyone should have iphones but in the meantime like in the meantime you casey can solve this problem by typing different things use your words casey don't just communicate with a little thumb