I Reboot With Reason
Marco:
We're getting close.
Marco:
We're getting close to WBC.
Marco:
I'm so excited.
Marco:
I'm getting excited.
Marco:
I'm getting excited.
Marco:
I've come full circle now with the headset.
Marco:
I've followed the complete Apple hype cycle.
Marco:
First, I was like, they're doing what?
Marco:
What?
Marco:
That seems weird.
Marco:
Why are they doing that?
Marco:
Then I'm like, what?
Marco:
This can't possibly be very good.
Marco:
Everything else on the market sucks.
Marco:
How is Apple going to make something good?
Marco:
Then I'm like, well, if they're going to release something, it's probably going to be pretty good.
Marco:
then you know i start hearing reports and rumors it's actually really good and now i'm like oh my god it's gonna be here it's gonna be really good oh my god like i it's happening this is just a cycle you know i go through all their new rumored launches and i think it's possible to be really good but i still don't know quite what that looks like and i like i'm excited again kind of what i said last week like i'm excited because i trust that if they are this excited about it it's probably for good reason
Marco:
And I still don't think I want to actually use this.
Marco:
But we'll see.
Marco:
And I'm excited to see what it is and to see how it's going to change our lives forever or not.
Marco:
Is it going to be like the iPhone or is it going to be like the Apple TV?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
We'll find out.
Marco:
Or the HomePod.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
I hope not the HomePod.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know.
Casey:
I think I am also going through the standard Apple slash KC regarding Apple cycle.
Casey:
Right now, I'm just kind of confused by it because I don't feel like it's filling a hole I have in my life.
Casey:
But typically when I say that, I end up buying whatever the thing is and realizing I had a perfectly shaped hole for exactly that device in my life.
Casey:
I just didn't realize it at the time.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
uh i'm i'm optimistic though i mean i have understood vr to be extremely cool i've only very briefly tried like oculus stuff extremely briefly um so i haven't had enough time with it to really understand what makes it so special uh but everyone i know has tried it says it's amazing and and and certainly the rumblings that we're hearing well fair enough uh but the rumblings that we're hearing is that the apple stuff is amazing so
Casey:
Yeah, I'm excited to see it.
Casey:
And I'm curious what the story will be around it.
Casey:
But it'll be neat to see.
Casey:
I wonder, you know, you'd said earlier, Marco, that Apple's excited about it.
Casey:
And we heard, I think through Gurman, I'm not going to be able to find a link for the show notes, but I thought Gurman had posted something last week or two that said like,
Casey:
A lot of the Apple executives are kind of pumping the brakes on this internally, which is interesting to me.
Casey:
That doesn't necessarily mean it's not great.
Casey:
It doesn't necessarily mean it's garbage.
Casey:
We'll see what happens.
Casey:
But I think on the macro level, I think you're right that Apple broadly does seem to be excited about it.
Casey:
And it's certainly interesting.
Casey:
Even if it's a disaster, I think it'll be interesting.
Casey:
And selfishly, it'll give us plenty of stuff to talk about, be it a disaster or a winner.
Casey:
I think it's interesting.
John:
there's going to be a lot to discuss and i'm super duper looking forward to that i'm excited about the boring wwc stuff like you know i setting aside the headset which i you know but it's probably not going to be for me but it's exciting to talk about but like you know they have new versions of all the os's new new frame you know versions of frameworks new version of xcode all that stuff that they always do you know all the swift stuff that i already know because swift is developed in public and
John:
Like, just all that good stuff.
John:
It's the sort of refresh all your things, period.
John:
And that's, even in quote-unquote boring years, that's exciting.
John:
It's exciting to me as a user.
John:
It provides the dim hope of...
John:
of whatever things that I'm dealing with in my apps or in my usage of these platforms might be fixed because, hey, it's the major next new version.
John:
So, you know, as we sit here going through 13.1, 13.2, 13.3 of macOS and, like, things aren't fixed or unchanged.
John:
You're just like, well, it's too late in the cycle.
John:
You got to wait for 14.
John:
And so hope springs eternal.
John:
It's like, well, the new version of macOS, that's when...
John:
whatever thing annoys me is going to fix maybe my weird windowing thing will be fixed accidentally in there like who knows uh and then all the new frameworks all the new apis that maybe i'll see something that'll be exciting and i'll be excited to add some feature to one of my applications because of a new api they added or something like that uh and you know user facing features stability performance improvements all that good stuff on all their platforms and you know
John:
That happens every WWDC.
John:
That alone is enough for me personally to be excited about it.
John:
It's not enough for like WWDC to be a smash hit in the major media for that you need a headset.
John:
But I like the boring stuff.
John:
I'm excited to watch some WWDC sessions where they tell me about new APIs in an obscure framework that no one else cares about.
Casey:
let's start with some follow-up the dell 6k monitor that was a phantom and then got a price just a week or two ago i think a week it was last week we were talking about it suddenly it's already in people's hands and so alex stevenson price uh took the fall for all of us and he bought the what was it 3200 something like that uh dell 6k monitor and because alex is a gentleman
Casey:
It works at Plex if memory serves.
Casey:
So double bonus points there.
Casey:
Anyways, Alex has tweeted, tooted a thread with regard to what it's like to use this thing with a Mac.
Casey:
And so I'm going to read most of that thread.
Casey:
There's not too much here.
Casey:
Alex writes, everything works out of the box with one Thunderbolt cable in zero software or drivers installed, which is awesome.
Casey:
That means I don't have to install any Dell software or rely on them keeping it updated.
Casey:
You can't control brightness or speaker volume with the system keys out of the box, but I found that there's a popular open source app for third-party monitors called Monitor Control.
Casey:
And we'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
That makes it just work and uses the system GUI, and it makes it completely transparent.
John:
I don't know if those two things, you know, match up there.
John:
You don't have to install any drivers and everything works.
John:
No.
John:
Almost everything.
John:
But no, but it's good to hear that basically like it works as a monitor and the stuff on it seems to work like it just acts like a Thunderbolt hub, I guess, or however it's doing its job.
John:
So and then monitor control thing, I don't think is a driver.
John:
I think it's just an app or whatever.
John:
So this is a pretty good story.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Alex continues, I freaking love all the ports, Ethernet, USB-As, USB-Cs.
Casey:
It's so flexible.
Casey:
I can just plug in everything I had connected to my old Intel iMac without needing a Thunderbolt hub or something else.
Casey:
And the pop-out front ports are useful and totally hidden when you don't need them.
Casey:
I also like having an HDMI input for versatility.
Casey:
It means I can easily plug in something like a console or an Apple TV for testing.
Casey:
And it can do picture in picture with the HDMI, which is neat.
Casey:
And then Ben Smith chimed in and wrote, I haven't used this 6K monster yet, but about a year ago, Dell released Dell Display Manager, or DDM, for Mac, which gives pretty complex software control of their displays.
Casey:
It worked well in my two 27-inch 4Ks.
Casey:
It feels like a sign Dell is committed to supporting the Mac.
Casey:
DDM was Windows-only for eons before this.
Casey:
So I'll put a link to the Dell Display Manager as well.
John:
The picture-in-picture on HDMI sounds cool.
Casey:
Yeah, that is super cool.
John:
That's the type of hardware feature.
John:
The Mac doesn't have to have any idea that it's there or that it's existing.
John:
It's just something that the monitor does for you.
John:
And for particular scenarios, like maybe someone who works for Plex, that might be super handy as opposed to trying to do some software solution and funneling it through a window that macOS is aware of.
Casey:
Super cool.
Casey:
All right, so we have some Final Cut Pro follow-up.
Casey:
People have used it.
Casey:
I have not.
Casey:
But people have used it, including Jason Snell over at Six Colors.
Casey:
And we'll put a link to his hands-on, which includes a couple of videos.
Casey:
I didn't watch the 30-minute one.
Casey:
I didn't have the time.
Casey:
But there's a shorter one that he has a screen capture of him doing some editing for the little upgrade social media videos that they do.
Casey:
So Jason writes, unlike Final Cut, Logic offers round-trip support for Logic projects.
Casey:
Sorry, I should have mentioned we're also talking about Logic here.
Casey:
Round-trip support for Logic projects between iPad and Mac.
Casey:
That's great, but be warned.
Casey:
Your Mac project must have been saved as a package or whatever.
Casey:
If it's not, you'll need to use the save as command to make a project version.
Casey:
I'm assuming, Marco, you can translate this because I have no idea what any of this means.
Casey:
Anyway, and must use the musical grid, not the standard time format.
Casey:
That's a very strong hint to anyone who is not a musician that this is not the tool for you.
Casey:
Marco, can you translate that into dum-dum for me, please?
Marco:
All right, so the first part is package format versus whatever format.
Marco:
All of these, Logic and Final Cut, the file formats that they save in are actually, as far as I know, in both cases, by default, are macOS packages, which are basically directories inside of which could be any number of files.
Marco:
That's kind of their native format.
Marco:
And that works...
Marco:
fine in most cases it does cause some problems with like syncing platforms sometimes because it's kind of treated as a whole bunch of files inside of a special directory but anyway that's just at the point and that's i don't know what they're doing there with ios and how that works there the the second part of it though about the um changing the the measures to time basically um
Marco:
So Logic is a music composition program.
Marco:
That is primarily what it is designed to do.
Marco:
And so by default, Logic projects do not work in timestamps.
Marco:
They work in beats and measures because it's for music.
Marco:
When you are using Logic to edit podcasts, that super gets in the way because it'll try to snap any edit you make to the beat grid of whatever you told it the BPM of your project slash song was.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
When you try to use Logic to edit podcasts, which, again, it's really not made to do, but it happens to be a really good podcast editor if you convince it to do it, you can change the time scale that it's using from beats and measures to just a timestamp, which is what you want when you're editing podcasts.
Marco:
And then you can drag stuff wherever you want, and you're seeing things represented as time instead of beats, and that's what you want.
Marco:
it seems like the iPadOS version of Logic Pro does not support that time-based measurement at all.
Marco:
It is only beats and measures and stuff.
Marco:
So maybe they'll add that down the road, but it's not there now.
Marco:
And among some other little issues here and there, that basically makes it very clear that this is really not for podcasts on the iPad.
Marco:
That being said, as Jason Snell has pointed out,
Marco:
You have Ferrite on the iPad, which is a really good app that edits podcasts in a Logic style, but it's made specifically for podcast editing on the iPad, and that fills that role very well.
Marco:
It doesn't help you if you're a Logic person on the Mac and you want to round-trip stuff.
Marco:
That's not very good.
Marco:
But again, as I said last week when these were introduced, I don't think...
Marco:
round tripping between the mac and the ipad is going to be a very common need for a lot of people using these programs i i have a feeling you're going to use it either on the ipad or the mac and i don't think a lot of people are going to be trying to use this like edit the same projects on both platforms back and forth for lots of reasons mostly practical and technical but also i think if you if you're the kind of person who likes to and has the ability to edit this kind of stuff on a mac you're
Marco:
you're probably going to want to use the Mac pretty much every time, whereas the iPad versions are going to largely appeal to people who either don't have a Mac at all or have a Mac but don't have the multi-hundred-dollar Mac versions of these software.
Marco:
So I think we're putting too much of a focus on the round-tripping aspect here, but that being said, the limitation of logic on the iPad to not use time-based measurement is...
John:
is that's pretty fatal for podcast editing so you know maybe but they'll probably get to it in the future as much as they said it was around like logic is supposed to be the one that is round triple setting aside uh plugins which we talked about uh last episode this is not a plugin issue this is like oh it's round triple but there's this thing that we totally didn't mention and you only see it if you're doing podcasts which again is not what this program is designed for but it is kind of weird that there's these caveats
John:
I feel like a big selling point for both of these apps could have been, this is not a toy version of insert app name here.
John:
It's the full-fledged thing, and you can do everything you can do on the Mac version, and that is absolutely not true for these applications, at least in version 1.0.
John:
So they couldn't make that point, and they didn't, but they did kind of say that Logic Pro was round-trippable, and as Dan Moran points out, he couldn't even figure out how to switch a podcast to be measure-based, even though it would surely be annoying, as you just said, Marco, of snapping to points that have no meaning in your podcast.
John:
Like just to get it over there, you know, just to have it.
John:
He was probably just going to try it out to review it or whatever.
John:
But yeah, we'll have to wait for future versions to see where this goes.
John:
Like the fact that podcasters, some podcasters use this as their audio editor.
John:
Makes it seem like kind of... I mean, same thing with GarageBand.
John:
GarageBand used to have a podcast template, I believe, and then they ditched that a while back, I think.
John:
This is not the intended use case of the programs, but certainly for GarageBand, it was at one time a supported use case, and Logic, you could use it for podcasts, and it wasn't awful.
John:
It seems kind of weird that Apple...
John:
Doesn't even consider that case important enough to support like non measure and beat based timelines, which like which they already supported in the Max version.
John:
So it's I don't know if this is a signal.
John:
This is just prioritization of 1.0 features or whatever.
John:
But I do feel kind of like, yeah, it's not a big deal.
John:
But again, logic is for musicians.
John:
Like if you saw the whole intro videos, all the musicians, that's fine.
John:
But it kind of feels like Apple should somehow make it even worse for podcasters so we wouldn't even try to make more of a market for like Ferrite and other apps like that.
John:
Because a lot of those apps have trouble.
John:
Like Ferrite is kind of amazing.
John:
It's a passion project from a small dev team.
John:
Is it only one developer?
John:
I don't even know.
John:
I think it is.
John:
Like that's amazing.
John:
But like think of on the Mac the sort of renaissance I think of
John:
graphics applications you know for a longest time it was like photoshop and illustrator and then maybe like freehand back in the day uh but they became old and creaky and new entrants came in whether it's you know the the whole affinity suite or pixel mater or uh photo mater or the the renamed pixel mater photo thing like there's there's a lot of stuff going on on the mac for in a market that seemed to be closed off apple has never really participated in this market um but with apple having logic out there uh
John:
And it kind of being useful for podcasts, but not really.
John:
I don't know.
John:
It seemed like to be a comfortable, weird place.
John:
I think Marco will be our canary in the coal mine here, kind of like he was for like switching to Swift, right?
John:
When does Marco finally give up on Logic Pro and try using something else slash try writing his own editor?
Marco:
yeah i don't i don't know i think at that point i would probably like i i know fair right has kind of flirted with the idea of a mac app here and there oh i think that's coming yeah i don't i don't follow it enough but yeah i'm pretty sure that is coming and and i think if logic were to become extremely hostile to podcast production even more so than it is now i think ferrite would just step in and replace it uh for for the you know people like like me and jason snell who actually edit this way
John:
Or like Adobe Audition or like there are other editors out there.
John:
I'm just saying it feels weird.
Marco:
Look, I have Audition.
Marco:
I don't edit podcasts with Audition.
Marco:
So the way Jason and now I edit podcasts, I kind of ripped off his whole style.
Marco:
It involves having the tracks split up into little blocks of non-silent speaking.
Marco:
So, you know, right now, as the two of you are not speaking, there is nothing on your tracks.
Marco:
And then, you know, right now I'm speaking and there's a block of audio.
Marco:
When as soon as I stop speaking and one of you jumps in and tells me how wrong I am, there will be a second block.
Marco:
Now, right now, Casey just laughed.
Marco:
That will be its own block on his track.
Marco:
Now, I can just really quickly, I can drag that left or right and move it forward or back in time.
Marco:
Or I can just click it and hit delete.
Marco:
And it is perfectly easy and fast to do that kind of edit.
Marco:
And so that's the kind of edit I'm doing is...
Marco:
moving around the blocks, deleting them.
Marco:
If somebody coughs, I can just click it, hit delete.
Marco:
That block is gone.
Marco:
If Casey laughed too slowly and I want to make my joke sound funnier, I'll scoot it up half a second.
John:
It takes him a little bit longer to get it.
John:
You can shrink up that delay.
John:
This is a very complicated way of saying that you run strip silence on everybody's tracks beforehand, in case people are wondering.
John:
The tracks come as a big, long, continuous strip of audio, and then you do strip silence, and it'll strip out with some tolerance all the parts in the track where somebody's not talking.
Marco:
Right, and by the way, and that feature doesn't exist in Logic for iPad.
Marco:
But that style of editing, I have found...
Marco:
is much easier and faster and more efficient to do in logic than it is to do in audition or any other program I've seen so far.
John:
Audacity is another popular one, I think.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Look, audacity is, it's free.
Marco:
It's this nice open source audio program.
Marco:
That's great.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
i wish audition could do it because i'm already paying for a ridiculous adobe creative suite thing so i can get access mostly just to audition and i love audition for lots of audition is like my audio toolbox like i do a lot of other stuff in it but i just don't like the way it edits and so anyway that style of editing logic fits that style really well and it fits my brain it fits my workflow and everything even though it fights me at every single turn if i like slightly veer off if i hit the wrong button or like if i'm typing in a chapter title as a marker
Marco:
And if I left if I left the podcast playing while I'm typing in a chapter title, occasionally something will grab the keyboard focus back to the track as it's playing.
Marco:
And the word I'm typing, which will contain a bunch of like regular letters, not holding command or anything.
Marco:
Regular letters in logic do all sorts of stuff.
Marco:
You can just hit A, and that does something.
Marco:
That brings up automation.
Marco:
So if you're typing a word with a few regular letters in it, and the focus gets out of that text field and goes back to the main window, which happens through some kind of weird bugger behavior constantly...
Marco:
As you finish typing the word, the window goes crazy with everything you just accidentally invoked.
Marco:
And you're like, oh my god, what happened?
Marco:
How do I get back?
Marco:
How do I undo this?
Marco:
And a lot of times the answer is I have no idea how to undo this.
Marco:
I just close it and reload for my last save.
Marco:
So I save pretty frequently.
Marco:
So anyway, logic fights you a lot.
But...
Marco:
It is really good when you got it, when you're in it, when you got it, and you're just getting through it.
Marco:
It's really good for that style of editing, and I haven't found anything better than that.
Marco:
So I use it for that.
Marco:
But the reason why Ferrite was able to come in as what I believe a single-person developer was able to do is because people who use Logic at a podcast like me are using a fraction of the functionality that Logic offers because we're not doing music production.
Marco:
If you actually focus on that little subset of abilities, you can make a really great editor as a small team.
Marco:
You know, one of my ideas for a very long time has been, hey, if this podcast app business thing doesn't work out, maybe I should go make an editor.
Marco:
I would love to make an editor, but I've always thought, like, I don't have time or the market's too small.
Marco:
Well, fortunately, Ferrite already now exists, and so I probably don't need to.
Marco:
So that's great.
Marco:
So anyway, if logic ever blows up for podcast use any further, I think we'd all just switch to Ferrite.
Casey:
Benjamin Mayo writes, quote, keep Final Cut Pro open until the export is complete, quote.
Casey:
This point alone would put me off using it seriously.
Casey:
Who wants to sit there with a foreground process bar, progress bar, excuse me, for minutes at a time?
Casey:
It feels like a dated restriction that iPadOS vNext could remove in light of VRAM, etc.
Casey:
So, in other words, apparently the official Apple instruction is you need to keep the app foregrounded as long as export is happening, which makes sense given the restrictions within iOS and iPadOS, but...
Casey:
It's kind of janky.
John:
They should have put a breakout game in there.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So this is a great example of like, what is it like to write pro apps for the iPad?
John:
The iPad, again, the M2 iPad, you can get it with like 16 gigs of RAM and an M2 SoC, the same thing that's in the M2 MacBook Air.
John:
It's just like there's it's incredibly powerful.
John:
But of course, if you want this export to complete, keep the app open.
John:
like that's you know and and who if you're apple writing a pro app hey apple you're empowered to make this better well but hold on i i feel like if it would be gross if they cheated and allowed themselves to background like i know i'm saying by adding the os level features to be able to say if you could do something in the background and you won't be killed like
John:
especially on iPads that have swap as we discussed in past shows.
John:
Like there's what separates them from a Mac with a single user logged in.
John:
They're a weird Mac with a single user logged in running a slightly different OS with slightly different GUI toolkits that is way less resource constrained than the Mac is because the Mac has all sorts of random stuff running out.
John:
I have multiple users logged in at the same time.
John:
Who knows what's taking up memory all over the place.
John:
The iPad is so locked down, so minimized.
John:
Every app on the iPad exists.
John:
has been brought up and existed in an environment of, like, resource starvation.
John:
They're not allowed to do certain things in the background.
John:
They're not allowed to hog the CPU.
John:
It's, like, so constrained.
John:
It's the quietest neighborhood of this sort of hardware class in Apple's product line.
John:
And yet, if you want to export a video from Final Cut, the only choice is just keep this app in, you know, make sure it stays running.
John:
Just keep staring at it.
John:
It's like going back in time to when you couldn't switch to another application because the previous one you were using would just disappear.
John:
they need to fix this like the hardware is so powerful and now they have powerful programs like final cut on them that kind of dialogue box is kind of and you know the final cut pro team is not empowered to make that change the ipad os team is empowered to make that change a new set of apis or a different set of restrictions for certain applications in certain situations yada yada yada
John:
uh you know i have to imagine like i said the if you were to you know hop onto an ipad at a terminal or you know look at the equivalent of activity monitor it's such a quiet neighborhood on there everybody is well behaved and quiet because they know if they act up the os is going to kill them uh not so on the mac and a mac with the equivalent power you don't have any of these restrictions you can
John:
Launch Final Cut, export, go do something else, play a game while it's exporting.
John:
I mean, obviously it'll slow down your export or whatever, but you don't have to worry that, you know, the Mac OS is going to kill Final Cut in the background because you opened a game.
Casey:
Yeah, it really is unfortunate.
Casey:
And, you know, I know that it snuck up on Apple that the hardware is more advanced than the software because none of us have ever mentioned this before.
Casey:
I'm sure they've never thought about it before.
Casey:
But what are you going to do?
John:
They didn't know four years ago that they were going to make an M1-based iPad.
Casey:
Right, right.
Casey:
Chris Hawking writes that you can go from Final Cut Pro on the Mac to Final Cut Pro on the iPad.
Casey:
John, tell me about how this is all held together.
John:
So this is what, it gets back to what Marco was referring to, the bundle structure of quote-unquote documents.
John:
In macOS, they're often directories with file name extensions on the directory name, and there's a bunch of stuff inside them.
John:
So apparently, Final Cut Pro on the Mac uses .fcp bundle files, and on the iPad, it's .fcpproj, short for project.
John:
Um, and the, the FCP proj bundle inside that buried in a certain directory structure is the FCP bundle directory.
John:
So the trick is you make the thing to make an FCP proj, and then you bring that over to the Mac.
John:
And then on the Mac, you edit the FCP bundle that's inside there, because if you right click in the finder, you can do show package contents and like dig the thing out.
John:
So you let, you let the Mac version of final cut, edit the FCP bundle that's buried inside the bundle for the iPad version.
John:
And then you bring it back and, and,
John:
You know, it's a little bit janky and a bunch of stuff won't work.
John:
And you can even you can even go the other direction.
John:
You can make this this file structure on your Mac to sort of encase your Mac Final Cut project thing.
John:
As long as you make this metadata file with the right data and all the other stuff, which is very tricky or whatever.
John:
But what it looks like to me is that the iPad, quote unquote, file format for Final Cut Pro is.
John:
uh is just the mac one wrapped in more crap and that that gives me you know again makes me optimistic that the mac version will eventually support this because it seems like just a superset of the mac format the mac file file is inside this directory with other stuff so i don't see how it couldn't support everything so i hopeful in a year or two as they revise these things they'll sync up in a more sane way and maybe be able to go back and forth
Casey:
And then Steve Trouten-Smith has, I guess, done a little bit of spelunking and has some notes.
Casey:
Steve writes, Final Cut Pro looks to be using the SwiftUI app lifecycle.
Casey:
It uses a SwiftUI app, as in the class app, you know, APP.
Casey:
And AppDelegateAdapter, Logic uses a traditional UI application main.
Casey:
If not merely an architectural choice, it might suggest that the Final Cut Pro app codebase is a lot younger, which could explain why it's less fully featured than Logic.
Casey:
I think that means that Final Cut Pro officially counts as a SwiftUI app using UIKit and not just a UIKit app using SwiftUI.
Casey:
And finally, Steve writes, baffling, the first run screen or welcome video that you see for 10 seconds on Final Cut Pro is a whopping 180 megabytes of the 750 megabyte install size.
Casey:
That is, that's a bold choice.
John:
Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
John:
Once you get the apps to be that size, maybe it's not that big of a deal, but it's kind of weird.
John:
Like, why do you need a welcome video at all?
John:
What year is this?
John:
Remember the welcome videos on Mac OS X?
John:
Those were cool and everything, but even those weren't this big.
John:
They weren't this big proportionally to the size of Mac OS X, my memory is.
John:
And anyway, you weren't downloading those from the App Store, I suppose, coming on plastic disks.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And then tangentially related, Ben Shireman pointed out to me something that I've been waiting for in Final Cut Pro on the Mac.
Casey:
So oftentimes, well, I shouldn't say often, occasionally,
Casey:
Uh, myself and Aaron will be at like a school function or something like that.
Casey:
And I will often have my big camera with a zoom lens, sometimes using that for video because it'll record 4k video.
Casey:
And then she'll have her iPhone and she'll be recording video.
Casey:
And one of the perks of having gotten used to final cut pro and doing Casey on cars is that I can, I know how to do like multicam recordings and things like that within final cut pro.
Casey:
However,
Casey:
My camera records SDR and iPhones record HDR.
Casey:
And in order to get both of them in the same project and not have it look completely weird and oftentimes way dimmer than it should, you had to do like a ton of work.
Casey:
And I forget exactly how you do it, but it's a real pain in the hindquarters.
Casey:
And in 10.6.6, Polka Pro 10.6.6, which just came out, I think, in the last week or so,
Casey:
One of the headline features on the little welcome screen is automatic color management.
Casey:
Easily edit HDR and SDR clips in the same project with intelligent tone mapping of video to match your color space.
Casey:
And it is so easy, in fact, that in the preferences for Final Cut Pro, at the bottom of the general tab, there's HDR, colon, check.
Casey:
Automatic color conform.
Casey:
That's all you have to do.
Casey:
And then magic happens, which is super cool.
Casey:
So now when we are at school functions recording our kids doing kid things,
Casey:
And trying to merge these together into one video, it won't look completely dark and underexposed, hypothetically anyway.
John:
So what does this actually do, practically speaking?
John:
You've got the HDR ones that have super bright stuff and then you have the SDR ones that don't.
John:
Does it take away the HDR from the HDR ones?
John:
Does it crank up the brightness on the SDR ones?
Casey:
Yeah, I understand what you're asking, and I don't recall the answer.
Casey:
Ben linked to, and we'll put in the show notes, a YouTube video where they talk about this, and I can't remember if they're pulling up SDR or bringing down HDR.
Casey:
That's probably a technically inaccurate way of describing it, but you get the gist.
Casey:
I don't remember off the top of my head which way it's going, but I presume it's got to be one or the other, right?
John:
Well, I mean, televisions do the same thing.
John:
Tone mapping isn't a term used in television settings as well.
John:
Televisions have to do it because, as we discussed in the past when talking about TVs, you can master video content for television shows and movies up to, you know, a maximum brightness level of like thousands and thousands of nits.
John:
And there is no television that you can buy.
John:
That can achieve those values.
John:
So you always have to map from, oh, the signal says this should be 4000 nits.
John:
Well, your TV maxes out at 1600 nits.
John:
So we're going to have to take these brightness values and map them, you know, using tone mapping down to fit on your TV screen.
John:
There's tone mapping on like a per frame basis on a per scene.
John:
There's tone mapping information that can come with the content.
John:
Video game consoles can provide tone mapping information to the television set based on what they know of the content that they're generating.
John:
Lots of different ways you can do this.
John:
Um, also SDR is supposed to max out at some incredibly low value, like the actual official, like NTSC television standard, I think is like, I don't know what the value someone's going to write and tell me I get it wrong.
John:
It's like 300, 350 nits.
John:
It's way less bright than you would think.
John:
Most television sets when showing quote unquote SDR will show it brighter than the SDR.
John:
They will show it at, you know, 500 or 600, just because brighter looks better.
John:
So already, most of the time you see regular SDR on a television set and on a monitor for that matter, because, you know, the monitors go up to like 500 nits or whatever, like the XDR, I think is five or 600 nits for non HDR content.
John:
you're already tone mapping up to make it a little bit brighter even though it's not technically correct so it could be that they actually do kind of meet somewhere in the middle because i think if you tone mapped sdr up to hdr levels it would look weird uh but you don't want to kill all the the hdr stuff this topic is way more complicated than my understanding of it obviously i'm just telling you the basics is like what televisions do with picture but like the whole world of color spaces and uh
John:
You know, look up tables and color correction and tone mapping is probably way more complicated when you're an app like Final Cut.
John:
But I kind of wish it did a bit like iMovie does, which is like, if you don't know what you're doing, just throw the video in a big pile and it'll handle it.
Casey:
Well, I think that's what this is doing now.
Casey:
It just wasn't doing that before.
John:
Yeah, it's got a checkbox.
John:
It said automatic color conform, which mostly does it for you as long as that checkbox is checked by default.
John:
But even iMovie has some weird stuff, like the tiny bit of video editing I do for my Destiny videos.
John:
I had to Google to figure out, like, I couldn't figure out why it wasn't, you know, my PlayStation 5 records at 60 frames per second, and my PlayStation 4 recorded at 30.
John:
So I'm like, great, now I can make 60 FPS videos.
John:
And I could not figure out why, no matter what I did in iMovie, it was always 30 frames per second.
John:
And the secret is, the first clip that you put in, iMovie decides...
John:
maybe that's documented somewhere and i probably could have guessed it or figured it out but i had to google to make sure like i'm like sometimes it would work and sometimes it wouldn't and i couldn't figure it out it's like just make sure the first clip is 60 and then from that point on as you chuck clips in the whole movie will be 60 even you know the 30s won't screw it up or whatever so do do what i mean or you know magical do everything for me can also be confusing uh but maybe not as confusing as the uh giant mess of controls that is final cut pro
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
That's lickability.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Lickability makes amazing apps crafted with care.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Lickability for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Hey, Marco, you stupid.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
What's 9 plus 10?
Marco:
Oh, God, this stupid thing.
John:
When you talked about this last show, Marco, I had no idea what you were talking about.
John:
But when I saw it, because you got the numbers slightly wrong, but when I saw the correct numbers, I vaguely recall seeing that somewhere, but...
Casey:
Oh, see, I don't think I'd ever seen this.
Casey:
It was mean, but funny.
Casey:
Yeah, so a handful of people wrote in with the Know Your Meme page or entry, if you will, for 9 plus 10 equals 21.
Casey:
Marco refused to play along with me.
Casey:
I'm very sad, but I'm sure using the magic of logic, he will clean that up to make both of us sound smart.
Marco:
There's only so much I can do.
John:
It's mostly made for editing music.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
That's true.
John:
But anyway, the point is... This is far from music.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
If you're interested in the history between 9 plus 10 equals 21, it's a very short, I believe it was Vine originally.
Casey:
It's all of like 10 seconds.
Casey:
And maybe Mark will drop it in.
Casey:
Who knows?
Marco:
I did not think it was funny.
Marco:
I just thought it was mean to the kid.
Marco:
Yeah, see, that's me as well.
John:
No, I don't like this meme either.
John:
It's vaguely upsetting to me.
John:
First of all, memes of little kids is not great because no little kid should be in a meme.
John:
And then it's like it's mean-spirited on top of that.
John:
I'm not a fan.
John:
Agreed.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I'm like, you know, I like memes where it's, you know, like like pretty much everywhere.
Marco:
It's going to be hot, like nice, simple, you know, dumb, but but like not punching down.
Marco:
I don't think at least.
John:
Yeah.
John:
A dog startled by a stuffed animal, that kind of thing.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
However, I am glad that I at least am now aware of what all of the children here are are talking about.
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
And then in the defense of John of Bleecker Street, there was a comment on Reddit.
Casey:
The ex-lurker writes, I went here during my last trip to New York on Casey's recommendation.
Casey:
It was incredible.
Casey:
The white pizza was probably the best I've ever had, and apparently that was no secret.
Casey:
There was a lineup down the street even at 8 p.m.
Casey:
Quick side note, I find an 8 p.m.
Casey:
dinner to be hilariously late, but I don't think that's really true in Manhattan.
Casey:
But nevertheless...
Casey:
The Ex-Lurker continues as a party of two.
Casey:
We got patio seats within a few minutes.
Casey:
Thanks to the wonderful service and staff.
Casey:
I'd say they made the experience just as much as the food itself.
Casey:
I also got a, I got two to that, which is, hmm.
Casey:
But I got two to that.
Casey:
And some, I couldn't put my hand on it.
Casey:
I couldn't, it was the weirdest thing.
Casey:
Mastodon on Ivory and on the website of Memory Serves, but definitely on Ivory.
Casey:
I could go back about a week in my mentions and then it jumped to like two months ago.
Casey:
I don't know what the deal was.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
It's Federation.
Marco:
We're fine.
Casey:
Yeah, it's all fine.
Casey:
I apologize.
Casey:
I can't cite the toot, and I don't know who tooted, but whoever smelt the Delta to my right.
Casey:
Hey-o!
Casey:
But the point is, somebody wrote to me and said, I went to John's years ago with my wife, and we are still talking about it to this day.
Casey:
So maybe not gold belly, maybe a little exceedingly expensive, maybe it doesn't travel the best, but if you happen to be in Manhattan, check it out.
John:
What's the follow-up to smelt it, dealt it?
John:
Is it denied it, supplied it?
Casey:
No, no.
Casey:
Whoever smelt it, dealt it, whoever made the rhyme, committed the crime is the one I'm used to.
John:
I think whoever denied it, supplied it.
John:
It's a slant rhyme, but you know.
John:
There may be some regional variations here.
John:
Yeah, I think there's more.
John:
There's probably a Wikipedia page that lists them all.
John:
I guarantee you there are more.
Casey:
uh okay so we were talking earlier about how marco likes that at podcasts and he likes to make it easy to just clip out an entire thing that somebody said um marco i'm gonna make it easy on you you're just you're gonna have to cut the next five minutes of me saying what the apple what why are you angry casey let me save you for myself why are you angry
John:
because i don't need to be told how to report bugs effectively i need them to respond to bugs effectively oh yeah this was bad no no but they're not that i'm mutually exclusive so this what he's talking about is apple posted this document that uh it contains a bunch of information about how to report bugs effectively
John:
It's making Casey angry for reasons that are explicable if you understand human nature and or know Casey.
John:
Or have you ever filed an effective bug?
John:
But looking at the documentation of how to file bugs effectively...
John:
I think it's well-written documentation that's mostly good advice.
John:
Now, it is frustrating when there is another problem with the bug reporting system that we've talked about many times on here.
John:
But this part of like, hey, for people who want to report a bug, here's our sort of best practices.
John:
These will help people get their bugs fixed better because the more information you can supply, the better you can supply it or whatever, fewer round trips.
John:
This is all good.
John:
even if it's not the part of the system that we think needs the most work it is a good thing apple should have this this documentation should exist and the things it says i mean i just mostly just skimmed it but the things it says are sensible and you know straightforward and well written so i'm not going to fault apple for making this documentation if anything if you want to complain about something casey you can say why didn't this documentation already exist because it seems like a basic essential thing that a big company like apple should have and who knows maybe they had an old version of it and this is
John:
this is the new version it's just frustrating because we think the problem is not on our end problem is it's not that we're not good at reporting bugs apple you're not good at responding to our bugs but i think they are two separate things so i pretty much applaud the creation of this documentation
John:
It doesn't really do much to help with the other side of the equation is once we've given you a beautiful bug report that follows all your best practices, what happens after that?
John:
And that's why we're still mad about.
John:
But I don't think you should transfer the anger over that process to this documentation because this documentation should exist and should be good.
John:
And it does exist.
John:
And I think it is.
Casey:
I understand everything you just said.
Casey:
I hear you and beep all of that right in the ear, right in the ear, because this is so obnoxious.
Casey:
Are you kidding me with this?
Casey:
Like, yes, John, I do understand.
Casey:
And I genuinely, I do agree with what you're saying.
Casey:
I honestly do.
Casey:
But this is so tone deaf and so obnoxious.
Casey:
I mean, I put it in the show notes when I work.
Casey:
So in the mornings, Wednesday mornings, I work on the show notes and I try to get most of it squared away then so I don't get distracted while we record.
Casey:
And what I put in the show notes is beatings will continue until morale improves because that's basically what they're saying here.
Casey:
Like, no, no, no.
Casey:
We are flawless, perfect people that have no issues on our side.
Casey:
But all you freaking idiots over there, let me help teach you how to make my job easier.
Casey:
Come on.
Casey:
Yes, John, I agree with you.
Casey:
I get what you're saying.
Casey:
You are right.
Casey:
I'm not as much as I joke.
John:
And even organizationally, the people who are empowered to write this documentation probably have no power over when and if bugs are responded to.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
The documentation team is not the same team that triages feedbacks.
John:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
Totally.
Casey:
But it's just so tone deaf.
Casey:
Even though everything you said is true, and as much as I'm giving you a hard time, it is true, and I do agree with you.
Casey:
And this is actually useful documentation.
Casey:
It's not too long.
Casey:
It's not too wordy.
Casey:
It's pretty good.
Casey:
And it's aesthetically nice to look at.
Casey:
It has a pretty easy URL.
Casey:
I forget what it is off the top of my head, but it's not a bad URL.
Casey:
But it seems like so unfair and so obnoxious that, first of all, of all the things Apple's documenting, this is what you're choosing to document.
Casey:
How about you document any of the 8,000 ****?
John:
APIs that just say... Other documentation does appear.
John:
Recently, they redid a bunch of documentation and did a really good job on it.
John:
That does happen.
Casey:
And they're getting better.
Casey:
They are getting better.
Casey:
I should give them credit in the sense that they are getting better.
John:
I don't know if they're getting better, but all I'm saying is they are doing other documentation.
John:
This is not the only documentation that they've done recently.
John:
They have done a bunch of other documentation.
Casey:
No, it's not.
Casey:
But it's just read the room, people.
Casey:
Read the room.
Casey:
There's so much more you could have done here.
Casey:
Cut me off, Marco, because I'm going to keep going.
Marco:
Apple has a profound inability to read the room so often.
Marco:
And this is one of those times.
Marco:
And look, I think both sides of this are true.
Marco:
I am sure Apple gets thousands and thousands of bug reports that are totally non-actionable because they're badly written, because they're incomplete, because they don't have required information.
Marco:
There are definitely people in Apple who have a problem in their hands of...
Marco:
These bug reports that are coming in, many of them are not good enough that we can actually act upon them or give a useful response.
Marco:
And therefore, we should tell people, hey, maybe try to do it this way.
Marco:
So that is totally valid.
Marco:
But when good people file good reports, they are so often either ignored or dismissed in a hurry without respect to the person who wrote them or the time they took that
Marco:
that it's a slap in the face to those of us who have ever done that because it seems like they are failing to read the room you know yes they get tons and tons of bug reports that need improvement also when you file correct bug reports you constantly are reminded by apple
Marco:
either via inaction, and in most cases, you can file an amazing bug report, give your sysdiagnose, give your sample project that demonstrates the issue every single time, give all the information you need, and as far as you can tell,
Marco:
No one has ever even looked at it.
Marco:
No one has ever even run your sample project.
Marco:
No one ever responds.
Marco:
It stays open forever.
Marco:
The vast majority of the bugs I file stay open forever with no commentary or response ever coming back my way.
Marco:
Now, I am fully aware, Apple people, before you set me on fire, I am fully aware that there can be internal discussion on the bug that I will never see.
Marco:
And for various reasons involving security concerns, but mostly just Apple's culture, for various reasons, the barriers are set up in place such that I will, as the bug filer, typically not see anything that's being discussed behind the scenes about my bug.
Marco:
The problem is the processes that you have in place, dear Apple bug people, have two massive problems.
Marco:
Number one, your secrecy dial is set too conservatively, and rather than ever tell us that even you're looking into it, we see status, open, response, none, forever.
Marco:
That's problem number one.
Marco:
So we can't tell if you're looking at our bugs, and frankly, it seems most of the time that you're not.
Marco:
Problem number two, I'm sure, dear Apple person, that your team deals well with bugs.
Marco:
Your team takes them in and they go through whatever the screener process is.
Marco:
And when they get to your team, I am sure your team runs those sample projects and actually reads the bugs and actually tries to act on them.
Marco:
and doesn't just have an autoresponder that says every time there's a new beta, please verify this is still the case in the beta.
Marco:
And if you don't do it within like, you know, two days, it automatically closes the bug.
Marco:
I'm sure your team doesn't do that.
Marco:
Unfortunately, many other teams do.
Marco:
And so that's the experience we get the vast majority of the time is either we get no response or
Marco:
Or, we get a response that suggests that the person who is making this response, if it's even a person and not just a script, their goal is to close as many bugs as quickly as possible while doing as little work as possible.
Marco:
And so they're trying... It's almost like, look, I have a child.
Marco:
That child sometimes does not want to do something.
Marco:
Say, you know, eat a new food or do homework.
Marco:
Whatever the case, something kids don't want to do.
Marco:
Kids that don't want to do something will often...
Marco:
Try to find some little tiny technicality that they think will cancel their ability to have to do the big thing they don't want to do.
Marco:
Even if it's not really relevant or even if it barely is relevant, it can be easily fixed.
Marco:
So, for instance, this piece of, you know, broccoli touched this lentil over here.
Marco:
Therefore, this invalidates my need to eat any of the rest of the things on the plate.
Marco:
I'm going going back to video games like that kind of logic.
Marco:
And of course, that's not valid.
Marco:
And this is why, like, you know, contracts that are written by lawyers tend to have clauses that basically say something along the lines of like, if some part of this contract is invalid or unenforceable, it doesn't make the rest of it invalid.
Marco:
Apple bug reporting does not seem to have such a clause.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And Apple bug reporting, it seems to be, if we can find any reason to close this bug report, we are going to do that immediately and with prejudice, if we've looked at it.
Marco:
Now, if we haven't looked at it, as I said, most of my bug reports just stay open forever.
Marco:
But if you do look at it, it seems like the most common response I get is those kind of autoresponders, like, please verify this is still the case in the newest beta of whatever, whatever.
Marco:
And then if I happen to be doing something else that week...
Marco:
And I happen to miss the usually unspecified deadline of like, hey, you know what?
Marco:
I don't actually run the Mac OS beta.
Marco:
So I don't actually know if this is still happening on Mac OS or whatever.
Marco:
If I happen to miss that few day period that they seem to give you, my bug just gets closed.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
It seems like they are constantly rushing through large batches of bug reports to close them.
Marco:
That's different from to fix the bugs.
Marco:
See, that's the problem here.
Marco:
Whatever the incentives are and the processes in Apple around bug reporting and bug filtering and bug processing or whatever, the process seems to encourage mass closure and invalidation of
Marco:
over actually reading them and fixing the problem.
Marco:
Because oftentimes, the very, very, very few times I've actually gotten a real response to a bug, it sometimes, frequently rather, seems that the person does not want to fix anything.
Marco:
They really just want to find a reason why they can ignore my bug report.
Marco:
Or why the thing I'm asking for, which seems very reasonable to me, like, hey, this API should behave the way it seems like it should by its name.
Marco:
Oftentimes the response is basically you're holding it wrong or we don't think it should behave that way because that would be difficult.
Marco:
Or like, you know, it's like, oh, you don't use this API.
Marco:
Go use this old deprecated one instead.
Marco:
It's like, well, that's not really a response that I can really use because it's deprecated.
Marco:
So often that's been the kind of responses I get.
Marco:
Usually nothing, but when I do get responses, it's either been seemingly automated or somewhat dismissive and trying to look for an excuse to not do work and to close the bug as quickly as possible.
Marco:
And I can totally see how a large engineering organization can create a system that has this dysfunction.
Marco:
Because, of course, you optimize for the metrics that you have to work with.
Marco:
So it is somebody's job to go through bug reports.
Marco:
They develop an incentive, whether implied or not, that they should go through as many as possible and try to close as many as possible.
Marco:
It is an engineering team's job that when bugs get assigned to them, they should probably look at them and verify them, and if they're real bugs, to schedule them for some kind of priority to get fixed and then actually fix them.
Marco:
However, it sure is a lot easier, especially when you're under crunch time, which is all the time.
Marco:
It seems a lot easier...
Marco:
If you can just find some reason why you don't have to fix them, then we can just close that report and move on with the things we actually need to do to solve this crunch time or the feature we actually thought was cool or whatever feature our boss is telling us has to be done by the end of the week.
Marco:
So it's not that our bug reports are all badly written.
Marco:
I'm sure many of them are.
Marco:
And it's not that Apple never responds well to bug reports, because they occasionally do, but it's that giant fat middle where the well-written, well-supported bug reports are so often, as far as we can tell, either ignored or dismissed for reasons that seem like crappy engineering management to us.
John:
There's some text that Casey pulled out of the thing here that is actually vaguely relevant to that.
John:
It says, please note, as an issue is being worked on, we can't provide status updates until a fix is available in a beta software update for everyone, or a different resolution has been identified after completing the investigation of the issue.
John:
So they're basically saying...
John:
We can't tell you anything about it.
John:
Don't ask us when it's done.
Casey:
That's what it's saying, but that's not the reality.
John:
And the thing that it says it can't be until basically until we think we have until basically we have think we have fixed it.
John:
We put that fix in a beta release and that beta release is released to everybody who is on the beta program.
John:
And only at that point can they provide an update to the feedback, which seems extremely, extremely bad.
John:
I mean, we've all noted that happening.
John:
Like the only thing you hear from them most of the time is like, oh, check if this is fixed in the beta.
John:
And Marco always thinks that means that someone's going through and just closing all the bugs and asking if they're fixed.
John:
But it could also be that.
John:
This process that they've just described in this document is happening, which is, well, they were working on it and they did implement a fix and they did put that fix in the beta.
John:
And now the only thing they're allowed to do is push whatever button that, you know, causes a boot to kick over a fishbowl that pours water onto a cat that runs over.
John:
wire it eventually causes someone to hit a uh you know a text expander macro that says check if this is fixed in b2876574 or 32 which you just have to know is you know mac os ventura 13.4.1 because they won't say that they'll just give you a build number as if you have them all memorized um and as if you're running mac os betas all the time um
John:
This is this is useful because it is official Apple process documentation of a bad process.
John:
And the bad process is we can't provide status updates.
John:
I mean, maybe you could say that means like we can't tell you how it's going.
John:
But it also kind of reads as what we experience is you just won't hear anything.
John:
And what you would like to happen is a back and forth with a human being who is working on this problem, clarifying, you sure X, Y, Z, and did you think about blah, blah, blah?
John:
And so you said you did that, but in your sample project, we do this, but does it work when you do that?
John:
And what are you actually trying to do?
John:
And why do you need this feature?
John:
And why do you think it should work that way?
John:
Back and forth, back and forth, you know, like how bugs work in functioning software projects, right?
John:
And that process can be the special public facing, totally separate from the internal discussion, blah, blah, blah thing.
John:
Because of Apple's weird secrecy thing.
John:
But if Apple wants to have the weird secrecy thing and the division between radar and feedback and all that, fine, that's on them.
John:
But it doesn't mean, okay, but now we can never communicate with you.
John:
No, now you have to have two separate areas of communication.
John:
The private one that's for all the Apple people and the public one with, you know, the person who reported and experiences the bug.
John:
Because it's important to communicate with them.
John:
It's important to...
John:
You know, like talk about the bug maybe before you even try to fix it, because maybe like you're thinking about a way that you think it should be fixed or you think it might be fixed by this other change or whatever.
John:
But that's the time to communicate with the reporter.
John:
And I have seen that happen occasionally where they will communicate and say, well, why is it that you want to do this or whatever?
John:
But this document makes it seem like actually that should never happen.
John:
You just report a beautifully formatted bug report and then you hear nothing until we say test this in the latest beta.
John:
And that's not a good process because skipping that whole middle portion where you discuss the bug may mean that you like maybe again, maybe the bug wasn't written clearly enough.
John:
Maybe you wrote it with some context that is that was in your brain, but it's not in their brain.
John:
And maybe even though you had a sample project, they think they understood how you wanted it to work, but you weren't entirely clear how you wanted it to work in the sample project.
John:
So they quote unquote fixed it according to what they thought the bug was saying.
John:
That can happen even in really well-written bug reports with really well-created sample projects that are very clear.
John:
Sometimes software is complicated and sometimes it's just a misunderstanding.
John:
That's why you have to have communication.
John:
Ideally, before you dive in and say, I know how I'm going to fix this, typey, typey, typey.
John:
Before you do that, make sure you understand the bug and the only way you can do that
John:
is talk to the person who's reporting it or the multiple people who are reporting it.
John:
These people are reporting the same bug.
John:
Maybe this person thinks that API should behave this way.
John:
This person thinks it should behave that way.
John:
And then internally, you think it should behave a different way.
John:
And like, it's just it's just exhausting.
John:
And how how much more difficult it makes everybody's lives.
John:
Obviously, it makes our lives difficult or frustrated because bugs don't exist.
John:
but i think it makes lives more difficult for the people writing the software as well because they are cut off from us just as we are cut off from them they can't reply to us apparently they're not empowered to do that they can reply on the internal thread and they can all discuss it but it's like they're all discussing you know a thing a bug that you reported but you're not allowed to be in the room and it's i wonder if they talk to each other i was like man if only the person who reported this bug could tell us what they meant instead of us arguing back and forth about it i think they meant this and i think they meant that but why do they think they
John:
want this do they have discussion threads internally where they're like debating it's like debating what the founding fathers thought or something when like George Washington is standing just outside a glass window saying I'm out here but you can't hear him because it's soundproof glass I'm out here just ask me I'm right here never mind that doesn't freaking matter what the founding fathers thought because that's stupid anyway that's the analogy I'm sorry um
John:
Like, we're here.
John:
You're there.
John:
Like, we should communicate.
John:
And if it has to be in some weird, you know, regimented secrecy-preserving way, so be it.
John:
But that just means you need more staff and more people to do that type of thing.
John:
Oh, that's too cumbersome for you?
John:
Well, then get rid of that and just trust your engineers to be able to hold their tongues when discussing things.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Like, whatever the solution is, this is in it.
John:
But this documentation like this is good because...
John:
If you ever, you know, encounter an Apple person and discuss this, it's difficult to pin this down because we don't know what's really going on.
John:
And they always think they know what's really going on, but they really don't.
John:
Because as we've talked about in the past, people within Apple don't have a full view of Apple either.
John:
They have a bigger view than we do on the outside for sure, but they can only kind of see their portion.
John:
of the company their portion of their you know the project or whatever and we can only see the tiny portion of the bugs that we throw over the wall but something like this where some group is empowered to write documentation that describes some part of the bug process for the whole company like this document is not just for like one framework for swift ui for you know it's this is this is not api platform anything specific this is whole company so whoever wrote this the responsibility was describe what good feedback is supposed to be
John:
like for developers and in that documentation they said we can't provide status update until it fixes available in a beta software update right so now you've got sort of like hard evidence proof it says well and the official apple documentation on the process that they follow this is what it says and we think this is bad and it's harder for them to say oh that's not how it works in my group i'm like look i'm just going to buy what apple's own documentation said it's easier to argue against this because otherwise we're just saying well i tried a thing and here was my personal experience and it's like that's just an anecdote i'm
John:
on average we do a really good job or within my group it's good and by the way on the whole like oh within my group we do good on feedback the problem is obviously we don't get to pick as developers which bugs we encounter like we don't get to say i want to make sure i encounter bugs in the group that's really responsive we don't we don't get to pick maybe i'm not even using that framework maybe that framework doesn't have any bugs maybe i don't encounter any all that has bugs you know it doesn't have any bugs that i encounter right
John:
when you're a developer you can't choose which api will do something unexpected based on how good how responsive you think the group is inside apple so and again when you're inside apple all you can do is be responsive in your group you can't as a you know rank and file developer somehow fix this feedback system internally but somewhere in apple's org chart there are people who
John:
who do have the power and responsibility to oversee this process.
John:
And if I met one of those people, I would have a little note card with this thing on it and say, see this highlighted passage here?
John:
This doesn't work for me for the following reasons.
John:
And if they say, oh, that highlighted passage is not actually how it works, I'll say, well,
John:
Maybe you should find the person who wrote this documentation that's supposed to apply to the whole company because apparently it's not true.
John:
Something is wrong here.
John:
Either this documentation is incorrect or you are incorrect about the policy that your company follows.
John:
Or the third thing is you can say, this is how it works and we think this is the best way it works.
John:
And then we're at an impasse there.
John:
Because if they really think this is the best way it should work, I think they should talk to more developers.
John:
That's what Marco keeps saying when he does read the room.
John:
He's basically like,
John:
Have you talked to enough developers to understand how we feel about the process?
John:
Is it working for us as developers?
John:
Separate from is it working for you, Apple, as a company and as the individual engineers, I think if you read the quote-unquote room at WWC, if you had as many developers as possible in the room at the same time and you actually talked to them about how the feedback process is working, I think what you would get is a net negative sentiment.
Casey:
Yeah, absolutely.
Casey:
And again, the thing is, they're choosing this.
Casey:
You know, what is it?
Casey:
We can't provide status updates.
Casey:
Bullshit.
Casey:
You choose not to, but you could.
Casey:
That is something you are capable of doing.
Casey:
And the other thing that drives me nuts is I know a lot of people at Apple that have been third-party developers, and they justifiably, for a moment anyway, really truly understood what it was like to be on the outside.
Casey:
But then they get inside, and they see how the sausage is made, and suddenly excuses are made for this.
Casey:
I don't care.
Casey:
I am not on the inside.
Casey:
I understand, and I think it was Marco going on about this earlier, and he's exactly right.
Casey:
I understand that they get an unfathomable amount of feedback, more than I could possibly imagine.
Casey:
And I understand that that is a very big burden.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
I don't care.
Marco:
Yeah, that's not on us.
Marco:
That's on them.
Casey:
That's not my problem.
Marco:
It's like, geez, it's so hard to make all this money all the time selling all these iPhones.
Marco:
Like, yeah, I'm sure there are challenges there.
Marco:
That's not our problem.
Marco:
Right, exactly.
Casey:
And part of being a platform vendor is vending the platform, including
Casey:
including making a platform, not a pile of shit.
Casey:
And if you want us to help you not make it a pile of garbage, then we need to be able to do that.
Casey:
And it's just so obnoxious for them to say, oh, excuse me, we would like it if you did your free labor in a way that was better for us.
Casey:
Please and thank you.
Casey:
We're not paying you for this time.
Casey:
I think the last time we spoke about this just a few weeks ago, a couple months ago, you know, I feel like I should bill Apple at whatever the going rate for an iOS contractor is, which years ago was like $150 an hour.
Casey:
I have no idea what it is now.
Casey:
But I should bill them for the time I write, filling out actually decent feedbacks.
John:
That's not how anything ever works.
John:
No, it is.
Marco:
I know you're frustrated, but that makes no sense.
Marco:
No, but I think it's frustrating that even if you read this document and even if you give it the most charitable interpretation of like, okay, sure, if Apple insists that they can't tell me what's going on with my bug until a beta version has been released that might fix it, that's totally understandable.
Marco:
It's not.
Marco:
And they can change that at any time to a large degree if they choose not to.
Marco:
But let's set that aside for now.
Marco:
Even that process does not happen consistently.
Marco:
I have so many bugs that go back years that actually were eventually fixed, that actually did eventually, the problem I was reporting did get fixed.
Marco:
Status, open, no response.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So, yes, some bugs make it into the system and do get those, like, please verify if it's fixed in this version of whatever.
Marco:
Some bugs do get that.
Marco:
Most of them still don't.
Marco:
Most of them still just stay open forever.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Yes, part of the process works that way, but there are still substantially broken parts of the process that make it so that our view from the outside is so often that filing bugs is a waste of our time.
Marco:
And it's not because we're trying to be lazy, and it's not because we're trying to be negative, and it's not because we're attacking your work personally, dear Apple engineer hearing me say this right now, we'll get to that in a second.
Marco:
It's that the process has shown us actions speak louder than words.
Marco:
And Apple's actions as a whole towards developers in this area have been largely failing us, largely dismissing us, and largely telling us that we are wasting our time.
Marco:
Now I know you, you individual Apple engineer listening to this...
Marco:
And you probably are very angry hearing this.
Marco:
Now, some of you will be like, yeah, you know, that's, yeah, they're right.
Marco:
You know, I wish we could fix it or I'm trying to fix it or whatever.
Marco:
But many of you Apple engineers listening to this right now are going to be angry at us.
Marco:
Now, I've been feeling for a while, actually, we have a larger cultural problem.
Marco:
You know, us podcasters and the commentary and the public versus you, the individual Apple engineer, are
Marco:
You get mad at us a lot because you feel like we're attacking your work.
Marco:
And I want to be very, very clear.
Marco:
First of all, you don't work independently of the company.
Marco:
You, when we attack something that you work on, we are attacking the output of the company.
Marco:
And that is maybe partially your responsibility.
Marco:
But on the whole, that's not on you, and we're not attacking you.
Marco:
Because your work is being shown through the context of a giant multinational corporation that we don't have good access into.
Marco:
We're not talking to you.
Marco:
You're not talking to us.
Marco:
There's all this context around this.
Marco:
I want to be very clear that...
Marco:
I don't want to attack individual engineers.
Marco:
You're working within a system, and that system occasionally fails you and it occasionally fails me.
Marco:
Our job on the outside is to comment on the work as a whole as we see it, as it gets out of the company, in the context of the company.
Marco:
You, dear engineer or bug screener at Apple who's here in the show, this isn't your problem.
Marco:
This is the problem of the system that is much larger than you within the company that you work for and the processes and incentives and realities of that system.
Marco:
So you, dear engineer, please don't be mad at us.
Marco:
We're not attacking you directly.
Marco:
Rather, we're trying to empower you.
Marco:
When we criticize the work of Apple or something about Apple, we are trying to empower the individual people inside the company to be able to do their best work and get their best work out to us.
Marco:
And we're doing that by making a stink in public so the higher-ups might feel some kind of heat on this issue, and that might help them decide, hey, this is worth looking into, or changing some policy, or making some decision differently, or allocating resources differently.
Marco:
That's what we're doing here on the outside.
Marco:
So again, I want you individual employee engineers, not just on this topic, but on lots of topics, we hear about this here and there, we hear some really hurt feelings.
Marco:
And I understand
Marco:
It hurts when people tell me my software sucks.
Marco:
I get it.
Marco:
And I really want to be clear here that we're talking about the company's processes and the company in general.
Marco:
The way to use us is to let our arguments speak in ways that you can't.
Marco:
Maybe you, for the good of your job, maybe you shouldn't be raising these concerns internally.
Marco:
I get that.
Marco:
There's a reason why I don't work in big companies.
Marco:
I wouldn't last very long.
Marco:
But chances are we can say things that you can't.
Marco:
We can reach people that you can't.
Marco:
So use us.
Marco:
Use these arguments to help make your department or your division or your project better and help convince the higher-ups with all of our rage and especially Casey's rage, of which there is much.
Marco:
Use this.
Marco:
Use this to make things better for everyone rather than taking it as a personal attack.
Marco:
Because I swear we don't mean it as a personal attack on any individual people or department there.
Marco:
Anytime we criticize anything about Apple, it's not meant to be like, oh my God, that was my project and you're directly insulting me.
Marco:
No, we are trying to make things better that are the output of a giant company.
Marco:
And sometimes the best way to do that is for podcasters on the outside to make a big stink.
John:
That's why you should wear your Mac Pro Believe shirts, too.
John:
Oh, here it is.
John:
There it is.
John:
One day a week, maybe, or on special occasions or at certain times, especially if you work anywhere near the Pro Mac hardware division.
John:
Just put that into your wardrobe rotation.
John:
I'm just saying.
Casey:
Do you know, because you presumably have shipment information forthcoming for the Ternus shirt, right?
Casey:
You haven't seen if that's shipped, have you?
John:
I'm assuming that I just got my son's Mac Pro Believe shirt came today.
John:
I know a bunch of people have gotten them.
John:
I didn't actually look at the shipping.
John:
I sent it to Apple Park.
John:
Is it ever going to actually make it to him?
John:
Who knows?
John:
Oh, of course not.
John:
If I was actually going to WWDC, I might deliver it in person, but you know.
Marco:
It's kind of a large building.
Marco:
Do you think it's kind of like... Are they going to place it in the middle of the ring?
Marco:
Just like, here, Apple Park.
John:
Boop.
John:
I'm assuming executives have people screening their mail so people don't send them anthrax and stuff.
John:
I'm assuming some, when they see a big name, like, oh, mail to Tim Cook.
John:
If you have a picture on the leadership page, I'm assuming someone is going through the mail.
John:
It's like sending something to the President White House.
John:
It'll get to them.
John:
Will it?
John:
I mean, in a functioning mail organization, not that we care at all about this, but hey, if you know how the mail process works inside Apple, feel free to send us some anonymous feedback.
John:
When people send you mail, can you just send it to Tim Cook Apple Park?
John:
I'm almost certain if you sent an actual piece of snail mail to Tim Cook at Apple Park, the main Apple Park address.
John:
It would make its way into the giant hopper that contains Tim Cook stuff.
John:
Would Tim Cook ever look at it?
John:
I don't know.
John:
But it's not like they'd be like, Tim Cook, I don't know who this is.
John:
It goes in the garbage.
John:
It doesn't have an office number on it.
John:
We can't deliver this.
John:
Return to sender.
John:
No, they're going to figure it out.
John:
And so I figured John Ternus is similar.
John:
Oh, my word.
Casey:
I think we need to move on because it just makes me ragey.
Casey:
I don't know if you noticed.
Casey:
But I do want to echo what Marco said.
Casey:
This is, I think, maybe I'm using the word wrong, but I think it's a political problem.
Casey:
And I think both Marco and John have pointed out that clearly Apple is not incentivized to fix this in a way that's compatible with third parties.
Casey:
And that doesn't mean it's any one individual contributor's fault.
Casey:
While I take a lot of fault or I have a lot of complaints with this whole thing, I don't mean to complain about any one individual person.
Casey:
And I know because I've exchanged emails with people on the inside that are desperately trying to change this and make it better.
Casey:
But unfortunately, rank and file.
Casey:
can't really turn a ship this big.
Casey:
And arguably, even the Federighis of the world, it's hard for them to turn a ship this big.
Casey:
So I get it.
Casey:
It's hard.
Casey:
I also get that I don't get how hard it is.
Casey:
But golly, it's just so infuriating from the outside.
Casey:
It just hurts.
Casey:
It hurts because without third party developers, this platform is not what it is.
Casey:
I mean, yes, it is an amazing platform.
Casey:
iOS, iPadOS, macOS are amazing platforms.
Casey:
But without third-party software, they ain't that great.
Casey:
And so I feel like, you know, it's just we keep turning another cheek.
Casey:
And at one point, I would love to not have to do that.
Marco:
Thank you.
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Casey:
John, turn my frown upside down, even though I really don't care about video games very much.
Casey:
Tell me about the new developments and make me care.
John:
Ah, so, video games.
John:
This was an announcement that probably came as a surprise to people who aren't obsessively following the company Bungie, but I am obsessively following the company Bungie because they're the makers of Destiny, that game I play all the time, except for now when I'm playing Tears of the Kingdom.
John:
But yeah, so they have announced a new game.
John:
The new game is Marathon, which is a name that may be vaguely familiar to you if you are an old school Mac gamer.
John:
uh i guess i have to start by explaining like was that that was the game like the mac game that was available i have i have a whole book full of games that was a classic you know that big uh book about like shareware mac stuff anyway uh there's a lot of surprising number but it's a very small community so marathon why was marathon important way back in the day uh max the thing that marco just did that happened all the time pc users were like oh max don't have any games or whatever that wasn't actually true there was a lot of really cool games on max
John:
um it was a very small and weird community but the thing that was true was hey you know that big new game that you heard of almost all the time that big new game that everyone is talking about would not be available on the mac there were exceptions and marathon was one of them and so was mist for example which is you know made on the mac for the mac but also shipped on other platforms
John:
But most of the time you couldn't play the big new game.
John:
And nowhere was that felt more than in the early days of PC first person gaming when Doom came out.
John:
Wolfenstein and then Doom.
John:
And, you know, if you were the right age of, you know, a teen, preteen around the time that Doom was coming out.
John:
and you were a Mac user, you knew that Doom existed.
John:
You wanted to play it.
John:
You couldn't play it because you had a Mac and your friends had Doom on their PC.
John:
And first-person shooters were the popular genre because it was like a genre-defining set of games from id Software.
John:
And there's a reason that that genre still exists.
John:
Destiny is a first person shooter, so it's still going strong.
John:
It is a very appealing, popular genre for a reason.
John:
And that was the beginning of it.
John:
And you felt left out of it as a Mac user because all your friends had Doom and you didn't.
John:
Part of that was like, oh, color on the Macs was not as common as color on PCs because they could have, you know.
John:
disgusting ega screens with rectangular pixels and cga cga had rectangular pixels i forget which one anyway the pixels are really big and they're i don't know i joined at vga yeah cga was all purple and green ega looked a little better vga had a reasonable number of colors but still anyway
John:
Um, so there was the, the lack of color was one problem.
John:
But the other one is that it, you know, the Mac was an entirely different API for doing stuff.
John:
And there were very few Macs and very few people had them and they were really expensive.
John:
So no, there was no doom available for the Mac until much, much later.
John:
And it was a bad port.
John:
Um, but what the Macs did have a little bit later was a game called marathon, which is a first person shooter.
Um,
John:
That was only available on the Mac made by a company called Bungie that was filled with Mac nerds that made games for the Mac.
John:
And they were not very well known.
John:
They had made a couple of games before that.
John:
They were also kind of first person, but with a bunch of other stuff around there, even marathon was not really the full doom experience.
John:
I remember one of the things that that marathon did is because it had to run on a Mac, which had pixels that were not the size of boulders.
John:
If you just made like Doom, what was Doom's resolution?
John:
It was like 300 by something.
John:
Something like that.
John:
Probably 320 by 240.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Like, yeah.
John:
640 by 40 divided by two, basically.
John:
No Mac screen ran at that resolution.
John:
So if you tried to make something fill like the smallest color screen available for the average Mac, which is probably around 640 by 40, although there was a little bit smaller one for the LC, you would be slinging more pixels than Doom was.
John:
And of course, that would destroy your performance.
John:
This is before, you know, GPU acceleration.
John:
It was all CPU stuff.
John:
So what Marathon did was shoved the the viewport of the first person game into a sub window surrounded by a bunch of chrome and crap that was cool and gamey looking chrome.
John:
But the bottom line was like, look, we can't we can't do 30 frames per second at 640 by 480.
John:
We don't have the computing power.
John:
Neither can doom on most machines when the game first came out.
John:
So we're just going to make a smaller window.
John:
But the things that had it going for it was did have small pixels, you know, ran it in quote unquote full color.
John:
It had really cool, you know, artwork and enemy design and gun design.
John:
All the things that Bungie is known for today for all of its games, the Halo series, Destiny, all that stuff that started back then.
John:
So it was a cool game.
John:
It had an interesting and deep story, which Doom did not have.
John:
And you'd run around and shoot things.
John:
Oh, and it also had a physics engine, which was incredible fun for the PvE experience when you're playing like on a LAN against other people.
John:
It had rockets and other things with physics that could, you know, shoot and explosions would push things around that, you know, the PC didn't get that until Quake when you could do rocket jumping and stuff like that.
John:
So Marathon was ahead of its time.
John:
People will say, oh, it was a better game than Doom.
John:
Doom was more visceral.
John:
Doom had higher frame rates.
John:
It had that whole moving and shooting thing was better than Doom.
John:
Oh, and by the way, you could look up and down at Marathon as well.
John:
And of course, every Mac had a mouse, so you could use what they called Mouse Look, which also didn't become particularly popular until Quake, right?
John:
marathon way ahead of its time mac exclusive that's why marathon is looms so large in the memory of mac users because it was a time when the mac was really getting it rubbed in its face that it didn't have a lot of good games all your friends are playing doom you can't play it you had to say yeah but we have we eventually we have marathon uh and even though you had that time in the sun with doom now marathon is the best first person shooter it is better than doom in all the possible ways and
Marco:
you know even better than quake because quake still has no story and it's all brown and you know i'm just trying to like at the time like i was in the pc side of that gaming space it's kind of like you know the mad men like i don't think about you at all like there's if there is there is this big perceived war going on by the mac people with this game as a pc person i don't think i noticed at all because we just had all the other all the other games and we were fine we were we had we had games come out of our butts we had too many
John:
But that's why Mac users love this game all the more because they could know their secret little treasure.
John:
It's like, well, you may not know.
John:
You may think we have no games or whatever, but actually we have Marathon.
John:
And actually Marathon is amazing.
John:
And actually Bungie is amazing.
John:
And they made a sequel and then a third one.
John:
I think Bungie was the first one to do this.
John:
So the second one was called Marathon 2.
John:
And the third one was called Marathon Infinity, which was the company's way of saying we're not making any more marathons, right?
John:
We're just going to increment the number to infinity to say, can we be any more clear?
John:
This is the last marathon game.
John:
Um...
John:
yeah like it's it didn't it's not as if that changed anything about the gaming market but it was it was a great thing it was kind of in line with the whole thing that mac had always had mac had always had the games were exclusive to mac were always weird and special in a particular way marathon was sort of the second generation of those the first generation of those was way more numerous and that's what the that book i was talking about i can't remember the title of it but it's like uh
John:
this guy who writes a bunch of books by interviewing authors of old classic software in in you know narrow genres and so he did a whole book on classic mac games they were amazing i would always whenever someone came over to my house and they were a console gamer or pc gamer i would show them my weird black and white mac games and they would be blown away because they had never seen games like this because they were so weird and so distinctive and so interesting in the way
John:
that like apple stuff is the whole surprise and delight and the type of person who makes games for the mac type of person who is a mac programmer is just a little bit different or weird and so were the games uh it's not like they were saying i'm gonna give up my pc i can't believe how many colors you removed from this game
John:
Yeah, no, but even the fact that they were black and white, they couldn't believe how finely detailed everything was, and very often back in the DOS days, how good the sound was, because if they didn't have a sound card on their PC, they just had the bleeps and boops, or the big staticky text in that Lynx game where they tried to make people talk.
John:
It was impressive, but it was also a weird little sub-genre.
John:
So that's why Marathon looms large in the minds of Mac users.
John:
And of course, Bungie would eventually go on to McHalo, which was debuted at Macworld.
John:
And then Microsoft bought Bungie, and that was a terrible blow to Mac gamers everywhere.
John:
And there's that whole history going on through that.
John:
Eventually, Bungie broke away from Microsoft, and the Halo IP stayed with Microsoft.
John:
And then another developer, was it 3...
John:
four three industries i'm sorry i'm not remembering off the top of my head some other company developed the next two halo games and then bungie of course went on to make destiny which i love uh but bungie retained the marathon ip and a bunch of other ip i believe i i can't keep track of where all
John:
it is i don't think they have myth anymore i think take two has that i don't think they have oni or maybe they do anyway they had the marathon ip um and destiny actually has references to marathon stuff buried in it as like easter eggs and a little bit of the story continuity or whatever
John:
So today, as part of the PlayStation showcase, oh, by the way, Bungie split from Microsoft, but then Sony bought them more recently.
John:
So Bungie's been passed around.
John:
So far, Apple has never bought them, and I hope they never do because Apple has no idea what to do with Bungie.
John:
But Microsoft was a pretty good steward to Bungie, and Sony, I think, will be a pretty good steward to Bungie because they're good with their game developers as well.
John:
Anyway, Bungie just announced Marathon.
John:
No, not the original Marathon game remade or something like that.
John:
They are making a new game.
John:
Destiny fans have known that Bungie has been making this new game for years.
John:
And in fact, what kind of game it was was also known.
John:
And also the rumor was that they were going to reuse the Marathon IP.
John:
but it's not the same as the first marathon.
John:
First marathon game was a first person shooter with the story.
John:
It was a single player and had a multiplayer component.
John:
Um, and it's set in a particular universe.
John:
Halo, by the way, also connects in that universe and has tons of references to marathon inside it or whatever.
Um,
John:
This is what's known as an extraction shooter, which I think is a phrase that both of you have probably never heard before.
John:
Nope, never.
John:
I have never played one.
John:
The most popular one, sort of the standard bearer for the genre is Escape from Tarkov, which I have never played because it's a military style shooter.
John:
I'm not into those.
John:
But it's kind of like you've played Fortnite, both of you, right?
John:
Nope, nope.
John:
I know of it, but I've never played it.
John:
I think it's some kind of dancing game, right?
John:
Fortnite is what they call a battle royale thing.
John:
Neither one of you have seen battle royales.
John:
That doesn't help you.
John:
Correct.
John:
But it's like open world multiplayer game where you have a big map.
John:
You chuck a bunch of human players into it and they have some kind of thing.
John:
And the battle royale ones, they all fight each other and there's one person left.
John:
in an extraction type game uh you have a goal to get to some point for for extraction there's other players there uh if you kill someone they drop their stuff if you die you drop your stuff and lose it potentially permanently like it's you know it's it's just twists on that type of genre that does not sound like a first person game where there's a story where you go through this sci-fi story and like that's not like that at all halo was like that halo and marathon were very similar if you don't know what i'm talking about with marathon have you played halo the first person campaign
John:
marathon was like that marathon was the the first halo essentially same developer very similar storyline lots of crossover there so they're taking the marathon ip and the whole you know the universe the enemies if you look at the teaser trailer that will link in the thing you if you know marathon you see some enemies you see some text that you'll recognize from marathon like they're taking that world and that universe and
John:
putting it into an extraction shooter they said they're gonna have a little bit more of a story type uh you know of experience to it than the average one and i'm sure they'll have the bungee twist on it or whatever um but yeah that's the when will it be ready there's no date there's just a teaser the teaser doesn't even show any gameplay the rumor was 2025 maybe they'll hit 2024 uh the game is coming out for ps5 the xbox series x and s and for pc no mac version
Casey:
Wait, are you serious?
Casey:
This thing that was the king of Mac gaming isn't going to be on the Mac?
John:
Well, after Microsoft bought them, the door kind of closed on Bungie really being a Mac game developer in any way, shape or form.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
Halo was eventually released for the Mac.
John:
but it was a port by a third-party company, not by Bungie, and it wasn't a particularly good port.
John:
Doom also came to the Mac, but it was not by id Software, and it wasn't a particularly good port.
John:
They haven't been a Mac gaming company ages, despite the fact that some of the people, including one of the founders, at least one of the founders,
John:
who like were there making marathon and it was four people in a little room on a bunch of max are still at bungie and are still essentially running the company but you know the world moves on i think you know when they were owned by microsoft them not making mac games kind of makes perfect sense when they're independent still makes sense because nobody plays games on max when they're owned by sony still makes sense because they're owned by sony and why would you make a mac version
John:
Like, the only reason they're making this on Xbox and PC or whatever is the same reason everybody does, because you want to hit most of the market.
John:
And if you hit those platforms, that's most of the market.
John:
If Apple was in any way competent at understanding the gaming market, they would be spending money, throwing money at companies like Bungie, at companies like Sony, at whoever, to say, hey, you're going to make a game that everyone's going to hear about and everyone's going to be playing.
John:
I know we don't have a lot of Macs, but we do have reasonable GPUs.
John:
Could you make that game for the Mac?
John:
And they're going to say no.
John:
And you say, well, what if we give you this many millions of dollars?
John:
And then they'll say yes.
John:
That's what it takes, Apple.
John:
But of course, Apple doesn't care about that, so that's not going to happen.
John:
But that was the announcement today, and I'm excited by it.
John:
I don't particularly care about extraction shooters, but I do trust Bungie to make a good one, and I do like Marathon.
John:
So I will absolutely try this game.
John:
Destiny is not dead.
John:
Destiny is continuing.
John:
I continue to play Destiny.
John:
I'll get back to it when I'm done with Zelda, I suppose.
John:
But I will give Bungie the benefit of the doubt and try this game.
John:
The trailer itself is pretty cool.
John:
It looks very different from Destiny.
John:
It looks very different from the original Marathon.
John:
But there is enough goodwill and memories of the old folks in the Mac community to make us interested enough to fire up our Xboxes or PlayStations or gaming PCs that we might have and try this game out.
John:
uh i don't think any of us are going to be particularly surprised or disappointed that it's not available the mac because honestly most people's macs don't have enough gpu grunt mine does haha don't have enough gpu grunt to play to play this game in even the lowest settings uh but you know that's that's just the way uh the world has gone in in recent years with the mac so i'm excited by this i'm ready to play the game but i'm also excited for the next destiny expansion and i'm also excited to continue playing zelda
Casey:
I guess I should finish Breath of the Wild at some point, huh?
John:
I mean, you don't have to finish finish it.
John:
I'm just kidding.
John:
You could, you know.
Casey:
No, I really enjoyed Breath of the Wild, but I just put it down at some point.
Casey:
I think Michaela was a baby at this point, and so I was just completely overwhelmed, and I just never really picked it back up, and I would like to finish it at some point.
John:
Have Declan eventually pick it up, and then you can play together with him.
John:
That's true.
John:
Once he gets old enough to be interested and coordinated enough to do it, then you can be, you know, and if he's not interested, wait for Michaela to get old enough and coordinated enough to, you know.
Casey:
Oh, no, he is interested, but we try to, you know, not park them in front of screens for hours a day.
Casey:
We're still in that stage of parenting.
John:
And it's also a little bit of a complicated game for younger kids to not just play with it as a sandbox, but to actually, like, do things in it.
John:
But it's fine to play with just as a sandbox as well.
John:
yeah uh sony had one more announcement this is like that some sony a bunch of sony news and because bungie is a sony company that's why i was tied up in it uh they kind of pre-announced which is weird this thing they're they're calling playstation q which is not going to be the real name which is a handheld device for streaming ps5 games everyone's into like this this steam deck uh not steam deck
John:
yeah i got it right steam deck yeah not the stream deck the steam deck uh there's one from asus as well they're basically like handheld pcs for playing pc games uh on the go uh and they're really cool and interesting sony said hey we went on one in on that but what they're putting out is basically like a playstation 5 controller cracked in half with a screen wedged in the middle which ergonomically i think is good because i like the ps5 controller uh but it does it's not a game player
John:
All it is is a way to stream games from your PS5.
John:
I occasionally do this from my bed on my phone or my iPad when I forgot to get something in Destiny.
John:
I'll just do the remote play thing because it's like a PS app on iOS.
John:
And you can just, it will turn on your PS5 remotely, start it up, and then you've got little on-screen controls.
John:
And I just, you know, swipe a little on-screen controls and go do some chore I forgot to do in Destiny and then shut the thing down.
John:
This is like that, but it's not an iPad or a phone.
John:
It has no smarts in it, like other than the networking and stuff like that.
John:
And you can only do it.
John:
You can't do it to stream it.
John:
I don't think it streams over the internet or anything, but we wouldn't actually know because it's not a real product yet.
John:
But I think it's really interesting that the Switch and the Steam Deck and whatever that Asus thing are, have made this a big enough market that Sony says, we should have something in that space.
John:
And you know what?
John:
Sony did lay all the groundwork for it with the streaming stuff, and they should have something in this market.
John:
And I'm vaguely interested in this if it works over the internet.
John:
If it doesn't, I probably am not interested in it.
John:
But I just thought it was, you know, curious that Sony feels so much pressure in this area that they pre-announced a product that they don't even have a name for, let alone a price or a date, just to say, hey, we're doing this too, so don't spend all your time on your Switch playing Zelda because we're going to have a way for you to play stuff in your bed too.
Casey:
Awesome.
Casey:
All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
It has been a while.
Casey:
I am sorry for that.
Casey:
But Jesse Stiller writes, if someone was looking over your shoulder and says to you, scroll down, what direction do you assume the person means?
Casey:
Are they asking to continue further down the page, perhaps reaching the bottom if you were to keep going?
Casey:
Or do they mean they want the contents of the page to move downward, meaning you're now seeing content that lies closer to the top of the page?
Casey:
I don't think this is up for grabs.
Casey:
This is 100% move the contents of what you're looking at upward so you are approaching the bottom of the contents, right?
John:
I think that's the common answer, but the problem is context, right?
John:
Because this thing, if someone is looking over your shoulder and says to you,
John:
what if you're on an iPad and what if something is barely visible on the top of the screen, but part of it is cut off by the top of the screen and they reach their hand out and point at the screen a little bit and they say, scroll down, then they want you to pull down on the screen.
John:
And what makes the context different there?
John:
Because it's a touch device, because there is something that is kind of cut off at the top of the screen, because you know in the context of the conversation that that's probably the thing they want to see because whatever you said before that makes you understand, oh, they probably want to see the thing that they can't see all of, right?
John:
And because they reached out to the screen, maybe with their finger extended, all that would combine to let you as a regular human know without thinking what they mean is put your finger on the screen and slide it down with revealing more of the top of the document.
John:
But in the absence of all that context, yeah, when someone says scroll down and you're not on a touch device and they're not, if all those things aren't true or some combination of things aren't true, they mean I want to see more of the document that's lower down, eventually getting to the bottom up.
Casey:
Stray's Nod00 writes, why is it received wisdom in the Apple opinion space that it makes sense for Apple to skip a generation of Apple Silicon in desktop Macs to save on the cost of reengineering the internals on lower volume products?
Casey:
Why is putting an M2 where the M1 used to be on an iMac any more complicated than a teenager slotting in a different CPU in a PC tower?
Casey:
What reengineering do they need to do?
Marco:
Ah, see, this question, I think, presupposes a reality of the old slotting a new CPU into a PC tower game.
Marco:
That was never really actually the case.
Marco:
See, you could swap CPUs in a self-built PC.
Marco:
You still can.
Marco:
However, at least in the days that I was doing this,
Marco:
the socket would change and what a motherboard like what processors a motherboard could support would change every so often and so generally speaking you could generally swap in any processor you wanted from a given family that was available at one time so for instance like when the you know the pentium 7 comes out and it has four different clock speeds you can put any of those four clock speeds generally
Marco:
into most motherboards that would support the Pentium 7 or whatever.
Marco:
But when the Pentium 8 or the Pentium 9 would come out, oftentimes those same motherboards would not support those new chips.
Marco:
And there were lots of reasons for this.
Marco:
You know, simple physical stuff like the socket would change or the thermal requirements or the power needs would change.
Marco:
But one of the key things that would change oftentimes is what used to be called the North Bridge.
Marco:
The Northbridge was the chip on the motherboard back forever ago.
Marco:
I know things are different now, but they're not that different.
Marco:
The Northbridge was the chip on the motherboard forever ago that would include a lot of the high-speed interconnect components.
Marco:
So things like the AGP or graphics slot interface, oftentimes the memory controller, any kind of high bandwidth stuff, stuff that was faster than USB or old slow ports, faster stuff than that.
Marco:
And over time, the way computer design went was we started more and more integrating that kind of functionality into the chip.
Marco:
And so the chip started including things like the memory controllers and the high-speed interconnects like Thunderbolt interfaces, stuff like that, PCI Express.
Marco:
You put more and more of that stuff on the chip over time.
Marco:
So what ends up happening is, back then, even, a motherboard would only last maybe one or two generations of processors.
Marco:
Now, so much of that stuff is on the chip itself that we've gone even further in that direction.
Marco:
So when you talk about the M1 or M2, whatever, chips...
Marco:
So much is on that chip that if you update the chip, you do actually often need to do a decent amount of reengineering of the surrounding board, the surrounding I.O.
Marco:
ports, the components, maybe the display driver if it's a laptop.
Marco:
There are actually significant differences that come along with that.
Marco:
whatever new generation of memory controller, I.O.
Marco:
controllers, display controllers, whatever new combination of all that stuff exists, that actually changes a decent amount.
Marco:
The thermal characteristics will change.
Marco:
The power characteristics will change.
Marco:
Maybe the number of ports it can support will change, or the abilities of those ports will change.
Marco:
The displays it can support, how fast it can drive those displays, over what interfaces it can drive those displays...
Marco:
So much of that actually does change when they do a new SoC.
Marco:
So there actually is a surprising amount of reengineering that has to happen to take advantage of all that.
Marco:
Now, if you want, they could just slow down a lot of those advancements.
Marco:
They could just say, all right, you know what?
Marco:
We're going to have, you know, the M1 supports X displays and X amount of RAM and all that stuff.
Marco:
And the M2 is going to support the exact same thing.
Marco:
And it'll just be 5% faster.
Marco:
We could do that.
Marco:
But stuff moves faster these days and people's expectations are high.
Marco:
And whenever there's a new version of HDMI 17 point whatever NQ that you will never use and that will only support half of what it claims to support anyway, whenever there's a new version of all these standards, we expect Apple to be there on day one with support or to be competitive at least with the market as soon as they can be.
Marco:
So all that stuff, they're building on quicksand here, just like software.
Marco:
Everything around them is changing.
Marco:
All the requirements are changing.
Marco:
They always want to try to deliver the highest-end stuff they can.
Marco:
Meanwhile, both physical reality and largely the market for...
Marco:
upgradable components and and more modular stuff like motherboards that you could just drop in a new chip in that market is mostly gone you know there there is still some of it in like you know a little bit of server not even barely even there a little bit in like the desktop enthusiast and gaming gamer spaces but like most computers sold these days are phones tablets and laptops none of which are upgradable none of which the market really demands to be very upgradable so
Marco:
It's largely a thing of the past where you could update just the processor and change nothing else around it.
Marco:
And we're better off this way overall because things move a lot faster now.
Marco:
Things are a lot faster now.
Marco:
And our hardware is generally better this way.
John:
apple's actually pretty awful about doing the things you described not so awful that they don't do it at all but like what ideally what you hope is if you're going from m1 to m2 even if everything about the soc was identical uh would be like well but the m1 had supported this standard of wi-fi and now there's a new version so the whatever machine we put the m2 in should support the new version of wi-fi which means a new chip from broadcom which means new antenna machine blah blah blah whatever you know
John:
The new version of USB, a new version of Thunderbolt, like you said, a new version of HDMI.
John:
When we say new version, Apple was shipping HDMI 2.0 for years and years and years after 2.1 was out.
John:
So every time they put out a new Mac, we're like, you know, if you're updating the SOC, don't you want to update all the parts to be the newer version of the stuff?
John:
And Apple would say, nope, we're going to ship HDMI 2.0 again.
John:
So Apple is slow about doing that, but eventually they do it.
John:
They're not still shipping USB 1.0.
John:
Even Apple has always lagged.
John:
How soon do they get USB 2.0?
John:
How soon do they get USB 3.3, super speed, whatever?
John:
We wish Apple would be even better about that, but they do upgrade those components eventually.
John:
So every time there's a new one, we want them to upgrade.
John:
The reason we talk about it on desktop Mac so much, like Margo said, they're such a small market.
John:
When it comes time to do this, again, if the M2 was a drop-in replacement and they didn't want to change anything else, the first question you have is, okay, it's drop-in replacement, and we're not changing anything else.
John:
So we can do it real quick.
John:
Anytime you put out any new product, there is a minimum amount of overhead that you have to do.
John:
with like certifying with the FCC certifying that your cooling solution still works for it.
John:
Cause the M two probably has different thermal characteristics than the M one, even if it is exactly the same quote unquote drop in replacement, you know, uh, making the new product, new skew, all the things that support it, uh, any new parts you might need, you know, like just, there's a minimum amount of that that goes with every product.
John:
And then you have to say, okay, if we just don't only change the SOC, don't change anything else.
John:
How compelling of a product is this versus the M1 one that we're selling?
John:
All right, so it's 5% to 10% faster and has like, you know, a different video decode unit.
John:
Is this differentiated enough in the market such that we're ever going to make back the money that we spend?
John:
This like the minimum overhead it requires to make a sort of a no-op new product that has no changes in it, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Like, say you just wanted to make the M1 and change literally nothing about it, but you change the name and it's an all new product and you need to get it recertified with the FCC or something like, can we make that money back?
John:
Is someone going to see this and say, oh, I now on that one, either I was I skipped the M1 and now the M2 comes out a real one or is it going to make M1 people upgrade?
John:
an upgrade like that is so minimal, it's not particularly compelling, it may not be able to make back enough profit for Apple to pay for the overhead required to make the new product, which is why Apple tends not to do things like that.
John:
Sometimes they do, especially if a product has been languishing on the M1 for ages and ages and ages, and like, oh, we should eventually make an M2 version of this.
John:
But the reason we think they're not in a big hurry to do it
John:
with like say the Mac studio or something is it's, if it's a newish machine and it has a processor in it that is currently actually pretty good.
John:
And there isn't like, you know, we look at the, the new one that would replace it just came out.
John:
You can squint and say, what would it be like to have, you know, M two max, Mac studio.
John:
Would it be that compelling of a product over this one?
John:
And would it be compelling enough to sell enough units to make up for its cost?
John:
And we on the outside look at that and say, I can understand why financially within Apple, they may do the math and say, this doesn't actually make financial sense.
John:
And the customers for this product can wait for the M3 version or something like that.
John:
We don't like it.
John:
We wish they would, you know, essentially... Even if it loses money, you just got to do it because when you... My argument has always been, if you're going to make pro products, you just... You have to keep up with the times.
John:
You have to actually update to the new version of HDMI.
John:
You actually have to put a faster SD card slot in there.
John:
You can't just keep using the old standards forever and ever and ever, especially on the pro lines because the pros care about that.
John:
But Apple does the math on that and says...
John:
I'm sorry, but the market is just so small, so, so small compared to our other products that we cannot justify the expenses.
John:
Even on the iPad, we talked about it.
John:
Why didn't the iPads get updated to have the camera in the new place and stuff like that?
John:
Oh, the pencil's in the way.
John:
Why didn't they re-engineer the iPad Pro?
John:
even the ipad pro the volumes are not enough for them to do a quote-unquote total redesign of internals and you know this really would be a redesign because you got to move the stuff all around and do all like even that product could not justify the redesign cost uh and so the the lesser ipad got a bunch of new stuff that the ipad pros didn't the mac studio sells way fewer units i imagine than the ipad pros do so
John:
yeah that's why that's why we think uh that it is we why we understand why apple does it even if we disagree with it and even if it was a drop and replacement which it almost certainly isn't because getting back to reality here the m2 is not the same as the m1 it does not have the same thermal characteristics and we do want them to fix all the stuff fix the stupid fan that's noisy do a better cooling system update all of the ports and components and wi-fi things then we wait to see what they actually do and they do like 50 of that
John:
Well, you know, we didn't change the cooling, but it does have the better Wi-Fi.
John:
The USB is the same.
John:
The SD card is the same.
John:
The SSD is a little bit faster.
John:
What do you think?
John:
We're like, we'll take it.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
Saurabh writes, how often do you reboot your Macs?
Casey:
Also, given John's exotic window arrangement, how does he maintain window arrangement continuity after a reboot?
Casey:
I would guess I reboot mine every two to four weeks, generally speaking, but there's no hard and fast rule.
Casey:
We'll come back to John to talk about his window arrangements.
Casey:
Marco, how often do you reboot your stuff?
Marco:
Whenever either there's a software update that requires it or if Xcode really gets wedged in a really weird way.
Marco:
And sometimes like there are some problems with like, you know, like launching stuff in the simulator or just debugging or just, you know, source kit or whatever in the background.
Marco:
Like there are some problems that just seem to require a reboot.
Marco:
So typically it'll be maybe every few weeks.
Casey:
All right, John, what's your story?
John:
So I'm not rebooting without any reason.
John:
And the reason usually doesn't have anything to do with stability.
John:
To give an example of a time when I'm rebooting a lot frequently is when I was trying to debug that weird bug I have with the window moving around and stuff.
John:
Every time I would hunt down a piece of third-party software and remove it, I would reboot.
John:
for a good measure if i'm about to reproduce it and do another like sample or spin dump or assist diagnose like when i made two test accounts that are just fresh accounts to try to reproduce the bug i would reboot after i did that like i want it to be fresh like that's obviously not a normal scenario i'm rebooting there for the purpose of rebooting because i want to say i made a change to the system that only take effect on reboot so time to reboot and i want to clean slate and i want to just you know reboot reboot like tons and tons of reboots to try to reproduce this bug that apple's never going to fix um
John:
but that that is an anomaly but that's an example of like i reboot with reason i don't reboot on a regular schedule i don't reboot for the hell of it it's only software updates or things that require reboot like hey i just removed some third-party extensions i think i want to be sure they're not loaded i want to reboot and have a clean system um
John:
i can't remember the last time i rebooted for any kind of software problem back back when i didn't know what caused my weird window thing i would reboot to get rid of that and of course that would work because when i when i logged back in there'd be only one user logged in i didn't know that at the time but that would that was the last example i can think of when i would reboot to avoid a situation that i you know a bug that was i was encountering that i found annoying and i knew rebooting would quote unquote fix it um
John:
As for Windows, any well-behaved Mac app should respect your window arrangement.
John:
Most of the apps I use on a daily basis do that.
John:
Some of them, by using the official Apple APIs, all of Apple's frameworks on the Mac have some way for you to restore state.
John:
So you can, you know, when someone selects shutdown or restart and the app is told to quit, it can save the state of all the windows and where they are.
John:
And when you log back in, macOS itself, there's even a checkbox you can check that says, hey, when I log back in, I want you to reopen all the applications I had running before.
John:
And then each of those applications, the responsibility for restoring state is delegated to them.
John:
So macOS just said, OK, I know you're running apps A, B, C and D. And it launches apps A, B, C and D. And then each of those apps
John:
when it's launched is responsible for restoring its state such that you can restart and come back to your computer and the screen should look exactly the same if everything goes well obviously that can't always be the case because say you had a web page loaded like the you know the front page of the new york times when you come back in the new front page of the new york times will be there it doesn't remember the old front page because it reloaded the page right
John:
Even apps like Chrome, which I'm assuming do not use Apple's APIs to do this, have a thing that says, hey, Chrome, on startup, what do you want me to do?
John:
And my answer is I want you to restore all the windows the same way they were before.
John:
So if any app has an option to do that, that's the option I pick.
John:
And that's how I do my window ranging.
John:
And if an app doesn't do that,
John:
I tend not to use it or not to like it or seek out an alternative that does support it.
John:
You know, my text editor supports it.
John:
Text edit, the default text editor supports that.
John:
BBEdit supports that.
John:
All the other apps, like the IRC app that I'm in to be in the chat room, it remembers its window position.
John:
It remembers what channel I'm in.
John:
When I launched the app, it goes back to right where it was.
John:
And, you know, I don't actually have the checkbox check to relaunch all the apps because if I reboot, I don't want it to do that.
John:
I just, I can launch them myself when I, yeah, I'd rather have a clean slate, but that's just a choice.
John:
If I had that checkbox check,
John:
and I rebooted right now, everything would come back to exactly where it is, except for Audio Hijack would not be recording.
John:
And I think Zoom would not restore state.
John:
I think every other album running would.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
And then finally for tonight, Brian Coffey writes, I just went on a Disney cruise and took hundreds of pictures and many videos and want to share with my tech lazy family.
Casey:
Iowa shared albums are too many steps for them to do.
Casey:
How can I send hundreds of photos to them privately over iCloud where all they need to do is click one link in iMessage?
Casey:
Create iCloud link appears to have a limit.
Casey:
I have no idea what the answer to this question is.
John:
iOS shared albums are the easiest.
John:
It seems like the problem is not that they have a bunch of Android users.
John:
If everyone has iPhones, iOS shared albums are the easiest way for people to see pictures that you want to share with them.
John:
They don't have to do anything.
John:
They just magically appear on their phones.
John:
Usually there's a notification.
John:
They tap the notification and they can see the pictures.
John:
That's it.
John:
that is the best way for, you know, tech lazy people to just deal with photos.
John:
But if you're trying to send them photos, how can I send hundreds of photos to them privately, so on and so forth?
John:
It sounds kind of like you want them to have the photos and not just like the reduced resolution iOS shared albums thing.
John:
And by the way, iOS shared albums do have a limit.
John:
And I think it's like 5,000 photos.
John:
So you'd have to make a new shared album every once in a while.
John:
But if your family...
John:
doesn't like ios shared albums because it's too complicated i don't know what to say that's the simplest solution i've ever found if the problem is that that ios shared albums don't work because you want to give them the photos like they have copies of the files i'm like well how tech lazy could they be that they're willing to accept 500 full resolution photos from you um but the answer to that is uh look outside of apple there are tons of services that do this in a cross cross-platform way i don't use any of them but i have relatives who do what are some of them like
John:
smug mug or like uh there's not shutterfly i don't know there's a bunch of there's a bunch of services like websites essentially where you upload your pictures to the website and then you can click a button and it'll send out an email to a bunch of people and no matter what platform they're on they'll be able to click that link in the email it'll open a web browser where they'll be able to see all your photos and download the full resolution ones if they want to in a web browser on any platform on any device on a phone on a tablet on a pc on a mac
John:
that most of those services you have to pay for but that will solve your problem but within the apple ecosystem if you're just trying to let people see stuff get them signed up for iowa shared albums and if the problem is they can't figure out how to sort of subscribe to your shared album because that can be weird just grab their devices like send the invitation they grab their devices and say accept accept accept and then you're done
John:
This is the ultimate sort of parent-grandparent type thing for like pictures of kids and stuff.
John:
You just chuck them in the album and then grandma gets a notification on her phone and she taps it and she sees baby pictures.
John:
It's the best system.
Casey:
Sorted.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Rocket Money and Lickability.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at atp.fm slash join and we will talk to you next week.
John:
Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
Marco:
And if you're into 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-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R
Casey:
So Casey, what's going on with your pricing?
I don't know.
Casey:
I don't know.
John:
You have analysis paralysis.
John:
You have too many different people with too many different opinions and you just can't decide.
Casey:
Honestly, that is 100% accurate.
Casey:
My current theory, which I don't want to go on for another 20 minutes discussing this.
Casey:
We can talk about it next week if we're still interested.
Casey:
My current theory, which I would like you guys to comment on, but I just don't want to go on forever about it.
Casey:
But my current theory is...
Casey:
When I spend money on things, be that media, be that experiences, be that whatever...
Casey:
When I spend money on things, I am most happy to do that when I am being met where I am.
Casey:
So if I wanted to, I don't know, get takeout, it is easy to do so.
Casey:
It is easy and not hilariously overpriced to do so.
Casey:
DoorDash makes it reasonably easy to have food magically appear at my house because
Casey:
But the app is okay.
Casey:
There's markups, which are understandable.
Casey:
I'm not here to debate whether or not DoorDash is good or bad.
Casey:
But it's all right.
Casey:
If I want to buy a piece of media, I don't want to have to think about how I get it.
Casey:
How do I watch it?
Casey:
Where does it arrive?
Casey:
Am I renting it?
Casey:
Am I buying it?
Casey:
I want to be met where I am.
Casey:
And with that in mind...
Casey:
There are people who would have no problem paying a subscription and would like to.
Casey:
And certainly, selfishly, I would like people to pay for a subscription to call sheet.
Casey:
But there are people that maybe don't want a subscription, are quote-unquote allergic to subscriptions, or understandably have fatigue with subscriptions.
Casey:
And so, as we discussed last week, there's an argument to be made, and don't jump on me yet, just hold on.
Casey:
There's an argument to be made for something that's a one-time purchase.
Casey:
Maybe I can phrase it as, this is not a lifetime unlock.
Casey:
There's no guarantee here.
Casey:
I'm offering this to you only because you might want it, but there's no implied guarantee, or there's no explicit or implied guarantee that this will last for any amount of time.
Casey:
But if you're really that allergic to subscriptions, fine, power to you.
Casey:
But the other thing I got thinking about was, all right, if I'm going to offer that one-time thing, which I'm not sure I will, but let's suppose for the sake of conversation, I will offer subscription for probably monthly and yearly.
Casey:
Let's suppose for the sake of discussion, I offer a hilariously expensive one-time thing.
Casey:
Would it make sense?
Casey:
And my current thinking is yes, but this is a weak opinion held loosely.
Casey:
Would it make sense to do consumables as well?
Casey:
So you can buy a 10-pack of searches or maybe a 100-pack.
Casey:
I don't know what the number is.
Casey:
I don't know how much it would cost.
John:
You're gradually approaching the casino games for children business model.
John:
And I know how you're getting there, but I feel like every time you go up, people are used to it and they understand it, but it's like, really?
John:
Consumables for an app?
John:
Like...
John:
What kind of app do you want to be vending out there in the world?
John:
Do you want people to feel like they're putting quarters into your thing to look up where an actor is from?
John:
I give that a big thumbs down.
Casey:
I agree with you.
Casey:
I agree with you wholeheartedly.
Casey:
But if you are not the kind of person that watches...
Casey:
That watches stuff often, but you want to be able to use a nicely made app to occasionally do that.
Casey:
Do you really want a subscription or are you going to want to pay?
John:
And I don't, I genuinely don't know what I, you can't, you're not going to get all the customers.
John:
Like, you know what I mean?
John:
You're not going to, you're not going to have a business model that is going to appeal to everybody who sees your app and finds it useful.
John:
That's just impossible, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
even you can't cover all the bases you have to just decide what which are the customers that you want to get hopefully you pick the group that has the most people in it right right like that but i don't think you can get all of them so if you're like you're fretting over like what people are allergic to subscriptions if you think you have to have a subscription app because you're using a third-party api with unknown uh financial things which as we've discussed the best thing then anyone who doesn't like subscription is out of your market and i don't think there's anything you can do for those people you want to revisit that decision and say well we're
John:
Really?
John:
Do I really need a subscription?
John:
Because right now it's free and I want to take the risk.
John:
Then you can revisit.
John:
But that changes everything.
John:
But if you're deciding you want a subscription, don't spend a second worrying about the people who don't want to pay for subscriptions because they're not in your market anymore.
Marco:
Yeah, I would even go further than that.
Marco:
I don't want to pay a subscription is really code for I don't want to pay.
Marco:
That's interesting.
Marco:
Well, yeah.
Marco:
Now, yes, you listener out there who are screaming, but, but, but,
Marco:
I will pay money, but I don't like subscriptions.
Marco:
In today's modern software world, that really just means I don't want to pay.
Marco:
It's simple as that.
Marco:
Because, look, there is an alternative here.
Marco:
You're not going to like it.
Marco:
There is an alternative here.
Marco:
However...
Marco:
Software that is on modern platforms that is expected and required to have some kind of regular maintenance updates at least needs recurring revenue to do it.
Marco:
That's why most apps are moving to this kind of model.
Marco:
There's other factors too, like the app stores, you know, non-existent handling of upgrade pricing and stuff like that if you were doing things that way.
Marco:
But really...
Marco:
Subscription pricing is a very clean, clear, mostly consumer-friendly option of pricing software.
Marco:
Now, there are apps that do it badly.
Marco:
There are apps that charge significantly more with subscription pricing than what might be warranted for what they're doing.
Marco:
There are apps that use deceptive techniques to trick people into paying more than they might think they're paying or more than they might expect to pay or take advantage of the fact that they're going to forget to cancel or whatever else.
Marco:
But the concept of a subscription payment for an app that has ongoing use that will require ongoing maintenance is...
Marco:
is is not only sound but is fair and it's actually consumer friendly when done right when you think about all the dysfunction of the old model of like well i'm gonna pay this one-time chunk and then it turns out next week i don't use this app anymore or i buy it and it's it's not really what i wanted it to be you know
Marco:
A lot of times customers just get screwed.
Marco:
Or you buy some giant app and then like three months later they unveil the next big version and you got to pay an upgrade fee that was way bigger than if you would have been paying like five bucks a month for the whole time.
Marco:
So the old model has its dysfunctions.
Marco:
The new model has its potential abuses.
Marco:
However...
Marco:
this model of subscription-priced software, this is just paid software.
Marco:
This is just how paid software is paid these days because the entire ecosystem of software development has shifted over time to, A, make this easier and actually make this the easiest option, but B...
Marco:
As I mentioned before, customer expectations and the ecosystem environments are moving so much.
Marco:
Customers expect so much ongoing now, and I can't blame them, that you need a way to fund it.
Marco:
You need ongoing revenue for each customer.
Marco:
So there's two options for that.
Marco:
You can either have subscriptions in some form, and the details we can talk about, but subscriptions in some form, or ads.
Marco:
Those are your options.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So if you really want there to, if you really want to satisfy the, I don't want to pay a subscription, but I would pay you for a lifetime unlock.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
First of all, those people are hilarious because whenever, whenever they offer, like I get emails like this and you know, it'll be like,
Marco:
I don't want to pay your $10 a year subscription, which is comically cheap for what I'm offering, but fine.
Marco:
I don't want to pay your $10 a year subscription.
Marco:
I want a lifetime unlock.
Marco:
How about I give you $15?
Marco:
The prices they have in mind when they say, I don't want to pay your subscription...
Marco:
It's not it's never that long of a time span worth of the subscription price.
Marco:
It's maybe two years at most.
Marco:
Like it's never a lot.
John:
So if you actually get to the model, the third model that you didn't mention, speaking of a lifetime not being that long, the third model is the one that people hate even more.
John:
But it all adds up to the same thing, which is, OK, I'll give you a lifetime unlock for fifteen dollars.
John:
But every 18 months, I come up with a new version of my program and I abandon the old one.
John:
right right yeah right and then you can lifetime unlock that one for 15 right and so you just go every 18 months and by the way and next time you update your iphone and you're required to update the os and with the new phone that old version of the app might break and then you're out of luck exactly no you totally abandoned it pull it from the store and just like when that breaks it's like well there's no in every 18 months you come up with a brand new version there's no upgrade pricing in the app store and that's on apple but every use a brand new version and then you get to pay for it and own it for
John:
the lifetime of that program but every 18 months you come up with version two version three version four that is it also a model that works and it is not subscription and you won't get recurring bills that you don't understand where they come from but you're still paying 15 every 18 months right it doesn't matter how we break it up like it's the same amount of money and by the way the people like boom the good old days of the good old days casey's app would cost an inflation adjusted 80 yeah
John:
And it would only work for three years before we came out with the next major version that you'd have to charge a $40 upgrade fee for.
John:
People don't understand how expensive software was.
John:
Go look at how much the original version of MacWrite version 2.0 costs and do the inflation adjustment calculation.
John:
It will make your eyes bleed.
John:
Software used to be so expensive.
John:
You'd buy some weird thing like NowMenus or something that would make an icon in your menu bar and inflation adjusted.
John:
It's like $120 for a little utility that appears in your menu.
John:
bar i'm not trying to go under twenty dollars for my little utility bar by the way um and they would have major new versions every 18 months to two years and the major new versions maybe you would have to upgrade pricing but maybe they'd want another 120 from you it was so much more expensive so in ab in like absolute real dollars like inflation adjusted dollars it was so much more expensive to do that thing so it's like if you do you want to just be
John:
a now utilities user for the entire life of that product, you're going to pay way more than if they were somehow transported to modern times and charged you $10 a year.
Casey:
To be clear, I haven't come up with an answer if I do offer a single unlock.
Casey:
Again, I would never praise it as lifetime.
Casey:
First of all, if I were to offer it, it would be a lot of money.
Casey:
I'm thinking somewhere in the order of $50-ish.
Casey:
To really make it look...
Casey:
I don't want to do this, and you probably don't want to do this.
Casey:
But if you are really that allergic to subscriptions, fine.
Marco:
Okay, sure.
Marco:
Yeah, but see, then you have a problem.
Marco:
Anybody who actually does buy that, you have 50 of their dollars.
Marco:
Asterisk, apples, cut, but whatever.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marco:
In their mind, I gave you $50.
Marco:
$50.
Marco:
and then you have the nerve in three years to discontinue the product because the API got shut down, you don't want someone to have 50 of your dot.
Marco:
You don't want that.
Marco:
You don't want anyone to have that over you because they will abuse it.
Marco:
You're much better off.
Marco:
Let's keep this very, very simple.
Marco:
This app exists now.
Marco:
For the time period it exists, you pay me X dollars per month or year to use it.
Marco:
And at some point in the future, this arrangement may change in some way.
Marco:
And that's cool because you didn't pay for the future.
Marco:
You paid for now.
Marco:
That's the model that is the healthiest model for everyone involved.
Marco:
There is nothing wrong with that model.
Marco:
If you ship with that model and only that model, you will have a good business.
Marco:
As long as you don't screw up the pricing, but you won't because we'll guide you.
Marco:
You will have a good business.
Marco:
And yes, there will be people who say, I just don't like subscriptions on principle.
Marco:
But you know what?
Marco:
There's also way more people who say, I just don't like paying for any apps on principle.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It's the same thing.
Marco:
It is.
Marco:
It is.
Marco:
It's the same.
Marco:
It's like, it's like when we, it's like, you know, like it's the same flag when you see that flag that just has like the police blue stripe.
Marco:
And it's like, it's the same flag from a few flags we've had before.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It's the same argument.
Marco:
What they're saying is, I don't want to pay.
Marco:
That's what they're saying.
Marco:
Or, hey, could I maybe pay a lot less?
Marco:
I don't want to pay you over and over again for this thing I'm going to use all the time.
Marco:
That's what they're saying.
Marco:
You've got to translate.
Marco:
Anything that says I don't want to pay you your $10 a year is really saying I don't want to pay you.
Marco:
And that's fine if you had something like ads where you could monetize non-paying users, but you don't, and you don't want that.
Marco:
So you have to be okay losing those people.
Marco:
You're never going to satisfy them with any purchase option you create that is fair to you.
Marco:
So don't even bother.
Marco:
Have a subscription app.
Marco:
And that's it.
Marco:
You are hardly alone in the marketplace if you make that choice.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So with that in mind, and I'm still kicking all this around, I think it was Marco that said earlier, you know, I am getting feedback from everyone.
Casey:
And while I do appreciate and enjoy that, every single person is 100% devoutly convinced that they are the most correct, and not a single one of them agrees with anyone else.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Ultimately, I'm going to have to put a line in the sand and say this is the way.
Casey:
And additionally, a lot of people are saying, including in the chat room earlier, well, you can change it.
Casey:
And that's true.
Casey:
You can.
Marco:
Well, asterisk.
Casey:
Well, so here's the thing.
Casey:
I'm really worried.
Casey:
So I think if I were to start with just one approach, it would be what you're describing, what both of you are describing, which is subscription, probably monthly and yearly.
Casey:
That is my approach.
Casey:
I think that's my bare minimum.
Casey:
I'm going to do that no matter what.
Casey:
The thing I worry about is, okay, so somebody downloads the app, they really enjoy it, but they see the subscription and they don't want to pay it and they bounce.
Casey:
How can I get to them again if I change the model or if I lower the price or whatever?
Casey:
You're discovering the world of marketing.
Marco:
How do you find customers?
Marco:
How about a push notification for marketing spam?
Marco:
yeah i mean i could do push notification marketing spam but you know what i mean like i i feel like yes they will have deleted your app you're not even gonna send you push you actually have to yeah you have to you have to you have to acquire customers casey and how much do you pay to acquire them deleting apps is hard now because now they go directly to the app library so they will abandon your app very quickly and easily even if they like it they'll abandon it because they just lose it but they won't delete it the fault is it the fault right now
Casey:
No, I think it gives you a prompt that says go to the library, which is considered to be the default, or they give the destructive, you know, or delete.
Casey:
That's in red or what have you.
John:
Oh, no, not when you delete.
John:
I get it where you say, yeah, yeah.
John:
I was saying, like, if you get a fresh iPhone out of the box and you buy an app from the App Store, it doesn't go to the library, right?
Casey:
Oh, no, I don't think so.
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
I don't believe.
Marco:
Hold on.
Marco:
I got more in here.
Marco:
Keep talking.
Marco:
I'll tell you in a minute.
Casey:
So in any case, so I think I will do, you know, a trickle.
Casey:
I will probably do a trickle out like we had discussed last week, a trickle out of free searches.
Casey:
A lot of people, I shouldn't say a lot, a handful of people have written me on Mastodon being like, no, no, no, no, no.
Casey:
Just do the free trial.
Casey:
Screw the trickle-out of searches.
Casey:
Just do a free trial, which I get.
Casey:
I really do.
Casey:
But I don't feel like it's a good first-run experience to say, hi, here's this app.
Casey:
You must sign up for a free trial that will obligate you to, I mean, yes, you can cancel it, but will obligate you to pay me soon before you can really do anything.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
Like, it just seems very off-putting to me for basically the onboarding screen to be, hey, screw you, pay me.
Casey:
I don't even know what this thing does.
Casey:
This might be garbage.
Casey:
I'm not in a position that I want to pay you.
Casey:
I don't even want to sign up for the possibility of paying you yet.
Casey:
And that's why I think that that's not the right approach.
Casey:
But in a perfect world, yes, I would do that.
Casey:
But I just don't think that that's realistic.
Marco:
By the way, real-time follow-up, it does not go directly to the app library by default.
Marco:
I just tested it on my test phone.
John:
That's what I thought.
John:
I looked up what MacWrite, and MacWrite shipped free with the Mac for a while, but eventually Claris got it, and it became a commercial product.
John:
That's why I was thinking of it, because my parents did buy a boxed copy of MacWrite from Claris or whatever.
John:
In this MacWorld 1994 review, the inflation-adjusted price of MacWrite Pro 1.5, if you bought it as a separate product from Claris, was, drumroll,
John:
Anybody?
John:
$1,000?
John:
$150.
John:
Remember, this is not like Microsoft Word.
John:
It's MacWrite.
John:
It's fairly simple text.
John:
It's from Claris.
Casey:
Actually, maybe Marco's more right than I gave him credit for.
Casey:
I would say between $100 and $300, but I'm worried that Marco is much closer to correct than I realized.
John:
$498.67.
John:
For a fairly simple, not particularly full-featured, not leader in its market, word processor.
John:
The text edit that comes free with your Mac does substantially more than its program.
John:
Substantially more and way faster.
John:
And it's free with your Mac.
John:
Software used to go a lot more.
John:
I want a subscription.
John:
Great.
John:
Okay.
John:
And by the way, when the next version of the MacWrite comes out, there may be upgrade pricing, but you're not going to get it for free.
John:
You're going to have to pay some amount of money, probably some substantial portion of that.
John:
$498 for the next version.
John:
Software used to be way more expensive.
John:
And like Marco said, people never talk about the bad sides of pay up front where you buy it and it turns out you don't like the program or whatever.
John:
You've spent all that money and now you basically have to use it for some period of time to make it worthwhile because if you don't and you can't return it, then you're stuck with it.
John:
Or if you buy it and a new version comes out and the upgrade pricing is $200 for upgrading users, you're like, ugh.
John:
It's, you know, there's downsides to every pricing model.
John:
The current pricing model is actually pretty good for consumers, minus the part where they don't realize money is slowly draining out of their bank account, which is why most of the people who hate subscriptions say they hate them.
John:
It's like, I don't want to forget about it.
John:
It's a way if you just sneakily drain money out of my bank account, like a little leech, and I don't want to have a thing that I have to remember to do.
John:
And to those people, I say, I know this is annoying, but you can get into the habit of every single time you subscribe, immediately unsubscribe.
John:
Because the way that Apple does subscriptions is you'll get the app for the full month or year that you used it, but when it's over, it just basically won't renew.
John:
It's annoying that Apple doesn't make that easier, and you can complain to Apple and try to make that easier.
John:
It would be nice if Apple said, oh, by default, when I subscribe, basically never do auto-renewing.
John:
Always immediately cancel the subscription.
John:
But people do do that manually, but it's kind of annoying that Apple doesn't let you do that.
John:
Yeah.
John:
That would save you the mental anguish of not understanding.
John:
That's why people keep suggesting, can I buy buckets of things?
John:
Can I buy a one-time thing for 100 searches or whatever?
John:
They just don't want to have to remember, oh, there's something I have to remember to do.
John:
Otherwise, money will slowly drain from me.
John:
That's what they want.
John:
And Apple could help fix that.
John:
And so that's, I feel like a lot of time, they're not saying I don't want to pay.
John:
What they're saying is I don't want, some people are saying, I don't want to have to remember to unsubscribe from a thing because I know I'll forget and then you'll be secretly getting money from me and that feels bad.
Marco:
And first of all, by the way, we do have literally a sponsor of this episode that addresses this rocket money.
Marco:
But also, this is part of the niceness of being in Apple's in-app purchase system, is that the customers know how easy it is to cancel an in-app purchase subscription, and we know how they work.
Marco:
So there are some services out there.
John:
The developers know, you mean?
John:
No, no, the customers know.
John:
Well, I'm not sure how many do know because I think most customers feel menaced by the subscription system and they can't find the place where they look at their subscriptions on their phone.
Marco:
Well, I mean, yes, that is true.
Marco:
And Apple has – that used to be horrendous.
Marco:
Now it is a little bit less horrendous.
Marco:
It should be way easier and it should be more user surfaced.
Marco:
However –
Marco:
People learn pretty quickly about that trick of canceling immediately and that you still get your free month or whatever.
Marco:
People learn that.
Marco:
And not everything on the web and everything works that way, but every in-app purchase subscription works that way.
Marco:
Now, developers do get...
Marco:
a server-side callback if you turn off auto-renewing.
Marco:
So apps can tell if they want to, and maybe they'll do annoying things if you do that.
Marco:
I'm not sure.
Marco:
It's probably against Apple's policies, but I'm sure people do it anyway, just like the push notifications where they just kind of
Marco:
Create new categories of notifications that have you automatically subscribe to that you definitely did not opt into.
Marco:
Even Apple does this with their own stuff because their own services team just throws away any possible goodwill that people have with user experience on their platforms.
Marco:
Anyway, back to the topic at hand.
Marco:
So number two,
Marco:
So the one thing that I think the feedback has convinced me of is that I do think a free trial is a good idea because it does seem like they do convert a lot better to real purchases than something without a free trial.
Marco:
So here's what I'm going to propose.
Marco:
Last week, we didn't really come to a consensus, but where we kind of stopped talking about it was... Well, now that you've come around on free trials, you know, we're close.
Marco:
Hold on, hold on, hold on.
Marco:
So it was some generously sized bucket of searches, say 20, that you would get.
Marco:
And then after that, you would only get like one per day unless you subscribed.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Now, I'm going to say, based on the feedback and kind of a week of thinking about it, I'm going to suggest something even simpler.
Marco:
You get your bucket of 20 searches or whatever, and then you have to start a free trial to proceed after that.
Marco:
No more one a day.
Marco:
No, you got your 20 searches.
Marco:
After that, you got to start a free trial to continue.
Marco:
And just leave it at that.
Marco:
And just implement that.
Marco:
And then you can just ship this goddamn app and get it out there in the store and stop spending so much time on the business model.
Marco:
Because while the business model is important, the product is more important.
Marco:
And getting it out the door before our audience is tired of hearing about it is even more important.
Marco:
So that, I think...
Marco:
Figure out something, stop the waffling, and I think that's a pretty good, pretty simple system that pleases me and probably to whatever extent possible a little bit of John.
Marco:
And I think overall that's a pretty decent system.
John:
My thinking on pricing when I've been thinking about it since is, yes, I still think free trials are the way you should go.
John:
But I was thinking about the total opposite end of this rectum.
John:
I talked last time about pricing it for listeners to the show versus pricing for people who have no idea who you are.
John:
If you really wanted to go totally on the pricing it for like the mass market and people have no idea who you are.
John:
A, you might have to do a little bit of marketing to sort of get traction going.
John:
But the pricing, the business model that would work best, I think, if we told you, hey, guess what, Casey?
John:
You're going to have lots of people who are going to at least give this app a shot, which is hard to do.
John:
But if you could somehow make that happen, the pricing model that would convert those people the most is the pricing model you see everybody else has.
John:
And it's going to make you cry.
John:
And it's, I think, probably not the right pricing model for you specifically, Casey List, because you are not the average consumer, average developer that nobody has any idea who they are.
John:
But if you were, free trial for seven days, annual subscription for three bucks.
John:
And you're like, what?
John:
That's not enough money.
John:
That's not enough money to cover my API costs.
John:
That'll never work, blah, blah, blah.
John:
And a free trial on top of that, blah, blah, blah.
John:
That stuff like that is what you see on the App Store.
John:
And that converts like crazy.
John:
Why?
John:
Because it seems cheap.
John:
It seems like a cup of coffee for a whole year, $3.
John:
And it has a free trial that converts people.
John:
But to actually make money with that kind of model, you need a lot of people to download your app.
John:
And that's the tricky part.
Marco:
I've never seen a yearly subscription that low.
Marco:
I've seen like $3 a week.
John:
No, I see it all the time.
John:
I get low-balled all the time on these apps.
John:
They're like, and you're like, sure, why not?
John:
Five bucks for a year, why not?
John:
I mean, think of what's Jelly's app called?
Casey:
Gift-wrapped.
John:
Right.
John:
How much is that?
Casey:
$3.50 if memory serves.
Casey:
A year.
Casey:
A year.
Casey:
That's way too cheap.
John:
It is.
John:
I know, but it converts like crazy.
John:
I don't even use that app and I pay for it.
Yeah.
John:
Just why?
John:
Because like, ah, three bucks a year, I'll try it.
John:
And I see when it renews, I'm like, ah, three bucks for another year, I'll try it.
John:
I mean, granted, I know Jelly and I'm paying for his app to, because whatever.
John:
But it's just like apps like that, that it seemed like they're underpriced.
John:
You can make it up in volume if your volumes are really big.
John:
The trick is you don't know if your volumes are going to be really big.
John:
To be clear, I don't think that's the model for you, but if you were looking for a simple pricing model that everybody understands that converts like crazy and is vaguely sustainable, that's it.
John:
like single single annual there's just just annual it's such a low price that it's not a barrier and there's a free trial so people like i can always cancel if i forget the free trial and then they forget and they pay three dollars a year and when it renews they see the three dollars like oh it's three bucks whatever i'll remember to cancel it next year that is the mass market model for an app with a single developer that is sustainable with a with a large number of customers
Casey:
Yeah, but that's predicated on a large number of customers.
John:
If you want to go all that direction, it's like, you know, $100 a year, you know, $100 universal unlock, and you abandon the app after two years.
John:
That'd probably maximize your money, but people do this.
Casey:
So let me ask one.
Casey:
I know I told you I didn't want to go on long, but here we are.
Casey:
Now I'm prolonging it.
Casey:
Story of my life.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I have an opinion about this, but I'd be curious to revisit, even if only briefly.
Casey:
And I will start with Marco, since John was the most recent to talk.
Casey:
Should I just hold my nose and put in ads?
Marco:
Well, first of all, the question would be, what ads?
Marco:
Are you just going to throw a Google ad box in there?
Marco:
Because that's garbage.
Marco:
Those are garbage ads.
Marco:
They pay garbage prices, and they make your app look like garbage.
Casey:
So no argument, which is why I don't want to do it because I agree with everything you just said.
Casey:
I don't think I have the – I don't know the word I'm looking for, but I don't think – I think the overcast ads are just fine for Marco, and I don't mean that to be a turd.
Casey:
I would love to do that sort of thing, but I don't think it will – I don't think that would work for me.
Marco:
No, it's not like an easily replicable system to any problem domain.
Marco:
It works in a podcast app for an app that has a good-sized audience.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
Those are two very big ifs.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
No, here's the thing.
Marco:
Your competitor is IMDb.
Marco:
Like, your competitor is already an ad-filled experience.
Marco:
People come to you to have not fewer ads.
Marco:
They come to you to have no ads.
Yeah.
Marco:
And so obviously, you know, if you're going for big mass market, there has to be a free plan to use it in some way.
Marco:
And so that will probably be ads.
Marco:
But you see in the app store what that means.
Marco:
You can try to have like a little tasteful ad banner.
Marco:
I have.
Marco:
I've done that.
Marco:
It pays nothing.
Marco:
You will make nothing from a tasteful ad implementation.
Marco:
The way to make money with generic Google or whatever ads on iOS is you load in as many ad SDKs as you can into the app, which, by the way, say goodbye to your nice privacy label.
Marco:
So you have tons of ad SDKs because you have to bundle multiple SDKs so that if one ad network doesn't have a good fill for you for that inventory, some other one will fill in.
Marco:
So you've got to bundle a bunch of SDKs.
Marco:
You've got to take the worst privacy approach you can because you won't make any money if you keep things private.
Marco:
And then what you end up getting is a crapped up app that pays you surprisingly little money for each use.
Marco:
And also keep in mind the usage pattern of your app really matters.
Marco:
In this case, your app is not something people are spending tons of time in.
Marco:
It's something they're consulting quickly and then leaving.
Marco:
So again, you're not going to make a ton of money from ads.
Marco:
Unless you really crap up the experience.
Marco:
Then, if you can make it so that people are constantly having to view interstitial video ads, or if you can arrange them in such a way that you generate a lot of accidental input and make people click on them, you're basically committing fraud, but you will make a few more pennies.
Marco:
But that's a terrible way to make a living.
Marco:
And ideally, you don't do any of those things.
Marco:
Ideally, you can be comfortable with the fact that you're going to have a subscription-priced app only with a generous free trial situation.
Marco:
But it will be a subscription-priced app only after that.
Marco:
and you're going to get the people who are not going to pay there will be lots of them and yes if you had a totally free usage pattern you could get way more people but you also would make way less money and you know so i i think it's fine to be in this category of i'm just basically paid only because the alternative would be pretty crappy i think
John:
john any other thoughts yeah no your whole selling proposition is supposed to be like imd but not sucky and filled with ads so like what's the hell the hell's the point of throwing ads in there yeah yeah the only way you could actually make money on ads and not crap it up entirely is uh step one get vc money and fund the development of this app to make the best movie lookup app
John:
that is for free and has no business plan whatsoever that is free to everybody and develop it so it is amazing and do that for two years and when you have literally millions of users and everybody knows the name of this app and every celebrity mentions it when they're on their you know talk show if they even still do that talking to people and they say oh i was looking up and call sheet and blah blah blah then you roll out one tasteful little ad and you hire a company to sell that one tasteful ad slot to your millions of people and now you have an app that is funded by one tasteful ad but that is a long
John:
When we're out to go with a lot of things that can happen in between, it's probably not going to happen for you.
John:
So I would say stick to your original plan, which is let's make a version of IMDb that doesn't suck and doesn't have ads all over it.
Marco:
And also, you're going to be offering a premium experience in other ways.
Marco:
So for instance...
Marco:
You can do things that most apps can't or won't do because they are less motivated, or they don't know the platform as well, or they don't have the discipline, or they hire consultants to make the app, and they don't want to bring them back because it's too expensive.
Marco:
So when there's a new iOS 17 feature that your app can take advantage of, you can be there with it.
Marco:
You can be there at release in September with support for that feature.
Marco:
If they launch new Siri abilities...
Marco:
God help them.
Marco:
If they launch a series of serial abilities, you can be there integrating with it on day one.
Marco:
They launch some kind of cool widget thing that might make sense for you.
Marco:
Some kind of search integration, maybe you can be there on day one.
Marco:
Like those are things that your premium app can do because you're an enthusiast in this area and you care about stuff that power users care about and people will pay for that.
Marco:
That's a premium thing.
Marco:
Whereas the rest of the market, like the mass market, they're just going to use IMDb and have their wall of ads.
Marco:
And if you provide your own wall of ads trying to attract them, not only does it dilute the value of your app to the people who want the premium experience, but it also largely – like you're going to lose that battle.
Marco:
They're not going to find your app.
John:
You don't have the brand recognition of IMDb.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Like they're not going to find your app.
Marco:
And if they do, they're going to be like, why am I doing this instead of IMDb?
Marco:
So your app should be only premium.
Marco:
It should be like, this is a premium experience for people who are aware that IMDB exists and want something better.
Marco:
And the way you serve them is with a premium experience with a subscription price.