Everyone Ends Up at Crab
Casey:
this is our 600th episode oh crap i didn't even realize i cannot believe casey didn't know this i completely forgot you really didn't know no well i knew like a few days ago and i just hadn't thought about it since then oh man mr anniversary geez i know i have fallen down on the job genuinely i i am gobsmacked because i completely forgot that that was today holy crap 600 episodes how
Casey:
How?
John:
I mean, it's not our 600th.
John:
It's our 600 and somethings because we have like, you know, we did the special interview episode.
John:
Of course, there's all the member specials and so on and so forth.
John:
Even just in the main feed, because we did that interview special separately, we already passed 600.
John:
But anyway, it is the 600th numbered episode of ATP.
John:
John's going to John.
John:
I'm just saying like it's what we're celebrating is the roundness of the number that's in front of the title and not necessarily the number of things that we have made.
Ha ha ha ha ha!
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Well, I will just say, in my typical fashion, I know I say this a lot, but I really mean it, and I think it's worth saying again since we're on 600.
Casey:
We are so very thankful for anyone who is listening to our voices right now.
Casey:
I won't belabor it because it may be too much, but anyone who is listening to us, anyone who's a member, anyone who's ever listened to us in the past, we thank you so very much for being here for 600 episodes.
Casey:
Because it was something like the 13th of March thereabouts in 2013 that...
Casey:
This all officially got started.
Casey:
I forget the date off the top of my head.
Casey:
And here we are 11 years later and change and we are 600 episodes in and it has genuinely been and hopefully will continue to be for a very long time.
Casey:
One of the coolest things I've done in my whole life is getting to spend a bunch of time with you two and all of our wonderful listeners.
Casey:
And thank you for being here.
Casey:
It really means a lot to all of us.
John:
It's a perfect place to start.
John:
If you're a new listener, episode 600, jump right in.
John:
Nice round number.
John:
Why not?
Marco:
Works for me.
Marco:
I don't want to sap on this too long, but it is really remarkable that we make a living talking to our friends about computers.
Marco:
That's incredible.
Marco:
I never would have guessed that as a young person.
Marco:
I always wanted to be a radio DJ when I was a young teen and preteen.
Marco:
That was my dream job.
John:
And now you get to do it if only you just play Fish.
Marco:
Right, yeah, basically.
Marco:
Which, I mean, you know, if you would have told me that a number of years ago, that would have been pretty hard to believe.
Marco:
But yeah, you know, to be a DJ is actually apparently not a very good job.
Marco:
It's apparently a brutal...
Marco:
business and not not a great career to pursue nor a very particularly achievable one especially these days as there's basically no radio left and and i would never have made it as a dj because i don't have the right voice i don't know enough about music i'm not cool enough there's so many reasons i would never have made it as a dj i don't speak well enough but
Marco:
to be able to literally make a living talking to my friends in radio form and BSing about computers.
Marco:
That's really, that's very special to me.
Marco:
So thank you everybody.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Couldn't agree more.
Casey:
We are incredibly lucky and incredibly thankful.
Casey:
And yeah,
Casey:
You know, as a part of the Relay 10 festivities that were last month, you know, a lot was said from Mike and Stephen about how it's really impressive to have a creative endeavor that has lasted as long as Relay has.
Casey:
And we are a touch older than Relay, actually a little bit more than a year older than Relay.
Casey:
And it's really incredible that the three of us don't hate each other.
Casey:
So.
Casey:
So I'm very proud of that fact.
Casey:
And I'm very, very thankful for both of you.
Casey:
And again, for all of our listeners, John, any sappy moments that you would like to contribute or shall I move right along to follow up?
John:
No, for people who don't know, I want to go back.
John:
If you listen to episode 400, which was a weird anniversary, but still a round number in front of the title, I gave my pitch of what I thought we were doing here at ATP.
John:
And I feel like I still feel the same way.
John:
So if you want to hear me say, what is ATP?
John:
What do you think it is?
John:
What do you think you're doing here?
John:
My description is in episode 400.
John:
If you want to go back and check it out.
Marco:
Standard Syracuse response to sentimentality is a citation and follow-up.
Marco:
It's a reference.
John:
Yeah, I don't, you know, dry, don't repeat yourself.
John:
It's good programming practice.
Casey:
All right, enough navel-gazing.
Casey:
Let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
That's what the people are here for.
Casey:
So we have a series of several pieces of feedback with regard to the macOS permissions alerts to set the stage here.
Casey:
It became public, clear, whatever, in the last week or two that starting with—what is it, Sequoia?
Casey:
I can never keep the version numbers straight anymore, as we learned in a past episode—
Casey:
With Sequoia, it will nag you every single week to let you know, oh, something could be recording your screen a week later.
Casey:
Oh, something could be recording your screen.
Casey:
We cool?
Casey:
We good?
Casey:
So Nathaniel Cohen writes with regard to that, I think by far the bigger problem than the alert rate is the alert UI.
Casey:
The alerts pop up in the rather crappy notification UI.
Casey:
There's no history and there's no centralized view over the alert decision-making that's required.
Casey:
A stream of randomly arriving requirements for user decisions can simply never meet the needed security and privacy objectives of the permission system.
Casey:
Also, regarding migration of permission grants to a new system, I personally hope there's an option to turn this off.
Casey:
I want to revisit these prior decisions.
Casey:
Better still, I'd like a nice UI to centralize the decision-making with as much information as possible about what the thing is that needs permission.
John:
So Apple would probably say, well, we've already got a centralized thing.
John:
If you go to system settings and you go to security and privacy or whatever, look, there's all the permissions.
John:
And like many things in system settings, I think...
John:
that that presentation of this information is inadequate and not particularly well organized, right?
John:
This is something that always annoys me about notifications.
John:
I always wish on all Apple devices that any notification that ever came in and that I dismissed and did something with
John:
Ended up in a log somewhere where I can go through the history.
John:
You got this notification at this time and then at this time you took this action on it, right?
John:
Not forever.
John:
Don't keep a log forever, but keep a log for 24 hours or something because it kind of annoys me that there's no one place I can go to see.
John:
Show me all the notifications, the ones that are pending and the ones that I've dealt with within the last N hours, right?
John:
Just so I can get an overview.
John:
Permissions is the same deal.
John:
What I think, and this will be related to the next question, so I'll just say it here instead of waiting until then.
John:
What I think is missing is essentially something that Google provides in its web interface in some fashion or another, like a security checkup where you go to this place and say, tell me what the deal is with security in my system.
John:
And it shouldn't be organized by permission the way things are now, like show me all the things with full disk access, show me all the things with that.
John:
It should be sort of organized...
John:
with an acknowledgement of which things are more troublesome right so screen recording would be near the top and something i don't know i can't think of another permission i have to open the thing but something is less severe would be towards the bottom right things everything wouldn't be exactly as you know equal like they wouldn't all be equally important to you uh like i don't know let's see um
John:
Scrolling, scrolling.
John:
See, they're not in the priority order, so I can't find one that's not particularly... Media and Apple Music, maybe, would be towards the bottom, right?
John:
Or Motion is Fitness, whereas Camera, Microphone, and Screen Recording would be near the top, right?
John:
Or Reminders would be lower than Contacts, maybe, and Calendar.
John:
Anyway...
John:
some sort of like centralized report in a nice ui that has organized the information for you and said just so you know um here are the seven applications that can record your screen or have microphone access or cameras or whatever that have been installed in the last whatever months or that permissions have changed in the last like like a report screen like some hey they could use ai to do it some kind of way of organizing the information
John:
like a human would do, to give you a one-page report that says, here's what you need to know about your system.
John:
Here's what's going on on it.
John:
And it's not like it would be asking you to do anything.
John:
At this point, it's just saying, I just want you to know here's the summary, right?
John:
And what would show up on the summary is applications that you just installed that you gave screen permission to
John:
Some kind of time next to everything.
John:
This has had screen recording permission for this amount of time.
John:
Three new things have gone into the microphone category.
John:
It would be great if you could pick the things that you cared about more.
John:
Again, not just a historical list, not just a thing subdivided by app or subdivided by a permission, but like a report.
John:
And then people could go to that report whenever they felt like I'm worried something is off on my system or I just want to check in.
John:
Now, maybe people would never check in and they'd be like, I made these decisions once and I'm fine with all the decisions I made and I'm sure everything's great.
John:
But if you're not sure or you can't remember or in this, you know, in this instance, people when they set up a new system, they want to wipe all the permissions and do them all over again.
John:
Or even if they do migrate them, they want to say, now's a good time.
John:
I'm setting up my new computer.
John:
I want to go get a security checkup, a security report.
John:
And things you can put in that report, like Apple has a lot of information they can leverage in the report, something that they're so hesitant to do.
John:
We've talked to this for years for the App Store is any kind of acknowledgement of like Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop.
John:
I know they're not all Apple in the Mac App Store or whatever, right?
John:
are applications that have more eyes on them, more users and a better reputation than some random application that just came out last month from a developer that has never made another application for the Mac.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
And as far as systems concerned, that's never communicated.
John:
So any kind of security report could take that into effect.
John:
What is the average rating of this thing on the App Store?
John:
How long has it been out?
John:
What version number is it on?
John:
Is this a bundle ID that Apple knows about?
John:
Maybe Apple could have an internal ranking of bundle IDs based on trustworthiness, right?
John:
And I'm sure the security people are flipping out and saying, no, that's the worst thing you could possibly do.
John:
Everything has to be exactly equally untrusted everywhere.
John:
But that's not how humans work.
John:
The goal of this screen would be to say, we want a human to look at this and have it be like the front page news of their security system.
John:
with ways to drill down and see all this stuff obviously you don't get rid of the full report or whatever and you know tell them you're not seeing everything here we're just trying to give you you know at a top level view but without that you're left with people saying well that dialogue came and went and i don't remember what i put on it and either you're going to nag me every single week or a different intro we'll see in a bit about every application that i ever said yes to or are you relying on me to go into system settings and click into these
John:
50 categories, one after the other, and scroll through the list and say, yes, no, no, yes.
John:
It's looking over every single item that you've ever approved.
John:
And really what you care about are the ones that are, you know, recent or suspicious or have severe provisions or that you didn't ever say allow this forever and ever, right?
John:
that's, that's what I think the system needs.
John:
And I know I'm asking for a lot here.
John:
It's like, well, we barely just got the new system settings.
John:
Now you want this whole new giant thing.
John:
Like we're getting a new separate passwords app, which is presumably a nicer place to look at passwords than system settings.
John:
I think we need the same thing for privacy and security.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I mean, it all adds up to me and certainly the way it is right now, it,
Casey:
I can understand how they got there.
Casey:
You know, oh, let's look at all the things that relate to location.
Casey:
Let's look at all the things that relate to screen recording.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
It's just it's not necessarily what I want or really in a perfect world.
Casey:
You know, you could say, give me all the stuff for this app, which actually can't you do that now that I say that out loud?
Casey:
Can't you?
John:
Yeah, they have a bunch of different ways to slice and dice it.
John:
But like, again, what they present to people is one particular view that is totally flat and it is organized by permission, which is a valid way to organize them.
John:
It's not a bad way.
John:
Right.
John:
But there are other ways to organize it.
John:
But like stuff we really need for actually humans to have a fighting chance is something that's organized more like a front page of a newspaper.
John:
I can't think of a better analogy.
John:
I'm old.
John:
Sorry.
Casey:
In any case, we got a lot of feedback and I'm slightly embarrassed and a little frustrated myself that I didn't think about this.
Casey:
But we got a lot of feedback about, well, why?
Casey:
Why are we getting nagged constantly?
Casey:
And several people wrote in, in this case, an anonymous person writes, I have a friend who has survived horrible domestic abuse.
Casey:
Her spouse controlled every aspect of her life, including installing software on her computer without her knowledge, keeping track of her passwords through key loggers and spyware and so forth.
Casey:
She was able to escape and then survived several attempts at her life.
Casey:
Perhaps these are the scenarios that Apple is trying to bring to light.
Casey:
This is a really great point that, again, I wish I had thought of and I'm embarrassed that I didn't.
Casey:
I don't have a great answer for this because on the one side, I feel like we should be able to say, no, never, never talk to me about this ever again.
Casey:
But on the other side, then that means other people could.
Casey:
And I feel like I, Jason was talking about this somewhere.
Casey:
It might've been the six colors podcast.
Casey:
I don't recall exactly where it was.
Casey:
And, you know, at some point his, his Jason's point was, you know, at some point you can't protect everyone from everything because
Casey:
But still, I mean, I, I, I, I don't know what I think about this.
Casey:
You know, I don't, I don't, I certainly don't want people in this scenario to be put in harm's way, but I don't know what the right balance is.
John:
I mean, what you want to do in this situation.
John:
So this is kind of like trying to, you know, use, uh,
John:
copy protection to stop people from copying a dvd that they have to be able to watch the movie on like in these domestic abuse scenarios very often the abuser has access as the person you know what i mean so you're basically trying to make it so the person you want to empower is not empowered because it's not actually them logged into their account you know what i mean right and that's a very difficult situation and that type of situation i think what you have to do is i mean what i suggested maybe is insufficient or whatever but you have to give
John:
the user tools to empower them.
John:
And you would say, well, OK, but if you give them those tools, the abuser also has those tools.
John:
But you have to make tools that are not useful to the abuser.
John:
So that, for example, that front page sort of summary of what you should know that's significant and recent about the security of your account, that's not useful to the abuser.
John:
It like viewing that doesn't help them.
John:
Right.
John:
But it does help the victim.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
It does help the person who is being abused every time they feel unsafe or unsure about what's going on.
John:
They can go.
John:
I need to go do a security check in.
John:
I need to check what has changed since last time I did a check in.
John:
I need to see what's important that I need to be notified about.
John:
Because even the weekly thing like this is the problem when someone has control of like your account, even like the weekly check in.
John:
An abuser will just turn off that permission, turn it back on, immediately get re-prompted and say allow and know that they have a week before they have to do that dance again, right?
John:
The nature of abuse is insidious.
John:
Like when you're in a situation where someone has that kind of control over your life, your computing life or your life or otherwise...
John:
it's very difficult to make the system, to lock down the system sufficiently because they always find a way in because in the end, the person who's being abused has to have a way in to use the computer, right?
John:
So you have to give that person tools.
John:
And I think a check-in type thing is a tool.
John:
A lockdown mode is a tool.
John:
Like Apple has a couple of lockdown modes and like the iOS where it's like,
John:
Certain features are just essentially disabled entirely.
John:
Right.
John:
And again, the abuser could re-enable them.
John:
And do they have that special password for lockdown mode or whatever?
John:
But you have to give tools and you have to give tools that are not useful to an abuser.
John:
And I think reports or surfacing information that's important or reviewing information that has already gone by.
John:
Here are the things you did approve and when.
John:
Right.
John:
With dates and everything on them.
John:
That is useful to someone who's worried about an abuse situation.
John:
It is not useful to an abuser.
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, it's a tough balance to strike, and I'm not sure what the right answer is, to be honest with you.
Casey:
We hinted at this earlier.
Casey:
Apparently, Sequoia will now prompt you monthly, not weekly, for screen recording permissions.
Casey:
This was reported 9to5Mac, among other places.
Casey:
In macOS Sequoia Beta 6, you can choose to, quote, allow for one month, quote.
John:
Yeah, it's kind of hard to tell from the betas because people, I guess they could set the date forward or whatever.
John:
And this is not in 15.1, by the way, or else I would have tested it because that's the beta that I have installed because I wanted to see the Apple Intelligence stuff, even though I still can't because that waitlist thing seems to do nothing.
John:
Anyway, if you click allow for one month,
John:
After the one month is up, what happens?
John:
Does it give you one last chance and then you say allow forever or does it just prompt you for a month again?
John:
Right.
John:
And we don't know the answer to this.
John:
And I think the thing that everyone is railing against is repeatedly asking.
John:
I don't think makes anybody any safer.
John:
Does induce alert fatigue?
John:
Right.
John:
And it's just plain annoying and insulting to the user that they can never be trusted to say allow forever.
John:
A better system would be to ask them a few times to be, are you sure?
John:
Are you sure?
John:
Are you sure?
John:
And then eventually say allow forever and have the allow for other apps be extreme allow.
John:
forever screen recording microphone and camera apps be extremely highlighted in the front page newspaper of like security check-in like that never go away and just say like these ones are going to prompt monthly hourly weekly daily right and these ones you've said allow forever and you know like this but i guess i mean apple hasn't really documented this yet and i suppose you could say allow for one month and set your clock forward one month but i'm always wary of doing that because i'm worried that the system is too clever and it knows that i did that and it's not going to behave the way it would
John:
normally but we'll see one month is definitely better than one week as i said in the last episode it's not that i object to even repeated prompting for things that are important because i think that is good but repeated too frequently is bad and i even think repeated on a regular interval is also bad it would be better to to prompt two or three times and space them out a little bit and then give the final allow forever and i think there should be a power user way to say allow forever immediately for people who don't want to be annoyed and
John:
Because that will show up prominently in the security checkup report that does not exist yet.
John:
Anyway, these are my suggestions.
John:
I'm not a security expert.
Marco:
The current version of this dialogue, they're trying to keep the decision they've made, which is these permissions will no longer be available forever.
Marco:
And they're trying to say, okay, well, a week, everyone complained.
Marco:
How about a month?
Marco:
And that makes it a little less annoying, maybe about 4.3 times less annoying.
Marco:
But it's still extremely annoying because what this is saying is, no matter what, we're not going to give you forever permission.
Marco:
And everything you've said about the possibility for various malware uses, for domestic abuse and surveillance uses, those are all true.
Marco:
Those are all real risks.
Marco:
But this is Apple kind of being mealy-mouthed about it.
Marco:
This is them saying, well...
Marco:
We don't actually want any apps to be doing that anymore, but we're not going to have the courage to remove those APIs completely.
Marco:
So we're going to allow apps to do this, but basically create a massive support burden for them that kind of makes it impossible to really get any traction on this.
Marco:
Any app that's going to rely on these APIs to capture the screen...
Marco:
It's now just going to have a lot of problems, you know, getting new customers, retaining customers, retaining usage over time.
Marco:
Like they're just creating problems kind of halfway.
Marco:
I say if you're going to actually have this strong of an opinion on whether apps should be allowed to capture the full screen.
Marco:
Just remove the APIs completely.
Marco:
Just go all out.
Marco:
Either do that or have it work for power users.
Marco:
I think if they've decided these APIs are so dangerous and are being abused so much out in the wild that they aren't even going to allow a permanent permission to be granted, those APIs maybe shouldn't exist anymore.
John:
I mean, a lot of these things have to exist, like being able to use the camera, the microphone, like they advertise things.
John:
They put things in their ads that show people with the Mac, you know, singing into it and recording stuff in GarageBand.
John:
And I know GarageBand is a first party app, but I don't think we can get rid of all these things.
Marco:
No, no, I'm not saying all these things.
John:
I'm saying this particular thing.
John:
Yeah, well, so screen recording is like, that's what we keep calling the permission, but it basically means can...
Marco:
an application see anything on the screen that is not one of its own windows and lots of applications need to do that to perform their functionality i mean screenshotting applications are an obvious one right well but what is so so you i'm sure you know this john so what is so this this dialogue which is terribly written says app is requesting to bypass the system private window picker and directly access your screen now i i am a
Marco:
I consider myself a Mac expert.
Marco:
I have no idea what that means.
Marco:
Is there an API that something like Zoom or Teams could use to say, like, share this window from this app to my call?
John:
Yeah, and I believe Zoom actually doesn't use the system one.
John:
I mean, so that's...
John:
This particular dialogue is trying to get people to use a new API.
John:
So this one, if you use the new API, you wouldn't see this particular dialogue, but you'd still see a different one.
John:
You'd see the one that says, this app is screen recording permission.
John:
Do you want to... So there's two different versions of this dialogue.
John:
One is they're using an older API that lets them capture the whole screen, and we wish they would use our new...
John:
you know, quote unquote, safe system mediated one, kind of like the the power box thing that does the open save dialog, right?
John:
You invoke an open save dialog on the Mac and then there's like an Apple framework that kicks in and that Apple framework is allowed to like see the whole disk even when your disk doesn't have full disk access and stuff like that, right?
John:
There's a system picker for like
John:
Pick the window that you want to record with your recording application.
John:
And then we let you do that.
John:
And during the picking, you can see all the windows, but your app can't see all the windows because you delegated to the picker.
John:
Right.
John:
And that works for like Zoom sharing your screen or whatever.
John:
But it doesn't work as well for like a freeform sort of like select a region of the screen to do like a screencast.
John:
Like, you know, I don't forget if I.
John:
ScreenFlow X or whatever can do this.
John:
Lots of screenshotting applications work like the Apple one where you can pick any arbitrary region of the screen and record that region of the screen.
John:
And the system picker for Windows won't work that way.
John:
I think the system picker might also let you pick regions.
John:
But anyway, there are other applications who just want to see things that are on the screen.
John:
Like I think...
John:
applications that want to do something graphically i think bartender does this so there's a lot of controversy behind it but even like a window manager that wants to know where the borders of the windows are and draw things around them and know what the content of the window is so they can blur over it and stuff like that uh there's lots of situations or even like a color picker if you don't use a system color picker and you just want to you know pick pick a color that's on the screen somewhere i think maya the big fancy 3d application doesn't use the system color picker and you'd be like well they should just use the system color picker but maya is this
John:
massive cross-platform application that is not going to convert to AppKit or convert to the system color picker, right?
John:
So I think there are legitimate reasons to not use the frameworks they want you to use.
John:
And also, even if you use those frameworks, you just get a different wording in this dialog box.
John:
Maybe you get a different icon, but you're still subject to the same
John:
alerting type thing like as far as again as far as i know and as far as every single story i have read there was even a story on like nine to five mac says oh this is just telling people the news you use newer apis but then there was an update to that thing they said correction there is no new set of apis that you can use the only hope we have is what we said in the last show which is there is an entitlement that some people think will stop you from getting this if you were ever granted this entitlement by apple but we don't know if that's true or not because apple has not said anything one way or the other so
John:
I mean, maybe this is nothing, not a big deal.
John:
And Apple will come up with a big communication and release notes and say, here's the deal.
John:
Everybody should switch to new APIs and this will motivate them to do so.
John:
Or maybe they'll just say nothing.
John:
Developers will just figure it out when the OS ships and when they request that entitlement from Apple and see if they get a response.
John:
Oh, I want one more thing on this, by the way, with the one month, like how annoying that is versus one week.
John:
This is another situation where centralization would come in handy.
John:
How about prompting me once a month, one time and saying these eight applications have the ability to screenshot and have like, you know, toggle switches or checkboxes next to them or whatever, instead of being prompted eight individual times once a month.
John:
Like how many applications do you have on your system that have camera access, that have microphone access, that have screen recording?
John:
Like,
John:
If every one of those things had some kind of check-in interval, some kind of decaying check-in interval with the possibility of giving permanent permission if you do it enough times or whatever, summary, put it all in one window, in one dialog box.
John:
It doesn't interrupt your other work or maybe on boot or whatever, as opposed to every single individual application having to ask once per whatever number of days forever and ever, because that is even more annoying.
Casey:
Moving along, David writes in with regard to what's the story with gas stations anyway?
Casey:
So David writes, I worked for a time on the point of sale software for gas stations, and the sales data says that they're basically in the business of selling just three things, alcohol, nicotine, and soda.
Casey:
Everything else is just there to fill out the store, and it doesn't amount to much for their bottom line.
Casey:
Some of the higher-end stores like Wawa or Quick Trip make a lot of money on their food, so there are exceptions.
Casey:
But your typical gas station only cares about those three things.
Casey:
Next time you're at a gas station, take a look at what they're advertising out front.
Casey:
I guarantee you it's beer, cigarettes, or soda.
Marco:
I have no reason to believe why this wouldn't be true, but this is also true of lots of businesses.
Marco:
For instance, most restaurants, the margins on food are very low and the margins on drinks are very high.
Marco:
This is kind of just true of lots of things.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
All right, we had a bit of a news dump from Mark Gurman, I guess Sunday, whatever day it was, a few days ago, and we're going to pick it apart a little bit.
Casey:
It starts with the iPhone 16 alleged camera button.
Casey:
So we've heard rumors for a while that there's going to be a physical button, I guess similar in spirit to the action button, but...
Casey:
The way it's been described is that if you hold the phone in landscape such that the lock button is high, you know, and up top, then there'll be a button basically where your right index finger would be, where you would expect it to be on a camera.
Casey:
So Mark Ehrman writes, the new camera control on the right side of the phone on the iPhone 16 Pro models will operate like a button on a DSLR camera.
Casey:
Right, okay.
Casey:
allowing you to press in slightly to trigger autofocus.
Casey:
Oh, okay.
Casey:
A harder press will take the picture.
Casey:
Right, okay.
Casey:
You can also swipe along the button to zoom in and out while shooting photos and videos.
Casey:
Well, now you have my attention, Mr. Gurman.
Casey:
That sounds super cool.
John:
I'm surprised this wasn't in the earlier reports because all the earlier reports showed this the capture button that we've discussed on many past episodes as being pretty long pretty like wide and like almost kind of like the old like 5G millimeter wave like window thing that on the side of the thing just kind of
John:
Much longer than a regular button.
John:
And that length is like, huh, I guess it'll be real prominent.
John:
It'll be easy to find for you to take your pictures.
John:
But this makes perfect sense.
John:
If it's also like a touch sensitive button, you can slide back and forth the zoom.
John:
That would be cool.
John:
Now, that's a little bit of an interface test there to do that well, because people's fingers move around and you don't want it.
John:
accidentally zooming, like bumping out of exactly one X to be like 1.1 X or something because your finger moved or whatever.
John:
So I hope it's implemented well.
John:
But that makes a lot of sense because, you know, on regular cameras, you have so many physical controls for controlling so many aspects of the camera process.
John:
And the shutter button usually only performs, you know, the half press to maybe initiate focus if you don't do back button focusing or whatever.
John:
And then sometimes if certain cameras, there's a thing, another thing you can do to zoom or obviously you twist the lens to zoom.
John:
And on the phone, we just don't have that many buttons.
John:
Exciting to get the action button.
John:
And I think it will be cool to get this capture button.
John:
But we really are populating sides pretty quickly here.
John:
So you better make sure the button, you know,
John:
earns its keep.
John:
And I think taking pictures, one of the most important physical things everybody does with their phone is exactly the reason you want to have a big button.
John:
So the zooming sounds cool.
John:
I just hope it works without accidental input.
Marco:
I actually have pretty high faith on Apple to do this well.
Marco:
So far, every time there's been rumors of the iPhone either adding a button or changing the way a button works or things like that, we always kind of freak out.
Marco:
Hmm,
Marco:
I don't know if that's going to be all right.
Marco:
And then they always release it and it's always fine and or even good.
Marco:
So I have a feeling this will be this will be probably very nice.
John:
I wonder if also if this thing says a swiping will do it.
John:
I wonder if it will be like press on the left and right edge to go plus and minus because I'm thinking about how this button will interact with cases.
John:
If it really is a kind of a flat button and you have a big cutout for it, will you be able to shove your finger into that cutout enough to feel like you're swiping it well?
John:
You know what I'm saying?
John:
It may actually add a prominence to those cases that don't cut out a hole in the side for the buttons, but rather have like a...
John:
like the case doesn't come up to the screen.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like they have a cutout that extends all the way to the top of the phone.
John:
So there's just a thing on the back.
John:
Maybe those cases will become more prominent.
John:
It definitely throws a monkey wrench into all of the case designs because kind of like the action button where people were guessing
John:
Should we double this button?
John:
You know, like my case has its own volume buttons that press the real volume buttons, right?
John:
Should we try to do that with this or is that not possible because it's capacitive?
John:
Should we make a cutout?
John:
If we make a cutout, how big is big enough?
John:
Can we make just a hole in the side or do we have to remove the side in that area entirely for the button to work?
John:
And will that, you know, not protect that part of the phone?
John:
It's going to be tricky.
Marco:
Maybe this is like a part of a grand scheme by Apple to reduce the amount of times people use cases, thereby increasing the amount of times people break their phones to now boost AppleCare services revenue.
Marco:
Oh, my word.
John:
That was in the design for a longevity thing.
John:
Do you add buttons to the phone to make people not wear cases so they break more often?
John:
Answer, no.
John:
That was a joke, people.
John:
It wasn't in there.
John:
I just want to make sure some listener says that wasn't in the document.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
continuing uh from mark german there's talk of the apple watch sc uh german writes i'm told that the move to plastic for the apple watch sc will lower production costs the aluminum case for the sc costs apple about five dollars a unit the plastic shell likely will be about half that i'm told another advantage of plastic the material allows for bolder colors imagine that than aluminum and is probably more kid-friendly
John:
I'm not sure if it does allow for bolder colors.
John:
You can make a little pretty bold as advanced by the iMacs.
John:
The back of the iMacs are incredibly bold.
John:
Apple doesn't allow for bold colors.
John:
That's true.
John:
But I feel like you can do that.
John:
But anyway, I like the numbers on this.
John:
We talked about the plastic watch a while ago.
John:
Like, how can you remove costs from the watch?
John:
What can you do?
John:
How much of those cases cost?
John:
Well, apparently it doesn't cost Apple that much.
John:
$5 a unit, and now granted that's their cost or whatever after spending a bazillion dollars on those machining things that machine the aluminum, but still.
John:
And I guess that doesn't also involve like the finishing steps or whatever, but half that.
John:
So you've saved $2.50, which probably translates into like $10 of price or whatever, depending on what the margins are on each individual piece.
John:
That's not a lot of money.
John:
I'd have to think that the advantages of plastic are, yes, I guess it costs a little bit less than every little bit counts if you're trying to make a low price phone.
John:
But I just think it's more sort of lightweight being the main thing and maybe more durable and resilient to damage for a phone that might be used for a watch that might be used by a kid.
John:
But I don't think this is necessarily a kid focused device.
John:
I think adults who want a lightweight watch will also find this appealing, especially if it comes in bold colors.
Marco:
It might end up being kind of a segmentation strategy also, though.
Marco:
I think maybe Apple is selling too many SEs and they want to sell more of the higher-end models to adults who actually want something that looks nice.
Marco:
And maybe this is a way to say, this is the kind of kid or less mature version of the watch.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I think plastic in general has a lot of advantages.
Marco:
Like John just mentioned, weight is a huge advantage of plastic.
Marco:
Certainly being able to bang it around without...
Marco:
Too much damage is also a pretty good advantage.
Marco:
So there are lots of other reasons why I would actually like to see more plastic options in general for just devices being lighter and more durable and nicer in certain ways.
Marco:
But I think this is probably going to make this look like a lower-end product than it actually is, which might be an intentional segmentation move.
Casey:
We'll see.
Casey:
The iPhone 17 Slim...
Casey:
will not fold uh german writes that the slimmer entry will be just a step towards something better eventually apple will want to squeeze the power of a pro model into this smaller design that feat will likely take until at least 2027 to achieve i also expect apple to produce a foldable iphone but all signs internally point to a foldable ipad being just as big of a priority that means we may still see a tablet version come sooner
John:
So if we didn't make this as clear last time we talked about the iPhone slim and the fold and everything, that the idea that the slim is the fold was a combination of rumors by a bunch of people essentially speculating.
John:
There was no rumor behind that.
John:
What we have rumors for is Apple's working on a folding phone, Apple's working on a slim phone, vague timelines, and increasing details about both of them.
John:
And so combining them is a fun thing to do, but it wasn't based on someone saying, we know this for a fact, the slim is the fold.
John:
And as Marco said, when we talked about this, the most likely thing is it's just a slim iPhone, which is fine, right?
John:
This is Gurman not flat out saying the slim is not foldable, but he basically says this is the slim.
John:
And by the way, there's also a foldable phone.
John:
And by saying there's also a foldable phone after telling us about the slim, it's basically saying to me the slim is not folding, which was the most likely scenario anyway.
John:
So if you hate folding phones and didn't want the slim to be folding, I think you're good.
John:
Good deal.
John:
And then the foldable iPad type thing is, you know.
John:
Apple rumors of Apple working on foldable things has been multiple years long.
John:
Right.
John:
And even the foldable iPad one, it's the type of thing where you're like, OK, it's foldable and it's iPad size.
John:
But is it an iPad or is it a foldable MacBook or is it neither one of those things?
John:
That's the type of thing you can't find out from like leaks in, you know, the screen manufacturers, you know, supply chain.
Marco:
Or is that just the foldable iPhone that when unfolded is kind of iPad-like in its capabilities?
Marco:
That I think is probably more likely.
Marco:
Because if you look at what folding phones are, we talked about it a little bit before, there's the flip-up kind that looks like an old flip phone that I don't think is super compelling long-term or here to stay for very long.
Marco:
Then there's the kind of book-opening kind.
Marco:
And I think that kind, Google just released a new one in their event that
Marco:
every other tech thing we'll talk about this week, and we almost certainly will not, but that seems to have some legs in that those are still pretty specialized, very high-end, very high-priced phones, but the people who have them love them.
Marco:
And we were kind of saying similar things about big phones, quote, phablets, back before iPhones got bigger, that the people who bought really big phones back before all phones were really big
Marco:
We thought they looked kind of ridiculous and they were big and expensive, but the people who bought them loved them.
Marco:
And I'm kind of getting similar feelings from people now who actually use book-style folding Android phones.
Marco:
They like them a lot, and that's some real capability there.
Marco:
So I think there is some traction behind that idea, enough that Apple should probably be looking very seriously at it, and it's good to hear that by all accounts they are.
Marco:
You know, we'll see where it goes.
Marco:
There's still a lot of challenges to be solved, but it seems like the market is buying them anyway.
Marco:
And, you know, even if things don't have perfect solutions, it seems like the market doesn't care because the utility is so high.
John:
Well, the prices are also so high.
John:
It's kind of like if you want the super expensive.
John:
I think some of these phones go for like $2,400.
John:
I think there was one I was looking at today because the most expensive thing on the phone is the screen.
John:
And this has the fancy ones have two screens, one that you can see when it's folded and one that you can see when it's unfolded.
John:
And the one you see when it's unfolded is twice as big.
John:
is the one you see when it's folded.
John:
And so if you're going to increase, if we're talking about using plastic to decrease the cost of the Apple Watch SE, well, if you want to increase the cost of a phone, add more screens and add more bigger screens, right?
John:
That's an easy way to do it.
John:
And remember, because these things fold, they try to be as thin as possible.
John:
And so you're losing some battery space because you have case, you know, you have like case, battery, case, case, battery, case, instead of case, battery, case.
John:
I don't know.
John:
That's, I know that doesn't work audio wise, but visualize it in your head.
John:
It's you're losing space for a battery with a foldable phone.
John:
I definitely feel like if you fast forward many years as screen technology and battery technology advance, especially if there's a battery technology breakthrough, like solid state batteries become affordable or whatever.
John:
And as screens presumably become less expensive when we sort of start maxing out human perception with screen technology and just start making it cheaper, which we haven't quite done yet, but we're getting there.
Yeah.
John:
Then at that point, you could get a phone that's like a 15 Pro, but also folds.
John:
So it's the exact same thing.
John:
Same size, same weight, same battery life, maybe even better battery life with solid state batteries.
John:
You know, better quality screen that you're looking at.
John:
Oh, but by the way, if you pry it open inside, it's a screen that's twice as big.
John:
technology will eventually exist to do that economically it doesn't exist today today they're thicker and they have worse battery life and they cost twenty four hundred dollars or two thousand dollars or whatever but yeah if apple wants to get there eventually they should start experimenting with folding phones and figuring out which form factor do people like you know they have they have all the market research of all the folding android phones that have been out for years and years to look at and to decide which one they think has shown that there is a form factor that
John:
makes the most sense for apple and i'm sure that's what they're experimenting with and all the stories we keep reading about are like apple's obsessed with making the crease not noticeable because when you do have a folding screen you know oleds are flexible but the substrate they're on can crease and even when it's open you can kind of both see and kind of feel where the crease is and apple doesn't like that so they're working on that problem how can we minimize or eliminate the crease um
John:
good luck apple it's a tough problem but yeah they're they are definitely late to the game of folding phones and it sounds like they're not going to have anything at least for a few years yet but i look forward to seeing what they have to offer because i think like i said i think eventually not in two or three years but in 10 15 20 years the tech will advance to the point where foldable phones don't have most of the downsides that they have today
Marco:
honestly i i hope apple gets to that game sooner rather than later because again like the market is it's not that everyone's going to convert to folding phones but if apple doesn't offer one in the next few years they will start to lose power users because like again like talk to people who actually use these things not gadget reviewers talk to actual people who actually own foldable phones if you can find one they're not that common but
Marco:
they love them they will never go back that's how good they are when you have that kind of product i really do think apple really should be taking it very seriously and again by all accounts it sounds rumor wise it sounds like they are taking it seriously um but i hope they don't wait until you know they can do the perfect thing uh if it means waiting too long and well in the meantime everyone else is shipping things that are
John:
decent enough and getting tons and tons of of you know user goodwill and building habits and you know losing power users to a different operating system that's what they did with the vision pro though so maybe we'll get to that in a little bit is it yeah because they used like don't wait until you got the perfect thing everyone else has headsets you should ship one too and they did and yeah well anyway
Casey:
Anyway, we have some Vision Pro updates.
Casey:
First of all, there's apparently... I didn't even realize this until I saw it in the show notes.
Casey:
There's a Lake Vrangla environment.
Casey:
This is reading off of Mac Rumors.
Casey:
Apple has released a new environment for Apple Vision Pro called Lake Vrangla, which is close to Oslo in Norway.
Casey:
This release follows Apple's announcement that the Bora Bora environment will be included in Vision OS 2 later this year.
Casey:
Its arrival will complete the current environment's menu, making all 13 listed options fulfilled and usable.
Casey:
I have downloaded both.
Casey:
I'm on the Vision OS beta, and I have downloaded the Wrangler environment as well as the Bora Bora 1.
Casey:
They're both really great.
Casey:
I like them a lot.
Casey:
Moving along, there will slash are slash are going to be new Apple immersive video series, films, concerts, and more.
Casey:
So reading from Apple Newsroom, Apple's releasing all new series and films captured in Apple immersive video that will debut exclusively in the Apple Vision Pro.
Casey:
Surprise, surprise.
Casey:
Apple immersive video is a remarkable storytelling format that leverages 3D video recorded in 8K with 180 degree field of view and spatial audio to transport viewers to the center of the action.
Casey:
uh boundless a new series that invites viewers to experience once in a lifetime trips from wherever they are premieres july 18 with hot air balloons i have watched that it was good it's like 10 minutes that was good it was interesting and it's cool to see you know the perspective of a hot air balloon i've never ridden in one now i sort of kind of have it's only 10 minutes i think i think that's right i watched that one a couple of weeks ago and my memory's garbage so i might have that wrong but i think anything i've seen is about 10 minutes
Casey:
Um, the next installment of wildlife, the nature documentary series that brings viewers up close to some of the most charismatic creatures, creatures on the planet premieres in August.
Casey:
I actually just about an hour or two ago watched episode number two, uh, which was about elephants.
Casey:
Elephants are adorable, man.
Casey:
They're so cute.
Casey:
And there's some baby elephants.
Casey:
They're so weensy.
Casey:
It's so cute.
Casey:
Oh my word.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
I'd like to come back to that in a couple minutes.
Casey:
Let me go through the rest of this list.
Casey:
Elevated, an aerial travel series that whisks viewers around iconic vistas from staggering heights will launch in September.
Casey:
This sounds a lot to me like, almost a frozen goodness, like Soren from Disney World and Disney's California Adventure, I think, or maybe it's Disneyland.
Casey:
Anyways.
Casey:
It's a ride where you kind of fly around through various landmarks.
Casey:
And if it's like that, I'm here for it because I love Frozen.
Casey:
I said Frozen again.
Casey:
I love Soarin'.
Casey:
And then later this year, special performances featuring the world's biggest artists, starting with an immersive experience from the weekend.
Casey:
That sounds very cool.
Casey:
The first scripted Apple immersive short film submerged a behind the scenes and on the court view of the 2024 NBA all-star weekend and big waves, big wave surfing.
Casey:
The first installment of a new sports series with Red Bull sports series with Red Bull.
Casey:
You say, even though Max Verstappen is evil, I would love to see some F1 stuff.
Casey:
So I'd like to briefly go back to the wildlife thing.
Casey:
So like I said, I watched the elephant thing, which was our video, which was about 10 minutes, give or take a little bit.
Casey:
Watched it a couple hours ago.
Casey:
But the Vision Pro, it's still something that doesn't have a strong place in my life.
Casey:
I find that more often than not when I pick it up, the battery's dead because I haven't used it in a while and it's eventually discharged itself.
Yeah.
Casey:
But over the last week or so, I've had a few occasions to use it, and this wildlife video is one of them.
Casey:
And I got to tell you, I don't know if I could justify $3,500 to just watch these 10-minute videos, but if you happen to have one or if you got one secondhand on eBay, because I saw a report like a week or two ago where they're selling for like half price on eBay right now, you know, something like $1,000, $1,500.
Casey:
which is still a staggering amount of money, but more understandable for the sorts of things that you probably would do with the Vision Pro.
Casey:
But these immersive videos, they are unlike anything I have seen before.
Casey:
And I know that, John, you and I particularly went around and around the axle trying to discuss the difference between an immersive video and just a 3D video.
Casey:
To briefly recap...
Casey:
A 3D video is when you're looking at something that doesn't move, but it has depth.
Casey:
By that I mean if you move your head, you're still looking at a rectangle, right?
Casey:
The rectangle is where the motion is.
Casey:
But there's depth within that rectangle.
Casey:
An immersive video is where as you pan your head left and right or tilt it up and down, your perspective changes because it's like watching an IMAX movie or something like that.
Casey:
So you're looking around and changing the things that you can see.
Casey:
And this elephant video is one of the many examples that we just talked about, but it is really, really good.
Casey:
And what makes part of what makes it so great is that they let you linger on each shot.
Casey:
You know, if you recall, we complained about the soccer highlight reel because it was like new, new.
Casey:
New.
Casey:
New.
Casey:
It was constantly.
Casey:
The camera was constantly moving.
Casey:
And so you're always trying to get yourself situated where you are on the pitch, field, whatever.
Casey:
It was very frustrating.
Casey:
Well, these are not like that.
Casey:
These are very well done.
Casey:
And the spatial audio was also very well done.
Casey:
So, you know, if one of the, they're not zookeepers, but one of the wildlife people is, you know, say directly in front of you.
Casey:
And talking.
Casey:
But if you tilt your head to the left, then you hear the audio move to be entirely in your right ear because that's the ear that's closest to the person talking.
Casey:
It's really, really well done.
Casey:
And I had such an eerie, funny moment when I was watching the elephant thing.
Casey:
It was roughly halfway through the video.
Casey:
So it's like five minutes in.
Casey:
And you're in a field or in an elephant habitat where they're trying to care for baby elephants and whatnot.
Casey:
And of course, this is somewhere in Africa, I think Ghana, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
And at one point, a bug like a mosquito or a fly or something like that flew at the camera such that it was just above the camera.
Casey:
And it was one of those things where if it was real, it would have hit you right in the forehead.
Casey:
And so it flies at the camera, and I think it might have pinged off just above the camera so you can see that it kind of bounces.
Casey:
And I noticed that I shook my head left and right a little bit to flick it off my skin.
Casey:
The fly that was in the video, I just naturally didn't even think twice about it and kind of shook my head a little bit.
Casey:
So it would fly away and get off of me.
Casey:
And that's such a silly kind of dumb thing.
Casey:
But that's how real this stuff can feel in just in the span of a few minutes.
Casey:
And as much as it's kind of funny and silly to slag on the Vision Pro...
Casey:
That is such a good illustration of how real it can feel.
Casey:
And I'd like to briefly bring up one other thing.
Casey:
I know I haven't given you guys a chance to talk about any of this.
Casey:
But earlier this week, just on a lark, myself, James Thompson, Jason Snell...
Casey:
and Mike Hurley all got on an immersive or spatial FaceTime call.
Casey:
That's what it is.
Casey:
So there was four of us, and we were basically arranged such that I was sitting across from Jason, Mike was to my right, and then James was to my left.
Casey:
And we had like a half an hour, 45 minute or something like that FaceTime call.
Casey:
And it is not the same as hanging out with your friends.
Casey:
I mean, I still smile from ear to ear when I think about when the three of us were back together in San Jose and got to see each other for the first time in five years.
Casey:
It's not the same as that.
Casey:
But golly, if it didn't feel pretty close.
Casey:
It really does elevate the experience and make you feel not like you're with your friends, but it feels really close.
Casey:
And I think also part of that is because the personas have gotten way better in the beta.
Casey:
They're not perfect, but they're way better.
Casey:
And so all of that is to say the Vision Pro is still kind of goofy and it's still just hilariously expensive.
Casey:
And it's still not something that I reach for all the time.
Casey:
But I do feel like the locomotive is starting to pick up some speed.
Casey:
It's slowly picking up speed, but it's picking up speed.
Casey:
And we're starting to see Apple really start to care.
Casey:
And I'm starting to get excited about where this platform is going in the future.
Marco:
I hope you're right.
Marco:
I really, really do.
Marco:
I don't think this is enough evidence yet that Apple really is getting the machine going.
Marco:
What this is is more promises and samples of future things that might be good.
Marco:
But here we are, almost seven months into this product, and we have so little content for it still.
Marco:
If Apple wants to make this take off,
Marco:
they have to step on the gas in a substantially bigger way than what we've seen so far.
Marco:
What we have from them now, from these new promises, is just that.
Marco:
Promises and teasers and things that might be good.
Marco:
I don't think this is evidence of enough yet.
Marco:
When next January rolls around and the Vision Pro will have been out for one whole year, we're going to look back and say, what did Apple do in this entire year of this new platform?
Marco:
And I think it's still going to be a pretty short list.
Marco:
And then we're going to be able to look back and say, oh, what about other people?
Marco:
What do other people do with Division Pro?
Marco:
What apps exist for it?
Marco:
What streaming services exist for it?
Marco:
Who else has made content for it?
Marco:
And I think that's going to be an even shorter list.
Marco:
And I know you're going to talk about apps in a second.
Marco:
But we're just not seeing, like, if you extrapolate out the lines of, like, here's how much is available for this.
Marco:
Here's how much traction this is getting.
Marco:
Here's how many customers are buying it.
Marco:
Those lines, even if you extrapolate them out, you know, a year or two down the road, they're still very, very low.
Marco:
We need to see this.
Marco:
This is great.
Marco:
We need to see a lot more than this.
Casey:
Yeah, and it's funny you bring all this up because the other thing we wanted to talk about with regard to Vision Pro is that apparently, according to 9to5Mac, there are more than 2,500 native apps for the Apple Vision Pro.
Casey:
Let's not focus on the fact that there's probably millions for iOS, but it's certainly many, many, many, many, many thousands.
Casey:
But hey, there's at least 2,500 for Vision Pro, and that's better than none.
John:
You should look at what the App Store curve was for a number of apps over time.
John:
Obviously, I think the App Store went better than this.
John:
But 2,500 is more than I would have guessed, right?
John:
And obviously, every app that's not created equal would be better if they had a Netflix app or whatever.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Since this is a chicken-egg situation and Apple controls both the chickens and the eggs because they make the Vision Pro and also they are making content, they can kind of decide how to resolve that.
John:
You could argue that it might be better for them to plan for...
John:
content, uh, release first party content release for the vision pro to accelerate around the time they released the lower cost one, because that's solving one side of this equation.
John:
Oh, people, you know, third parties don't want to make content until we sell a lot of vision pros.
John:
And obviously we're not able to sell a lot of these $3,500 ones.
John:
So let's release the cheaper one.
John:
Hope that sells better.
John:
Hope that will spur third parties from going.
John:
Like if Apple went all in and spent a gobs spent like Apple TV plus kind of money, uh,
John:
to make content for the relatively tiny number of people who bought the $3,500 headset that may not be the best use of their time unless all that content is evergreen.
John:
Right.
John:
So no live sports or no, you know, uh, Olympics coverage or anything like that, because there's just not a big enough audience for that.
John:
So they may be holding back and say, if we're going to be spending money for vision pro stuff, let's, let's plan to spend it so that the content comes out after the low cost headset, which who knows when that could be, but yeah,
John:
anyway uh if we if the vision pro had launched in the u.s and all the things that we just read had launched at the same time as the vision probably like okay you know good start for a new platform but given it's been in a seven month wait it's a problem and as people pointed out in the chat room it's been seven months for us uh but it just came out in other places in the world so it's a little bit of a sort of staggered launch here i continue to think that the if apple is committed to this platform uh that the slow and steady approach is a reasonable one even though it is as i keep your
Marco:
being very frustrating for the people who spent 30 100 on this thing and also like apple is not like intentionally slow playing this they're pushing it hard like i've i have gotten three different calls from app store from apple store business reps trying to sell me a vision pro by the way i already own a vision pro which i bought from the apple store but hey
Marco:
The business reps are pushing it hard.
Marco:
The developer relations staff is pushing it very, very hard.
Marco:
They are pushing hard for people to adopt it with their apps and for customers to buy it.
Marco:
They're pushing very hard.
Marco:
They're not intentionally holding back.
Marco:
This is what they have.
Marco:
This is all they have.
Marco:
There's not going to be, I don't think, some future where all of a sudden a flood of a bunch of stuff comes out that they were just holding back artificially.
John:
No, not holding it back, but they didn't budget for it.
John:
Right.
John:
Like, so they're trying to sell you a $3,500 headset that you already bought.
John:
Right.
John:
But that's different than essentially putting money, you know, like, like an Apple TV plus content, right.
John:
Putting money to produce video content, paying someone to produce these, you know, record the weekend singing.
John:
paying the nba to do the all-star things you know like that's production budget right and you can choose how much of that you want to make when they launch apple tv plus they spent millions and millions of dollars to make tv shows and movies and all that stuff and get tom hanks to be in a movie and get jennifer aniston to be in the tv show and and you know right now they're cutting those budgets on all those things because a lot of people are right but they can choose when and how to spend money on content for this thing
John:
And they are spending money for content, but they're not spending, you know, Tom Hanks movie money, right?
John:
Which, by the way, that movie didn't do well with Apple TV.
John:
Like, you never know quite what's going to hit, especially with the creative content.
John:
But that's what they could be, not holding back, but saying, when we have our schedule for how much money we're going to spend on content and when that content will be available, let's plan for the best, biggest amount of content to come at a point after we think we have a chance of selling more of these.
John:
Now, maybe in the beginning, like I said before, maybe they thought they would sell way more than they have.
John:
Yeah.
John:
They couldn't have thought they were going to sell more than the screens they could get.
John:
And that was capped at like a million.
John:
And so that's like a half a million Vision Pros worldwide.
John:
And it seems like they might not even reach that.
John:
So the plan for year one of this thing couldn't possibly have been for content that would not make sense when the total possible viewership is half a million people.
John:
Right.
John:
And what you're seeing, I think, is content that makes sense for a maximum possible viewership of half a million people.
John:
That's what everything we've read off here.
John:
That makes sense to me, right?
John:
And again, if they wanted to, they could have done something evergreen.
John:
You know, an immersive movie with Tom Hanks in it.
John:
Because that movie, you know, you can watch it next year and it'll still be good.
John:
It doesn't age out, right?
John:
But live sports ages out.
John:
Concerts, debatable.
John:
Little demo reels probably age out because there'll be more impressive stuff.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Like, we're not inside Apple.
John:
I don't know what the strategies are.
John:
But I look at this from the outside and I think, well, this is not great for people who bought one and it's not great that Apple couldn't sell them at $3,500.
John:
But...
John:
The strategy makes sense to me, given what we know about what they released, how it sold, and the rumors of what's in the pipeline.
John:
Again, frustrating, but it makes sense to me.
Casey:
Yeah, I guess that's true.
Casey:
I feel like for a company with effectively infinite money, you would think that they would want to just throw a big old pile of money at this problem and fix it and have people say, oh my gosh, you would not believe how cool it is to see, I don't know, say The Weeknd's concert or...
Casey:
you know, whatever the case may be.
Casey:
And I'm just a little disappointed that they haven't done more, but you're right.
Casey:
I mean, the numbers do bear that maybe this is the right amount of content.
John:
And I hope they, I bet they do think maybe one of these hits and will give us a hint about where to really put that money for like the one that, you know, the content that's going to come out timed with the cheaper one, right?
John:
Is it going to be concerts?
John:
Is it going to be sports?
John:
Is it going to be that short film?
John:
Like the things you let off, they're covering a lot of different bases.
John:
They're not all just, let's take you in a hot air balloon.
John:
They've got music.
John:
They've got sports.
John:
They've got narrative movie, which is the first thing I've seen announced, right?
John:
And of course, they have the whole app story, right?
John:
I don't think they know which of those things is going to be the most compelling to people.
John:
What's going to make them spend $1,500 on the next headset?
John:
Which one of these things will appeal to them?
John:
And where should we put our money?
John:
Should we just do tons and tons of concerts and ignore everything else?
John:
Or should we do all live sports?
John:
I think this will help them figure it out, presuming they have viewership numbers on these things.
Marco:
Well, but again, timing is important here.
Marco:
You said they have music, they have sports.
Marco:
No, they don't.
Marco:
They are promising to maybe sometime in the future have like one music concert, have one sports weekend.
Marco:
This all makes sense for them if they didn't need to convince people to buy this and if they didn't need to keep people happy who did buy it.
John:
Well, I mean, they don't need to keep you happy if you divide because they already got your money.
John:
But yeah, like this is stuff that's, you know, I mean, first of all, this announcement, this announcement was from July and already some of the things that they announced did come out on the dates they said they would.
John:
So I believe that they're actually going to release all this stuff.
John:
when they say they will because it's not that much stuff.
John:
It's a small amount of stuff.
John:
But I think you are basically a test audience.
John:
Anyone who has these things and is still actually using it in any way, you are the test audience to see how engaged are you with these things that they release.
John:
And even though it's a tiny test audience, they should be able to tell from that
John:
Which of these things is more appealing?
John:
And, you know, which of these things do people tell their friends about?
John:
Where their friends go, I don't suggest you buy this $3,500 thing, but man, you should check out this concert.
John:
It was really cool or whatever.
John:
You should check out the sporting events, right?
John:
We'll see.
John:
Like, I still think this is a slow burn here.
John:
And in terms of like, oh, it'd be great if they just spent tons of money.
John:
Well, you know, a company's not going to spend tons of money on a thing that it's not even sure...
John:
It's worth spending a ton of money on like, like, it's up to the hardware to sell, and then to motivate them to make the content and it's up for the content to, you know, like, it's a give and take, right?
John:
You can't just say, Okay, well, when I'm budgeting all the money we have, yes, granted, Apple has, you know, effectively infinite money.
John:
What you can do with that money, you can do a lot of different things, right?
John:
For example, getting out of China takes a huge amount of money and time and maybe a better use of your time than spending $300 million on content for 150,000 people who use their Vision Pros every day.
John:
Right?
John:
So, you know, baby steps.
John:
We'll see.
John:
Again, frustrating to the people who own them, but so far it makes me think Apple is just...
John:
being patient with this now the fear is always the home pod thing are they being patient with the home pod or they just not care about it several years ago we're like okay well they don't really care about it right well we'll see how it works out for vision pro right now i think they're just being patient how many people right now do you think use vision pro regularly total in the entire market
Marco:
my 150 000 was my guess 100 you think 150 000 people use a vision pro regularly yeah that's my guess out of uh out of like maybe 300 000 sold so half of them right i would estimate more like maybe 20 000 i don't know only apple knows i'm just guessing like i don't even own one myself so i could not tell you
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
The thing is, for me, I do turn to it from time to time.
Casey:
And there are very specific times that I think it's extremely useful to have because I have no self-respect.
Casey:
I'm happy to use it on a plane or a train.
Casey:
We've talked about that many times.
Casey:
And it is phenomenal.
Casey:
It is utterly phenomenal to just be immersed in a movie and the plane or the train that you're on.
Casey:
effectively doesn't exist.
Casey:
Like, it is amazing.
Casey:
This spatial FaceTime I was talking about was super cool.
Casey:
I do really enjoy watching the immersive video.
Casey:
Unfortunately, you know, once you see it, you've mostly seen it, and there's a sum total of what, like an hour of immersive video on the entire platform?
Casey:
But...
Casey:
It's cool.
Casey:
So and then what if the Marvel app slash interactive storytelling thing?
Casey:
I actually have only done the first like 10 or 20 minutes of it because then I got busy and then forgot about it.
Casey:
But the 10 or 20 minutes, despite me sounding blase about it, was actually extremely cool.
Casey:
So there are times when I turn to the Vision Pro and there are times when I'm glad I have one.
Casey:
I wouldn't say I'm always glad I have one, though, and that's the tough thing.
Casey:
But I don't want to count it out quite yet, even though it's definitely, I was going to say an ailing platform.
Casey:
I think that's a little dramatic.
Casey:
It's not a platform that's really hit its stride yet, but I can squint and I can see several different ways in which it could.
Yeah.
Marco:
I hope it does.
Marco:
Honestly, I really hope it does.
Marco:
Because they do have some great engineering in it.
Marco:
There are some really cool ideas.
Marco:
There's a lot of potential.
Marco:
There's also a huge number of big mistakes they made.
Marco:
And I think they have botched the launch in really sad and impressive fashion.
Marco:
And so there is something to save here.
Marco:
But they have to save it in order to...
Marco:
Save it.
Marco:
We need to see action and potential changes here and there in both the product and in the ecosystem that they need to jumpstart.
Marco:
And so until we start seeing significant moves in those areas...
Marco:
it's hard to see it as anything other than a flop and honestly really i i honestly genuinely think like john said 150 000 people he thinks regularly the user i honestly think that might be off by a factor of 10 like that's how it seems like like i mean granted this is not like a platform that you see people using you know outside very much because it's not made for that but like i've seen more cyber trucks in real life than i've seen vision bros like that's saying something cyber trucks you do use outdoors so true
John:
And by the way, you said they were pushing this thing hard.
John:
If they were really pushing this thing hard, they'd be giving it to developers that they want to make apps.
John:
They'd be giving it no strings attached.
John:
They'd be saying, you don't have to make an app, but here, we'll just give you one and think about it.
John:
That's how you actually push things hard.
John:
The fact that they're not doing that shows that A, they're Apple because they don't ever give things away.
John:
And B...
John:
that they're still kind of like, eh, we'll just take it slow and steady.
John:
Because, I mean, honestly, they should have been giving them away.
John:
That's one good way.
John:
Like, give it away to the good developers.
John:
Again, using Apple's knowledge of which developers you think make quality applications and...
John:
you know entrust them with free essentially dev kits right but that's hasn't been the apple way for a variety of cultural reasons that don't make a lot of sense and so if you ever see apple doing that for apple i would say it's a sign of desperation for any other company i'd say it's just good business but apple is so culturally against that type of thing that's like we'll make it so good you'll pay you'll pay for it yourself you'll want to make apps for it it's like okay well if you can pull that off great thumbs up but if you can't pull that off think about giving them away
Marco:
It wouldn't even have to be for free.
Marco:
Even if they just had a developer purchase program, which they've done before in very small ways.
Marco:
If they had a developer purchase program where a developer of a reasonably established app could buy one for half price or something like that.
Marco:
Get them in the hands of developers who would appreciate the discount and therefore overlook some of the math behind the market and actually get apps out there.
Marco:
I think that would help a lot.
Marco:
But what would help even more is content and not only making a ton of content themselves for it, but also maybe making moves to repair relationships with third-party content providers that would be important for it, like the big streaming services like YouTube, Netflix.
Marco:
Get those apps on there.
Marco:
But doing that is going to require relationship work that I think Apple is allergic to even trying to do.
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Casey:
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Casey:
Let's do some topics.
Casey:
And first thing we have to talk about is that apparently the Mac 4 Mini will be really mini.
Casey:
So this is from Bloomberg.
Casey:
Apple's planning a new version of the Mac Mini that will be its smallest desktop computer yet.
Casey:
This is the first major change in the Mac Mini's form factor in...
Casey:
14 years.
Casey:
So a mere three years before we started this program.
Casey:
That's when it was changed last.
Casey:
The device will be far smaller than its predecessor, approaching the size of an Apple TV set-top box.
Casey:
Despite the smaller overall design, the new Mac Mini may be taller than the current version.
Casey:
Today's model is about 1.4 inches high.
Casey:
The updated edition will still feature an aluminum shell, though.
Casey:
Apple's tested models with at least three USB-C ports on the back of the Mini in addition to an area for plugging in the power cable and an HDMI port for connecting the device to TV sets and monitors.
Casey:
People involved in the development of the new Mac Mini say it's essentially an iPad Pro in a small box.
Casey:
That's cool.
John:
So I wish we had a little bit more information about this.
John:
My first question is obviously internal power supply or not.
John:
Because you can make it real small if you put the power supply in a brick.
John:
But that hasn't been Apple's way.
John:
The Apple TV is really small, and it has an internal power supply, and it's pretty cool.
John:
I think there's no reason they can't keep up with an internal power supply.
John:
And I like the idea of the mini being redone.
John:
But my question for this is, for a desktop computer, this is not a portable.
John:
As far as I know, there's no rumors of this having a battery or anything like that.
John:
For a desktop computer...
John:
uh, what is the smaller size by you?
John:
I agree that the current mini is too big.
John:
Like we've all made fun of it when the M one Mac mini came out and the people cracked it open and half the box was empty.
John:
Cause they just use the same box from the Intel one.
John:
And this giant monster overpowered, like ridiculous power supply.
John:
There was like two or three times as much power as it needed, but you know, they're just saving money.
John:
You have the existing case, but they did it with all the M ones.
John:
Uh, they,
John:
you know devices that just use the existing cases make sense and it makes sense that they would shrink it but apple tv size it's getting to the point now where i feel like the cords are going to pull it off the desk because they weigh too much you know what i mean with like i'm all for a smaller mac mini but i hope i don't think the size of apple tv is necessary right just you know half the size of the current one i guess that sounds about right but when i picture an apple tv size thing and that's my mac mini i'm
John:
I know it seems weird at that point, like maybe make it magnetically attached to the back of the studio display or something like a little moray, whatever, like the little sucker fish things.
John:
I don't know what they're called.
John:
But hey, you know, once every decade and a half, it's time to change the Mac Mini.
John:
I think it's on the same schedule as the Mac Pro in that regard.
Marco:
I hope they don't lose too many of the ports.
Marco:
The rumor is possibly three USB-Cs.
Marco:
I hope it's at least that because the Mac Mini is really good for ports for its size.
Marco:
I hope they don't lose too many ports.
Marco:
To make it smaller, I think it serves multiple angles.
Marco:
One is...
Marco:
Smaller will have less stuff in it.
Marco:
It will have fewer ports.
Marco:
It will be a cost savings for them.
Marco:
Making it smaller will probably be a lot cheaper, and they will make a higher margin on it.
Marco:
So good for them.
Marco:
They need more money.
John:
You can fit more of them on a shipping container, you know what I mean?
John:
All the shipping costs, the packaging costs, everything that's in.
John:
It's called the Mac Mini.
John:
It's in the name.
John:
This is the one they make small.
John:
I don't begrudge them making it smaller.
John:
They should.
Marco:
Of course, right.
Marco:
So, you know, number one reason to make it smaller, they will save money.
Marco:
Whether they will pass it along to us, well, they won't, but they will save money.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
But also, when you look at the Apple Silicon Series iMacs, you know, the new slim, colorful ones...
Marco:
Those were desktops that got people excited about a desktop for the first time in a pretty long time because they were interesting and cool and they took it in a different direction that kind of got people's attention again.
Marco:
And it didn't revolutionize the world of desktops, but it took this one desktop that already existed and made it cooler and made people like it again and made it get into the news and kind of capture people's attention again.
Marco:
That will happen.
Marco:
If they make a very tiny Mac mini, that will happen to a smaller degree, but that will happen for the Mac mini.
Marco:
So that's a reason as well.
Marco:
And then I think finally, I think a lot of Mac minis end up being used in places where space is at a premium.
Marco:
Things like data centers.
Marco:
If you have a server rack where you have a bunch of Mac minis and some kind of custom mount or something, that will actually be a substantial upgrade for you to be able to fit more of them in a rack.
Marco:
um especially presumably as they're continuing to be very power efficient and everything like that um that also would be a lot better with internal power supply as john said so i hope it does keep that and i think it probably will um so when you look at how the mac mini is used like it's used in a bunch of different ways and most of those ways would either benefit or be neutral if it got smaller um
Marco:
The only way that would really kill it, I think, would be if it starts needing dongles for everything.
Marco:
I mean, it's not going to kill the product, but that would start reducing the utility of it in certain ways.
John:
And if it thermal throttled a lot, too.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
If a thermal throttles, that will too.
Marco:
So what I'm hoping they don't compromise on is thermal throttling.
Marco:
Good one.
Marco:
I hope it's still internal power supply.
Marco:
And again, looking at how many of them are being used in like kind of utility or data center roles.
Marco:
I hope it still has an Ethernet port.
Marco:
That would be a big one.
Marco:
And the Apple TV does offer that.
John:
Apple TV has got an HDMI port, internal power supply, Ethernet port.
John:
There's no reason it couldn't have all these things.
Casey:
Before we get a bunch of feedback, not all of them have an Ethernet port.
John:
Not the cheapest.
John:
Well, not the cheap Apple TV.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Right, exactly.
Marco:
Anyway, so if they can retain as many ports as they can and Ethernet and internal power, then it still retains its utility for most of the ways that they are actually used.
Marco:
So I hope that's what this is.
Marco:
And if they can make it smaller while retaining that utility, that's great.
Marco:
If they cut too much from it,
Marco:
to make it smaller, I think that's the wrong move.
Marco:
But we'll see.
Marco:
So far, again, so far, the recent history of the Mac Mini has been, you know, it doesn't get frequent updates.
Marco:
It never has.
Marco:
It never will.
Marco:
But when they have updated it recently, it has been pretty good.
Marco:
So I hope they continue that pattern.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't think that there's a need for the Mac Mini to get particularly smaller, but I love the idea of it.
Casey:
Again, as both of you said, assuming we don't lose Ethernet, assuming we don't lose at least a decent number of ports.
Casey:
Like for me, I could totally lose the USB-A ports.
Casey:
I know not everyone would agree, but for me, I'd be fine.
Casey:
I would also not want an external power supply.
Casey:
I concur with both of you that I think an internal power supply is part of what makes it so wonderful.
Casey:
But that would be great.
Casey:
I wouldn't necessarily upgrade specifically because it's so small, but I would at least be enticed to do it because why wouldn't you?
Casey:
Oh, and thermal throttling.
Casey:
I agree with you, John, that if it has to aggressively thermal throttle, that would not be great either.
Casey:
But, you know, the Mac Mini...
Casey:
I would never want that to be my only computer for various reasons about the way I work with computers.
Casey:
But I really love the Mac Mini because it is so darn flexible.
Casey:
It can be like a little server.
Casey:
It could be your only computer if you want it to be.
Casey:
It could be a server that's co-located somewhere.
Casey:
There's any number of things it can do.
Casey:
It can kind of be all things to all people.
Casey:
And if it can get physically smaller, sure, man, why not?
Casey:
I think that sounds really great.
Casey:
So I'm here for this.
Casey:
I don't know if I would buy one, but I certainly love the idea, assuming it's not Compromised City.
John:
By the way, the Apple TV also has Gigabit Ethernet.
John:
Anyway, I feel like there's an interesting convergence happening between the Mac Mini hardware and the Apple TV hardware, right?
John:
Like at a certain point, especially if the Mac Mini is Apple TV sized,
John:
the Mac mini is like an Apple TV with a better SOC essentially and ethernet port and a USB ports rather like two rounded rectangles.
John:
One's aluminum, one's plastic, uh, with the power plug, ethernet, HDMI, and then some USB Cs on the mini.
John:
Like they, they both have Apple Silicon in them.
John:
Like, is it just, is the Mac mini of that size just like the world's most powerful Apple TV that doesn't run TV OS?
John:
and is the apple tv 4k slowly becoming kind of like the dtk was like a a slow mac mini that doesn't have expansion other than hdmi and ethernet remember the days when the apple tv was a thing that ran mac os right before it ran tv os or whatever there is like we talk about the platform convergence or lack thereof between ipad and mac
John:
But what is it about tvOS that couldn't just be an app that ran on a Mac mini?
John:
Because once it gets to be that small, Marco was saying, like, people put their Mac minis in weird places.
John:
It used to be that people would put their Mac minis next to their TVs before streaming boxes existed, before the Apple TV existed.
John:
Because you could, you know, run a Plex server on it connected to your TV, so on and so forth.
John:
And you'd want it to be small because it'd have to be with your TV junk, right?
John:
That's why the Apple TV is very small and unobtrusive and, you know, like...
John:
I'm not saying these things are going to converge like the Apple TV has a thread radio and, you know, the presumably the Mac Mini won't or will it?
John:
We'll see.
John:
But at a certain point, Apple making two puck size things with Apple Silicon SOCs in them at two different prices just starts to look like a wider range of Apple TV powers if it wasn't for the OS difference.
Marco:
Well, I mean, first of all, the OS difference is substantial.
John:
What part of the OS couldn't just be an app?
John:
Like you launched the tvOS app and it just runs everything you see there.
John:
It's a full screen app.
John:
It takes over everything.
John:
It answers to the remote.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like there's I don't think there's any.
John:
Maybe I'm wrong.
John:
Maybe there's some part of tvOS that's specifically tailored to have some sort of like real time feeding.
John:
But I feel like everything that it's doing is so within the power of the SoC.
John:
Like it's so not a big deal to the SoC that this will all just be an app.
Marco:
I mean, it's not that different in terms of technical grunt.
Marco:
It's more about massive differences in the realities of hooking it up, managing it, the capabilities it has.
Marco:
So for instance, try to configure a Mac never connecting a keyboard to it.
Marco:
It can be difficult.
Marco:
There's all sorts of little details.
Marco:
If it was a Mac, it would have complexities X, Y, and Z. Anybody who's ever tried to use a Mac as a TV computer, you've run into these complexities before.
Marco:
You know this.
Marco:
You know that it's fairly different.
Marco:
Also, I would say the Apple TV costs $150.
Marco:
The Mac Mini costs $600 to $800 for a basic one.
John:
It has way more RAM and way more SSD space.
John:
It's a super...
John:
It's a super high end.
John:
But all I'm saying is they're both Apple Silicon.
John:
They both have RAM.
John:
They both run the same base OS, right?
John:
You could have a macOS, you know, boot into essentially like at ease or whatever, you know, thing that works through remotes.
John:
Anyway, I'm just the hardware at the very least is converging, if not the software.
John:
And the software is close enough to each other that they could really have one thing that did both of them.
John:
I'm not saying they should combine them.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Or Mac Mini, whichever one you decide is the standard bearer for the rounded rectangle puck shape.
Casey:
Well, we'll see what happens.
Casey:
But like I said, I'm excited for this.
Casey:
So there's been some big news this week.
Casey:
I'm in a good mood.
Casey:
I really don't want to be in a bad mood, but we got to talk about it.
Marco:
Listen, we don't have to actually talk about this that much if we don't want to.
Marco:
Because I'm also in a good mood.
Marco:
We talk about the Mac Mini.
Marco:
It's fun.
Marco:
Do we really have to talk about Apple being a jerk again?
Marco:
I say this as somebody who I love my career that I've made in part by...
Marco:
calling on apple when they've been jerks apple's being a jerk to patreon again more app store bs again apple is doing horrible things again with the app store commissions again like do we actually have to really drill it in again how just terrible this whole thing is and how much they're ruining the reputation especially among creators like my god what a terrible move like apple's apple's modern business model is to
Marco:
shake everyone down as much as possible.
Marco:
Half their profit is coming from making great products, and the other half of their profit is about to come from shaking everyone down.
Marco:
I hope we can continue to celebrate the former, and I hope the latter is not forever.
John:
Well, it sounds like you already did talk about it, but I have a slightly different take on this.
John:
Like, well, let's just say what the story is first.
Casey:
I was going to say, let's set the stage here.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So Patreon put up a blog post.
Casey:
I think it was yesterday as we record.
Casey:
It was early in the week.
Casey:
But anyways, reading bits and pieces from the blog post, as we first announced last year, and we'll link to their original blog post about this.
Casey:
Apple's requiring that Patreon use their in-app purchasing system and remove all other billing systems from the Patreon iOS app by November 2024.
Casey:
Again, this is Patreon's own blog post.
Casey:
This has two major consequences for creators.
Casey:
Number one, Apple will be applying their 30% App Store fee to all new memberships purchased in the Patreon iOS app, in addition to anything bought in your Patreon shop.
Casey:
Number two, any creator currently on first of the month or per creation billing plans will have to switch over to subscription billing to continue to earning in the iOS app because that's the only billing type Apple's in-app purchase system supports.
Casey:
So Patreon, just in case you're not aware, I presume all of you are, but just in case, Patreon is a way that you can say, hey, let's say ATP was on Patreon.
Casey:
We're not, but let's say we were.
Casey:
We could say, hey, every time we release an episode, you can pledge to give us $1, $10, $100, whatever the case may be.
Casey:
Or you could say every month on the first of the month, you're going to give us, you know, eight bucks or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
And you can do all this through Patreon's website.
Casey:
And that isn't possible in iOS, in the iOS app store.
Casey:
So now going back to the blog post.
Casey:
Apple's fee will not impact your existing members.
Casey:
It will only affect new memberships purchased in the iOS app from November onward.
Casey:
We've been working closely with creators to figure out the best way to help you avoid earnings disruption stemming from Apple's 30% App Store fee.
Casey:
Based on creator feedback, we've built an optional tool that can automatically increase your prices only in the iOS app to offset the cost of Apple's fee.
Casey:
This way, you'll continue to earn at least the same amount per membership as you do on all other platforms.
Casey:
Apple's in-app purchase system, on the other hand, only supports Patreon subscription billing model.
Casey:
So there's a thread about this on Masked On, which I'd like to come back to if that's okay.
Casey:
But we're continuing on with the blog post.
Casey:
Apple's also made it clear that if creators on Patreon continue to use unsupported billing methods or disable transactions in their iOS app, we will be at risk of having the entire app removed from their app store.
Casey:
Are you kidding?
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Are we surprised?
Casey:
Is any part of this surprising?
Yeah.
Marco:
The surprising thing is that it lasted this long.
Marco:
Apple's entire business model is, again, selling products, and then secondarily, which is assumed to be matching them in revenue, or in profit, rather,
Marco:
Shaking down as many people as possible.
Marco:
Apple makes a lot of money from hardware and a lot of money from rents.
Marco:
That's what this is.
Marco:
This is a pattern they've been doing for a long time.
Marco:
They're basically scrounging around the couch cushions of every possible app that's in the App Store.
Marco:
Apple has made a consistent effort to go and see where can we squeeze more money that we haven't been able to squeeze or that we haven't squeezed before.
Marco:
They haven't tried to squeeze before.
Marco:
They are basically hunting around the App Store looking around saying, hey,
Marco:
Looks like you're making some money.
Marco:
We need a piece of that.
Marco:
And they build a big stick.
Marco:
So this is a pattern they've been doing for a long time.
Marco:
And it's not necessarily like that somebody was breaking the rules and they go catch them.
Marco:
Usually it's, which is I think the case here, usually it's like kind of a vague edge of the rules where like
Marco:
something has been okay for a while and apple suddenly decides that's not okay anymore and you have some money and we need the money so therefore uh we're gonna reinterpret or change this rule to now include you so please business that we had really no you know role in creating uh you need to now give us your money because we we need it more than you do obviously
Casey:
Alright, so there's this thread on Mastodon from Cideria, and Cideria writes, It's not clear to me why I would allow Patreon to take 5% above and beyond payment processing when I can just get subscription service from PayPal for the price of payment processing.
Marco:
Oh.
Marco:
Oh, God, let me tell you, you do not want to use PayPal for subscriptions.
Marco:
Trust me.
Marco:
I did that before.
Marco:
Look, I'm not a huge fan of Patreon.
Marco:
It's fine, but I wouldn't use it myself.
Marco:
But my God, you do not want to use PayPal for this.
Marco:
If those are your two choices, pick Patreon.
Marco:
Trust me.
Casey:
So continuing from Cideria, what I am here for is the buy creation model.
Casey:
If you don't offer me that, then I can get what you're selling for much cheaper elsewhere.
John:
Yeah, so...
John:
My take on this, Marco's already covered a little bit, is that like the rules in the App Store for what Apple wants a percentage of are arbitrary, kind of.
John:
Apple has changed them over the years.
John:
If there has ever been any kind of thing that they've stated to try to tell you what they're going to charge for, they've said we want to charge for digital things.
John:
We don't charge for physical things.
John:
There's lots of edge cases in gray areas during the pandemic.
John:
People are given like yoga sessions and they were doing them over the computer instead of in person.
John:
And Apple's like, is that a digital good?
John:
Is that a physical one?
John:
Maybe we need money from those yoga people.
John:
Right.
John:
Patreon.
John:
It's kind of I mean, it's not so much in a gray area, except that like Apple didn't charge them originally and they're really big and important.
John:
And Apple's like, I just let him be because it's kind of a physical thing.
John:
Like, oh, people are trying to fund a cooler and the cooler gets made.
John:
Well, it's Kickstarter.
John:
Patreon is like you're going to.
John:
you're gonna make a new painting every month and they're gonna pay you to do it because they're like your patrons patron of the arts or whatever like patreon you could have people pay you for anything literally anything right some of that stuff happens in the physical world some of it happens in digital some of it's like neither is that a digital thing i don't know but if you squint you could say okay i can see how apple's
John:
somewhat consistent rule of digital things we want to cut of would eventually come for Patreon and say, well, you're kind of like a digital thing or you're more towards a digital thing, so we want to cut of your stuff, right?
John:
But that's just how Apple frames it.
John:
And I really think that's kind of like a back-solving, like, well, what are we already getting money from that we care about?
John:
Let's just say that's our rule, right?
John:
What actually makes sense and what a lot of the feedback about Patreon has been discussing is, I'm going to link it for the 17th time in the show, my Art of the Possible post on Hypercritical, where it's like,
John:
Apple acts as if applying business terms to people will make them reshape their businesses to fit the cut that Apple wants.
John:
So if Apple says we want 30% of this business and the business says there's not a 30% for you, like this is a low margin business that every cent is already accounted for by various people in the value chain.
John:
There's not another 30% for you or 15% or 5% or any percent, right?
John:
Like we pay these percentages and everyone gets these percentages for doing the jobs they're doing.
John:
And there's just no money left for you.
John:
And Apple's like, we'll just change the shape of your entire industry and or business to make it so that this percentage is available to us because that's the way it should be.
John:
And what I wrote in this blog post is like, look, Apple, you can try that.
John:
But if it turns out that those businesses cannot or will not reshape themselves to provide your fee,
John:
then you just miss out on those.
John:
And the example that I've seen coming up during this whole kerfuffle is the one that has been coming up for years and came up when it was actually relevant was e-books, right?
John:
You've got authors, publishers, resellers like Amazon, established royalty and fee structure from publishers to resellers and retailers and everything.
John:
I was in that business.
John:
I know where all the percentages go.
John:
They're all accounted for.
John:
Right.
John:
And yes, the author kind of gets screwed.
John:
They don't get as much money as you think they should.
John:
There's a lot of businesses that are like that, like the music industry.
John:
But anyway, setting that aside, there's not another 30 or 15 percent hanging around for the maker of the phone that you bought the song.
John:
Right.
John:
That's not part of the value chain.
John:
And Apple's like, we think we should be.
John:
And Amazon was like, OK, well, then you just can't buy e-books on the Kindle app on iOS.
John:
Because there's not like if you let us do it without giving you a cut, we'll put it in the app.
John:
It'll be great for users.
John:
Everyone will love it.
John:
Apple's like, no, you can't put it in the app unless you give us X percent.
John:
Right.
John:
And that percent is not available.
John:
And how many decades or years has it been?
John:
That percentage is not becoming available.
John:
That business has not reshaped itself to fit Apple's desire to get that fee.
John:
patreon is a similar model patreon you know connects people who want to pay for a thing with someone who wants to get paid for doing it whatever that thing is you know whether they want you want to pay them per painting they make or on a monthly basis or whatever it is and whatever they're going to do that's between you that's between the the patrons and the person who has the patreon and patreon is the platform that enables that to happen
John:
And Patreon takes a cut for being the platform that makes that happen.
John:
And if you look at, we'll put a link into Patreon's, like, fees.
John:
Their fees have a range.
John:
Like, if you got into Patreon, like, really early, like, you know, when Patreon first launched, Patreon would take 5%.
John:
And then the current ones are anywhere from 8% to 12%.
John:
And those are the fees and they charge for payment processing and currency conversion.
John:
And, you know, there's fees, fees, fees.
John:
Right.
John:
But the point is, if you add up all of Patreon's fees in the worst case scenario, like, you know, for the privilege of me doing this thing, for letting people sign up to give you money, for collecting the money from them, for then paying you out for the money that they gave you, for me doing all of that, Patreon takes this percent.
John:
And that percent, I think universally, is less than 30.
John:
So Apple wants a bigger cut of Patreon's business than Patreon takes.
John:
Patreon is the business that connects people and people who do things and people who want to pay them for it, right?
John:
And Apple says, yeah, but we make the phone and the OS...
John:
where the app is that people use your service through.
John:
And so we want a bigger cut, sometimes substantially, like three times bigger cut than you get because we think we provide three times the value that you, the actual platform, does.
John:
I can understand Patreon saying there's not really room in our business for someone to make three times as much as we do.
John:
on every transaction right a lot of people are mad at patreon right now because you know some people are like well patreon rather than saying okay we're going to give apple it's 30 and by the way it's 30 because patreon is a huge company each individual person who has a thing on patreon
John:
They may be making pennies, right?
John:
They're making not a lot of money.
John:
Don't they qualify for the small business, blah, blah, blah?
John:
Well, Patreon does not qualify for the small business, blah, blah, blah, because they make more than whatever million dollars or whatever.
John:
So Patreon has to pay the big amount, not the small business program amount, which kind of sucks, whatever.
John:
Anyway, a lot of people are saying, Patreon, how about you just get your app out of the app store?
John:
You have a website.
John:
That's how a lot of people use Patreon.
John:
Is the app so important that you're going to give Apple 30% and then basically give an automated way to pass that 30% cost on to the customers who pay on Patreon, right?
John:
So that's what they're saying.
John:
Like, hey, people who are on Patreon, you can just basically raise the rates of all of your subscribers by 30%.
John:
If they use the iOS app and then you'll get the same amount.
John:
It's like, yeah, but every single person who plays for a Patreon is going to be paying 30% more and that 30% is going to be going to Apple.
John:
And if you told them, hey, we're going to, I know you subscribe to this Patreon for this person.
John:
We're going to raise your prices 30%.
John:
but if you don't want that to happen don't use the ios app i bet they would go fine i won't use the ios app i can go to patreon.com i know where the website is this website does not require the phone to exist it works fine on the web the web is the platform nobody owns i don't think i want to give 30 of my money to apple like if you told someone i'm paying five dollars a month and it's okay you know eight percent is going to patreon and the whole rest is going to no sorry 30 is going to apple wait what
John:
8% goes to Patreon, 30% goes to Apple, and the rest goes to the person I'm paying?
John:
Why is 30% going to Apple?
John:
It's like, well, if you do it through the web, they don't get anything, which, by the way, you probably can't even tell them unless you're in the EU.
John:
But anyway, people are mad at Patreon, saying, Patreon, why are you doing this?
John:
Especially the people like that thing you read from the thread I messed on.
John:
It's like, the reason I use Patreon is because I can let people pay me for every sculpture that I make.
John:
If I don't make a sculpture, I don't get paid.
John:
Every sculpture I make, this person pledged to pay me $1, right?
John:
So I put out a new sculpture, I say, here's the new sculpture, and I get $1, right?
John:
in-app purchase doesn't support that right or paying even something as simple as paying on the first of the month you're like oh monthly subscriptions exist but they don't all start in the first of the month so some people have patrons who say on the first of every month i will collect one dollar from you because that's what you pledge for whatever it is that i do but apple doesn't support that within that purchase so patreon's saying not only will we pass along the 30 cost if you want us to or not if you and then you can just pay the 30 we don't care who pays it or whatever um
John:
But we're eliminating those other two things where you get paid for every sculpture you make and you get paid on the first of the month because iOS and that person doesn't support that.
John:
We're just going to eliminate that for anyone who uses the iOS app.
John:
Only people who use the web can do that.
John:
And then furthermore, we won't even provide an option in the app that says, I don't want to use the app to do this stuff.
John:
I'll do it all on the web.
John:
I still want to have the app so I can look at stuff, but I don't want to use it to pay because if we did that, Apple said, apparently they'll take the app off the app store.
John:
So I think there's plenty of blame to go around.
John:
But this is, I think, just another example of a business that Apple wants to insert themselves into that just doesn't have that much money laying around for them.
John:
The users don't want to supply it.
John:
Patreon doesn't want to supply it.
John:
It's not as if they're taking 30% of Patreon's cut.
John:
They're taking 30% of the whole price.
John:
If you pledge $1 a month, 30 cents of that goes to Apple, right?
John:
And whatever percent goes to Patreon.
John:
And then the rest, you know, goes to the person you're actually trying to pay.
John:
Apple simply can insert itself into certain businesses because they're already established and the cut is already, you know, everyone has decided that the distribution of money on that is acceptable to all involved.
John:
And when Apple power shoots in and say we want a fairly large percentage, sometimes we want the second largest percentage because the person who owns the Patreon is getting the largest amount still.
John:
And then Apple second and then Patreon a distant third.
John:
That just doesn't make sense to people.
John:
It doesn't make sense to the people who have business on Patreon.
John:
It doesn't make sense to the people paying for it.
John:
And honestly, I don't even know how it makes sense to Apple because I don't feel like Patreon is going to be making them as much money as like in-app purchases on subway surfers or whatever.
John:
So it's yet another, you know, it's kind of like wish casting.
John:
Wouldn't it be great if 30% of this existing business could go to us?
John:
Yeah, we all have that feeling about lots of business.
John:
I can look at all sorts of businesses and say, wouldn't it be great if like how much of a percentage of Patreon's business should the internet service providers have?
John:
How much should the cellular companies have?
John:
All those facilitate the transactions that are taking place.
John:
Arguably, the internet service providers, Patreon couldn't exist without them.
John:
Shouldn't they get like 15%?
John:
And if you start doing that and saying everybody along the chain is going to get some big percent that they're going to boost their stock price and their earnings reports or whatever, it doesn't work.
John:
It's not sustainable.
John:
there's not enough money to go around to have like, okay, we're connecting, we're connecting people who make things and people who want to pay for it.
John:
Uh, unfortunately, uh, kind of like the music business, uh, you pay $1 and three cents of that dollar gets to the person you wanted to pay.
John:
And the rest goes to millions of different middle parties that have somehow found their way to into this business and that you have to pay because they're monopolies and duopolies.
John:
And that, I think, is the real story here is how much room is there in a given, especially established business for new parties to come in, even if they're part of the value chain.
John:
And Apple is part of the value chain.
John:
Even if they're part of the value chain, how much place is there for them to come in and to demand money for the things that take place there?
John:
It's I mean, at this point, I'm kind of surprised that Apple doesn't say, well, if you use Safari, when you go to Patreon dot com, we get 30 percent.
John:
If you use Chrome, we don't get it.
John:
But if you use Safari, we get 30% because we're facilitating that transaction by having a web browser that we make.
John:
And they are facilitating it, but most people have decided that the web browser maker doesn't deserve 30%.
John:
But I guess the phone maker does because of in-app purchase.
John:
It's...
John:
It's frustrating.
John:
It's frustrating on all sides here.
John:
People are mad at Patreon.
John:
People are mad at Apple.
John:
People who are on Patreon are mad that they have to figure out some other alternative.
John:
A lot of these shenanigans, this is not the reason we do this, but because we're just a bunch of programming nerds, but people were asking in the chat room, don't you guys use Patreon?
John:
Don't you use Memberful?
John:
We are...
John:
in the privileged position not to have to do that because we're software developers so marco wrote the system that we use we do use a third-party thing we use stripe which is a payment processor which is an extremely difficult thing to do but guess what stripe doesn't charge 30 yet yeah it shows like three percent yeah they charge what payment processors charge you know and patreon probably uses stripe behind the scenes and patreon charges for payment processing and i get they'd probably have make a little profit and the rest of that money goes to their actual payment processor which honestly is probably stripe right
John:
But not everyone is going to write their own membership program.
John:
I would not recommend it.
John:
In fact, I don't think Marco recommended.
John:
No, we can do it because we're a bunch of nerd programmers in a nerd podcast.
John:
And no, we're not going to start a competing business with Patreon because that's not what we want to do.
John:
But it's when businesses like Patreon end up taking more and more of the money.
John:
And at this point, at this point, like not taking more of it, but like, you know,
John:
Apple takes more of the money and Patreon allows you to pass it on to your customers or to pay it yourself.
John:
It just makes the people who are stranded there, people who can't and don't want to write their own membership systems like that.
John:
That's why I use Patreon.
John:
I can't write my own membership system.
John:
That's why Patreon exists.
John:
And all of a sudden prices are going up 30 percent and I'm getting none of that.
John:
That's not a good feeling for anybody.
John:
And honestly, I really, you know, Guru wrote about this today.
John:
Like, people are saying, hey, Patreon, just pull yourself out of the App Store.
John:
That's what it's come to right now is that people are so against Apple-ness that they're saying, look, these companies should just not be in the App Store.
John:
It's not worth it.
John:
Like, that's what people always say.
John:
Well, if you don't think Apple's cut is worth it, take your app out of the App Store.
John:
And now, finally, we're getting a concrete scenario in an app that people are familiar with and saying...
John:
Yeah, pull the Patreon app.
John:
It is not an essential part of the Patreon process.
John:
And maybe Patreon knows something that we don't.
John:
Maybe they know that that is their biggest sales funnel.
John:
If they pulled the app, they would go out of business, right?
John:
In which case, maybe Apple does deserve some percentage of it or whatever.
John:
But honestly, we're never going to find out until someone tests that theory, because I feel like the web is a perfectly reasonable.
John:
We don't have an app.
John:
We don't have an iOS app with an app purchase.
John:
We just have a website, atp.ifm slash join.
John:
Every single one of our members went through that website to join.
John:
None of them went through an iOS app.
John:
There is no iOS app you can use to join our membership program.
John:
It's only on the web.
John:
And yet somehow people find it and join.
John:
It's a miracle.
Marco:
I hope the government steps in and breaks Apple of its addiction to extortion.
Marco:
That's what this is.
Marco:
Apple's business model is hardware and extortion.
Marco:
And it's a terrible place to be.
Marco:
They are clearly incredibly shameless about it and incredibly addicted to this revenue.
Marco:
This is exactly the role that government regulation plays when a large monopolist, which Apple – I know we can argue about the definition of that, but the role they take here is the role of a monopolist.
Marco:
And when a monopolist starts having undue influence over large areas of commerce that become damaging to an entire market –
Marco:
that's when government regulation steps in to regulate that monopolist and to force them to behave differently in certain ways to protect the health of the entire market.
Marco:
There is no question that Apple has reached that status, that Apple is abusing that monopoly power to extract things via extortion, to extract more money from lots of businesses out there.
Marco:
It is incredibly damaging to everyone, including Apple's long-term strategy.
Marco:
Again,
Marco:
I question Tim Cook's long-term strategy here.
Marco:
I do not think he is a good CEO anymore.
Marco:
I think his role in the company has run its course.
Marco:
I think he has done all the good he's going to do, and it's time for a different strategy.
Marco:
It really is.
John:
There we go.
John:
Aaron, mark your bingo cards.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
Yes, of course.
Casey:
I need my own sound effect for this.
John:
Yeah, we need a sound effect.
John:
Marco calls for Apple executives to be fired.
Marco:
But where does this end?
Marco:
What is the strategy here exactly?
Marco:
The strategy here is begging for regulation.
John:
I don't think it's extortion, but if you want to see what Apple's model was, I mentioned the music labels.
John:
The music labels have established a business where essentially this is the case, that the middle party gets most of the money and the artist gets the smallest amount.
John:
And to some degree, the movie industry has done that a little bit.
John:
At least they have some unions there to push back against or whatever.
John:
There are existing businesses that are shaped like that.
John:
And I bet Apple looks at the music industry and says, wow, this is amazing.
John:
The music industry takes most of the money.
John:
And whatever pennies are left go to the artist.
John:
And the most successful artists are still millionaires.
John:
But the music labels are billionaires.
John:
And obviously, digital music and streaming and all other stuff has sort of put a dent in that business.
John:
But that's a business model that a business person could look at and say, wow, that's great.
John:
We should have that for us.
John:
But I don't think you can retroactively make that happen.
John:
Like Patreon is not a new website or concept.
John:
It's been around for a long time.
John:
And the percentages are what they are.
John:
And they have competition in this area.
John:
And the money is distributed the way it's distributed.
John:
And part of the way these services work is they try to tell creators, come to us, to our site.
John:
We have the best features.
John:
People like to use our site.
John:
And we won't take as much of your money as the competitor.
John:
But Apple's not competing on that ground.
John:
They're just saying there's an existing business.
John:
And if you squint, it looks like a digital thing.
John:
And we say we get a part of all digital stuff that goes through our phone.
John:
And we've been able to do that because a lot of the things on our phone started from zero and they arrived on our phone.
John:
And then that purchase made them tons of money or whatever, right?
John:
But existing businesses aren't already shaped like that.
John:
And they're coming in saying, make room for us, make room for us.
John:
And even though there are businesses that are worse, like the record labels,
John:
Apple can't butt their way into that either and say, by the way, we want 30% of every single thing.
John:
Obviously, they already sell digital music and do streaming and do all this stuff or whatever.
John:
So maybe it's not a great analogy.
Marco:
I was going to say, I think they've already butted their way into that.
John:
But they innovated their way into that by saying, we'll find a way to sell your music in a way that people will buy it.
John:
And they did that with the iTunes store.
John:
And then streaming, in most cases, streaming, the labels are still getting most of the money.
John:
It's not Apple taking the large chunk of the money there.
Marco:
Although I think Spotify would have some dispute with the term competing their way into that because there was also a little bit of unfair competition with that.
Marco:
But admittedly, like, yes, they did largely get into that via competition that was partially fair.
John:
And also the artists were already getting screwed there.
John:
right seriously getting screwed right and so they continue to get screwed it's it's terrible right but here arguably the people who use patreon were like they're okay with this deal they're like i give patreon eight percent and it's well worth it because i can't i'm not a programmer i can't write my own patreon website right i want the people who give me money to have the least friction possible and people know how to use patreon or whatever similar website you're using and for that i give them eight percent and it's well worth it to me 38 going and not going to me
John:
starts to be a different deal right and again you say well that's just through the ios app they can continue doing it through the web right i don't know what the funnels look like maybe apple is calculating that they are such an important funnel and i keep using that term but it's like basically where do users come from to pay you money do most of them come through the ios app do most of them come through the website what is the split right if ios is such an important platform for making patreon money that they feel like they can't leave
John:
then maybe Apple is calculating that they can take this cut.
John:
And apparently, Patreon is not pulling their app, and they're saying, yes, we are going to do this, and prices are just going to go up from everybody.
John:
And what this should make people think is, getting back to what Marco was saying, do we want to live in a world where the Android-IOS duopoly has a stranglehold on the distribution of any service that uses your phone?
John:
And they are able to take that percentage because they are the funnel, because they are a duopoly, right?
John:
It's like, oh, Apple is the funnel.
John:
The Apple gives you all your customers.
John:
You should pay them percentage.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Apple gives us all our customers because there is no other way to get your app on the iPhone in front of people's faces other than progressive web apps, which Apple continues to fight against a little bit.
Yeah.
John:
And that's why, like, it's not like they're the funnel because they do such a great job.
John:
They're, except for in the EU, they are the exclusive way to put apps on people's phones, right?
John:
And Android and the Google Play Store, they're not exclusive, but they are the vast majority, right?
John:
That's the root of this is that they have, you know, they can command those prices because they are the funnel, because they are essentially a duopoly.
John:
And striking at the heart of that is not saying Apple can't charge Patreon money.
John:
It's saying...
John:
Why should Apple be the exclusive distributor of apps?
John:
And it gets back to the whole EU DMA thing or whatever.
John:
So that's the period of turmoil that we are in, right?
John:
In the EU anyway, governments are trying to break the exclusivity of distribution that is the root of all this stuff.
John:
Over here in the US, we're mostly just...
John:
being sad that patreon is going to be charging a lot more money and none of that money is going to be going to occur to the creators but you know patreon pulling the app or uh making patreon competitors that don't use the app store or whatever all of those are just kind of like hacking away at the leaves of the root of this whole problem is the android ios duopoly and maybe the department of justice is going to help with that but we'll see
Marco:
I mean, honestly, why stop at Patreon?
Marco:
What if a church has an app?
Marco:
Why don't they take 30% of a church's donations?
Marco:
What about different charities and non-profits?
Marco:
Can you just take 30% of all their income, too, if they happen to have apps?
Marco:
I mean, again, why stop here?
John:
Well, you're talking about, like, you know, Apple does make judgments about, you know, we choose not to take this money even though we technically could.
John:
We choose not to because it's a nice thing to do, like with non-profits and stuff like that.
Marco:
Kind of them.
John:
But the root of that problem there is still Apple gets to decide.
John:
There are no other influences on that.
John:
No competitor that can make different decisions to put pressure on Apple other than Android.
John:
So Apple and Android kind of do the similar things, which we'll talk about probably next week.
John:
There's another fun example of Apple and Android doing very similar things because they're essentially a duopoly.
John:
And there's no other way to get on phones.
John:
And phones are used by everybody.
John:
And it's...
John:
I mean, every time this happens, people bring up the web and just go, you know, just throw salt over their shoulder or whatever and say, like, thank God the web exists because if it didn't exist, Apple would never allow it to exist.
John:
You know, the web, the platform nobody owns, not even Google, even most of the times it seems like they do, is the one sort of side door to this whole process.
John:
For now.
John:
Right.
John:
But the duopoly is so strong that they could say, hey, anything you buy using Safari, we get 30 percent.
John:
They haven't tried that yet because you buy so many things through there.
John:
But Apple likes to pretend you live in a world where it's only possible to ever give anyone money using a native app.
John:
It's not true.
John:
You can go to ADP.FM on your phone and buy a membership from us.
John:
And Apple does not get a cut of that, even though you used your phone to do it.
John:
Isn't that wild?
John:
It's not wild.
John:
You used to be able to do it with computers that Apple would make and you could buy things through them.
John:
Apple got no cut of it.
John:
And somehow the world didn't collapse and Apple didn't go out of business.
Casey:
Let's suppose we're in an alternate universe where the anti-steering rule doesn't exist.
Casey:
And yes, I know the EU is basically that alternate universe, but just bear with me here.
Casey:
Let's say that Patreon could worldwide just say, hey, these are the prices if you would like to use Apple's in-app purchase system.
Casey:
But if you'd like to see other pricing, go to the web.
Casey:
Here's a link.
John:
Or it's the other price and you tell them the other price or get it for 30% less by clicking on this web link.
Marco:
Yeah, this is the price on our website.
Marco:
Here's a link to get there.
Casey:
No argument.
Casey:
But my point is, even if you weren't allowed to show the price, I still feel like we would say, man, this is kind of dumb, but whatever.
Casey:
If people want to save a little money, they'll go to the web.
Casey:
The link's right there.
Casey:
And even better, you know, if Apple actually had to, what's the word I'm looking for?
Casey:
Compete.
Casey:
There it is.
Casey:
If Apple had to compete for the business and then in that case you could say, you know, oh, you can pay a 30% premium to use an app purchase or you can, you know, not pay that and go to the web.
Casey:
Here's the link.
Casey:
I feel like if that escape hatch was there, I would be a tenth as grumpy as I am right now.
Casey:
But because Patreon isn't allowed that escape hatch because of Apple's bullshit rules that are one of their many...
Casey:
then there's no escape patch.
Casey:
And so now Patreon's screwed.
Casey:
And Patreon being screwed, that sucks because I feel for them.
Casey:
But the people I really feel for, which is what you two have also been saying, is the creators.
Casey:
These are people who are just trying to eke out a living.
Casey:
Not different than us.
Casey:
They're just trying to eke out a living doing something creative.
Casey:
And they're trying to get rewarded for their efforts, which, again, is not unreasonable.
Casey:
And yet because of Apple...
Casey:
they're all these creators are potentially going to get screwed and that's just that's not fair and i don't grasp what apple's going for here like intellectually and and maybe i guess this is probably where it stops i just need to shut up but intellectually i get they just want more money they're a corporation that just wants more money and it's as simple as that
Casey:
and i get that but i i can't help but feel like especially in the last year or so apple has been you know trying to do get as many own goals as they did during the aforementioned butterfly keyboard era and actually i would say it's worse now because if you didn't want a butterfly keyboard you just don't buy a laptop but here what are you going to do not use an iphone like yes i guess you could go to android but so many people are not going to do that and honestly in android land it's basically the same thing yeah
Casey:
So I just, why, why, why is, is it worth it to you for everyone to hate you?
Casey:
Is this money from Patreon worth it to you for all these creators to say, you know what?
Casey:
Apple, because they're a bunch of anyway.
Casey:
Like, is this really worth it?
Casey:
Apple, is this worth it?
Casey:
And it's easy for me to say, but I don't think it is.
Casey:
I don't think it's worth it.
Casey:
And I think what Apple isn't realizing is they're doing damage perfectly.
Casey:
possibly irreparable damage to their brand and as much as i hate you brand i i hate kind of referring to them that way but it's true people are looking at apple and unequivocally saying they're the baddies now and that's just too bad and
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I don't want to be that person that's wishing for the glory days of the years past.
Casey:
But I can't help but wonder if that's who I've become when it comes to Apple.
Casey:
And I think, Marco, it was you that said earlier this very episode, their hardware is incredible.
Casey:
And you know what?
Casey:
A lot of their software is too.
Casey:
But their policies are just awful and getting worse with every day.
Casey:
And I don't really care whose fault it is, to be honest.
Casey:
I don't care if it's Phil's.
Casey:
I don't care if it's Tim's.
Casey:
I don't care if it's Eddie's.
Casey:
I don't care whose it is.
Casey:
It's just gross, and it's unnecessary, and I hate it.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
I guess I should do a little introspection about why I'm so worked up about what a corporation does, but it just stinks.
Casey:
And I really wish they would choose different options.
Casey:
But anyway, now that my rant is over, again, I come back to if the anti-steering rule...
Casey:
wasn't there if patreon was allowed to say go look at the website or you know or again if apple had to compete if the app store had to compete with the web then i feel like this would be a not a nothing burger but it would be much less of a big deal but because of apple's absolutely absurd rules here we are and it just sucks that's part of like it's part of a sort of we always think like what is apple thinking like do they have a different view on the inside part of what lets you know
John:
what you can charge for the things that you make is competition, right?
John:
So like if you make a thing and you think it's worth X and you set the price way too high, you'll find that out because people will buy competing products instead of yours.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Or if you have an array of services and boy, this one isn't selling well, but this one's selling like gangbusters.
John:
And in fact, we raised the price on the popular one and people are still buying it.
John:
People must really want that, right?
John:
There has to be competition for you to learn what part of the value that I'm providing do people want to pay for?
John:
right and what part do they think is not worth paying for and i think apple for whatever reason inside the company doesn't like they don't not for whatever reason but because they don't have that feedback they don't realize what part of the things they're providing are valuable and what aren't they just think like we make the platform and because they can make any rules they want the only feedback they get is like the most extreme of like someone pulls patreon pulls their app from the store like that's literally like
John:
the grumbling they get or whatever, like, ah, they'll still pay it.
John:
Obviously the, the, the, you know, the IP that we're providing is worth the percent we're getting and they grumble or whatever, but they keep paying in.
John:
And it's like your feedback mechanism can't be, if they don't literally stop doing business with us entirely, it must be fine.
John:
And so they think, like, our role in that Patreon transaction is worth 30%.
John:
And no one from the customers to Patreon says, Apple, are you kidding me?
John:
Patreon's percentage isn't even 30% from using Patreon, right?
John:
There's no way yours is, right?
John:
And again, you can argue how much of that is the ISP, how much of that is the, you know, the company that assembled the phone, how much of that is the cellular network.
John:
And, like, they don't get cuts of all that stuff, right?
John:
But...
John:
Apple says, well, we charge this amount and people pay it, so we must be worth it.
John:
It's like, no, you're not in a market that lets you know if what you're doing is worth it because you don't actually have competition, partially because of rules that you made that says people can't even show that, hey, you could get this for 30% less on the web.
John:
Suddenly, if people saw that option, like, wow, people are choosing in-app partners way less than they used to when they see they can get it for 30% off somewhere else.
John:
Because people buy things on the web all the time, I swear to you.
John:
On your own phone it happens.
John:
And so in the absence of that, of competition, it makes it so they can't tell.
John:
I find it's hard to believe.
John:
It's like surely they know, right?
John:
But it's increasingly become my theory that they're able to maintain the fiction that these percentages are appropriate because they think that's how much value they're providing.
John:
And they don't realize that
John:
Or they haven't internalized that it's because, you know, they have captives, that it's not a competitive market, that it's duopoly and that they set these incredibly anti-competitive rules.
John:
And, you know, maybe they'll figure that out from the EU, but in our long discussion of EU stuff, and there'll be more of it.
John:
I'm sorry, everyone, not in this episode, but in the future, because it continues to roll on.
John:
Even then, they're like, we will comply in a way to make sure that we get all the money that we were getting before and it's just more complicated.
John:
And that also prevents true competition.
John:
And that also prevents them from realizing how valuable is what we're providing.
John:
I bet tons of people would pay more than payment processing fees to use in-app purchase.
John:
But more than payment processing fees and 30% or even 15%, there's still a gap there.
John:
What is the gap?
John:
We'll never know unless Apple exposes its services to competition.
John:
And you can see...
John:
This company is offering these terms.
John:
Apple is offering these terms and they're all on the same phone and they all have the same access.
John:
And let's see which business, you know, compete, have some competition.
John:
Then the water will find its level and everyone will figure out how much we can charge for which services and which services people want and which services people don't want.
Casey:
Do you think people would be, including me, would be so worked up if there were no anti-steering clause?
Casey:
If they could just link out to Patreon.com, do you think people would be so upset?
John:
No, because Patreon probably wouldn't have used a net purchase to begin with because their business is so sensitive to the cut that anyone takes.
Marco:
To be clear, Patreon doesn't use a net purchase.
Marco:
Patreon already has their own user base.
Marco:
They've already gotten from their own efforts and the efforts of the creators that use it, mostly.
Marco:
But they use the native app.
Marco:
Yeah, but they already aren't using an app purchase.
Marco:
Apple is saying you have to start using an app purchase and, of course, then pay us by using it.
Marco:
But when we chose Stripe for our payment processing for our membership system, the reason why Stripe only charges 3% is because there is competition in that market.
Marco:
And we could have chosen any payment processor.
Marco:
And in the future, if Stripe says, hey, you know what?
Marco:
We're going to actually start charging you 30% instead of 3%.
John:
we can say okay see you later and we would switch because it's a competitive market we can do that and you that you the atp member hopefully would not notice that because you don't care what a payment processor is yeah well they would notice they have to like re-enter their credit card details but like anyway the whole point is you'd still you'd still go to atp.fm slash join you wouldn't go to a different place you'd still have the same membership account you would have to make a new membership account like yeah you wouldn't have started listening to a different podcast entirely like yeah
John:
You wouldn't have to use an Android phone.
Marco:
There would be many, many differences because that's a competitive market.
Marco:
And ultimately, again, this is the role of government.
Marco:
I know why Apple is not going to do this because Apple does not show concern for long-term strategy right now.
Marco:
Whether you agree with me that that's Tim Cook's problem and he should maybe go, that's up to you.
Marco:
But right now, look at where the company is.
Marco:
They currently make their biggest revenue driver from deals that are very likely to and probably very easy to strike down by government regulation.
Marco:
So, you know, there's significant risk there, plus, you know, risk in China, hello, there's a lot of risk in Apple's current financial situation.
Marco:
You know, whether you think that's good or not, from their point of view, it is the role of government to protect markets and the health of markets.
Marco:
And in this case, Apple is literally extorting an entire market that they keep expanding the extortion into.
Marco:
And it has grown to a size now that governments should and are stepping in to regulate.
Marco:
And it's just a matter of time, and I can't wait for that time.
Marco:
And again, and I say this as an Apple developer who will continue to use in-app purchase and pay the percent in my app because it is worth it to me to continue paying that percentage for my app.
Marco:
But that should not be the only option.
Marco:
And I certainly would not suggest that every business out there that happens to be used on a phone sometimes needs to give Apple 30% and have to be the only option.
Marco:
That's nuts.
John:
If you were Patreon and you launched your app with your own payment processing and Apple just let you do it and you had that established for a number of years, then they offered you in-app purchase, you'd probably be like, no, I'm good.
John:
Because you already implemented and it's a much lower percentage, right?
Yeah.
John:
that's like kind of the situation patreon is in where like well apple finally came for patreon it seems like it should have come for them earlier it makes perfect sense but they didn't and so they've had years of doing this all themselves they already wrote that code they already maybe their code isn't as good as an app purchase maybe it isn't as smooth maybe they don't get to use like i mean hell they could use apple pay if they wanted i don't know if they do but either way if you had already done that in your app you like you're saying okay i'll just keep using it at purchase because it's worth it to me
John:
Because without it, you'd have to write your own version of that and that would be a pain.
John:
But what if you already wrote that?
John:
What if you already used Stripe on your back end and wrote your own in-app purchase loan and you've been using it for 10 years?
John:
Then Apple comes, how about paying us 30% for a better version of what you wrote yourself?
John:
And you'd be like, is it better though?
John:
And I've already written it myself and 30%, no thanks.
John:
And then Apple would say, how about if we don't give you an option?
John:
Or we kick you off the store.
John:
Now do you like it?
John:
And you'd be like, okay, well...
Marco:
Well, and we actually have... There actually is a parallel to this.
Marco:
Apple Podcasts and premium podcast support.
Marco:
So, Apple Podcasts, a couple years ago, launched support for paid podcasts that you could have people... As a podcaster, you could have your listeners buy your premium podcast directly in Apple Podcasts.
Marco:
Apple, of course, takes 30%.
Marco:
And as a podcaster, you could choose to do that.
Marco:
However, you are not currently required to do that.
Marco:
Now, what if Apple made a new policy to say, hey...
Marco:
Since we have such a large percentage of the podcast player market, if your podcast offers a paid membership program, you now have to offer it through our service, or you will kick your podcast off of Apple Podcasts.
Marco:
That's where this is going.
Marco:
If you follow the company and its ridiculous entitlements and extortion pattern to its next conclusion, that's the kind of thing they will keep doing.
Marco:
And again, they have...
Marco:
very strong power in the podcast market.
Marco:
They have, by most measurements, well over 50% of the client base.
Marco:
And so they could do stuff like that.
Marco:
That is what monopolies can do.
Marco:
And it is not in the interests of the market overall that monopolies be allowed to do that.
Marco:
And that's why we have regulation.
Marco:
So I hope our regulation begins to work.
Marco:
Thank you to our sponsors this week, Tailscale and 1Password Extended Access Management.
Marco:
Thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at atp.fm slash join where you can use our payment processor and we only get charged something like 3% and you can join and you can hear our exclusive content and our other membership perks.
Marco:
One of the member perks is ATP Overtime.
Marco:
This is a bonus topic that we do every week.
Marco:
and it's exclusive for members.
Marco:
ATP Overtime this week is going to be about the breakdown of Mac sales by family that was recently published by CIRP Research.
Marco:
We're going to talk about what percentage of Macs are different product lines and what that means.
Marco:
That's going to be in ATP Overtime this week.
Marco:
Join at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
Thank you very much, and we'll talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
Marco:
And if you're into Mastodon, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
They did it.
Marco:
So long.
John:
We were talking about headsets and VR stuff.
John:
And even though I did the 30-minute Apple Vision Pro demo, that is basically the extent of my VR headset experience.
John:
Until now, on my summer vacation this year, my brother brought along the headset that he and his kids use.
John:
It was Quest.
John:
What is the most famous Quest?
John:
I think it was the Quest 3.
John:
I don't know.
John:
It was one of the MetaQuest headsets, right?
John:
And I got to use it for a little while.
John:
And it was honestly a much more,
John:
it was exactly what i expected i mean maybe it's because i use vision pro right and you know it's not like i don't know what vr headsets are but i i felt like vision pro i had all the wow factor i go back to that episode where i was talking about my experience it was extremely impressive and really affecting in a way that the quest wasn't uh again maybe because i've already used the vision pro but uh what was i doing on the quest well honestly i was mostly playing games
John:
i was playing beat saber it's what everybody does with with these things i was playing whatever those other demo type things are uh and it really just reinforced things that it would have told you intellectually with actual experience hand controllers guess what they're really good for games everybody knew this i've said this many times now i've used one yep hand controllers they're really good for games beat saber pretty fun motion sickness is a thing like you know
John:
much profound to tell you obviously i'm personally very susceptible to motion sickness and honestly i'm surprised i did as well as i did in the quest i didn't feel like the lower resolution and lesser frame rate in the quest compared to the vision pro affected my motion sickness i think it would get just as motion sick if i was playing beat saber in vision pro uh i don't does beat saber available for vision pro without the hand controllers
John:
no there is there's a there's like a different rhythm game that is i forget the name of it but it's not beat saber anyway beat saber is a cool game there's a reason people like it uh i thought it was cool i thought it was fun i enjoyed how responsive the hand controllers were they've got buttons on them it seems to know where my hands are i could do really fast motions i felt like it was mostly fair on the other hand i played uh forgive me i don't remember the names of all these things but there was table tennis essentially in there some kind of table tennis type game and that was not good
John:
i felt like the table jason likes i like it the 11 table tennis where you're like in like a like a loft it's like somebody's bedroom playing yeah i mean i'm sure all table tennis games look the same but i'm sure it was that one because i'm sure it's like comes with some game pack or comes with the headset or something right i felt so i do have some experience playing motion control table tennis right and i have experience playing real table tennis and i felt like the quest table tennis is
John:
did not accurately represent how I was swimming.
John:
Like, I was swinging.
John:
Like, I would miss the ball entirely, and I'm like, there's just no way I missed that ball entirely.
John:
And it was only for certain motions at certain higher speeds.
Marco:
Blame the controller, John.
John:
That was totally controller's fault.
John:
I didn't miss.
John:
No, no.
John:
The computer's cheating.
Marco:
It was motion.
John:
It was losing motion tracking, essentially, right?
John:
And I say this because the best experience that I've had playing table tennis with motion controllers is the... I don't remember what it was called.
John:
The...
John:
PlayStation, what was it called?
John:
Motion, maybe?
John:
You know the PlayStation controllers that had like a light-up ping-pong ball on top of them?
John:
They were like a black stick with a light-up ping-pong ball?
John:
Whatever that was called for, I believe, the PlayStation 3?
John:
Anyway, they had like a... I think Rockstar made it, or maybe I'm thinking of the Xbox One.
John:
Anyway, someone made a table tennis game with those motion controllers.
John:
And those motion controllers are very primitive.
John:
They were essentially gyros, accelerometers, and a light-up ball that a camera...
John:
that was sitting on your TV, the camera would see the light-up ball, and that was way more fair in terms of, look, if you miss the ball, you miss the ball, but if you hit it, it will register the hit.
John:
And the quest one, it got flummoxed too easily.
John:
It got flummoxed in a way that I thought Beat Saber would get flummoxed, but Beat Saber never did, and I don't know what the difference is.
John:
Maybe it's Beat Saber...
John:
They're more larger motions and less space critical because the blocks are so big in Beat Saber or whatever.
John:
Or maybe Beat Saber just has a sort of client-side prediction thing where it'll be like, oh, we'll just say you hit it, it's fine.
John:
But yeah, I was missing stuff in table tennis that I was like, there's no way that I missed that.
John:
It felt disconnected.
John:
Whereas the only comparison I have for Vision Pro is people have said...
John:
that they have successfully played real table tennis with pass-through on, and they were impressed at that work.
John:
As a demo of, like, look how good pass-through is.
John:
I can play real physical table tennis with someone who's across from me, and I'm wearing Vision Pro, and I'm using pass-through to do it.
John:
That was a great demo of how good, how low latency, how non-distorted pass-through is, that they wouldn't miss the ball because it was all warped or whatever.
John:
But I have to say, table tennis really did show the limitations of the quest.
John:
But...
John:
beat saber on the quest it's like apple you could have this you've got the technology for this what you don't have are what can't be too expensive you know hand controller things uh and uh you know just get the beat saber send the beat table people a bunch of free dev kits and pay them 100 million dollars and have them a beat saber envision pro it's ridiculous anyway
John:
I enjoyed it.
John:
It was not the same as Division Pro, but it definitely showed me something, again, that we all already knew.
John:
People buy these things and they play games on them because they don't cost $3,500.
John:
I mean, Marco's son has one.
John:
Not a lot of people have them.
John:
The PSVR 2 has not caught on that great either on a gaming platform, but that is a use case that is proven in the market for...
John:
some amount of people and i came away from it saying quest pretty good way to play beat saver i don't know i it's not it's not profound i just want to say that like uh i this is i'm dipping my toe more into the vr waters and it just reinforced everything i already thought about what vr headsets can be good for and the money that apple's leaving on the table by stubbornly refusing to do certain things
Marco:
Yeah, like, when you use the Quest 3, like, you really see, like, wow, this thing, like, for, you know, quote, only 500 bucks, that's a really good product compared to the Vision Pro.
Marco:
Like, it doesn't do everything the same way, of course.
Marco:
It doesn't have as high-resolution screens.
Marco:
It doesn't have, you know, certain specs don't match.
Marco:
But for, like, a seventh the price, it's a surprisingly good product overall.
John:
Another great compromise is setting aside, obviously, that it's plastic instead of aluminum and it felt fairly lightweight or whatever.
John:
I wore my glasses inside it.
John:
Oh.
John:
Why?
John:
Because it's not mine.
John:
This is not fitted to me.
John:
I didn't have the right headset size.
John:
This is the one that, like, my nephews and my brother use.
John:
A very wide range from, like, you know, six years old to essentially my age, right?
John:
Different head sizes or whatever.
John:
It doesn't have special lenses.
John:
I didn't have to get anything measured.
John:
I put my glasses on and I put it over my head.
John:
And was it comfortable and awesome?
John:
No.
John:
But it was fine.
John:
you know what i mean like this is the kind of sort of utilitarian uh you just like you just do what it takes to get the job done make the thing big enough for people to wear their glasses inside it it's not as good as the vision pro it doesn't look as good it's not as comfortable but boy is it so much easier for me to just pick up put my glasses on put the thing on my head and then go to town yeah and it worked right like it was fine
John:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, you could see how low resolution the screen was.
John:
But anyway, I'm just saying like, it's just, it was so much lower friction than if he had brought a Vision Pro with him, which he doesn't have, by the way.
John:
And I'm pretty good at Beat Saber.
John:
But everyone thinks they're good at Beat Saber because I think the game is tuned to make you feel like you're good at it because it's actually pretty easy.
Marco:
Yeah, when you ramp up the difficulty, you're like, oh, no, I'm not good at Beat Saber.
John:
Yeah, I guess it's like Rock Band.
John:
But no, I was never good at Rock Band.
Marco:
I'm pretty good at Beat Saber.
Marco:
Once you start adding in the different motions where, okay, you can poke it and twist it and bop it.
Marco:
And it gets really complicated very quickly.
Marco:
And you're like, oh, no, I thought I was good at this.
Marco:
I was just playing on easy mode.