Bob’s Barbecue
Marco:
i'm so happy fish is back it's it changed everything now i finally have new music again for the first time in two and a half or one and a half years oh so happy well new new in quotes there are other artists that exist you know that is the thing yeah but there hasn't been a lot of new music this past year from anybody really i mean there's been some here and there but taylor swift did two new albums during covet didn't she it's true something like that that's not even counting re-recording existing songs
Marco:
Oh, that counts, but my jam band doesn't count.
John:
No, I'm saying that's not even counting.
John:
She did two complete new albums of new songs, plus also we recorded a bunch of old stuff, I think.
Casey:
Just today I was going through my beloved Spotify playlist, which we'll be talking about a little bit later, and I noticed Days of the New, which most people probably don't recognize, but you've heard, especially if you were in like late 90s, early 2000s, into rock of that era, you've heard some of their stuff.
Casey:
Basically, Days of the New is Travis Meeks, I believe the guy's name is, and he's had really, truly awful, terrible substance abuse problems his entire life.
Casey:
And I thought Days of the New, which again is basically just him, had basically folded on account of him not being physically or mentally capable of performing music anymore because he was so...
Casey:
He was in such a bad spot.
Casey:
Well, apparently an album just dropped today, and I listened to about half of it, and I really liked it.
Casey:
Days of New 2, I believe, was the one that imprinted on me in college.
Casey:
I don't know if you guys had this experience, but it was an album I never expected to listen to, or like for that matter, and I still listen to it every great once in a while.
Casey:
This is like acoustic grunge, I think is how it's classified.
Casey:
It's very peculiar, but I really, really like it.
Casey:
So yeah, new Days of New album I was excited about.
Casey:
Now, Marco, do you run out of fish?
Casey:
Like, don't you have about 800 hours of fish in your computer?
Casey:
Do you run out at some point?
Casey:
What happens?
Marco:
I have 53.7 days currently.
Marco:
But, you know, there's some I listen to more than others.
Marco:
And, you know, some shows aren't that noteworthy.
Marco:
And some shows are really good.
Marco:
And some performances of certain songs I like better than others.
Marco:
I have a whole star rating system.
Casey:
Well, sure, sure.
Marco:
And and so, you know, but it's still nice to have new shows.
Casey:
No, I mean, it's not unfair.
Casey:
Of course, any new music, especially from someone you enjoy, is probably going to be good music.
Casey:
I don't I don't begrudge you that.
Casey:
It's just funny that you're this excited about new music when you have 56 days.
Casey:
What is that?
Casey:
Like one eighth of a quarantine that you can not listen to anything with no no repeats over over an eighth of a quarantine or whatever that may be.
Marco:
yeah well and like and there's different there's new songs like you know they despite what john thinks they also write new songs and add them into the repertoire and so how can you tell how can you so a lot of the newer songs uh you know you only have you might only have a small number of performances in your collection so far
Marco:
and they evolve over time and so you know it's you you want new stuff plus i just i like that the band is back together and they're making new music and and they're super happy and the music's getting pretty good pretty fast so yeah i'm i'm i'm very happy here
Casey:
You know, it's funny.
Casey:
I see that Dave Matthews is touring again, which I know Marco's super excited about.
Casey:
And obviously Fish is touring again.
Casey:
And a lot of other artists are touring, which in and of itself seems great.
Casey:
You know, I love live music.
Casey:
I love going to see live music, which I haven't been able to do even COVID notwithstanding in a few years now because our kids were so small.
Casey:
It was hard to just pawn them off on someone.
Casey:
But it seems like with everything that's going on these days, I don't know how long all this is going to continue because...
Marco:
uh delta's really running rampant here and have we mentioned if you're an american please get your shot please please don't throw away your shot anyway i'm very curious to see if like dave and fish and all these other artists are going to keep this up for much more than another month or two yeah i'm i don't know i mean i i think either most or all of fish's tour is outdoors um certainly i think all the all the venues that i have looked up have been outdoors but so i think at least most of the concert or most of the tour is
Marco:
So that probably helps a little bit.
Marco:
But at this point, I wouldn't make any assumptions about the future of COVID and shutdowns and quarantines and everything.
Marco:
We can barely see a few weeks out at this point.
Marco:
It seems like the one lesson we know from all this is don't assume that, oh, in X days or months, things will be back to normal.
Marco:
Things will be fine.
Marco:
You can't make that assumption very far ahead into the future.
Yeah.
Casey:
We got a lot of people writing to help me out with my request to get Spotify's genuinely tremendous playlists into Apple Music.
Casey:
Because I'm trying to force myself to migrate to Apple Music.
Casey:
It's not going well.
Casey:
And Andrew Bement was one of the first, if not the first, to mention.
Casey:
And many, many, many people did.
Casey:
Andrew writes, I use Apple Music daily, but Spotify still beats Apple hands down in regards to the playlists that they curate and provide for users.
Casey:
I use the app SongShift.
Casey:
Cool.
Casey:
Moving right along, Mark Barrowcliff writes, the iOS third-party music player market has never been stronger.
Casey:
It may be that dynamic, diverse ecosystem you've been missing.
Casey:
Also, many offer Apple Music and or Spotify integration.
Casey:
Shameless plug for my annual iOS Music Player Showcase.
Casey:
And so Mark has a blog post, which we will link in the show notes, that discusses all these different third-party music players.
Casey:
I did look at the blog post.
Casey:
There was nothing that jumped out at me as like, ooh, that's the one for me.
Casey:
But I'm going to probably over time, if I ever get spare time,
John:
start looking through this and trying some of these out so i forgot to mention last week that i have one of the popular third-party music players install i i've tried a bunch of them it's weird with third-party players where like you want them to be different than the apple one because otherwise like why bother having a third-party app if it's just going to look like the apple one but then in every way that they're different than the apple and you're like oh this is kind of weird uh that's less true with apple music kind of
John:
you know, invading the Apple app because now I see ways that these third-party apps are different that I like better.
John:
But it's cool to check them out.
John:
Unfortunately, some of the stuff we talked about last week, it can't be fixed by these third-party apps because they are just apps.
John:
So if your thing is like, oh, I don't know why this song takes a long time to play or says it's not authorized, the apps can't fix that.
John:
That's the service behind the scenes, right?
John:
And if Apple's app experiences those errors, surely third-party ones will be as well.
John:
But if you just want a different interface or a different way of looking at music, it's worth checking a couple out.
John:
I think the one I have is called Marvis or something.
John:
Another popular one is called Albums, which is diverging even more and saying, what if you just want to listen to whole albums?
John:
What if we made an app centered around that UI?
John:
I think that's probably the more fruitful avenue.
John:
If you just try to say, I'm going to make a full-featured app that tries to aim for exactly the same customer base as Apple...
John:
But it'll be different.
John:
That's difficult.
John:
But for something like albums, at least that seems like a more straightforward vision of, like, I'm going to make a different kind of app, and it's only going to appeal to a certain kind of customer, but that certain customer is really going to like it.
John:
So anyway, check out the showcase and try out a few of these apps.
John:
People, you know, I know especially young people don't like to pay for software or whatever, but...
John:
When I see one of these showcase things, they're like five bucks each half the time, or at least they used to be back in the day.
John:
Who knows where they are now?
John:
Or even if they're a subscription and it's like $3.99 a month or something, just subscribe and then cancel, right?
John:
You can essentially get all the apps for less than the price of a decent meal.
John:
Uh, and then just try them all.
John:
And yeah, maybe you don't like any of them.
John:
It's like, oh, well, that was a fun $25 weekend activity that I did for my, I mean, it comes in your definition of fun, but I find it fun to just buy a bunch, buy a bunch of apps and try them out.
John:
And, you know, like now that everything is subscription, you know, now that so many apps are subscription instead of purchase, it doesn't mean you can't play the same game.
John:
just buy and cancel like for the most part that works really well and you don't have to you can just most of them you can just uh subscribe and then immediately cancel or you can subscribe subscribe subscribe try all the apps decide you don't like them all and then go cancel cancel cancel um so anyway try that out and uh
John:
I hope these apps are successful because I wouldn't want Apple to, well, not that this will help, but I was going to say I wouldn't want Apple to stop allowing third-party music players, but it really doesn't matter how many people buy these apps.
John:
If Apple decides to do that, they're going to do it, which is kind of crappy.
John:
But anyway, I guess the advice then is get them while you can.
Casey:
Something like that.
Casey:
Also, I'm thinking of it.
Casey:
Some people did point out some of the places that Apple has roughly analogous playlists to Discover Weekly and Release Radar.
Casey:
And at this point, I'm not impressed by them, but it's also unfair to Apple Music because I don't have literally a decade worth of listening data that I've pumped into Apple Music.
Casey:
And then that got me thinking, like, one of the things that I'm going to miss about Spotify if I do successfully divorce myself of it, which I don't think I will, is...
Casey:
over the years I've put in a bunch of metadata about what I enjoy.
Casey:
And I don't know, I don't even necessarily mean like listen counts and things of that nature, but when I follow an artist because I want to be notified that they have new music, like there's a lot of, of bands or artists or what have you that maybe I don't obsess over them like the way Marco does fish or I used to do with mute math or, you know, still sort of do with Dave.
Casey:
Um, but I really enjoy their work.
Casey:
Like emancipator is a great example of this.
Casey:
And I, I,
Casey:
I have all of these, probably hundreds of artists that I've followed or liked or what have you in Spotify, which is a hint to Spotify of what it is that I really enjoy.
Casey:
And maybe there's a way to move that data over, but if so, I'm not aware of it.
Casey:
And it would be really kind of a bummer to miss out on that.
Casey:
Like, playlists are kind of the biggest thing, and...
Casey:
At least the non-weekly playlists, the ones that I curated myself, obviously those are easy to move over with SongShift.
Casey:
I could continue to move the Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlists using SongShift, but the thing is, if I'm not using Spotify anymore, I'm not really giving them any more data to go on, so presumably those playlists are going to get crummier over time.
Casey:
So I don't know.
Casey:
I don't know what I'm going to do.
Casey:
I'm still trying to force Apple Music on myself, but I think it was marked
Casey:
last week that said basically why are you forcing this just do what you like yeah and that's probably the conclusion that i'm going to end up at but i really i want to give it a try just to see because again i have a lot of momentum on spotify and maybe over something will click and i'll see the matrix for what it is and then i'll never look back but smart money says marco's right
Marco:
What I was saying last week about use what you like because don't consider this service that you're getting as part of a bundle an obligation that you have to then use this instead of this Spotify service you like.
Marco:
Because really all those things you just said about the history you have with Spotify and everything, all the recommendations and the stats and everything, that's all huge.
Marco:
One of the reasons why I am still so tied to Apple Music myself is that I have all those stats and history and stuff on that side.
Marco:
And Spotify has almost no idea what I like because I don't use it much.
Marco:
And I don't have my whole collection in there and everything.
Marco:
And so Spotify, to have Spotify recommend stuff to me, it's basically shooting in the dark.
Marco:
And I have play count history in Apple Music slash iTunes.
Marco:
I have last played dates.
Marco:
That all matters.
Marco:
And that factors into what I choose to play next.
Marco:
I have star ratings.
Marco:
I have this huge amount of data and stuff in there.
Marco:
And I don't know if any tools would sync that back and forth between the two services.
Casey:
Exactly.
Marco:
But either way, that all has value to me.
Marco:
And so to test out other services and everything that would lose that I think would be a problem.
Marco:
And as for the third-party apps...
Marco:
I was aware that there are third-party apps.
Marco:
For Apple Music, I've tried some before here and there.
Marco:
I've done a similar thing, as John was saying, of just buy three or four of the top-rated apps and just test them out and see what you like.
Marco:
But none of them really have fit me well.
Marco:
And I can see on almost all of them that are well-known, I can see why people like them.
Marco:
It isn't that they're bad apps.
Marco:
They just don't fit me very well.
Marco:
And it's a shame because ultimately what I'm probably going to do is just use Apple Music slash iTunes until I can't stand it anymore or until it goes away or changes in some major way that breaks what I need from it.
Marco:
For instance, if it went Apple Music only and there was no more concept of your own library, that would hurt me deeply.
Marco:
Eventually, I'll probably just make my own.
Marco:
At some point, once podcasting as a fad has passed and my podcasting business goes away and I have no idea what to make for an app,
Marco:
I will probably make the app that nobody wants to use except me, which is a music player that just plays files that you just upload.
Marco:
Like you have some cloud storage somewhere and you put files into it and it plays them.
Marco:
i basically want like win amp for 2021 like just that's or like like itunes like what itunes used to be like that's what i want no one else wants that now because no one else wants to buy or acquire drm free mp3s in in their own ways like i don't even know in in five years from now who's even going to be still selling mp3s like right now you can still buy music downloads from a few places but
Marco:
But they're falling out fast.
Marco:
And I can't imagine those are still going to be a thing in 10 years, but maybe not even five years.
Marco:
So the idea of an app that just plays music files that you somehow legally acquire, or illegally, I don't really care.
Marco:
But I would try to do things legally as much as I could.
Marco:
But the idea of an app that just plays files...
Marco:
Nobody wants that except me.
Marco:
So someday that'll be my retirement labor of love, but I haven't gotten there yet.
Casey:
You know, I keep forgetting, just because I don't ever use it this way, but Plex will absolutely do this sort of thing.
Marco:
Oh, God, of course.
Casey:
Of course it will.
Casey:
I love Plex.
Casey:
Everyone knows I love Plex.
Casey:
I am not passing any sort of endorsement on their music stuff.
Casey:
I've heard it's good, but I never use it because I'm not interested in it.
Casey:
I'd rather just stream from Apple Music or Spotify or whatever.
Casey:
But if you were wanting to deal with Plex, which for me is a pleasure, but for many is a pain, that is one solution to your problem.
Marco:
I think we need some kind of sound effect for whenever Casey mentions either Plex or Synology.
Marco:
Or FFMPEG.
Marco:
Yeah, maybe we can get like a Synology Viberslap or something.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Plexguero.
Marco:
It was the chat room that prompted him to do that.
John:
Would you have remembered Plex if the chat room hadn't mentioned it?
Casey:
No, I didn't think of it until said something.
Casey:
And I was like, oh, yeah, you're right.
Casey:
Because, again, I just don't think of Plex as a music platform.
Casey:
It absolutely is.
Casey:
It absolutely will do it.
Casey:
Same thing with pictures.
John:
They even have cloud storage now, right?
Casey:
They did for a while.
Casey:
I don't think that's true anymore.
Casey:
But, again, Plex will do pictures.
Casey:
They have their own Google Photos knockoff.
Casey:
Oh, I have some follow up about that.
Casey:
It just reminded me.
Casey:
But anyways, they have their own Google Photos knockoff.
Casey:
I tried it briefly.
Casey:
It was okay.
Casey:
But yeah, I think a Plex is purely for video, which again, is not the case, but that's my mental model of Plex.
Casey:
So yeah, had not said something in the chat, I wouldn't have thought of it.
Marco:
i mean this is like like part of the uh part of the annoying thing about like modern platform companies and everything is that there are so many companies and platforms that try to make their own everything like you have between apple google facebook amazon uh and then you know these smaller players like dropbox or sonology or plex like
Marco:
everybody has their own photo app and cloud storage syncing folder and music app and video manager like everyone has all of these things and most of them are just either they're either terrible or they're at best mediocre and i can't imagine the amount of time that's been wasted like all these companies making so many different things trying to be everything to everyone all the time but certainly music music library playback is one of those things that like
Marco:
There's 15 different companies, large to medium-sized tech companies, that try to make you put all your stuff in their system, and I don't think any of them work very well, except, honestly, Apple's.
John:
I wouldn't lump Plex into that.
John:
Plex's whole thing is that they're a media player, and it makes perfect sense.
John:
They're not trying to do everything under the sun.
John:
They're just saying, we have a media library where we keep your media in the form of files, then we keep metadata about them, and then we have various ways for you to get at it across the internet.
John:
Music and photos totally fit into that.
John:
It's a little bit more of a stretch for Synology because they're a storage vendor and it's like, well, we're storing your stuff, maybe we can make apps, but not that big of a stretch.
John:
But they're not like trying to, you know, I don't know, start a, you know, what do you call it?
John:
I can't even remember the word for the thing I'm trying to think of.
John:
The social network.
John:
There you go.
John:
They're not trying to become the next Facebook and they're not trying to sell you books over the internet like Amazon and not trying to become a cloud provider, but yeah.
John:
I mean, I'm glad there's alternatives because they, you know, competition.
John:
We want to keep these people honest.
John:
But I wouldn't specifically lump Plex and Synology into the group of people who want to do everything, which does include Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and those big companies.
John:
And on the topic of recommendations for music stuff, yeah, it's a shame when you have your history of uses someplace else and
John:
And it's probably not in these companies' best interest to allow you to export that data to a competitor's app because they don't want you to switch, I guess.
John:
But I always get a sneaking suspicion that it actually doesn't take that much data for them to get your number because we're all kind of...
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
listens to lots of fish, but he hasn't listened to this year's concert recently.
John:
Other people who haven't listened to this year's concert in the last year, it's like, no, fish is just like one giant word, you know, like the word cloud.
John:
That's probably all they need to know about you to narrow you down to like 90% accuracy.
John:
And then after that, you listen to three more songs and that's as accurate as this album is ever going to get.
John:
And then you just oscillate around that point forever.
John:
Did you mean Dave Matthews Band?
No!
John:
And if you give the thumbs down to Dave Matthews, now you're like at 95%.
John:
Likes Fish, doesn't like Dave Matthews.
John:
We pretty much know who you are at this point.
John:
Listen to one more song.
Casey:
At that point, all advertising is sold as, would you like to advertise to Marco Arment?
Casey:
Here's the guy who loves Fish more than anything else in the world and hates Dave Matthews.
Casey:
It's him.
Casey:
He's the one.
Casey:
All right, let's talk about photos.
Casey:
So I've been continuing to play with Apple Photos or iCloud Photo Library, and things are mostly good.
Casey:
I had a couple of bumps here and there, but nothing that interesting.
Casey:
But a lot of people had some feedback, some of which I should have thought about, and some of which I think was maybe not as smart as I thought it was, with regard to how did the Dave Matthews and Mute Maths concerts begin?
Casey:
get added as an album where they where apple photos stated you know this is the you know the 19 dave matthews band or whatever it was or the mute math concert and a lot of people were like hey dummy of course they you know apple photos i keep trying to say they of course apple photos knew that uh that that was you know the dave matthews concert because it's in your calendar
Casey:
Well, yes, that is true.
Casey:
But remember that these events, these calendar events were like literally three or four years ago.
Casey:
And if I go spelunking into my calendar on iOS, they have long since fallen off my device.
John:
Is that a thing that happens?
John:
Do events fall off your device?
Casey:
Because maybe I'm wrong, but I thought so.
Marco:
The calendar events do.
Marco:
Calendar events only... On the Mac, they stay, I think, forever.
Marco:
But on iOS devices, by default, they only sync back a certain amount of time into the past.
Marco:
You can change that, though.
John:
Well, so even if they're not displaying within the app...
John:
If they're showing up on the Mac, that means they're probably in iCloud storage, which means that if the memories thing wanted to look that info up, they could get it.
John:
But I'll let Casey continue because all these theories, a lot of people had theories that are essentially this is the way Google would do it.
John:
Right, exactly.
John:
A, they're right that Google would do it that way.
John:
And B, they're also right that it would work.
John:
But C, that's not the way Apple's doing it, which Casey will get to in a second.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So first of all, you're assuming I'm using iCloud for calendaring.
Casey:
I'm actually not.
Casey:
I'm using Google Apps for calendaring.
Casey:
And yes, these events surely exist on Google, on Google servers.
Casey:
And yes, strictly speaking, the device could go crawling back years and years and years in order to ask Google for that data.
Casey:
But that's not Apple style is exactly what you're alluding to, John.
Casey:
You know, Apple styles to do all this on device.
Casey:
And if you can't figure it out on device, then, oh, there's nothing to know.
Casey:
So, yeah.
Casey:
So people talked about my calendar.
Casey:
Similarly, people said, well, no, dummy.
Casey:
You've got your ticket receipts and your email.
Casey:
Surely that's how they figured it out.
Casey:
Same problem.
Casey:
I have literally two emails in my inbox right now.
Casey:
I've been working very hard in the last few months to stay as close as I can to hashtag inbox zero.
Casey:
So I have literally two emails in my inbox.
Casey:
Now, my archive goes back like 15, 20 years, and it does have all of these tickets for sure.
Casey:
But again, it's not on device.
Casey:
And so at least in the case of like an iOS device, I'm extremely, extremely skeptical.
Casey:
Although now that I'm talking out loud, it just occurred to me, it could have been the Mac that figured all these out.
Casey:
Maybe that was a secret sauce.
Casey:
But nevertheless...
John:
But I don't even think Apple would go through your email for this because it's just not an Apple style thing to do.
John:
Like forget about on device versus not on device.
John:
Just sort of like rummaging through your email to try to not that Apple doesn't do that, but it's just it's not that's not Apple's go to.
John:
That is definitely Google's go to Google's going through email for all sorts of things.
John:
Not a human being computers doing it.
John:
Don't be scared.
John:
But anyway, it's not Apple style.
John:
And, you know, so I think that's not the first option Apple would go to if they had other options and they do.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And so the first person I saw point this out to me, I believe, was Benjamin on Twitter, who said, hey, in the WWDC 2018 keynote at about 29 minutes, 25 seconds, there will be a timestamp link in the show notes.
Casey:
Federici says, and this is either verbatim or almost verbatim, quote, photos indexes over four million events by time and place.
Casey:
So you can search for them and find photos you took at those events, quote.
Casey:
So I think if I'm understanding this right, basically photos, Apple's photos software has access to some sort of like scraped or some other database of like event information.
Casey:
Here's a football game.
Casey:
Here's what concert appeared when.
Casey:
And that makes a lot more sense.
Casey:
And apparently there are APIs that allow for this.
Casey:
I think setlist.fm might have some sort of API.
Casey:
Somebody else cited some other online database where there's APIs where you can say,
Casey:
you know, Hey, what, what events happened in Richmond on, you know, such and such a date.
Casey:
And so that I think is the magic that I didn't realize happened.
Casey:
So to recap, it appears that something somewhere has, you know, indexed over 4 million events in 2018 anyway, uh, by time and place.
Casey:
So they can say, well, if you were at, you know, John Paul Jones arena on such and such a day at some, such a time, then you must've been seeing a Dave Matthews concert.
Casey:
And I think that was the missing sauce.
Casey:
There's also a KBase article that reads, search for an event like a concert you attended or a trip you took.
Casey:
Photos uses the time and location of your photos along with online event listings to find matching photos.
John:
And that's the more Apple style thing to do it because the Google style will cover many more bases and be more correct.
John:
But Apple doesn't want to rummage through your stuff for the most part.
John:
So it does the more limited one.
John:
It only handles events, right?
John:
You know, it's not going to know Bob's Barbecue.
John:
Because, you know, Google goes through your email and finds 50 threads about organizing a barbecue over someone's house that it figures out is Bob.
John:
It can do Bob's barbecue.
John:
But Bob's barbecue is not in the four million event database or whatever.
John:
Right.
John:
So that's it is, you know, it is more privacy respecting.
John:
It is simpler.
John:
It is more limited.
John:
And it also involves less guesswork.
John:
Like Casey said, like if you're in that arena, it's a pretty big, you know, you don't have to be, the GPS doesn't have to be too accurate to tell you're in a giant arena.
John:
And if the date is set correctly, and if it's on the calendar, Dave Matthews.
Casey:
Very quick Google Photos follow up.
Casey:
So I think I said last week that I'm exploding out of my one terabyte of Google Drive online storage.
Casey:
As of last recording, I'd gone into Google Drive and I thought I deleted all my photos and then I emptied the trash and nothing actually got deleted.
Casey:
Several people, although not many, alarmingly, usually when I ask for feedback, I get quite a bit.
Casey:
In this case, I didn't get very much, which was unfortunate.
Casey:
But several people wrote in and had different theories, all of which were good.
Casey:
But it seems that the actual thing I'm supposed to do is delete all of my photos and videos by hand.
Casey:
That is, as near as I can tell, the only way to do it.
Casey:
So I'm going in every time I sit down at the computer, I'll go through a batch, and I will go to the Google Photos website.
Casey:
I will select the first...
Casey:
picture or first day and i'll swipe swipe swipe scroll scroll scroll natural scrolling because i'm not a monster scroll scroll scroll and then i will shift click a different photo which then gives me you know several hundred or maybe a thousand photos that i can then click the delete button and say yes delete them please and that is started to clear out my google drive so i'm going to have to do this for all of my pictures which goes back like
Casey:
almost 20 years, something like that.
Casey:
Actually, it probably does go back about 20 years.
Casey:
So I'm looking super forward to that.
Casey:
Thanks, Google.
Casey:
This is great.
John:
You didn't contact support, did you?
Casey:
I tried, but I am a grandfathered free Google Apps user, so they said, piss off, you don't get support.
John:
Nice.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Isn't that cool?
Casey:
Love Google.
John:
I mean, I don't pay, well, I don't know.
John:
I guess I pay for Google Drive storage.
John:
When I was having the problem, though, I'm just on the regular public Google Drive, and I...
Casey:
somehow got through to some chat thing with somebody and that's how they gave me all that advice but i don't know if they know that i'm a paying customer or something anyway well and it's funny i found some github repository where somebody had written some javascript that you're supposed to basically inject into the page and i read it and it seemed logical and it seemed safe before i tried it but of course it has been updated in the last 15 seconds let's not let's not run arbitrary javascript to delete things please
Casey:
Oh, no, I don't care.
Casey:
I mean, I have nothing of value in Google Photos.
Casey:
Oh, not anymore, anyway.
John:
It's going to delete all your email or something.
John:
Who knows what it'll do?
Casey:
Well, fair.
Casey:
But, I mean, yes, I suppose that's true.
Casey:
But one way or the other, because the JavaScript script hasn't been updated in the last 14 seconds, of course, none of it worked.
Casey:
And I tried it, and it was like, what?
Casey:
You want me to do what now?
Casey:
And I didn't care enough to actually go through and debug it and fix it.
Casey:
So here I am, shift-clicking and deleting like a frigging monster.
Casey:
That's very frustrating.
Casey:
Moving on.
Casey:
Henrik had some information about photo editing.
Casey:
Tell me about this, John.
John:
This is just clarifying, like, what's the deal in the iCloud photo library with originals and edits and when you can do edits and having to do with editors or whatever.
John:
So this is sort of generalizing the situation, partially based on some documentation for one of the classes in Photokit that's involved.
John:
So he says, about photo editing versions, I believe it works like this.
John:
The library keeps the original.
John:
a final composite and the last editor used can modify its previous edit so there's there's always the obviously there's always the original and there's the baked version of the the thing but then whatever editor was used to make that baked version can modify that previous edit so presumably the thing that's missing here is item 2a is like essentially what uh
John:
what adjustments in the editor can turn the original into the final version so then when you if you still have that editor installed you can then modify the edit by saying oh this had a brightness of plus five i'm going to change it to plus four and then it will simply rebake from the original with all whatever other settings you had like keep keep track of all your settings and then instead of plus five this time it does plus four and rebakes it in right and he says that this applies to the built-in editor as well obviously you can never be without the built-in editor when using photos app because it's built in
John:
But it's the same system, it's just that if you use a third-party editor and then you uninstall that third-party editor, you lose the ability to just tweak one little setting on the modified version because you need the editor to do that, obviously.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
This is where I personally host all of my servers.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Linode for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
We have some Mac Pro related things to discuss.
Casey:
And we were talking about this before we started recording.
Casey:
And my conjecture is because we're talking about the Mac Pro, this is going to last approximately three to seven hours.
Casey:
And John and Marco said, oh, no, no, no.
Casey:
It'll be quick.
Casey:
So start the clock, everyone.
Casey:
Let's see who wins.
Casey:
John, go.
John:
We're going to win this one because it's not that much to talk about.
John:
All right.
John:
So the news is... You're just making it worse now.
John:
The news is that Apple has new video cards for the 2019 Mac Pro.
John:
It has not revised the 2019 Mac Pro.
John:
It doesn't have new Xeons.
John:
There's no new version of the thing.
John:
Nothing like that.
John:
But it just has new video cards.
John:
They've done this before.
John:
The video card that I... One of the two video cards that's in my Mac Pro was released, what, a year after the actual machine was released?
John:
Yeah.
John:
So this is a thing that Apple does.
John:
Occasionally they will release new video cards for their computer that takes video cards, which is a great idea.
John:
I love it.
John:
Imagine a modular computer that occasionally they release new modules for.
John:
These are the, they're not super new cards, but these are the AMD cards.
John:
Obviously they're not Nvidia.
John:
And these are the AMD cards that are remotely competitive with the top line Nvidia cards.
John:
These are the RDNA 2 cards.
John:
The part numbers are like 6,000.
John:
So 6,800, 6,900 cards.
John:
In keeping with whatever naming scheme Apple has been using, you can buy a PC video card, a 6800RX or something, whatever they're called.
John:
Anyway, the Apples are always called W, then the number, then an X. So W6800X, all squished together, no spaces between them.
John:
I'm not sure what the W and the X are supposed to indicate.
John:
But anyway, these are Apple's cards.
Marco:
Can I guess it's, wow, that's expensive.
Marco:
Yes, that's probably what it is.
John:
Or the connectors are super wide.
John:
Anyway, so we talked about this on past shows that we knew in upcoming versions of macOS there were drivers for these GPUs.
John:
And we kept saying, why would there be drivers in a new version of macOS for a card that Apple doesn't make?
John:
Maybe Apple's going to start selling these cards.
John:
And lo and behold, here they are.
John:
So...
John:
From what I've read, if you buy the quote-unquote PC versions of these cards, like you just buy a Radeon 6800 for a gaming PC and stick it into your Mac, since the drivers are in the OS, it will work.
John:
But if you're like me, or if you have just money that you need to get rid of, like in Brewster's Millions, you may be interested in these cards.
John:
Because...
John:
These cards are MPX modules and to review MPX modules is the standard that Apple came up with to essentially let them not have to have a separate power connector for their, among other features, not have to have a separate power connector on their video cards.
John:
Um, and also, um,
John:
Their video cards, all these MPX modules thus far, are passively cool.
John:
Like, there are no fans on them.
John:
And if you buy PC gaming cards and you say, what do you mean?
John:
You're going to get a Radeon 6900 with no fans on it?
John:
How is that not going to melt in your computer?
John:
The heatsink is really big.
John:
And the Mac Pro itself has very large fans in it.
John:
So that's how these things work.
John:
They have the regular PCI connector and then like I guess in front of or in back of depending on how you look at it the PCI connector there's another connector on the card and that supplies power and a bunch of other crap.
John:
I think also Thunderbolt pass through and some other stuff that's not in the PCI spec.
John:
And that makes these cards special and it makes them appealing to me because I wouldn't want to put a card that had a bunch of fans on it inside my beautiful Mac Pro.
John:
And I wouldn't want to have to run a little, you know, one or two power connectors from the various power supply power connector ports with some stupid adapter probably to get my card going because there's no wires inside my Mac Pro.
John:
It's, you know, basically wireless.
John:
So that's cool and everything.
John:
What?
John:
And like I said, these are the quote-unquote good video cards.
John:
It's the best it's going to get, because if Apple's not going to put it on NVIDIA cards, these cards are actually competitive for the top-line gaming NVIDIA cards.
John:
Now let's talk about the cards.
John:
It's 6800 and 6900, and also there's a 6800 Duo.
John:
um the mpx modules always cost more than regular cards because they're weird they have thunderbolt connectors on the back of them to connect to your pro display xdr and regular cards don't have that regular cards generally can have that i had a little snippet about why it is extremely unattractive for a pc video card maker to ever put thunderbolt ports on their cards um
John:
Uh, but I have lost that piece of information.
John:
Maybe I will dig it out for a future show.
John:
Uh, there's obviously lots of reasons like no one on the PC space has Thunderbolt monitors, but there's also other technical limitations that are annoying as well.
John:
Uh, but of course Apple wants it because that's what their monitors use.
John:
Um, and so my W 50, AMD W 5,700 X, whatever the hell card I have was a thousand dollars, which is more expensive than any 5,700 you get for a PC, uh,
John:
But it's an MPX module, and I think mine might have more RAM than the average PC one.
John:
And you're just paying a premium for something that matches your computer and all that.
John:
So that tradition continues.
John:
The W6800X with 32 gigs of RAM, and you can find 6800s for the PC with 16 gigs of RAM or 32.
John:
Apple's price is $2,800 for that card.
Casey:
Oh, golly.
John:
And that is not what it would cost for you to put a 6800 in your gaming PC.
John:
Now, that said, as many people have joked, it's almost like Apple's prices are sort of like they've built in the scalping because it's very hard to get GPUs to get gaming GPUs right now, because both because of, you know, cryptocurrency mining and also because of just a general chip shortage from COVID and everything.
John:
So if you want like a top line gaming PC card, it's like a lottery.
John:
People are still trying to hunt them down.
John:
They're very difficult to find.
John:
And if people manage to buy them, they resell them for way above the actual price.
John:
So it's almost like Apple is just self-scalping.
John:
It's like, well, we've made these cards and now we're going to sell them to you at very high prices.
John:
uh the 6900 i forget i didn't put the specs of the details but it's like the same differences between the pc68 and 6900 6900 is faster better has more execution units blah blah the 6900 also with 32 gigs of ram this one really blew me away six thousand dollars
John:
for a graphics thousand dollars for a graphics card that you can get for substantially less than two thousand dollars new on on a gaming pc grief i think you can find them for maybe eight hundred or nine hundred dollars six thousand wait but is it the same card or is this like the workstation version of the card with like workstation ram and everything it's
John:
basically the same card it's 32 gigs and you can you can buy them for the pc like it's not because it's an npx module like physically speaking the card has way more stuff going on on it to support npx with the power and all that other stuff but yeah but i have to imagine this is like the typical difference between workstation cards and gaming cards of like increased precision and stuff like that right
John:
No, no, I don't think that's the case at all.
John:
I think it is computationally identical to a top line 6900 on a PC with the exception of all the MPX stuff.
John:
I hope not, but you might be right.
John:
Pretty sure.
John:
Obviously, the Apple ones have like the maximum amount of RAM and stuff like that, but...
John:
what people buy these like for anything they use them for whether it's crypto mining or as playing games uh you can just compare it take a gaming pc with a plain old regular 6900 with 32 gigs of ram and then play the same game versus the the mac one it's not going to be a big difference and i know games aren't supposed to workstation cards used for so fine pick anything else pick
John:
video rendering pick you know something anything that uses the gpu i don't think that these are they're not like the workstation ones where they're bad at games so these are very good at games but they're not i don't think it's like they have higher precision or they have ecc ram or anything like that i'm pretty sure they're close to identical but even if they're not six thousand dollars doesn't really make any sense until you think about the fact that nobody's going to buy these things because they're super rare and then for the bargain price of five thousand dollars you can get two sixty eight hundreds in a single card
John:
So each one of those would have 32 gigs of RAM.
John:
And then on the back of these cards, I think all of them, there's four Thunderbolt 3 ports, and there's also an HDMI port, but the HDMI port is HDMI 2.0, which is kind of crappy.
John:
Not that if you have it on a Mac, you're probably going to use HDMI anyway.
John:
But if you're hoping for HDMI 2.1, so you could do 120 frames per second gaming, that's not going to happen over HDMI on these cards, unless they misspoke on the spec.
John:
So kudos to Apple for continuing to update these computers.
John:
Not so many kudos for these prices, which are ridiculous.
John:
All that said, if Apple had not made a transition to ARM, I would buy the 6800.
John:
But I'm not going to buy it at this point because I'm not going to spend another $2,800 on this computer when I know it's just waiting around to be replaced by the ARM Mac Pro.
John:
And also like the video card I have in there is actually pretty good.
John:
And there's no games that I want to play right now that are
John:
overwhelming it so yeah to answer anyone's question no i'm not buying any of these cards i did look at what the sort of if you work for apple how much of a discount do you get which is kind of a good way to gauge what the margins are because apple if apple sells something with huge margins usually you get a big discount if you're an employee right so i think the employee discount on
John:
the the six thousand dollar card is much much bigger than the employee discount on the uh the twenty eight hundred dollar card so as usual that six thousand dollar price has a lot of margin on it as you can imagine um but i still think it's cool that they make these like i i really like the idea of like the reason i would be considering buying one of this because i like the idea of it being an npx module because if apple doesn't make that card nobody else is going to make it they can't no pc makers i wish i knew this tech stuff that i had written in the notes but no no
John:
PC makers make video cards with Thunderbolt ports on them.
John:
So right there, it's like a, you know, forget about running your produce by XDR off of it.
John:
And they don't care about making something with a giant passive heat sink with a special connector.
John:
Only Apple can make these things.
John:
And so if they have to charge $2,800 for them, do it.
John:
And...
John:
And people will buy them who need them and who want them to be nice in their macaroni.
John:
And if you didn't want these, you already bought a PC 6800 and already have it in your Mac making tons of noise.
John:
So I think this is great.
John:
I'm just not going to buy any of it.
John:
But like I said, if the ARM transition didn't happen and it was just Intel from here on out, I would totally spend $2,800 on that 6800.
Marco:
What's interesting about this GPU update release is not the particular cards they're using, and it's not the particular prices they're charging.
Marco:
What's interesting is that this happens at all.
Marco:
Here we are well into the ARM transition, and...
Marco:
the mac pro as we know it today doesn't seem like it's going to be part of the arm transition like so far based on you know we talked about this a lot before it sure seems like the arm mac pro replacement is probably going to be a smaller computer that does not have card slots for gpus like it's probably going to be an all-in-one thing maybe it's the new cube you know whatever people think it might be but like
Marco:
It's probably going to be some kind of smaller thing where the GPU is part of the system on a chip, just like on the M1s, just like, you know, a giant version of that probably with giant GPU cores and giant CPU cores.
Marco:
And it's going to cost a lot, but it's going to be the smaller thing that is a totally different beast than what we know of now as the Intel Mac Pro.
Marco:
That's the current thinking.
Marco:
And I still think that is probably pretty clearly the direction we are heading.
Marco:
So the question becomes, what the heck do they do with this Intel one that they just released relatively recently?
Marco:
I mean, it isn't that old.
Marco:
It hasn't been, you know, significantly updated yet in the sense that they're still the same Xeons.
Marco:
But there's a question of like, will they ever update it again?
Marco:
And if they don't, that flies directly in the face of what they said when they launched it.
Marco:
They were very clear, like, this is going to be a modular system, upgradable, you know, and they said in various unofficial contexts that, like, they intended to keep this thing going for a while.
Marco:
This wasn't meant to be a one-off.
Marco:
This was meant to be, like, you know, here for the long haul, we're going to keep this thing updated.
Marco:
That was the...
Marco:
the clear direction I got from a few people here and there off the record.
Marco:
So it seems like when they shipped the Mac Pro, which again, not that long ago, they intended for it to have a significant future.
Marco:
Well, they had to know at that time that the ARM transition was coming because they announced it like a year later.
Marco:
So obviously they knew at that time that this was happening.
Marco:
So the question is, what future did they have in mind when they made the Mac Pro?
Marco:
And, you know, we don't know how the story ends yet.
Marco:
So I guess, and they might not even know how it ends yet.
Marco:
So, you know, time will tell overall.
Marco:
But I think...
Marco:
One of the big questions is like, well, if this thing is not going to be part of the ARM product line, do you keep updating it with Intel chips even into and after possibly the ARM transition?
Marco:
And we don't know how that goes yet.
Marco:
This thing could have been a one-off like the trash can Mac Pro could have been a one-off that never got touched again.
Marco:
But now, they've now done kind of two GPU updates to it, which is something.
Marco:
Like, that's significant.
Marco:
Now we know, like, okay, they haven't stopped doing GPU updates yet.
Marco:
Especially, you know, the first one was pretty soon afterwards.
Marco:
The second one now is, you know, what, a year and a half afterwards?
Marco:
Two years, whatever it's been.
Marco:
And so now we know, in a much bigger way...
Marco:
They intend for this product to not be dead yet.
Marco:
Now, not being dead yet is a little bit different than having a future, but this is something.
Marco:
This is meaningful.
Marco:
There are current rumors out there that there are upcoming Xeon updates that could be relevant to it, and there's current rumors that those things are supported in recent builds of macOS, and that therefore it is possible, maybe even likely, that there might be a Xeon update to the Mac Pros, which might involve a bigger thing.
Marco:
And that would be great because the way I think this is most likely to play out, I think the Mac Pro gets at least one processor upgrade, like at least one significant processor difference where we're not just getting, you know, more chips from the family that already gave them these chips like they did once with a couple, with like the 20, quote, 2012 Mac Pro, which is really just, you know, different chips from the 2010 era.
Marco:
What I think they're going to do here is actually give this one more batch of New Zeons because
Marco:
I don't think Apple wants to make a computer with card slots five years from now.
Marco:
I think they made this computer because the market needed it.
Marco:
They needed something to carry us through this era.
Marco:
They needed something to address what pros weren't getting from the trash can Mac Pro or the iMac Pro.
Marco:
So they made this thing out of need in 2018, 2019, as they were finalizing the design and targeting, getting it out and everything.
Marco:
They made this because there was a need then.
Marco:
But I still don't think Apple has it in their heart to have a giant expandable slot-filled tower five or ten years from now.
Marco:
So I think they need this current Mac Pro to carry all the pros forward until all the pros are ready to buy the ARM Mac Pro Cube whatever thing that has no slots and just the whole thing is basically replaceable.
John:
Yeah.
John:
We've talked about this before, but I feel like Apple, I'm hoping Apple has learned their lesson that that's just like doing the trash can all over again.
John:
And as amazing as ARM is, like when I look at these MPX modules, I think, you know what?
John:
I mean, kind of like you just said with the Xeon, like if they do do like a, it would have to be a motherboard bump because it's a different socket.
John:
If they do a new motherboard Mac Pro with new Xeons,
John:
uh the work they did to make these mpx modules for these cards not wasted because you could just stick these cards in the new mac pro and you know where else you could stick these cards into an arm mac pro in theory possibly i'll tell you where you can stick these cards right exactly but no i'm like i don't know we have to see what the arm mac pro is going to look like but just because it's half the size doesn't mean it has zero slots it could have one or two slots big enough to fit an mpx module right so
John:
i see the and it's not just by the way it's not just these video cards like if you go it's so hard to do an apple's terrible store interface yes i know they just revised it on their website it's still bad what if you just want to go to like this used to be easier on apple sites i have a mac pro what crap can i buy for it that's so hard to do in the store but it is possible it is actually possible you go to like explore and then you go to accessories then you filter by buy a product but it should be like when you go to the mac pro there should be a giant button that says show me crap i can buy from my mac pro at horrendous prices like that should be a link but it's not
John:
anyway um if you go to like essentially the parts page like what kind of parts can i buy the only computer apple sells that they will essentially sell you parts for as a regular citizen is the mac pro because you can stick stuff in it you can stick the little pegasus raid drive things and the 400 piece of bent metal and like seven or eight or nine choices of video card like and they'll i think they'll even sell you ssd stuff like
John:
You can buy parts from Apple to stick in this Mac Pro.
John:
It is actually a modular computer.
John:
And Apple has steadily been releasing these parts.
John:
And there's third-party ones and there's first-party ones.
John:
And yes, they're all expensive.
John:
But that really is the promise of a modular computer.
John:
And I have a hard time believing that when they transition to ARM, they're going to say, you know that whole moment we had where we realized you want a modular computer?
John:
Well, never mind.
John:
It's trash can again.
John:
You're going to like it.
John:
I'm hoping that even if it is smaller and lighter and quieter and it uses an amazing integrated GPU, that maybe there's still a way to take parts in and out of it.
John:
And maybe one of those parts could be a GPU, but we'll see.
John:
And by the way, I finally looked up the bit of info that I had lost about Thunderbolt.
John:
So here is the information from anonymous source.
John:
A Thunderbolt spec requires that the port can supply both DisplayPort and PCIe and 60.5 watts of bus power.
John:
On a card, that PCI bandwidth and power would have to come at the expense of the GPU itself, and nobody would want to make that trade-off just to support Thunderbolt.
John:
In the PC space, I mean.
John:
This is why Apple added the extra pins to the MPX module, right?
John:
So basically, to support Thunderbolt, you'd have to zap power
John:
uh and bandwidth from the gpu and you know you make your gaming cards slower so apple solution to that apple being apple is like what if we just add a whole bunch of new connectors and pins then we can supply all the extra power and all the other stuff and we won't have to sap cpu power for it yeah and again only apple can do that because no pc game no gaming pc maker is going to make a pc motherboard with a special connector that's only on their computers you have to buy their special video cards
John:
That really isn't only an Apple moment.
John:
And then charge $6,000 for it, which as many people point out, for $6,000 of the 6,900, you can build an amazing gaming PC with a 6,900.
Marco:
Probably also including the monitor.
Marco:
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Casey:
A few weeks ago, a few days ago, I don't remember exactly when this was, there was a kerfuffle that happened because apparently there's some group that has some sort of like crack or spyware or something like that that was used to target journalists and human rights activists.
Casey:
And this list of people who had been hacked had come out and everyone got their their junk in a bunch.
Casey:
And I didn't really follow this, hence that really crummy summary.
Casey:
But there's perhaps something to be said about this.
Casey:
So, Marco, can you kind of explain what's going on here or take me in a different direction if you prefer?
Marco:
Sure.
Marco:
I'm going to take the different direction approach.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
So I don't know much about the story specifics in the sense of who was targeted, how they found it and everything, but the gist of it is this NSO group is one of these companies that basically sells iPhone hacks as a service to governments and things like that, which honestly is an extremely gross business in my opinion.
Marco:
People have...
Marco:
come up with justifications like, well, what if there were terrorists and you wanted to save children from abductors?
Marco:
And it's like, okay, that's not the common case of how these things are used.
Marco:
So the whole business of this, I think, is gross because usually it's used for things like spying on dissidents and journalists and women.
Marco:
It's a terrible business.
Marco:
Don't forget union organizers.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So the whole hacks to serve some kind of good, that's a bunch of BS.
Marco:
They're usually not serving some kind of good.
Marco:
So anyway, so this company, NSO Group, they have this software called Pegasus that basically allows them to remote hack iPhones.
Marco:
And the way they do this is via security exploits.
Marco:
And so I don't know much about this whole underworld of the security...
Marco:
But the idea is if you can find a way to exploit any modern operating system, especially phones, that's valuable.
Marco:
That has value to somebody.
Marco:
So, for example, if you can find a way to hack an iPhone in a way that just requires sending a specially crafted iMessage to the phone...
Marco:
That doesn't even require the user to click on a suspicious link or anything like that.
Marco:
If it's a no-click exploit where the user just receives a message and breaks something in their phone and you have control over their phone, that's incredibly valuable.
Marco:
That's worth millions of dollars apparently on the market.
Marco:
So, you know, you can imagine people like NSO Group want that, presumably like the NSA or, you know, other like intelligence agencies most certainly would be interested in something like that.
Marco:
You know, there's lots of ways to, you know, lots of people who would be interested in buying that exploit from you and making sure you don't tell Apple about it so they don't fix it.
Marco:
And the whole point of security bug bounties that a lot of the big companies have done in recent years is for people like Apple or Microsoft or Google or whoever to say, look, if you find an exploit like this out in the wild, we will pay you for it.
Marco:
Hopefully, we will match or beat the price that the bad guys will pay for it.
Marco:
so that you don't sell it to them you'd we'd rather pay you ourselves so that you you know quote sell it to us and then we can fix the bug and that way our platforms don't get attacked in this way and our users are not you know vulnerable in this way and apple was very very late to the bug bounty thing uh they they only released their but they only started their bug bounty program i think what about two years ago or something it wasn't it pretty recent yeah i think so
Marco:
So Apple has their security bounty thing, and from what we've heard, it's not very good.
Marco:
We keep hearing stories over and over again.
Marco:
Now granted, these are anecdotal, and a lot of the bug bounty stuff is not super publicized for obvious reasons.
Marco:
You try to keep this kind of stuff...
Marco:
hush-hush for plenty of reasons, like not just bad PR, but also just the practicality of things being exploited in the wild.
Marco:
So we don't have a lot of good data on this from the outside of how much Apple's actually paying out, how many reports are actually being addressed correctly and everything, how often somebody sells a pretty big exploit to Apple instead of, quote, a bad guy.
Marco:
But we keep seeing reports on Twitter and blog posts from people who have reported issues to Apple.
Marco:
And let me know if this sounds familiar to us as Apple developers.
Marco:
We hear reports of people reporting bugs to the security binding program and just never hearing a response.
Casey:
No.
Marco:
Or people who report security bugs, and the Apple people kind of argue with them and say it's not really a bug, even though it clearly is, and it's clearly demonstrable.
Marco:
Or we hear the Apple people say, oh, well, we fixed this, but they didn't fix it.
Marco:
Or the Apple people say, well, yeah, this is a bug, but it's not that big of a bug, so we're just not going to fix it yet.
Marco:
Or, yeah, okay, we'll fix it soon, and then it never gets fixed.
Marco:
Does this sound familiar?
Marco:
Does this sound like any other Apple feedback process?
John:
The biggest complaint that I've seen is that people will report a bug and everything will seem to be going fine with long delays between, but still like, okay, well, we've got your bug report.
John:
There actually is some feedback of them.
John:
Hey, acknowledging we got your bug report and we're investigating it and we'll get back to you and everything seems great.
John:
Or maybe they even agree, yeah, we're totally going to give you the agreed upon amount for this thing.
John:
But then they change their mind and say, you know what?
John:
We changed our mind.
John:
We were going to give you the bounty for this one.
John:
But for reasons that don't make any sense to you, we've decided we're not going to pay you.
John:
And that whole like waiting a long time and potentially arguing about whether it's legit or them deciding, oh, this isn't really the bug you thought it was.
John:
It's not as exploitable as you thought.
John:
And then they back and forth.
John:
It kind of reminds me of the pitch for the iTunes Music Store back in the day because the way bug bounty programs work is that companies are trying to compete with the bad people, right?
John:
If you have a security exploit, you could sell it to someone who's going to sell it to someone who's going to use it to break into the phones of dissidents in China or something, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
And they'll pay you a lot of money.
John:
The bad guys will pay you a lot of money for your security exploit.
John:
So the idea of a bug bounty is, well, but what if Apple decides to pay you more?
John:
Or maybe even they pay you less and you just feel better about it because you're not selling it to the bad guys.
John:
But like, you know, bid against the thing.
John:
Say, I know you could make money from the bad guys, but wouldn't you rather get an equal or maybe even a lesser amount of money from us?
John:
So that you'll feel better about, you know, you're making our thing more secure and you still get paid.
John:
Like you become a viable, like if you're a security researcher, you can actually make a lot of money if you can find a lot of bugs because they don't pay you 50 bucks.
John:
Like the amounts that they pay you will go up into the six figures and maybe even more, right?
Casey:
Network attack without user interaction.
Casey:
Zero click kernel code execution with persistence and kernel PAC bypass.
Casey:
One million dollars from Apple.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And so like it is like Apple's trying to compete with it's like when the iTunes store is saying, well, we're competing with piracy.
John:
Right.
John:
Because we want to, you know, we understand that we're not doing this in a vacuum.
John:
The problem with the bug bounty program is that it really falls down on the area where iTunes excelled.
John:
Piracy is free or close to free.
John:
And iTunes was trying to charge you $99 a track.
John:
So how is that competing with piracy?
Casey:
99 cents.
John:
You're not competing with piracy.
John:
You're way worse than piracy.
John:
Like, I want it for free, not 99 cents per track.
John:
But the thing the iTunes Music Store had going for it was, one, you know, you're not pirating, and so it might make you feel better about yourself.
John:
But two, and the most important one, it's easy and convenient.
John:
and getting money from apple for a bug bounty is not easy and convenient they're totally falling down the most important feature it's not so much that apple's not paying enough which they probably aren't let's be honest they have so much money they should be paying way more like i don't understand why they're trying to cheap out on it but apple's going to be apple
John:
But still, like I would say just if you're in the ballpark, like a million dollars is not chump change, but you have to make it easy to get paid.
John:
And you can't be like, oh, I don't know.
John:
Maybe I'll give you 10,000 for that because it's not as big.
John:
It's just, just pay the people because they're going to look at this.
John:
All of them say, and they're like, boy, I spent like,
John:
nine months waiting and fighting or a year or a year and a half waiting and fighting with Apple to try to get paid.
John:
And then in the end, they got $0.
John:
Some of them are like, you know what, Apple, I'm not even going to take your $10,000 because I should be getting the 200,000 that I should for this thing.
John:
And they just, they just become angry at the process.
John:
And that is the exact opposite of the iTunes music store strategy.
John:
Apple needs to make it easier and more convenient to go to the good guys and tell them about the thing than it is to sell it to the bad guys.
John:
And right now, the bad guys are probably like, here you go, Bitcoin, and they're off, right?
John:
It's really, really easy to get paid for them.
John:
In fact, you could probably sell them fake scams and then hope they don't find you and kill you.
John:
Wow.
John:
Apple is really, really falling down on like the like it's probably because it's being run by security people or whatever, like iTunes Music Store had like Steve Jobs eyes on it and people who understood that our main selling point is that it's easy and convenient.
John:
And and then it's distant second that, you know, it'll make you feel good to actually pay for music.
John:
Right.
John:
So I hope Apple gets his act together, not to just say, OK, well, we'll double our prices, but to instead say.
John:
Let's not argue over stuff like this.
John:
If someone finds a bug, heck, what if two people find the same bug?
John:
Just pay them both.
John:
Like you have so much money, Apple.
John:
Just pay them both.
John:
Pay them in a timely manner.
John:
Don't wait like to the very maximum limit because they all have these sort of informal agreements of like, well, I'm going to go public with this exploit, Apple, if you don't fix it within like six months or something like that.
John:
Just like pay them immediately.
John:
Pay them speculatively.
John:
Just make it super easy because then everybody, you know what everyone will say is like, hey, if you think you found a bug in Apple thing, don't try to sell it to the bad guys.
John:
Just tell Apple.
John:
They'll pay you super quick.
John:
And, you know, that's how you get people to report bugs to you.
John:
So I hope this does change.
John:
That said, the one thing I always worry about with bug bounty programs is that
John:
you are redirecting the security researchers who are most likely to consider selling their exploits to the good guys, but the ones who are themselves nefarious still exist, are never going to participate in an Apple bug bounty program, and it only really takes one unknown exploit for whatever the given version of iOS is.
John:
So I do wonder if, like...
John:
If your goal is to increase the security of iOS, it doesn't matter how many bugs you fix.
John:
It's like any kind of security thing.
John:
If there is one bug that you don't know about that provides a full exploit, the 100 bugs you fix almost mean nothing.
John:
Well, you still have to fix them.
John:
True, but it is such a cat and mouse game that's like, in the end, did we make it more secure?
John:
Or was this NSO company still able to exploit every single one of our phones on the day they were released?
John:
Because that's what you're trying to prevent, right?
John:
The NSO company doesn't need 70 exploits.
John:
They just need one that works that Apple doesn't know about.
John:
So if they've got that one, all the bug bounty people you're paying might not actually be solving your problem.
John:
But anyway, you're certainly not going to solve it by not doing bug bounties because...
John:
Yeah.
John:
Because then you just won't know about 50 bugs and it will take you much longer to close those holes.
John:
Like as it stands, but they fix this, but they fix it in 14.6 or seven or whatever.
John:
Seven fixed it.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So yeah, you got to know about it before you can fix it.
John:
And having to do that to five X points is better than having to do it to one.
Marco:
I think my concern here is – so you mentioned that the iTunes Music Store had Steve Jobs' eyes on it, whereas this doesn't seem to have that kind of person in the company.
Marco:
I think it's bigger than that.
Marco:
I think the iTunes Music Store was something that Apple was actively excited about.
Marco:
They really cared a lot about that.
Marco:
The bug bounty program is something that they seem to do very reluctantly.
Marco:
It seems like Apple does not like this.
Marco:
They don't think they have to do this.
Marco:
They're doing it not because they want to, not because they think it's the right thing to do, but because they think they have to.
Marco:
And that's why they came late to it, and that's why they came really half-assed to the party.
Marco:
Unfortunately, not only is that attitude unlikely to ever change, but...
Marco:
In a way, this is part of the entire flow of developer relations in the company.
Marco:
Because in large part, this is part of developer relations.
Marco:
It uses a similar feedback system.
Marco:
It's targeting a similar group of people.
Marco:
And it has a similar...
Marco:
like feedback and response problem and responsiveness problem you know if you look at the companies that do bug bounties really well one one name that comes up all the time is microsoft microsoft apparently does a really good job with theirs it's considered like one of the best run or if not the best run bug bounty program in the business people also say microsoft's developer relations are awesome and from from all accounts they have been for a very long time you know microsoft is very very good at dealing with developers
Marco:
The attitude towards developers is totally different.
Marco:
The feedback mechanisms are totally different.
Marco:
Everything is totally different between Apple and Microsoft with how developer relations are handled and what happens in practice.
Marco:
Apple treats developer relations as...
Marco:
mostly an afterthought and and they treat developers mostly as kind of you know pesky annoyances that occasionally ask things of them and they're just like oh do i really have to deal with you um slash you know financial resources to be farmed uh that's that's how being an apple developer most of the time feels like um and
Marco:
The feedback mechanism for security is the same.
Marco:
Again, it's basically radar.
Marco:
It's the same feedback system, I think, or at least it certainly works the same way.
John:
When I was reading the stories of people arguing with their bugs, I was jealous of the amount of personal human interaction they were getting.
John:
Because they are getting argued with, but it didn't seem like what they got was like,
John:
a computer program responding to them or someone who had no idea it was eventually after six months of waiting an actual human being who knew what the heck they were talking about who would respond to them and say things they didn't like but still it's like well at least you're getting a human to respond right like that's what i was you know going through bugs it's like
John:
Even if I get the result I don't want, I just like to think a human being like read it and understood it and is closing it for a reason and not to have it like be closed by a machine as some sort of automated process because they did a release and they want me to confirm whether my bug is fixed and stuff like that.
John:
So I think they do get better treatment than regular developers.
John:
But I agree with Marco that that's not saying much.
Marco:
Yeah, and that's why I fear that this won't ever really change because to change this meaningfully would require Apple to dramatically improve and change their entire developer relations ecosystem.
Marco:
They would need to dramatically change change.
Marco:
how they view us internally, how they treat us, the resources allocated to dealing with feedback and bugs.
Marco:
And that goes down to engineering practices and engineering realities and incentives and resource allocation in the company.
Marco:
It's such a massive shift to change anything that would meaningfully improve their bug bounty program.
Marco:
And ultimately, I worry about that because I worry about the security of their devices.
Marco:
They just keep skating by on not having things quite blow up in their face too badly with some of these exploits.
Marco:
But it's only a matter of time before there's a really bad one that's exploited on a really large scale, and then it'll come out later on, a few months later, oh, this was reported to them months ago in their bug-binding program, but they ignored it, or they tried to cheapen the...
Marco:
the price to the guy and he went and sold it to you know iran or whatever this is like a ticking time bomb like that that apple's just playing with fire here and it's what it just seems like such a such like a you know a self-owned to use john parlin it's like this is such an easy problem to solve well sorry this is it's not an easy problem to solve from the place that apple is currently at because as i said i think this requires dramatic improvement of developer relations feedback engineering practices this gets down to software quality
Marco:
allocation of time for bug fixes like this this is all intertwined but i hope apple goes in that direction someday i don't see them doing it now and i don't see any of the current leadership going for this because i think if there was any if there was going to be any
Marco:
hint of of this kind of change in the company it would have happened like in the last 10 years like from these same people and it hasn't so hopefully maybe in 20 years when all the current execs have hopefully retired and we have new people maybe they'll prioritize things differently because this this is such a stupid problem for apple to have they should apple should not be regarded as a company that does not respond promptly and well to security reports and
Marco:
Apple should be the company that everyone knows as, oh, you find a bug in the iPhone, you're going to get mad money from Apple.
Marco:
That's how people should view it.
Marco:
And instead, it's this pain in the ass.
John:
Yeah, and looking at the exchanges, I get the impression that the security org Apple absolutely wants to know about all these bugs and fix them.
John:
But the fact that there's anyone ever arguing back and forth about what should get paid or what level it should be paid at and all that sort of delaying and stuff makes me think that once you get up the org chart from the actual security people who are doing the actual technical work...
John:
At some point, someone is responsible for saying, how much money did we pay out and how much benefit did Apple get as a company?
John:
And that person is pushing back and saying, don't just pay everybody.
John:
We really need to justify every... Because they're expensive.
John:
Not all a million dollars, but there's six-figure ones and five-figure ones, right?
John:
You have to justify.
John:
Someone is demanding that you justify.
John:
You gave how much in bug bounties?
John:
Show me what benefit we got from that.
John:
How many bugs did we fix?
John:
Well, because...
John:
And that's sort of the pressure from above.
John:
That's the culture, right?
John:
I don't know if that's a real thing that's happening, but when I see the exchanges, I'm like, the security researchers wouldn't be arguing about this.
John:
It's not their money.
John:
They don't care whether you get this bug bounty at the full price, but someone somewhere who is responsible for the budget or whatever or responsible for profit and loss.
John:
I know they say the departments don't have profit and loss.
John:
It's just a top-line thing.
John:
But if you've been in a big company long enough, you realize you can smell someone somewhere caring about
John:
pinching those pennies and not wanting to pay stuff out and that's that's the wrong motivation especially at the scale i think like part of the reason i think these security researchers do get slightly better treatment than developers is there's a bazillion developers and there's probably like you know two dozen people in the world who are equipped to find these kind of security things it's almost like they could all be on a first name basis with apple right
John:
so they should essentially get white glove treatment and they should be paid promptly and without argument and it you know for all the money apple has they're just too busy buying back their own stock they got so much money they don't know what to do with it they can't even draw down their cash and someone somewhere in apple's org chart is worried about paying out too much in bug bounties that is penny wise pound foolish it's not even penny wise it's just pound foolish that's it
John:
Yeah.
John:
Setting aside the larger dev relations thing, the bug bounty thing, I would just never want to see that.
John:
And a lot of the things that I read with the exchanges, it's almost like the person they're arguing with doesn't understand the exploit.
John:
Like the security researcher is trying to say, you don't understand.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Do you understand the implications of this exploit that I have shown you?
John:
So it's almost like the slightly less technical manager person hops onto the email thread and says, yeah, we don't want to pay you because we don't think this is X, Y, and X. And then the person who reported it is like, are you kidding me?
John:
Do you understand what you could do with this?
John:
And has to explain to them in laborious detail, look, I could just do X and Y and Z and see, I have you exploited.
John:
And it makes me think that it is a less technical person parachuting in to try to like...
John:
you know like the person who comes in to try to get you to not leave comcast right whatever they're called retention specialist or whatever the the the apple's money retention specialist parachutes in and they just don't even understand the technical issue they don't they don't even understand it well enough to make a convincing argument they're just really like yeah we don't want to pay you the full amount and it's incredibly frustrating for these people and i don't i don't blame them
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Casey:
All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
And Arianna Aneha writes, do you guys still use e-readers?
Casey:
What is the general view on the cadence of slow software releases by Amazon for the Kindle?
Casey:
Do you think there are any particular features you would like to see?
Casey:
I'll start.
Casey:
I have a Kindle Paperwhite, I think.
Casey:
I don't even know what I have.
Casey:
I have an older Kindle that has some sort of quasi-touchscreen that, if I recall correctly, a friend of the show, Stephen Hackett, sent me because he wasn't using it anymore.
Casey:
I use it quite a lot, and it lets me read books.
Casey:
like that's sure someone like a Jason Snell would have a more nuanced take on this because I know Jason reads many, many books and has very particular thoughts on what he wants from knee reader.
Casey:
Uh, for me, I just want something that has a light on it that lets me read books that I can put on there without connecting it to anything physically.
Casey:
And my not too new Kindle does that.
Casey:
And the battery lasts basically forever and it's easy to read in sunlight.
Casey:
So, uh, yeah, I still use e-readers.
Casey:
I, uh,
Casey:
I don't remember how many books I read last year, but I've been on a pretty good tear of reading novels recently.
Casey:
And I probably read somewhere between 20 and 50 books last year, probably closer to 20 than 50.
Casey:
And almost all of them were on the Kindle, and I really like it.
Casey:
Are there features I wish I had?
Casey:
I don't know, nothing I can think of.
Casey:
I'm not a very sophisticated e-reader user.
Casey:
Marco, if I recall correctly, you don't believe in reading novels or any long-form prose like that, right?
Marco:
yeah i for a while i i used kindles um but i i rarely actually read full books on them if i do ever read a full book i want to do it on a kindle but that's unfortunately not something i do very often yes i know i should read i don't um and and i've used it much more in the newspaper days back when i was more of a reader um it's funny like now i wouldn't even make newspaper now like in today's world for lots of reasons but the biggest one is that i just don't read anymore
Marco:
But anyway, e-readers are, I think, a fantastic way to do it, except that e-readers as a category pretty much just means Kindles now.
Marco:
So that's problem number one is like Amazon's massive dominance over the e-book business is so strong that...
Casey:
Well, that's true asterisk.
Casey:
I don't remember exactly which one it is, but I know Snell's e-reader of choice is not actually a Kindle.
Casey:
And forgive me because I really don't remember what it was.
Casey:
But if he was to buy for himself, and I think what he did buy for himself was something else.
Casey:
I know this because I just recently bought Aaron a new Kindle, and I was asking him, well, what do you recommend, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
And he had recommended, I want to say like a Kobe or something like that.
John:
You should look it up on his website because I think he wrote about it on Sex Callers.
John:
But like –
John:
the sort of amazon blight like when amazon owns a market then any when any one company owns a market like this it just becomes a blight because it's like well what's their motivation to make anything better amazon's a little bit better about that and they seem to have some internal motivation to make things better but yeah having one company dominate is not great but the good thing about ebooks is that it is a it is enough of a backwater as compared to like
John:
gambling games for children or other much larger sources of money um that the reason jason can do that is the drm has essentially been cracked and you can buy your books from amazon because they're the only game in town or whatever and then crack them and put them on your kobo whatever like you know i mean like it's it's kind of like uh the mp3s and the napster days or even like the itunes days when you could like rip off the fair play drm or whatever i
John:
there are ways if you are technically savvy to pay for your books legitimately but then read them on the reader of your choice using publicly available tools that know how to crack the apparently not particularly strong drm on these things but the fact that amazon is so dominant in the area of ebooks is not good for anybody in the ebook industry and we're just kind of saved by the fact that apparently amazon doesn't care enough to
John:
You know, to fight against the quote unquote piracy of you paying money for a book from Amazon and then stripping off a DRM so that you, the owner of that book, can actually read it where you want to.
Casey:
Yeah, for what it's worth, for me, the like prototypical garbage to look at and kind of to use app that functions flawlessly is Calibre, C-A-L-I-B-R-E.
Casey:
which is a Java app, if I'm not mistaken, so it looks like it does not belong on the Mac.
Casey:
But it lets you do this sort of thing like strip DRM and or reformat for, what is it, Mobi or something like that, which is Amazon semi-proprietary format.
Casey:
It'll let you basically go from anything to anything, kind of like SongWhip or whatever it's called that we were talking about.
Casey:
Not SongWhip.
Casey:
SongShift.
Casey:
Yeah, Song Shift, thank you, that we were talking about earlier.
Casey:
Similar idea.
Casey:
It is not great to look at, but it's open source, it's free, and it works extremely well.
Casey:
I use it all the time.
Marco:
Yeah, so going back to the actual question here of Amazon's slow cadence of software updates for the Kindle, Amazon has shown over the history of the Kindle, and now into the era of their Echo devices with screens,
Marco:
Amazon's ability to make software UIs for people to use is comically bad.
Marco:
It's so bad.
Marco:
It's almost mind-bogglingly bad how bad Amazon is at making software for people to use.
Marco:
UI, actual interactive software.
Marco:
They seem to be pretty good on the back-end stuff, and the shopping stuff, and the abusing worker stuff.
Marco:
They're all pretty good at all that stuff, but they really are not very good at all at making software that you interact with as a person.
Marco:
And the Kindles, in the early days of the Kindle, it kind of skated by because it couldn't do much.
Marco:
The early Kindles were such primitive devices, and the early e-ink screens were so primitive and limited that
Marco:
There was only so much they could even attempt to do.
Marco:
So Amazon wasn't able to crap them up very much with their terrible UI design skills.
Marco:
And over time, Kindles got better and Amazon got more ability to screw things up.
Marco:
And they used it with great success.
Marco:
I can't recall a time when the Kindle software got updated and it was overall a better thing, in my opinion.
Marco:
Every time they've moved things forward, quote, they've added more crap and made certain things harder or cluttered certain things or made bafflingly bad decisions about things like text rendering, like the justification.
Marco:
It's so bad.
Marco:
Ultimately, I think this is one of those cases where
Marco:
You don't really want Amazon to be messing with the software on Kindles very often because they're really not good at it, and they're more likely to make things worse than to make things better when they start messing with them.
Marco:
So ultimately the super slow glacial pace of Kindle advancement I think is a benefit because the alternative is worse.
Marco:
That being said, I do wish that there was more competition in this area, or I wish Amazon could get their game together in terms of making these things more usable.
Marco:
But it seems like Amazon's really, really good at making hardware that is okay and
Marco:
and software that is okay, and selling it for cheap prices.
Marco:
That's what they're optimized to do.
Marco:
And the entire Kindle line is just that now.
Marco:
It's just a bunch of crap hardware running crap software, but it's pretty cheap.
Marco:
And so ultimately, expecting any kind of quality or good features out of that is probably a pipe dream.
John:
I mean, I kind of like how cheap it is and that it shouldn't be expensive.
John:
I like that there's very inexpensive models.
John:
But one of the results of not having a lot of competition and having one big dominant player is they don't see the need to cater to anything except for the fat part of the bell curve.
John:
So a friend of the show, Wave.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Do you know a person named Weave?
John:
Anyway, Michael Johnson.
John:
Is he at Apple now?
John:
I think so.
John:
Formerly of Pixar.
John:
Complains all the time about the fact that if you read a ton of books and you buy a ton of books from Amazon, the Kindle experience is terrible.
John:
Like they just don't expect people to buy that many books.
John:
It's kind of like when Apple, you know, we complain about Apple experiences.
John:
Like if you own all the Apple devices and buy lots of things from Apple, the experience is worse.
John:
Very often your best customers, oh, so you've bought 10,000 books?
John:
Well, our software just falls over and you can't find anything and it's really slow and it searches.
John:
It's like, aren't I your best customer?
John:
It's like, yeah, but you're at the edge of the bell curve.
John:
There's no reason for us to cater to you with like a pro level Kindle or to make sure that our backend can handle your 10,000 books or anything like that.
John:
If there was a more competitive marketplace, if Amazon didn't have this locked up, if it was possible, if there was some kind of open standard, like say EPUB, for eBooks that had actually become widespread and dominant, then lots of different companies can make eBook readers.
John:
And maybe one of those companies would say, we cater to the people who have tens of thousands of books.
John:
And we'll make sure that our system can handle your books and has a good way to filter them and organize them and doesn't bog down and so on and so forth.
John:
And we sell them for more money and it's the high-end pro version of the e-reader.
John:
And there are Kindles that are expensive and there are Kindles that are cheaper and the expensive ones are nicer than the cheaper ones.
John:
My wife has one of the fancy ones.
John:
But Amazon has no motivation to cater to the really difficult use case, right?
Yeah.
John:
Just like they don't have any motivation to cater to, you know, oh, I read these certain kinds of books and they need this feature because the books have illustrations that need to be rendered in a particular way.
John:
It's like people don't do that.
John:
It's just a bunch of words.
John:
We can't even bother to get the justification right for, you know, a decade or however long they spent with that terrible default.
John:
um so yeah well let's not have one big company dominate an entire market because it's crappy uh and yeah i hope this i hope things do improve like i said the good thing about it is that in the end especially for simple things like novels it is just text and if you could get it and crack it open one of those open source tools and convert it to epub uh your reading options become a lot more uh numerous
Casey:
So wait, do you have one, John, that you use or no?
John:
So I don't actually use Kindle 3.
John:
I read on light-up screen devices, but I think Kindles are great.
John:
If and when my eyes ever got to the point where I found it tiring or something to read from a light-up screen, I would absolutely use a Kindle.
John:
I don't find it tiring.
John:
I read my e-books, yes, in the Kindle app, sometime in the Apple Books app, but mostly in the Kindle app.
John:
On my iPad, even on my phone, it's just what I'm used to.
John:
I read off screens all day.
John:
Reading off screens does not bother me at all.
John:
But if it did, I would go to Kittle.
John:
I don't actually like the fancy Kindle.
John:
The Oasis is the one that's got a lump on one side.
John:
Oh, it's great.
John:
That's what my wife has.
John:
I think she has the fanciest of the fancy ones.
John:
I like the screen and everything, but the asymmetrical lumpen shape, I understand the appeal.
John:
It's just not how I...
John:
read ebooks partly for rsi reasons so maybe i would have to do use one of the step down models but i'm glad there are at least within amazon a couple of different sizes and shapes of kindles you ever seen the first kindle talk about asymmetric uh i don't think did you i think that you didn't send me that one of all the ones you use the giant stack of kindles you sent me the disgusting ugly one didn't yes i have seen that one it is it is a hell of a thing it's really probably gonna be a collector's item you have one of those sealed in the box never touched by human hands original kindle probably worth some money now
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And moving right along, Stephen Robles asks, do any of you use a VNC app to remote into your Maxwell traveling?
Casey:
I've tried TeamWeaver Jump screens and more, but none of them seem ideal and I wonder about security.
Casey:
So I think what Stephen is saying here is that they would like to have a one-stop solution to
Casey:
to kind of tunnel into their computer at home and also VNC.
Casey:
And so if you're not familiar with VNC, what is it?
Casey:
Virtual Network Computing or something like that.
Casey:
I forget what it stands for.
Casey:
But anyway, it allows you to control your computer remotely.
Marco:
Screen sharing.
Casey:
Yeah, screen sharing.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
And for me, what I do is I have a VPN running on my Raspberry Pi.
Casey:
Do we need some sort of musical instrument for that, too?
Casey:
I have a VPN server running on my Raspberry Pi, and that's how I get onto my in-home network.
Casey:
And then subsequent to that, which is secure, I'm running WireGuard is the particular VPN software I'm using.
Casey:
And so once I'm on my in-home network, I'm not too worried about security because that's covered elsewhere in this stack, if you will.
Casey:
And for me, if I'm on my Mac, I just use the built-in client.
Casey:
And if I'm on my iPad or very rarely my iPhone, I'll use screens.
Casey:
And that works just fine for me, but I've never tried any of the fancy tunneling or forwarding or any of the stuff that I believe screens will do, but I've never had a need for it because I've always run a VPN server out of the house, be that the Synology with Viberslap or the Raspberry Pi or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
So I do use and like screens.
Casey:
I've never tried any of these others.
Casey:
I think I might have tried Jump Desktop a while ago, and I didn't care for it, but to each their own.
Casey:
But for me, controlling the tunneling portion and the VNC screen sharing portion separately was how I preferred to do it.
Casey:
Marco, what's your situation?
Casey:
Do you ever do this?
Casey:
Well, you don't even have a desktop anymore, really.
Marco:
No, I do.
Marco:
I have a Mac.
Marco:
I'm using it right now.
Marco:
The M1 Mac Mini has been my main computer for some time now.
Marco:
I thought it was the Air that you were using full time.
Marco:
No, I was before I got the Mac Mini.
Marco:
Oh, my apologies.
Marco:
Yeah, but the Air is now my laptop.
Casey:
You change computers so often, I can't keep up.
Marco:
It's been six months, maybe.
Marco:
In case he doesn't listen to the show.
Marco:
No, I've been using the Mac Mini ever since I got my Mac Mini.
Marco:
I know you're using Mac Mini, so do all the listeners.
John:
In case he doesn't listen, it's fine.
Marco:
Anyway, yeah, I used to have remote screen sharing enabled.
Marco:
I haven't had it for some time.
Marco:
I mean, geez, it used to be a feature of MobileMe.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, back to my Mac.
Casey:
That worked pretty well.
Casey:
Did it?
Casey:
I thought it did.
Casey:
It didn't work very well for me.
John:
Sometimes it worked.
John:
When it worked, it was miraculous, but it worked very on and off.
John:
There were multiple parts of back to my Mac, but the main one that didn't work is sort of like,
John:
the sort of cloud sync discovery process of like, hey, we know where your computer is.
John:
And then once you've made that connection and it showed up in the UI, then it would do all the cool tunneling thing through to it.
John:
And then it would essentially just use like, I don't know if it was straight VNC or if it was Apple Remote Desktop, which I think is its own protocol.
John:
But either way, it was the, hey, I know about your computer thing that would fall down.
John:
Because I used to use it from trying to get to my computer when I was at work sometimes.
John:
And it would be like, back to my Mac, it's like so many Apple features where if it appears in your sidebar, you can use it.
John:
And if it doesn't,
John:
Who knows?
John:
Tough luck.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Why is it not there?
John:
I don't know.
Casey:
Yeah, that's right.
Casey:
Now that you're saying this, I remembered.
Casey:
You're exactly, exactly right.
Marco:
Yeah, that's exactly how things would go.
Marco:
Anyway, yeah, so ever since then, I haven't really used it.
Marco:
I don't have a need for it, so I try to minimize the amount of holes in my digital life.
Marco:
This is a pretty large one that people could potentially exploit in terrible ways, so I personally choose not to open this hole.
Casey:
Oh, man, John.
John:
Yeah, so when I described of like trying to get to my home computer from a work computer, I would do that occasionally when I had some specific need for it.
John:
But in general, in terms of like, you know, when you're out of your house or when traveling, I don't like to expose anything in my house to the Internet.
John:
I mean, or not intentionally anyway, let's say.
John:
So like my Synology is not on the Internet.
John:
In general, I don't have my computers accessible from the Internet.
John:
When I travel, I physically unplug my computer from power.
John:
So that's a pretty good way to stop people from getting into it.
John:
Um, partly because like, Hey, if I'm away and there's lightning storm, I don't want to, I know I have a surge suppressor and I know I have a UPS or whatever, but it's like, why don't I just unplug it.
John:
Right.
John:
So no, I don't, I don't VNC into my computers when I'm out.
John:
It's not that there's nothing exposed to the internet, but it's a very, like Marco's point, it's a very limited service area.
John:
And if I'm actually going to be out of my house, I really want my very expensive computer to be very safe.
Casey:
I mean, to each their own.
Casey:
That's bananas to me.
Casey:
I probably told this story at least a couple times on this show, but I remember the first time I saw somebody VNC into their computer.
Casey:
I was in my dorm room.
Casey:
It might have been my freshman year at Virginia Tech.
Casey:
And a friend from way at the other end of the hallway came and asked me a question or something and decided to sit down and chill.
Casey:
And I guess that he had left his music running in his room on his computer or something like that.
Casey:
And so he asked me if he can use like my computer for a second.
Casey:
And I think there was a web front end that you could have installed on Windows machines at the time or on VNC as installed on Windows machines.
Casey:
And he basically used this Java applet or JavaScript applet or whatever it was to remote into his computer from my dorm room.
Casey:
And my mind exploded.
Casey:
I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen.
Casey:
And I have always had the ability to do that ever since.
Casey:
Now, do I use it very often?
Casey:
Actually, that's not true.
Casey:
I did use it earlier today to look at something because I was too lazy to walk upstairs.
Casey:
But in terms of using it when I'm traveling, I do not use it often.
Marco:
I don't usually use it.
Marco:
I use it today.
Casey:
I don't use it in the context of when I travel very often, but I do use it when I'm feeling lazy around the house pretty frequently.
Casey:
But man, that first time you see somebody VNCing, it is something else.
John:
It's kind of sad that the ex-window system didn't really catch on because it's really the, or for that matter, display postscript over the network that Nex used to use.
John:
Like the thing we're describing, VNC, is essentially ship a bitmap image plus your inputs for your keyboard and mouse over the network.
John:
And it's extremely inefficient when compared to the other approaches that have existed over the years.
John:
Yeah.
John:
eventually i guess bandwidth and the simplicity of uh a screen scraping technique like that uh went out over the fancier stuff like display postscript or x and obviously everyone hates x windows so there's that there's that all right finally on ask atv tonight uh philip wilkinson writes imagine if apple built their own chip foundry and fully owned the whole supply chain why wouldn't they
Casey:
I'm curious to hear y'all's answers to this, but I think the most obvious thing is it is really expensive and takes a long time.
Casey:
Now, are those problems Apple could fix or deal with?
Casey:
Sure.
Casey:
But it's super expensive and it takes a really long time.
Casey:
So I don't think they have the appetite yet.
Casey:
I think there's other things that they view as lower and more ripe hanging fruit, but...
Casey:
I wouldn't be surprised if at some point it does happen or there's an acquisition that gives them a foundry or something like when you said, like, could they do it?
John:
Yes.
John:
It's borderline because here's the thing.
John:
Making a cutting edge ship foundry doesn't just take huge amounts of money.
John:
It also takes lots of expertise.
John:
And if you like the only way you can get an adequate return on that kind of investment is you have to have enough demand.
John:
Right.
John:
So.
John:
Apple presumably wouldn't want to be TSMC where they do business for everybody because the Apple way to do it would be like we make chips just for Apple.
John:
And I do wonder, even with Apple being as big as it is, if Apple itself, I don't think Apple itself uses enough chips to justify the expense of a cutting edge fab.
John:
Because TSMC doesn't just make chips for Apple, though sometimes it seems like that, but they don't literally just make chips for Apple.
John:
I suppose they could sort of right-size it, but as Intel has shown, getting on the cutting edge and staying on the cutting edge of chip foundry is really, really expensive, and there's no guarantee that you're going to stay there no matter how much money you spend.
John:
So, you know, for all those reasons, I feel like unless Apple...
John:
you know apple doesn't want to be in the business of making things for other companies that's not a thing that apple does right they're happy for other people to do that but they don't want to be in the business and then you know there's the obvious sort of business reason of you know if it's not part of your value proposition let someone else do it right so you know apple apple is trying to innovate in all the areas apple innovates they design their own chips but they don't fab their own chips because fabbing is kind of a commodity right you can fab anybody's design tsmc will fab whatever you you know right and
John:
That's a commodity, but the actual chip design, that's the thing that Apple does, right?
John:
Or, you know, making memory chips.
John:
That's a commodity.
John:
Memory chips are a commodity, and Apple competes with other companies and pits them against each other to get the contract to put the memory, to sell the memory for their laptops or whatever.
John:
But that's not where they add their value.
John:
There's nothing special about Apple's memory.
John:
There's nothing special about, you know...
John:
the the aluminum that goes into apple's things but the actual machines that you know carve them up or design or whatever so it's not really part of apple's value proposition like and so when any company is choosing whether they're going to do something as apple has said can we make a difference in this area it could be argued that like oh apple thinks they can you know fab things better than anyone else in the world but apple has
John:
close to zero expertise in that now so they would essentially have to buy all the smart people in the world who know how to fab chips and buy all the factories and buy the entire supply chain that goes into them and spend years and years and years and billions and billions of dollars and then hope they have enough uh you know customers and just being themselves to make up the money that they spent uh you know ahead of time to make those giant factories so unless there is some uh
John:
amazing breakthrough that only apple has access to uh i don't feel like they would do that now the flip side of that is things like micro led for example things like screens are more or less commodities apple buys them from lg lg sells them to anybody who wants a screen more or less right uh you know they're
John:
That's it seems like it's commodity.
John:
So why is Apple buying micro LED companies technologies that are not yet commodities like, oh, there's not 50 people you can go to and get a micro LED screen.
John:
Right.
John:
It's it's a nascent technology.
John:
It's just we're just trying to do it now.
John:
If Apple can buy a startup that thinks they have a good way to make micro LEDs competitively.
John:
own that company and be the first to market with a micro led screen that can fit in a phone or a laptop or whatever their target thing is.
John:
That's a competitive advantage for the company.
John:
But eventually if micro led screens are made by, you know, seven different companies, uh,
John:
their competitive advantage is over so i i if there was some secret chip company that says we can fab chips that you know one eighth of a nanometer feature size and nobody else in the world can do it uh apple snap us up and then let us do like that would be a good idea but i don't think that's that exists right now i think the market leaders are gigantic and they fab chips for everybody and there's no secret startup with a way to do that better mostly because a tiny little startup can't fab
John:
You can't make a chip fab.
John:
I suppose they could have some novel manufacturing technique or something.
John:
But anyway, a lot of people think that that's the way business always works, that there's some secret that you can get.
John:
There's some little company with these five people, and they have a secret that no one else has.
John:
And if you snap them up, then Apple will be able to make super holographic memory chips that no one else can make.
John:
Very rarely does that happen.
John:
Best case scenario, you get a thing like where Apple buys PA semi, where it turns out they got a lot of really good chip designers.
John:
And then they gave those people like 10 years or whatever to make the world's best chips.
John:
That was a good acquisition.
John:
I think the micro LED one.
John:
might be a good acquisition or it might come to nothing.
John:
Apple buys all sorts of companies, companies that know how to make sensors for AR, VR stuff, the headsets, the software.
John:
A lot of those things, you know, turns out they don't produce anything great or, you know, like what was that big thing with the glass, like the quartz glass that they were going to, they bought some company to do that or invest it in some company.
Marco:
Oh, the Arizona thing?
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
The Sapphire.
John:
You try.
John:
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but yeah, Sapphire.
John:
But ChipFab,
John:
that's big money.
John:
And right now it's a commodity.
John:
And so Apple is happy to, not happy, but Apple is okay paying TSMC to do it.
John:
And I think probably the reason they're okay is because TSMC is not owned by Samsung or Google, right?
John:
Their whole business is, we will fab your chip for you.
John:
We don't really care who you are.
John:
And they respond to Apple's money by saying, okay, Apple, if you pay it lots of money, we'll give you our best chips sooner than everyone else.
John:
And that is a relationship that Apple understands and I think is...
John:
reasonably happy with.
Marco:
Thank you to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Linode, and MadeIn.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
We will talk to you next week.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
They did enough.
Casey:
Accidental Tech Podcast So long
Marco:
All right, so this weekend I was sitting on my deck next to John Gruber for reasons.
Marco:
But anyway, I was on my iPad and I was trying to look up the weather.
Marco:
And I had restored my iPad recently and so it didn't have a lot of apps on it yet.
Marco:
So I thought, oh, I don't have any other weather apps.
Marco:
Let me just launch Apple Weather.
Marco:
So I pull up Spotlight, you know, Command Space, type in weather.
Marco:
And oh, there is no Apple Weather app on iPad because...
Marco:
Of course, why would there be an Apple weather app on the iPad?
Marco:
It's only 11 years old.
Marco:
There's still no weather app.
Marco:
It's a game of checking with Instagram.
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
Seriously.
Marco:
So when I did this, though, I saw... So, you know, if you go to an iPad, you commit space, type in weather...
Marco:
It doesn't have anything, but it shows you... In the spotlight thing that comes up, there's a little thing near the bottom, and it will search the App Store for whatever term you typed in.
Marco:
So there it was.
Marco:
It had a recommendation from the App Store.
Marco:
And there was an app, the title of which was...
Marco:
weather and then a space and then a little tiny bullet in the middle of i'm seeing this as well yeah yeah you see this good all right this uh and the icon looks very similar to the apple weather icon and if you look at the screenshots it looks exactly like what you would expect an ipad version of apple's weather apps look like it looks exactly like this is clearly an apple it's apple weather for right for your ipad
Marco:
oh my god you're right okay so i actually i'm and i knew i could tell you know i obviously weather space dot is not a legitimate copy of apple's weather app like obviously this is going to be some kind of spammy you know crappy app but i figured you know what let me take i'm going to actually install this and see like what what is apple recommending every single time you type in weather into an ipad which i
Marco:
Again, I don't think it's unreasonable for people to expect that their iPad would have a weather app built in.
Marco:
But anyway, just leaving that there for now.
Marco:
So this app, it's everything you'd hope it would be.
Marco:
Obviously, weather space dot.
Marco:
You got a great title so far.
Marco:
You launch it and the very first thing you see is a giant subscription required screen.
Marco:
Now.
Marco:
As far as I know, it is not actually allowed for an app to immediately launch into a subscription requirement upon launch.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure that the app has to do something in its normal state without immediately just putting a big barrier in front of you.
Marco:
But we'll set that aside for now.
Marco:
I'm sure Apple's not looking very heavily at apps that come up for millions of people using iPads.
Marco:
So eventually I found that in the very, very corner, there's a little tiny...
Marco:
X and I tried clicking that and I did actually get past the subscription promo screen and was able to use the app for free there's a little ad in the bottom but you know no big deal every single thing you try to do in the app throws that screen back up and oh oh I forgot to mention they want 10 bucks a month
Marco:
And by the way the reviews look, it sure looks like someone's paying it.
Marco:
I mean, they must have many downloads.
Marco:
The positioning they have, the ranking they have, they must have so many downloads.
Marco:
So someone's paying these things.
Marco:
And if you look, and you look and it's like, okay, this is...
Marco:
This is not the worst app I've ever seen, but it's not a good app.
Marco:
And it's clearly kind of, you know, squatting.
Marco:
Like, it's like keyword spamming.
Marco:
It's ripped off Apple's design.
Marco:
Like, it's clearly not made with 100% good intentions and, you know, good faith.
Marco:
And the fact that this app can charge $10 a month to someone, someone's paying it.
Marco:
It's, I guess, number 12 in the weather chart, whatever that means.
Marco:
So, you know, people are getting this and paying for it.
Marco:
And I think people like Underscore and our friends like James Thompson and the Weatherline people, obviously the Carrot Weather guy, so many people make amazing apps that are well-handcrafted, and Apple gives them occasional crap in app review for some little nitpick thing.
Marco:
Meanwhile...
Marco:
this exists like meanwhile if you type in weather on an ipad you get weather space dot and it's this ten dollar a month subscriptions borderline scam app uh that my favorite thing is like the hourly forecast on the free version is every three hours
Marco:
And you can unlock the intervening hours by buying these subscriptions.
Casey:
That's actually very clever.
Marco:
Is it?
Marco:
But it's like, am I really going to decide, okay, I know the weather at 7 a.m.
Marco:
I know the weather at 10 a.m.
Marco:
If I want to know what it's going to be at 9 a.m., I've got to pay $10 a month.
Marco:
So yeah, that's fun.
Marco:
And just for the sake of it, I also type in calculator.
Marco:
because the ipad again still does not contain a calculator once again only 11 years old here and calculator you know you have a similar situation there is calculator space and then there's a dot that's like a high dot it's not yeah what is that i mean there's a million unicode characters i'm yeah i don't know what this is but if you if you look it's calculator subtitle the basic math calculator the
Marco:
The brand name, International Travel Weather Calculator.
Marco:
That's the business name.
Marco:
International Travel Weather Calculator.
Marco:
Obviously, this is definitely their legitimate business name that they've incorporated as.
Marco:
This is so bad.
Marco:
And you look... And again, it's the same... It's just like... You look at these categories.
Marco:
There's hundreds of apps that are just like generic word and then some Unicode punctuation symbol to try to make it look as neutral as possible.
Marco:
And so people think, oh, this is just calculator.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
This is a massive part of the App Store.
Marco:
Like, if you look at... There's...
Marco:
There's thousands of apps that do this.
Marco:
It's kind of a funny thing to see.
Marco:
We think the app store is the indies like us and then big companies.
Marco:
There's so much garbage like this getting through there.
Marco:
You have to wonder, what is this ecosystem like?
Marco:
What is this business like?
Marco:
are all these made by the same like three spam companies are they all made by thousands of developers around the world like international travel weather calculator like what i i don't know and it just kind of makes me sad like that all of this stuff is like sucking money out of the app store meanwhile like you know people like us are trying to make good apps
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
To some degree, it's like, I guess, more power to them.
Marco:
To another degree, it's like, man, I wish this stuff was better.
John:
What's the monetization model on the calculator app?
John:
Can you not use the number five?
John:
I believe it's a dollar a month.
John:
But can you not use the number five until you pay?
John:
You can type any digits as long as it doesn't have a one in it or it adds subtle errors to each of your calculations of plus or minus five and you don't know until you pay.
John:
I don't quite know what the model would be there.
John:
I think part of the reason they get away with this, like, I remember when Apple was, like, bragging about it.
John:
We have, you know, 1,000 apps, 10,000 apps, 100,000 apps.
John:
Eventually, at a certain point, it became like, you probably shouldn't be bragging about that because there's just no way for there to be 600,000 good apps in the world ever at any one time for the iPhone.
John:
And so probably, yeah, so what's going on here?
John:
Is it just some kind of...
John:
You know, farming system where there's an automated system of creating a new developer account with a fake credit card and an address and making a bunch of scam apps and putting it in the store until Apple finds you out and shuts you down and just repeating the process and trying to, you know, do SEO and pay for reviews.
John:
It's like an entire...
John:
An entire ecosystem.
John:
Like, it's a different ecosystem, but it's an entire ecosystem of scams.
John:
And I do wonder what percentage of the App Store is essentially weeds.
John:
Like, very thriving economy of weeds.
John:
And I bet for the people who participate in that economy...
John:
it just seems like playing a video game that makes you money, right?
John:
Because it's like, I don't, you know, it's almost like it's not connected to people at all.
John:
We just make these apps, we pay for the fake reviews, we hide our features behind a toggle that we turn on server-side once we get past reviews so that it throws up the thing in your face, we add the dark patterns to accidentally make people subscribe, we accept X percent of refunds from Apple, we accept that we're going to get shut down every n.3 months, and we just repeat the process, and this is how we make a living, and
John:
It's totally out of like a, you know, 90s sort of cyberpunk type of thing, but it's a real thing and it's much more boring in real life.
John:
You see all those pictures of like those giant review farms where they pay to give five star reviews and there's this whole wall of iPhones all set up that are automated in a way to write up their reviews.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The upshot of it to the actual users is, you know, for technical users like us who get questions from other family members is we, you know, we dread family members doing this on their own, which is like,
John:
if you if someone comes to you and says i was trying to find a weather app and and you're like oh no all right because what are they going to do they're going to do what marco did and type weather into the search and that is not a that is not an environment where you can just drop a person into it and expect a good result that's why the scams make money it's like junk mail like you just need some percentage of people to do it you need a good seo you need to be in the results you need some small percentage to actually accidentally pay you ten dollars a month and not get the refund
John:
and you make it up in volume um but yeah it's not like i compare this to the physical apple store like you can essentially tell somebody who's like i don't know what kind of computer i could get if you don't have time to go into it with them you could say
John:
Just go to an Apple store and talk to the people there because you have faith that, A, there's not that many choices.
John:
There's like seven products in the whole store.
John:
And B, that the people in the Apple store will ask them intelligent questions and give them good advice at what to buy.
John:
And we all know from our experience in the Apple store is that they're not going to try to get you to buy a Mac Pro because they smell that you have money or something.
John:
They're not going to sell you the gold printer capers like Marco would.
They're going to...
John:
No, I didn't sell the gold printer cables.
John:
I taught people out of the gold printer cables.
John:
Like Marco was supposed to.
John:
Yeah, there you go.
John:
Because that's our experience with the Apple Store.
John:
It is a pleasant place to be and the people there are knowledgeable and helpful and aren't trying to scam you.
John:
Not true of the Apple Store.
John:
There's nobody there.
John:
You are just going to be devoured by wolves.
John:
It's a scary forest filled with literally hundreds of thousands of apps, like 0.01% of which are good.
Marco:
My favorite thing about weather space dot is that even though it's an iPad weather app, it only works in portrait.
Casey:
Oh, nice.
Marco:
And I never, so the entire time I'm using this like sideways because I'm trying to get, isn't that true of iPhone apps on the iPad too?
John:
They don't go into landscape.
Marco:
That was true.
Marco:
I don't know if it still is.
John:
I think that is true.
John:
Maybe they fixed that.
John:
Someone just put a link in the chat for about iPadOS 15, hands-on with Apple's weather app for iPad.
John:
What are they talking about?
John:
Is there an actual in iOS 15?
Casey:
Oh, did they?
Casey:
No, everybody relax.
Casey:
Apparently, it's a completely deadpan review of weather.com because that is the weather app on the iPad.
John:
I couldn't parse this page because I was like, are these banner ads?
John:
But they were screenshots of a website.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
Because that is effectively, that is the weather app on the iPad is weather.com.
John:
Got it.
John:
Okay.
John:
All right.
John:
Just clarifying.
Marco:
Anyway.
Marco:
Clearly they need to try weather space dot.
Marco:
The only problem is that, you know, they would have to rotate their iPad to portrait.
John:
Is it option 8?
John:
What is the dot?
John:
There's another problem with that.
John:
Because I'm not sitting in front of an iPad, I can't actually search and see what you're seeing.
Marco:
Option 8 is a bullet.
Marco:
I don't know if this is the same bullet.
John:
It looks like it to me.
John:
Another type of thing, like basic policies that you would imagine Apple would have come up with by now is...
John:
No names that are trying to appear like another name by having the same name and then some kind of character that is less visible.
John:
Because there's not really a legitimate reason for your thing to ever be called name of some existing app space dot.
John:
I can understand maybe if there's some company that whose branding is kind of like we are the dot company and all our apps have dot after the name, maybe they can make an argument in a world where humans can communicate intelligently.
John:
But I feel like one of the rules they could do is say, hey, the name you've given your app.
John:
Does it match one of these patterns that we know people use to try to duplicate the name of another app?
John:
For all I know, they allow complete duplicate names.
Marco:
They actually they don't.
Marco:
And that's why this is so.
Marco:
But it's weird.
Marco:
Like there used to be these weird hacks where so originally like the app store, you had to have a name that was unique.
Marco:
But you could hack it so like if you had it first only available in certain countries that didn't have a name conflict.
Marco:
And then you could like switch it over.
Marco:
There were like some weird hacks possible.
Marco:
I don't know if they've closed those holes yet.
Marco:
They probably have.
Marco:
But there is a name uniqueness requirement.
Marco:
And that's why you get these, you know, calculator space dot, weather space dot.
John:
Right.
John:
And that's why they should have a rule of, like, no non-breaking spaces, no zero-width spaces, no characters that look like an E but aren't an E. Like, you can make up a bunch of rules, and websites have to do this all the time, to detect patterns that appear to be, like, scam names, right?
John:
Like, you're trying to camouflage what your real name is because there's an existing app called Weather, and yours is called Weather with an E that's not really an E. But no one can tell that in the font that the App Store uses, right?
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Withschwa are...
John:
right well not even a schwa just like thinking like a legit 100 looks like a regular e because as you said unicode has many things to choose from and i'm sure apple does have rules like that but weather so your point weather space dot as the literal number one result for searching for the word weather on an ipad where apple knows it doesn't have a weather app that's the reason for you to make a new rule to forbid existing app name space dot hell just do the apple thing and only consider the the list of protected names to be apple's apps you'd still catch that one because apple's app is called weather
Casey:
frustrating the uh the best part of all this is didn't i don't know if it was like publicly or just on twitter but there was a big stink made that the revamped weather app and ios 15 on the on on the iphone is all swift ui and you know as far as i knew part of the wonderful panacea that's swift ui allegedly is that you can deploy everywhere right right right so where's our ipad oh it's not a technical barrier
John:
at all sure totally i don't think you don't need swift ui it's like think about calculator like forget about you don't need swift ui to make calculator like you could you could give like one reasonable developer like a month and they would have the iphone app ported and debugged on the ipad forget about swift ui because it's just the the iphone calculator app is just not that complicated sorry uh james thompson i was waiting i mean p calc to its credit is extremely complicated as you know if you ever went to the about screen
John:
But even just setting that aside, the calculator part of it is complicated and full-featured.
John:
Atmos is just like a grid of numbers basic math operations.
John:
It's very simple.
John:
It already exists and works.
John:
You just need to scale up the UI.
John:
And the UI is, last I checked, it's like just solid colors with lines separating the buttons.
John:
It's not even like skeuomorphic like it looks like a physical button anymore.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
yeah someone gave didn't someone give an explanation maybe it was one of maybe it was one of gruber's interviews with executives of why there's no calculator on the ipad do you remember i don't remember it was some dumb reason but i think they did actually give a reason whatever the reason is it's dumb like it's it's obviously a clear need that many people have like why do these apps not exist on ipad from apple like just the the ipad versions of them of the iphone apps like just like every other app like
Marco:
It's not hard.
Marco:
They can do it.
John:
You can just ask Siri and then really, really hope that Siri didn't misunderstand you and give you the wrong answer, which probably has like a 10% chance of happening.